Losing the Remote: Exploring the Thai Social Order with the Early and Late Hanks

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the common understanding of Thailand’s ethnic divide as marked by unfamiliarity and an absolute difference between Thai society and the hill tribes in the country’s north. Much scholarship has overlooked how the negotiation of diversity and complexity has been foundational to Thai and other Southeast Asian societies and cultures for millennia. An ideology of ethnically singular and exclusive Thai identity framed the historical context in which Lucien Hanks initially wrote about Thai social life and its logics. I draw on his later work, particularly the research he conducted with Jane R. Hanks in the northern hills, to revisit diversity in Thai society and history. Hanks identified merit and power as the key principles of the Thai social order. A third notion, parity, enables inclusive and diverse social networks. It offers an indigenous challenge to any association of Thai identity, worldview, or social organisation with intolerance and ethnic chauvinism.

KEYWORDS:

• Thailand
• society
• history
• power
• pluralism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I thank the Editors of Anthropological Forum and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive engagement with my case.

2 Lucien Hanks died in 1988. Jane R. Hanks completed revisions of the manuscript with the help of colleagues Nicola Tannenbaum, Richard O’Connor, and Nina Kammerer. In 1990 when I was a graduate student, I was brought into the project to help Jane with the bibliography as I knew the literature on the highlands.

3 My discussion does not focus on Anderson’s work, Jonsson (2022, this issue), Aragon (2022, this issue), Tannenbaum (2022, this issue) and O'Connor (2022, this issue) make the connections clear.

4 The exception is former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was driven from power in 2006 and remains in exile. His government’s financial support to villages and the establishment of Subdistrict Administrative Councils had very positive impact in rural areas and countered previous governmental neglect.