THAI MOBILITIES AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

Abstract

In recent decades geographic mobility in Thai rural communities has intensified and broadened in scope. As a result, the lives of many and perhaps most rural citizens no longer (if they ever did) fit easily with popular portraits of rurality as stable, isolated, and intrinsically different from the dynamic modernity of urban Thailand. Nevertheless, as the rhetoric of the ongoing national political crisis illustrates, rural–urban divisions remain powerful symbols in contemporary Thai society. This article examines how Thai mobilities both reflect and contribute to processes of self-imagining and national identification, posing questions for conventional understandings of the “rural–urban divide” in Thailand. Dominant discourses of urbanity and rurality contrast sharply with villagers' lived experiences of rural–urban flows and other mobility practices. Drawing on fieldwork with migrants and others in rural and urban Thailand, as well as on related scholarship, this article explores some of the ways in which Thai mobilities engender conflicting experiences of and desires for cultural citizenship and national belonging.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Philip Kelly for the invitation that got me thinking along these lines and for his graceful editing of this thematic issue. I am grateful also to the other participants in the April 2009 Toronto ChATSEA workshop and subsequent reviewers for their lively engagement with the material and for their incisive comments. I have done my best to incorporate their insights into this analysis. Any remaining shortcomings or errors are entirely my own. I am also indebted to Justin McDaniel for his excellent and impartial management of the Thailand-Laos-Cambodia online list (archives accessible at https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/rels-tlc) and to the list's members whose regular postings have greatly enhanced my ability to follow both ongoing events in Thailand and the contested discourses surrounding them.

Notes

^1. In April and May 2010, red-shirt gatherings paralyzed one of Bangkok's prime commercial districts, culminating in violent confrontations with the Thai military and police. In the aftermath, conservative counts numbered casualties at ninety-one deaths and over two thousand people injured. See figures in Asian Human Rights Commission 2010, 1. For thoughtful reviews of the situation leading up to the protests of 2010, see Wheeler 2010; McCargo 2009.

^2. On media rhetoric, see, for example, Rojanaphruk 2010. Public discussions have at times taken quite a vitriolic tone, particularly in the anonymous realm of cyber-discourse.

^3. In addition to their geographic associations with urban and rural populations, “yellow” and “red” camps are often described in terms of their respective opposition to or support for former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Nevertheless, yellow and red supporters can be found in both city and countryside, just as the allegiances of participants on either side are not reducible to a single set of loyalties.

^4. Much reporting on the current crisis tends to obscure, if not actively ignore, a long history of political engagement and awareness on the part of Thailand's less powerful citizens, particularly in rural areas. This includes radical movements such as the Assembly of the Poor, which sponsored significant marches on Bangkok in the late 1990s, as well as the earlier and violently suppressed actions of the Farmers Federation of Thailand in the 1970s. For recent analyses of these political movements, see Missingham 2003 and Haberkorn 2007. Not all political mobilization in rural areas has supported radical, leftist, or egalitarian movements. See Bowie 1997 for discussion of rural participation in the reactionary Village Scout Movement.

^5. Rosaldo 1994.

^6. Stevenson 2003, 333.

^9. Ibid., 738.

^7. See contributions to Rosaldo 2004; also Chu 2006.

^8. Ong 1996.

^10. See Ong 1999.

^12. Holston 1999, 169. Holston 2008 offers a detailed analysis of how varied forms of differentiated citizenship can emerge under systems of democratic governance and explores how this plays out historically and ethnographically in Brazil.

^11. Holston 2008.

^13. See contributions to Reynolds 2002 and Vandergeest 1993 for critical analyses of these and other discursive tensions in the construction of Thai nationalism. These nationalist norms of citizenship are even more fraught for non-Tai ethnic minority groups whose claims to formal citizenship as well as substantive protections are especially insecure; see, for example, Jonsson 2005.

^14. In a dissertation, Vorng (2009) analyses the power of rural–urban hierarchies in the everyday discourses of middle-class Bangkok residents, arguing that urban middle class identities are formed in significant ways through their differentiation from things and people associated with Thailand's rural periphery (baan nohk), especially those linked to the rural Northeast. For an analysis of the ambivalent reception of these attitudes among Northeastern Thai residents see McCargo and Krisadawan 2004.

^15. These models of rural nostalgia take different forms. Some are largely static and historical, while others seek to build present-day development strategies that are rooted in a(n at times unrealistic) reorientation of consumption desires and a return to rural simplicity and “traditional” social relations. See Walker 2008; also Vandergeest 1996.

^16. Rigg 2001 documents these processes for the Southeast Asian region as a whole. See also Bello et al. 1998; Phongpaichit and Baker 1995, for related analyses of the Thai political economy.

^17. For example, Jonathan Rigg and his collaborators have generated a compelling body of evidence documenting specific agrarian transformations and the broad diversification of rural livelihoods across Thailand. See Rigg and Sakunee 2001; Rigg and Ritchie 2002; Rigg et al. 2008; Rigg and Salamanca 2009.

^18. See, for example, Rigg et al. 2008; Bruneau 2009. See also Glassman 2004.

^19. These effects are not equivalent for everyone, of course. Rural Thai communities are often sharply stratified and ties with local power brokers and political patrons represent strategies for advancement and empowerment accessible to at least some village-based actors. See Boonmathya 2003; Vandergeest 1993.

^20. Economic stratification and class differentiation are important dynamics throughout rural Thailand; see, for example, Bowie 1998; Baker 2000; Ratana 2003; Aeusriwongse 2008.

^21. See, among others, Bello et al. 1998; Mills 1999 (Women); Glassman 2004.

^22. I adapt this idea of jumping scales from Glassman 2001.

^23. This project was accomplished with the financial and technical assistance of a national community development organization; participating households had to pay a significant fee and provide labor for many weeks of construction. Meeting these costs was no small hardship for some families who could little afford to forego the daily earnings of an adult member during this period. A few years earlier the same organization had provided low-cost loans to build rainwater cisterns and latrines, enabling most (but by no means all) households to install these amenities, and greatly improving their year-round access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

^24. See Mills 1997, 1999 (Women).

^25. For a more detailed discussion of migration and mobilities in Baan Naa Sakae, see Mills 1999 (Women).

^26. The goods residents could buy in this fashion ranged widely from sweets and dried fish costing a few baht per serving to large items of furniture and household appliances sold on installment plans.

^27. Appadurai 1990 points to the imaginative possibilities of media and other globalizing modes of cultural production in contemporary societies. Significantly, Thai television is a major purveyor of rural–urban distinctions: both pejorative images of country bumpkins and ideological narratives about rural “traditions” as the timeless repository of national identity.

^28. Kirsch 1966.

^29. Mills 1997; Mills 1999 (Migrant).

^30. In fact, as far as I can tell, only one other linked park exists, near Vientiane in Laos.

^31. This trip took place before the first major bridge between Nong Khai and Laos was completed (the Thai–Lao Friendship bridge) in 1994.

^32. The role of sites like Phanom Rung in public assertions of national pride and identity remains strong in Thailand, as is true for heritage sites around the world. For example, the designation of another ancient Khmer temple, Preah Vihear, located on the Thai-Cambodian border, as a Unesco World Heritage site for Cambodia in July 2008 has resulted in a simmering border dispute. Public demonstrations by yellow-shirt proponents have linked the conflictwith Cambodia to the broader Thai political crisis. Protests over the status of the Preah Vihear temple site became a part of yellow-shirt demands in late 2008 and helped to precipitate the change in government to that of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva (2008–2011).

^33. Elsewhere I discuss similar ideals and the importance of leisure travel for rural-urban migrants in Bangkok; see Mills 1999 (Migrant).

^34. See Mills 1999 (Enacting); 2005 (Fingers); 2008. My research has focused on grassroots activists who are members of small unions, regional labor groups, and NGO–sponsored study programs, many of whom are women and rural migrants. Only a small minority of Bangkok wage workers take up such activist roles. Labor unions operate in a highly restrictive legal environment and only 3 to 6 percent of the private industrial labor force is unionized; see Glassman 2004. Moreover, Thailand's labor movement is neither strong nor unified and a history of political co-optation characterizes many higher levels of national labor organization.

^35. See also Pangsupha 2007 for an analysis of how daily stresses shape both activist and non-activist workers' choices in Bangkok.

^36. See Vorng 2009. Brody 2006 also shows how these dynamics play out in a Bangkok shopping mall.

^37. Mills 1999 (Enacting), 2005 (Fingers), 2008.

^38. Mills 1999 (Enacting); Mills 2008.

^39. Labor activists have also participated in Thailand's recent political protests. Some of the grassroots activists I have worked with joined in the large anti-Thaksin protests of 2006, in solidarity with a wide range of civil society groups opposed to the corruption and profiteering enabled by his government. Here labor groups found themselves allied with a variety of political factions that were later to support yellow shirt protests. The role of labor activists in the conflicts of more recent years is not fully clear to me; however, the current polarization of discourse and the openly anti-elite rhetoric of red-shirt politics, has bolstered support for the latter among many working-class Bangkok residents whether they are of rural origin or not.

^40. Notable exceptions include Kitiarsa 2008 on working class Isan transmigrants in Singapore; and Bao 2005 and 2009 on middle-class and Sino-Thai immigrants in the United States.

^41. Jones and Pardthaisong 1999 (Commodification) and 1999 (Impact); Tsay 2002.

^42. Skrobanek et al. 1997; Dinan 2000.

^44. Ibid., 16.

^43. Ong 2006.

^45. Mills 2005 (Engendering).

^46. For critical commentary of such , see Skrobanek et al. 1997; Ratanolan-Mix and Piper 2003. A growing body of research (some of it as yet unpublished) now seeks to challenge the primary identification of Thai women's transnational marriages with sex work and trafficking by examining women's own agency in pursuing and crafting these ties (e.g., Boonmathya 2005; Ratanolan-Mix 2008; Lapanun 2010).

^47. Mydans 2010; Angeles and Sunanta 2009, 550.

^48. Angeles and Sunanta 2009, 565.

^49. Ibid., 557.

^50. See Knodel and Saengtienchai 2007; Knodel et al. 2010; and Thompson 2009 for some initial quantitative and qualitative research on this topic.

^51. In 1992, during another period of antigovernment protests in Bangkok, the use of mobile technologies served to mark participants as predominantly “middle class,” according to Ockey 1999. By contrast, the use of mobile phone text messaging, internet links, and community radio broadcasts to coordinate and mobilize the 2010 red shirt protests signals the adoption and familiarity of these technologies across a broad swath of Thai society. See, for example, Fuller 2010.

^52. Urry 2007, 51–52.