Colonial discourse in Ambiguous Allure of the West

Rian Thai: International Journal of Thai Studies

A handful of Thai gender studies academics have noted that the field’s failure to develop a satisfactory episteme of contemporary masculinities is the result of a dominant theoretical approach which has favoured cultural exceptionalism whilst eschewing the frameworks developed in Western academia. This article maintains that this approach – which I argue had been a mainstay of the Thai anthropology of the fifties and sixties and, later, during the intensive research effort of the 1990s AIDS crisis – has resulted in a currently stagnant academic construction of the Thai male as a series of crude stereotypes whose behaviour is rooted in ‘traditional’ cultural values and beliefs. Drawing on six months ethnographic fieldwork performed in the northern town of Nan during 2012, I argue that Thai gender studies must move beyond the explanatory models of ‘traditional’ Buddhist values and begin to see Thai masculinity as an intensely hybrid and internally contested discourse, the meanings of which are constantly in flux. By analysing the discursive strategies of male members of the Nan municipal fitness centre, I note how individuals are able to reject, appropriate and (re)negotiate dominant idioms and discursive formations of masculinity in a bid to construct their own pragmatic interpretations of legitimate masculine subjectivities. In doing so, these men become implicated in a poly-vocal and power-laden discourse which constantly re-defines ‘Thai masculinity’, thereby interrupting its perceived fixity. Drawing from the works of Foucault and Bhabha, this article will introduce the term ‘hybrid masculinities’ and consider the potential benefits of its application to the established theoretical tools currently employed in the study of gender and identity in contemporary Thai culture.

Since the collapse of Marxism as the dominant tradition of radical critique in the 1980s, varieties of post-structuralism have emerged as the most influential form of critical analysis in Thai studies, both in Thailand and the West. However, like previous generations of Marxist-inspired analysts, contemporary post-struc-turalists need to address epistemological questions about the validity of using theory derived from the Western cultural and intellectual tradition in studying a South East Asian society. Issues regarding the translation, transculturation and localization of theory are just as important for twenty-first-century post-structuralist Thai studies as they were for twentieth-century Marxist Thai studies. This study is a critical review of Rosalind Morris's post-structuralist analyses of modern Thai culture. Through an assessment of the work of a prominent advocate of post-structuralist approaches to interpreting modern Thai culture, it highlights the interrelationship between the practice of translation between languages/discourses, on the one hand, and the epistemological status of Western theory in Thai studies, on the other.

South East Asia Research, 2020

Book Reviews 472 closely with a twelfth-century story displayed on the bas-reliefs and other features of the Bayon temple (Ang 2007, 364-381). Apart from these issues, Traces of Trauma is clearly a groundbreaking work that takes a refreshing look at Cambodia's dark past of the 1970s and the long-term impacts of the violence on survivors. Through its interdisciplinary approach of examining a range of visual cultural materials, together with the author's broad knowledge of contemporary Cambodian history, art, culture, and politics, Ly's Traces of Trauma has many original contributions to offer to both Cambodian and Southeast Asian scholarship as well as the fields of art history, cultural studies, memory studies, cinematic and performance studies, and many more.

Social &# 38; Cultural Geography, 2005

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.

Thailand's Plural Identities: Contesting the National Imagination in Fiction and Ethnography, 2024

This article examines notions of national identity and diversity in Thailand during the twentieth century. It draws on ethnographies, historical fiction, jungle adventure, romance, and official documents to question common notions of Thai identity and of what constitutes socially relevant Thai-language writing. The focus is in part on so-called hill peoples, whom scholarship has generally regarded as irrelevant to an understanding of Thai society. The study suggests a recurring debate among rival Thai perspectives on society, identity, and inequality. I divide the range of social imaginaries into three groups. Some manifest unambiguous pluralism and interethnic equivalence. Others express a class-based critique of the harm that derives from hierarchy and social inequalities. The third view insists on Thai distinction from and superiority over other peoples. The implications of this chauvinism are often elitist, sometimes racist, and also at times authoritarian. Of the three views that I identify, the emphasis on pluralism and interethnic equivalence has never received any notice from scholars of Thai society and culture.