This edited volume is an outgrowth of a conference in honor of Charles F. Keyes held at the University of Washington in 2007. John Marston introduces the volume and then wraps it up with a brief biographical essay about Keyes, an interview with Keyes, and an extensive bibliography of Keyes's work. The nine essays in this volume are drawn from those presented at the conference.

The authors focus their essays on some of the topics that Keyes explored during his productive academic career. The broad focus is ethnicity, as the title suggests. The essays are divided into three sections with three papers in each: “The State and Public Ceremony,” “The Grassroots Negotiation of Modernity,” and “Crossing Borders of State and Nation.” The authors draw on their research in mainland Southeast Asia with essays on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. They focus on upland peoples in Thailand (Jane M. Ferguson, Judith M. S. Pine, and Pinkaew Laungaramsri); Vietnamese in Vietnam, Laos, and the United States (Allison Truitt and Duong Tich Hanh) as well as Cambodia (John A. Marston); and, not surprisingly given Keyes's initial research, the people of northeastern Thailand (Ratana Tosakul, Suchada Thaweesit, and Suriya Smutkupt and Pattana Kitiarsa).

The first section, “The State and Public Ceremony,” contains Truitt's essay “The Tenth Day of March and Contingent Lineages of Vietnamese Statehood”; Ferguson's “Rock Your Religion: Shan Buddhist Ritual and Stage Show Revelry in a Contested Zone at the Thai-Burma Border”; and Marston's “Reestablishing the Cambodian Monkhood.” Truitt discusses March 10 of the Hung Kings’ death anniversary celebrations and provides background information on the Hung Kings, who serve as symbolic founders of the Vietnamese state and ancestors of the Vietnamese people. She also highlights how different populations celebrate the Hung Kings, in particular through accounts of the celebrations in Vietnam and Louisiana. This is a vivid sketch of the various topics. Like Truitt, Ferguson presents a sketch of another diasporic cultural celebration, that of a Shan ordination festival taking place on the border between Thailand and Burma. Novice ordinations are iconic of Shan religious practices, and the festival on the border celebrates Shanness, an ethnic identity that marginalizes the Shan in both Thailand and Burma. Marston provides an extensive discussion of the reestablishment of the Cambodian monastic ordination lineage, contrasting official narratives with accounts of monks who had to stop wearing their monastic robes during the Khmer Rouge period and who resumed wearing them when it became possible to do so. Each paper addresses the ways in which people in different locations negotiate issues of identity and agency.

The papers in the section titled “The Grassroots Negotiations of Modernity” include Tosakul's “Alterity to Modernity: Village-Based Self-Sufficient Farm Production in Northeastern Thailand”; Pine's “Christianity, Modernity, and Creativity: The Construction of a Lahu Baptist Identity”; and Laungaramsri's “Contested Citizenship: Cards, Colors, and the Culture of Identification.” Tosakul discusses self-sufficiency economies and their connections with Buddhist values along with the rather contradictory need to have the labor, land, and income necessary to maintain these self-sufficient households. The multitude of topics covered in this essay makes it impossible for her to discuss any of them in depth. Pine's essay highlights how Lahu Baptists use ideas of a premodern, proto-Christian past (p. 127) to construct an identity that is both Lahu and Christian. Laungaramsri discusses issues surrounding official Thai identity, the variety of identity cards that indicate the range of non-Thai identities, and the limits these place on mobility and employment.

The final section, “Crossing Borders of State and Nation” includes Thaweesit's “Narrating Legitimacy, Narrating Agencies: Citizenship Negotiations among Internationally Displaced Laotians in Northeastern Thailand”; Hanh's “Temporary Lives, Eternal Dreams: Experiences of Viet Labor Migrants in Savannakhet, Laos”; and Smutkupt and Kitiarsa's “Cross-Border Hypergamy and Gendered Agency: Farang Husbands and Isan Wives on the Global Cultural Stage.” Thaweesit, like Laungaramsri, presents a detailed case study of displaced Lao and the various ways in which the Thai government fails to recognize their Thai citizenship. Hanh discusses Viet migrants to Laos, their reasons for going there, and the ways in which they construct their livelihood. The final paper by Smutkupt and Kitiarsa discusses a different alien population, Western men who marry Isan wives and become Isan sons-in-law. Smutkupt and Kitiarsa relate narratives of assorted Western men and Isan women to provide a nuanced analysis of the expectations on both sides.

Ethnicity, Borders, and the Grassroots Interface with the State should be of interest to readers who want to understand the history of anthropology in Southeast Asia. The introduction provides a nice framing of Keyes's research interests, and the interview at the end provides insight into how he thinks about his work and its relationship to anthropological theory. It will also appeal to area studies specialists and graduate students working on issues related to the papers’ topics. The topics are a little esoteric, and the quality is too uneven to use the book in undergraduate courses.