Sandra Cate
Anthropologist and folklorist Sandra Cate explores contemporary art, textiles, material and expressive culture, religion, tourism, and concepts of heritage in Southeast Asia and in the diaspora. She has written about silk tourism, Buddhist temple architecture and murals, narrative festival scrolls, Mien/Yao needlework, and Bangkok traffic jams. Her recent essays in Everyday Life in Southeast Asia and Modern and Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia: A Critical Anthology concern participatory art in Thailand. Her book, Making Merit, Making Art: A Thai Temple in Wimbledon, analyzes contemporary Buddhist murals. Her analysis of Buddhist cloth scrolls, co-authored with Leedom Lefferts, was published by the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore. She currently teaches anthropology at San Jose State University in California.