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This paper is an ethnographer's reconstruction of his experience in Thailand with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the flux of opposing biases he was subject to as a black African on one hand and a farang development expert on the other. The paper discusses how racial thinking affected dynamics in the UN office and in the field, and how and why those dynamics played out differently over the course of the project. It describes racial hierarchies and meanings situated in this particular country and era as a contribution to an unfinished anthropological inquiry: how blackness and whiteness are intimately woven into the everyday practices of development bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the emerging transnational mobility of Japanese young men as lifestyle migrants in Southeast Asia, mainly targeting those in their twenties and thirties moving to Thailand for a change of life. Japanese lifestyle migrants are considered to be socio-cultural “refugees” who escape the stresses of Japanese society and seek a better quality of life elsewhere. This paper explores how and to what extent mobility liberates Japanese men from the male-centered corporate culture orsalarymanmasculinity. It also analyzes the role that travel writings have had in the social labelling and facilitation of the lifestyle mobility of Japanese young men sojourning in Southeast Asia in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For decades people from Myanmar have fled or migrated to Thailand. Civil conflicts, political repression, poverty and a lack of work opportunities are just some of the reasons why people have left Myanmar. Through these movements and the way they have been governed, a borderland has been constituted. In recent decades especially, the border itself has been strategically manipulated by state authorities to preserve a border area used as an industrial node for export-oriented industries dependent on cheap (i.e. migrant) labor. This article discusses the processes establishing the systemic categories of “refugee” and “labor migrant.” On the basis of fieldwork conducted from 2012 on, the article also analyzes the influence on the borderland of recent political and economic changes in Thailand and Myanmar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]