William J.Klausner was born in New York City in 1929. He has spent more than half of his life in his second home, Thailand. He arrived in Thailand in 1955 and spent a year of intensive field work in a northeastern Thai village. He then served as an advisor to the Ministry of Interior assisting in the development of a national community development program. He has written extensively in the three major fields of his interest: law, culture and popular Buddhism.
This collection is Klausner's material that he produced when he conducted his fieldwork at Ban Nongkhon, Ubonratchathani province, in 1955-1957. The collection consist of 32 notebooks, 5 typescripts, 1 letter, and 22 photographs. His research is a study of Thai social and culture transition. So what he recorded concern with religion, ritual, belief, traditional knowledge, superstition, astrology, and villager's way of life.
