New Mandala

10 responses so far ↓

• 1 polo // Nov 16, 2006 at 6:49 am

  Hmm. The 2006 royal coup d’etat. Should a paper on that come under “Buddhism in the Modern World”, or “Contesting Global Governance”, or “Democracy under Globalization”, or “Law and Society”?
  Or perhaps should it be included in “Natural and Man-made Disasters”?

• 2 Nirut // Nov 16, 2006 at 12:11 pm

  Good question polo, I like “Contesting Global Governance” as I think it should be contested and rigorously, in practice and in theory (though not necessarily in the way that it is being contested in Thailand right now); “Buddhism in the modern world” would open up some very interesting possibilities for enquiry into the relationship of the state and Buddhsim in Thailand…perhaps in terms of ideas of moral authority and the state. The moral authority of candidates in elections and how vote buying plays into processes of its construction, an important issue for consideration in juxtaposition or complementary fashion to coups and other “technologies” of “Thai democracy” or political culture. “Law and society” could be interesting if the context of Thailand’s history of coups and numerous constitutions and what this might mean for legal culture in Thailand was unpacked in the context of this coup and not the neo-liberal notion of “civil society” that has come to dominate people’s perspectives on this kind of discussion over the last decade. “Natural and man-made disasters” could lend itself to an interesting play on the coup and Tsunami and would perhaps allow for a comparisson between Thaksin and the coup in context of some real pressing issues facing Thailand to contextualise much of the debate over democracy, sufficiency economy and the coup. “Democracy under Globalisation” is to me quite a ridiculous notion. I can’t see how a discussion of democracy in terms of the chimera of globalisation isn’t actually about the international dimension of democracy in which case we have two central areas of enquiry. The postal vote, which was an issue a few years back in Thailand around Chuan’s time but even with my obsession with political culture and vote buying would be hard pressed to write anything meaningful on it. The other being International Relations, which is too macro for my liking…

  Havig said all the above, Nic, I don’t know what Tim and Ant think of globalisation, but for me the conference couldn’t have a less appealing theme to have to write about…there isn’t much more I can say about globalisation than I think it is a novel cultural elaboration of the “no longer flat earth” theory and it carries with it the airs of pretention of the enlightenment sentiment that is implicated in legitimating the succeednig centuries of cosmological chauvinism that gave us entire theories of racism and capitalism. I prefer to ask why valorise such an idea with an international conference…is it because right now “inter” is particularly salient for Thais as anti-coup factions try to attract foreign commentary to support their cause and the pro-coup lobby are reduced to defending their position by resorting to Asian Values to shore up their position against international criticism. Or is it a project of a particularly influential academic class that’s aspirations are global that shapes the conference theme?

  When the host country, of which the conference is about, is in the grip of a coup, has an ailing monarch who has been head of the nation for most of living memory and implicated in the coup culture, an upsurge of civil unrest involving acts of state (torture, massacre) and civilian violence (”terrorist” and other acts) that must have an impact on political culture now and in the future (obviously in and from the past), along with a raft of other domestic and more local oriented concern such as an unabated HIV/AIDS epidemic, massive debt across classes, a rise in acts of random violence on the streets of large urban centres, why look globally…is this an intentional myopia, a head in the sand approach by Thai studies to the “difficult questions” ?
  Anyone care to throw around some ideas about this one or are we just going to roll over and write our papers about how amazing it is that earth isn’t flat?

• 3 James Haughton // Nov 16, 2006 at 4:52 pm

  Tough challenge there Nirut.

  I think my answer would be that studying borders, internationalisation, etc, tends to highlight the constructed rather than essential nature of “nation” or “thai”; and that goes a certain way towards undermining the rhetoric of uniqueness that has been trotted out to justify the coup, fend off foreign criticism, etc.
  The coup itself is only possible because the thai state has been constructed by history to be over-centralised in bangkok, and hence vulnerabe to decapititation; which is a result of pre-modern era understandings of the nature of the state clashing with french and british imperial states at the undefined borders of these different concepts.
  Similarly the HIV/AIDS epidemic cannot be addressed without looking frankly at the role transnational Burmese, Lao and Cambodian labour plays in keeping the thai economy afloat, which is in turn tied in to ideas circulating in thailand about legitimate and illegitimate migration, the way borders are enforced or evaded, the rightful place of thailand in the region, and so on, which I suspect date back to an older perception of non-thai as “kha” or slaves.

• 4 Nirut // Nov 17, 2006 at 12:19 am

  James thanks for taking up the challenge. I like your idea about the possibilities that the study of borders and internationalism can provide in terms of analytical clarity vis-a-vis state rhetoric and related essentialisms.

  Applying your comments to Tongchai’s work as an example of border studies doing this, I’d say that Anderson’s imagined communities (of which Tongchai’s study is an exemplary use of his insights, applied to the Thai case, and so to me is first a study of nationalism and then a border study) is the source of this critique you speak of and that in the case of Thailand, as Anderson himself pointed out in the late seventies, Thai Studies (”the discipline”) was/is in fact heavily implicated in the claims of a unique” Thailand and so its projects (then and now), warrant critical scrutiny, hence my raising this issue. So basically the critique was there without the borders and internationalist perspectives and so I say the global perspective in this sense isn’t appealing on that level, as much as what is happening now and a desire, rather, to look away from it.

  My point is that I think the conference theme has come out of an element of reluctance on behalf of the conference co-ordinators to provide any solid critique of the coup and related institutions as well as the realityof the social state of affairs in Thailand and in part as to not look globally is to subject Thailand to scrutiny when it is unprepared to do so based on a lack of certainty and an absence of any rehearsed position to take to say all is ok, as things are still too new (for counting any chickens as they may be ducks) and so the nations academics are experiencing a state of schizophrenia like in WW2, “we don’t know who has won yet so lets play it safe and look away and see what the rest of the world says first and then decide what we will make of it all”.

  I say this in terms of Thailand’s already well honed sense of its place internationally and the politics of representation/identity politics that are integral to processes of contextualization for both domestic and international consumption on this point. I would go so far as to say that this practiced, practice has given us “Global Thailand 2008″ in part as a soul search for those whose “civilised” nation has become even less dissimilar to their “barbarian” neighbours through the coup (I agree with your take on the Burmese, Lao and Cambodian “others”) and in part as what do you do when you are Thailand and you have the coup “that was not supposed to happen (anymore)?” You see having the coup now is like being uncivilized in the past, it subjects Thailand to comparison with “failed states”, so what better than a “global gaze” for the moment. Thai studies conferences are after all very much a show case on Thailand.

  Regardless of my musings on logics of practice, I don’t think the internationally outward focus of the conference can actually achieve something that an inward focus couldn’t (already has) but it can certainly provide an escape from much that could benefit from a more localized intense focus. Perhaps critiques of uniqueness are easier avoided if the nitty gritty details of Thailand’s normalcy are glossed over for its global ambitions?

  Anyway, I am very interested in your comment regarding understanding of HIV/AIDS in terms of the Burmese, Lao and Cambodian labour and the role these migrants have in the Thai economy. What is the relationship you are drawing here exactly? And waht is the process of othering you are highlighting?

  I would be a little cautious over attributing the coup’s success to the centralised nature of Bangkok as the military were on the streets of other main urban centres such as, Nakhon Sawan, Phitsanulok, Khon Kaen, Khorat, Chiangmai etc. reflecting both “decapitation” and “amputation”. Also however, I would say that as in other countries when the military have control of parliament it pretty much spells and end to rule of which ever govt was in power, the coup de tat not requiring total control over every source of power of the state, regardless of geographical distribution.

  I would however like to hear more on the undefined borders of the different concepts of French and British imperial states and the pre-modern Thai versions…are you saying that Bangkok is a “hybrid” city that reflects in its form and influence the “clash of civilisations of yester-year?

• 5 James Haughton // Nov 19, 2006 at 4:55 am

  Nirut: You’re quite right that I was drawing inspiration from Thongchai – I should remember this is an academic board and cite my sources!

  On HIV/AIDS my general impression is that the epidemic was brought more or less under control among potential Thai victims; but now an ever-increasing number of workers in the Thai sex industry are from the surrounding countries (and from ethnic minorities within Thailand) rather than being ethnic thai. These people are usually oppressed by the Thai state (though there has been some progress on this front since the MOUs on migrant labour in 2004) and sex workers are far more likely to be prosecuted and deported as “illegal migrants” rather than treated as “human trafficking victims” or “potential victims of HIV” as more sympathetic constructions might have it. Male migrant labour is also more likely to go to cheap sex workers who are less likely to take anti-HIV precautions (I have heard some anecdotes about an increase in the child sex trade as a result of thai sex consumers demanding virgins out of fear of HIV/AIDS).
  The Thai business lobby is in general anti-migrant rights and anti-workers rights as this keeps wages down, and this translates into, eg, not allowing health workers or NGOs who want to educate about HIV into work sites (The ILO has done a few reports on this). HIV/AIDS is being deported from Thailand to its neighbours who are far less equipped to do anything about it.

• 6 Nirut // Nov 19, 2006 at 11:19 am

  A most tangled skein of political economy is woven indeed, James. The nexus of state labour-needs drawing people into a position of marked disadvantage and vulnerability vis a vis selling their labour, subsequent socio-economic position in Thailand and the sets of state categorisations that they become labeled with and “processed” out and back home (is this a strategy of destabilisation by state agencies to ensure a compliant class of labour?), all the while the migrants themselves are treading a dangerous path through a sociality fraught with HIV and then deported back to their country of origin where services and facilities to cope with the disease are fundamentally limited/non-existent.

  This is a very different version of Migrant Labour to the domestic kind Mary Beth Mills writes about in the northeast of Thailand and would be a very interesting point of juxtaposition that could better contextualise Thailand’s place in the region in terms of political economy.

  I had heard the same kind of anecdote regading children being in increased demand due to fears of HIV by customers…

  I have read Graham Fordham’s and Chris Lyttleton’s work on HIV in Thailand as well as some chapters in edited collections Like Nerida Cook and Peter Jackson’s book on Gender and sexualities inThailand. The only one that I found provides a thorough political economy of the disease was Fordham’s and both he and Lyttleton provide very interesting insights into social change and its impact on sexual norms etc and the implicationsfor the diseases spread through the Thai population. Neither discuss the foreign migrant labour in any detail however, Do you know of any one who does? Or is this an area you are working on yourself?

• 7 James Haughton // Nov 25, 2006 at 4:50 pm

  Lyttleton has done a few pieces on the spread of HIV into Laos: one is called “Sister cities and easy passage” about the sex trade between Savannakhet and Mukdahan; another is called Watermelons, bars and trucks – dangerous intersections in Northwest Lao PDR and is available here. http://www.rockmekong.org/pubs/he-pubs/Watermelon.pdf

  A good source for development literature on foreign migrant labour is UNIAP – the UN Inter Agency Program on Human Trafficking in the GMS, their home page is here: http://www.no-trafficking.org/uniap_frontend/Default.aspx

  I’m not sure that the issues which confront foreign migrants are that different from those confronting girls from Isaan. While the migration of girls from Isaan is not illegal it is definitely constructed by Bangkok discourse as immoral (cf the discussion here about the so-called death of Somtam) and they are subject to similar forms of exploitation.

• 8 Historicus // Mar 3, 2007 at 12:41 am

  Should we simply forget all this and boycott a conference that is being opened by a proncess, features the king at the top of their poster and is obviously trying to avoid the real issues in contemporary Thai/Tai studies? Then again, in 1984, some foreign academics did take up a call to protest the arrest of Acharn Sulak and others, and called on Prem to release them. Maybe this time the foreign scholars could call on Prem to lock himself out of the political driver’s seat. But maybe it won’t be necessary and those nice military men will have arranged an election by the time the conference comes around.

• 9 Srithanonchai // Mar 3, 2007 at 2:02 pm

  I guess that there will have been elections shortly before the conference. That might not be a problem. However, I am still curious to learn what “the real issues in contemporary Thai studies” are.

• 10 New Mandala » Thai Studies Conference: The extended deadline // Jun 10, 2007 at 9:39 pm

  [...] coverage of the preamble to the conference is available in half a dozen posts from our archives (15 November 2006, 15 March 2007, 23 March 2007, 2 April 2007, 13 April 2007 and 27 April 2007).  Those posts, and [...]

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