Tracks and traces is an attempt to reread the work of Andrew Turton in light of the changing context of Thai politics and society of (and in which) he wrote, and in terms of how this reading may be applied to Thailand today. Many of the chapters are concerned with recent Thai history (especially politics) and contain the various authors’ reflections on Thai studies literature. This makes for interesting reading because, although the events and literature described will be familiar to most of the target audience, the chapters are brief, often polemical and highly readable. Each provides a succinct example of what the (often prominent) authors make of the field in overview and on reflection. Each chapter can be approached as a kind of ‘position statement’ that may reveal more about the author than about Thailand or Turton per se. Specialists of the region will thus find this a fascinating collection because it highlights the different ways these scholars ‘read’ Thai history and Thai studies.

Keyes starts the collection with a contribution outlining his take on the history of political events in the Northeast and his view that this must be understood in terms of a ‘continuity of a distinctive ethno-regionalism in northeastern Thailand’ (p. 25). Ganjanapan and Hirsch take a fascinating look at agrarian change, updating Turton's work in this area in light of the challenges of interpreting globalisation. Cohen usefully describes various anthropological interpretations of power and leadership in Thailand, many of them inspired by Turton. Glassman's lively and invigorating contribution presents an insightful reflection on the vicissitudes of radical scholarship. While not everyone will follow Glassman to his political conclusions, the historical survey he presents of the entanglements of scholarship and politics is insightful and provocative, and well worth the read. Chiengthong presents an account of modern subjectivities and political action that was to my mind remarkably inconclusive. Rigg uses Turton's early work on participation to reflect on the changing nature of development discourse. Reynolds provides a commentary on Turton's work on the history of slavery, noting the salience of debt bondage and other forms of unfree labour today.

While the book is written in a clear style that would be accessible for beginner students, much of the content takes the form of meta-level interpretation — the Thai studies of Thai studies — that would be of interest mostly to advanced students or specialists. Much of this meta-interpretation is somewhat idiosyncratic and highly debateable. For instance, I was left puzzled by Nicholas Tapp's attack on what he (erroneously I believe) calls ‘postmodern’ approaches in recent Thai scholarship. As an example, he describes Walker's influential article (Andrew Walker, ‘The rural constitution and the everyday politics of elections in Thailand’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38, 1 [2008]: 84–105) on the rural constitution as failing to ‘ask where truth may actually lie, or … to probe alternatives to the dominant perspective’ and as supremely disinterested in ‘fear and intimidation’ (p. 69). By contrast, I read Walker's 2008 article as a vigorous analysis of a particular and alternative form of political and moral reasoning. His analysis itself is a challenge to the hegemonic assertion that rural people are incapable of such sophisticated forms of political engagement. Walker argues that this moral reasoning exists, truly, and deserves analytical attention. If it were so, as Tapp suggests, that Walker was a toothless postmodernist disinterested in truth, fear and power, the recent news that Walker has been announced ‘unwelcome’ by the Government of Thailand for the next Thai Studies conference would make little sense. Contrary to Tapp's reading, it appears that Walker has been all too interested in speaking truths, ones little welcomed by those able to wield power to forceful ends. This small example shows how much of the meta-interpretation that is undertaken in Tracks and traces is not an even-handed introduction to Thai studies, but is rather the highly positioned, and in my view idiosyncratic, writing of individual authors.

The collection does not have a conclusion. The final chapter is by Grabowsky, and it is an analysis of an early diplomatic mission, for which Grabowsky champions a little-referred-to phrase apparently coined by Turton: ‘ethnography of embassy’. The absence of a concluding note leaves the reader with the sense — which has been growing throughout the chapters — that Tracks and traces is rather like an eclectic string of beads, mismatched and crafted from differing materials, strung together only by the tenuous link that they all refer to the work of Andrew Turton. While the book could be criticised on these grounds, I came away instead charmed by this odd eclecticism. This unlikely thread — Turton — became a foil against which each author could display his or her own particular take on Thai studies (whether one agrees with that take or not), revealing much about the author's own particular concerns, views and preoccupations in the process.