(Im)Mobilization and hegemony: ‘hill tribe’ subjects and the ‘Thai’ state

Abstract

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon ‘hill tribe’ people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new ‘Thai hill tribe’ subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside—the ‘non-Thai hill tribe’. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its ‘others’ are redefined.

Keywords:

• hegemony
• citizenship
• subjectivity
• embodiment
• Thailand

Acknowledgements

Enormous thanks is owed to the Cultural Geography Speciality Group (CGSG) of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) for the honour of Best PhD Student Paper Award which was granted for an earlier version of this paper, presented at the AAG Annual meeting in New Orleans in 2003. Many thanks also to the Australian National University for support to undertake this research, to the National Research Council of Thailand for granting permission to do research in Thailand, and to Ajarn Chira Prangkio of Chiang Mai University for his sponsorship and support during my time in Chiang Mai. I am extremely grateful to the Highland Association, and Dr Chayan Vaddhanaphuti of Chiang Mai University for giving me the opportunity to participate and learn. Finally, I would like to thank Vincent Del Casino, Katherine Gibson and Linda Malam for their comments, critical insights and support; and the five anonymous reviewers of the CGSC student paper competition and two anonymous reviewers for Social & Cultural Geography for their generous comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 ‘Khun’ is a title of respect in Thai, like Mr or Ms, and ‘Wandii’ is a pseudonym. In the rest of the this paper I will refer to ‘Wandii’ by her first name, as is customary in the Thai context.

2 For discussion of the term ‘geo-body’ see Thongchai (1994). Thongchai introduces the term to capture the diffuse meanings associated with the territory of the nation such as ‘integrity and sovereignty; border control, armed conflict, invasions and wars; the territorial definition of national economy, products … culture, and so on’ (1994: 17). His study traces the history of the emergence of a Thai geo-body, and in doing so presents a unique and significant challenge to notions of a pre-given ‘Thai-ness’.

3 ‘Tai’ is an ethno-linguistic category which refers to the Tai-speaking people who are spread across the valleys of South-East Asia between Thailand, southern China, Laos and Vietnam. It is a group with which the modern ‘Thai’ national identity is linked.

4 A more detailed discussion of my methodologies is provided in my PhD dissertation, McKinnon (2004).

5 ‘Highland Association’ is a pseudonym for an NGO with which I worked during doctoral field work in northern Thailand.

6 The term ‘governmentality’ originates in the last works of Michel Foucault. It is a way of speaking about how the operations of modern governments began to extend beyond simply collecting taxes and managing territory, to managing society, populations, to governing good citizens. These new modes of rule exist both within and beyond the formal apparatus of the state. Foucault's studies focus famously on institutions in which (prisoner, patient) subjects are formed and regulated. But the formation and regulation of subjects spreads beyond the institution also—to practices of self-regulation and self-rule. The term governmentality encapsulates these complex processes of rule, describing the ways in which the process through which human beings are formed as subjects (citizens, patients, criminals, etc.) are processes of power, acts of governing. I consider in much more detail the work of Foucault, the concept of governmentality, and the relationship between knowledge and power in my PhD dissertation (see McKinnon 2004). For a good introduction to the work of Foucault see Rabinow (1984). For a good introduction to governmentality see Foucault (1997) or Rose (1999), and for work more specifically on the regulation and transformation of bodies see Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977) and The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990).

7 The year 1907 marks the last of a series of treaties between the Siamese state and the French and British that hinged on drawing detailed maps of the Siamese border (Thongchai 1994: 128). Give or take a few ongoing disputes over small parcels of land, the borders drawn at this time remain the borders of present-day Thailand.

8 The terms ‘Tai’ and ‘Kha’ appear in various chronicles kept by the royal court about key events such as battles and journeys during the King's reign. There are two key types of chronicles: tamnan which are more traditional and are usually religious in nature; and phongsawadan which are more modern and perhaps more ‘factual’ (R. Renard, personal communication).

9 The slogan ‘race, religion and King’ was adapted from the British slogan ‘God and Country’ by King Vajiravudh who also introduced the concept of the Thai nation and the concept of Thai race or chat Thai (see Renard 2000; Wyatt 1984).

10 Such detailed stipulations on the practice of daily life suggest that, in its efforts to shape a new citizen-subject, the State was looking to Europe as the exemplar of modernity and civilization.

11 Estimates ranges from 60 to 80 per cent of highlanders without citizenship in 1999.

12 I have not successfully located the exact document that states that an applicant no longer has to prove fluency in central Thai, and am relying on information provided during field work by the Nai Amphur of Fang District who has taken a special interest in the details of citizenship laws due to the high proportion of highlanders residing in Fang District; as well as information provided by Khun Wandii.