by Baker Chris
Figure 22: Mass mobilization. Two-stroke motorcycles helped to connect rural Thailand to the market and the nation.
The USA stimulated the construction of provincial highways in the 1950s and 1960s to reach its air bases. The Thai army began to build feeder roads in the 1970s to have better access to the areas commanded by jungle guerrillas, and the Accelerated Rural Development programme used US aid funds to pave village roads. Local politicians with construction businesses kept up the momentum through the 1980s and 1990s. By around 1990, every village except some in the highlands was accessible by a paved road, and every provincial and most district centres were connected to the capital by an overnight bus.
Japanese firms began assembling motorcycles in Thailand after the Second World War and gradually converted to local production. By the mid-1970s, sales ran around 50 000 a year. As the economy accelerated and as migrant remittances to the villages increased, motorcycle sales rose steeply, reaching 2 million a year before the 1997 crisis. Most of these were sold in the rural areas, where by the mid-1990s over three-fifths of all households owned one. With their cheap price and ability to go where there are no roads, they revolutionized rural transport – ferrying farmers to their fields, housewives to the sub-district markets, children to school, and everyone to temple festivals.
By 1980, a television could be found in almost every urban household, but in only a third of households in the countryside. Over the next decade, the Japanese government gave aid for rural electrification to promote demand for consumer durables, and the television stations extended their coverage nationwide. Once the remittances from migrant labour increased in the late 1980s, a television set became the first purchase choice. By the mid-1990s, over 90 per cent of rural households had one.
While the government abandoned the fight to control print media, it was acutely aware of the power and rural reach of electronic media, especially television. Up to the 1990s, all four television stations and all 400-plus radio stations were operated or licensed by the armed forces or government agencies. The content was closely controlled. The radio news was a succession of press releases by official agencies. The television news began with the royal family and tracked down the military and political hierarchy. Prime time was reserved for locally made drama serials. Special programmes were broadcast about the monarchy, armed forces, the standard version of history, and official views of national development.
Gradually, this situation eased, albeit partially, but enough to allow these media to become more of a mirror in which the society could project itself. Around 1990, television channels moved the royal news to its own segment and abandoned the strictly hierarchical format. More programming was subcontracted out, allowing companies such as Watchdog and the Nation Group to introduce more independent political commentary and debate. Locally made drama serials grew in quality and popularity, often adapting popular melodramatic novels, and serving as a mirror for the formation of the new middle class. Every night around half of urban adults sat down to watch, and newspapers serialized the scripts for those who missed episodes. Though scattered across genres of love story, family drama, ghost story, and action drama, few scripts wavered from a focus on the new middle class. Favourite themes were the individual achieving success against adversity; the family achieving new prosperity without losing its moral compass; and the struggles against old habits of nepotism, violence, and corruption. The dramas were also a showcase for sharing tastes in dress, fashions in home design, forms of speech, and models of social behaviour.
As the rural audience widened and prospered somewhat in the 1990s, the programming tilted towards them. The television drama ‘Nai hoi thamin’ (The Hardy Drover) was the first to present villagers as more than comic relief and to feature urban actors struggling to approximate northeastern rural accents. More time was devoted to gameshows, often hosted by comedy troupes recruited from the lowbrow nightclubs (kafe) catering to rural migrants. Radio DJs quietly overthrew official linguistic unity by playing and introducing songs in local dialects.
Popular music formed another social mirror. The ‘songs for life’ band Caravan returned from the jungle in the early 1980s. A new band, Carabao, managed to popularize the genre while retaining some of its political content. In 1984, Carabao’s ‘Made in Thailand’ became one of the first national hit songs by poking fun at the enthusiasm for foreign goods and brand names. The central region style of luk thung became popular in concert tours from the 1960s onwards by reflecting the sorrows and aspirations of the rural migrant. It then gained a national audience through audiotapes and radio.
In the 1990s, luk thung penetrated television, and singers became national stars, wafting off to Tokyo and Los Angeles to entertain the Thai diaspora. The northeastern style of mo lam was also updated and popularized, and the Khmer border region’s kantreum. In the 1990s, companies like Grammy began to organize these stars, as well as domesticated versions of western and Japanese pop, and to cultivate a national ‘star culture’ by exploiting the synergies between music, television dramas, and product advertising.
The new public space made room for a new pantheon of heroes and heroines, distinguished by the ordinariness of their social backgrounds. Luang Por Koon was an ascetic monk from rural Khorat who produced amulets that became popular among soldiers as protective talismans, and later spread to a wider market as charms for riches and good fortune. Revenues from amulet sales and pilgrim donations rose to several hundred million baht a year, invested in schools and other welfare. Public figures, royalty, and especially politicians paid visits to Luang Por Koon, who made a point of using forms of personal address now considered old-fashioned, low-class, and impolite. Phumphuang Duangjan was an uneducated child labourer who became nationally famous as a country singer. After her early death in 1991, Princess Sirindhorn attended the funeral, the prime minister gave a eulogy, and her local wat was converted into a shrine to her memory. Khaosai Galaxy knocked out 16 of his 19 opponents as an international boxing champion, and then became an actor and television personality. Another boxer, Somluck Kamsing, won Thailand’s first Olympic gold metal at the 1996 Olympics and became an instant national hero. Weightlifter Paveena Thongsuk became the first Thai woman to win gold eight years later. In 2013, Ratchanok Intanon became the world badminton champion. Beginning in the mid-1990s, television hosted a new style of earthy comedy with players recruited from a local music-hall type tradition, especially Mum Jokmok.
Khaosai, Somluck, Paveena, Ratchanok, and Mum all came from the rural northeast. Religion, song, sport, and comedy broadened the class range of the social mirror and breached old psychological barriers inherited from the sakdina era.
Celebrating diversity
This expansion of new public spaces in print and electronic media formed a mirror in which a rapidly changing society could reflect and share tastes, social conduct, aspirations, and even political ideas. It was very much a single national mirror. Almost all of the media emanated from Bangkok and primarily reflected city society. Hence, it had a powerful influence in establishing an aspirational standard for the rest of the country. But it was also a mirror that increasingly reflected the diversity of the society.
One area where this was evident was in religion. Popular practice of Buddhism in terms of temporary ordination and attendance at the local wat was in decline. But other, new forms flourished, aided by the advances in media and communications. Pilgrimage tours by charter bus became popular, swelling the patronage of temples associated with famous monks, both living and dead. Several living monks acquired a national audience through radio talks, audiotapes, or simply prominence in the national news. The differences in their style and message allowed the audience a choice. Phra Phayom Kalyano advocated a modern and rational approach to urban life. Luangta Mahabua had a reputation for ascetic practice and resulting supernatural power. Luang Por Koon offered a talent for miracles coupled with a distinctly northeastern, levelling earthiness. Such monks attracted huge followings and chann
elled large donation incomes to projects of charity and construction.
Popular religious practice had never been as controlled as the authorities might want, but now many new forms flourished in response to social change. People removed from their communities needed more individual forms of practice. Many sought ways to manage life’s new uncertainties, which were no longer about the weather or epidemic disease but about business risks, marriage prospects, exam results, and social standing. Amulets became even more popular as protection against misfortune. Several magazines appeared to publicize their provenance, powers, and prices. Spirit mediums were consulted for advice on business and personal matters. Retreats and insight meditation became fashionable among the more sophisticated. Help on anything from business decisions to lottery selections was sought from Brahma images in spirit houses; shrines to the Chinese goddess of compassion, Kuan Im; a host of monks with auspicious names, such as Luang Pho Ngoen (Reverend Father Money); and even the spirit of the deceased country singer Phumphuang. The equestrian statue of King Rama V in Bangkok became the centre of a votive cult, which began among middle-class Bangkokians concerned about economic and political stability but then broadened its social and geographical base to become a stop on upcountry bus tours to the capital. Buddhist wat that had some historical association with the Chinese in Thailand (such as Wat Phananchoeng in Ayutthaya) attracted the patronage of the urban wealthy, and began to acquire some of the functions and the atmosphere of a Chinese shrine.
Some monks attracted sect-like followings. Phra Pothirak offered a lay, urbanized version of the forest monk practice of asceticism. After the followers of his Santi Asoke movement increased and also became entwined in politics, Pothirak was forced to disrobe in 1989, and his followers mostly retreated to self-reliant rural communities. Dhammakai began from one monk’s popularization of a form of insight meditation, but was then marketed to students and young professionals as a route to both worldly and spiritual success. It built by far the largest religious centre of the modern era on the outskirts of the capital and attracted over a hundred thousand to its major events. In 1998, after followers claimed to witness a miraculous apparition in the sky, its leader was accused of using high-pressure marketing and misusing the movement’s massive assets.
Although attempts to reform the Sangha organization emerged again after 2000, they seemed scarcely relevant. Conventional practices had been superseded by a ‘religious market place’ or, to reverse the pairing and emphasize the importance of supernatural aids for worldly success, ‘a mystification, spiritualization, and enchantment of the market and capitalist enterprise’. 12
This sense of variety was also celebrated in new versions of Thai history that emerged more in the public media of magazines and pocketbooks than in academe. The school gathered around the Sinlapa Watthanatham (Art and Culture) magazine by-passed both the monarchical continuity and the idea of a ‘Thai race’ that had structured the official versions of Thai history. Instead, it adopted the modern geographical space of the nation-state and then described the variety of ethnic, social, and cultural influences that crowded its past. Sujit Wongthet, the magazine’s editor, argued that the ‘Thais were always here’, meaning that the major ‘ancestors’ of the modern nation were the ancient settlers identified by new archaeology, especially in the northeast, not the Tai who migrated from the north in the standard version of Thai history. Srisak Vallibhotama, who provided much of the research background, traced Thai history as a story of widening trade networks that produced ever greater ethnic complexity, which in turn demanded broader and more sophisticated political systems – with almost no role for the kings and warriors who dominated the standard interpretation. Dhida Saraya further displaced the ethnic definition of the nation by arguing that Thai was a ‘civilization’ characterized by its long Theravada Buddhist tradition.
The social mirror also displayed the great variety subsumed within the ethnic descriptor ‘Thai’. In the protest campaigns that emerged in the 1980s, groups often drew on local identity as a source of support. The Karen in the northern hills, for example, claimed the right to remain resident in forests on grounds that they possessed special knowledge of plants and forest conservation. In the early 1990s, academics in regional universities published cultural encyclopaedias of the south and the northeast, which highlighted the very different local traditions in areas that had only been attached firmly to the Thai capital since the 19th century. Intellectuals such as Srisak highlighted the lak lai (diverse) origins of the people enclosed within the Thai borders by immigration and by people-raiding. Tourism encouraged the rediscovery or reinvention of local identities. A new generation of ethno-historical research began from the premise that pure Tai culture could only be found in Tai communities outside Thailand.
Government continued to promote ‘Thai culture’ through a National Culture Commission and campaigns such as the Thai Culture Promotion Year in 1994. These bodies admitted that Thai culture had been formed from many influences, but still argued that there was a coherent and unified synthesis. This consisted, on the one hand, of the high culture of Buddhism, classical arts, and courtly behaviour; and, on the other, the folk arts and close social relations of the village community.
This official royal-and-rural definition of Thai culture had increasingly less relevance to the lives and environment of the growing number of urban people, particularly those in the capital. From the American period onwards, the language of urban consumer culture (especially brand names) was English. The liberalization of markets in the 1980s, and the global revolution in communications, increased the inflow of foreign commercial products and cultural artefacts. Personal relations in everyday life, both in the open spaces of the skytrain or mega-mall and in the smaller world of the business company, diverged from the legendary closeness of the village community or the noble-bureaucratic ideals of politeness defined as proper Thai behaviour. Urban society increasingly evolved its own conventions, which owed little to these supposedly ‘Thai’ codes of behaviour. Youth sought entertainment from Hollywood, Japanese pop, and European football. Traditional cultural performances were increasingly museumized or reinvented for sale to tourists.
In practice, the social mirror had helped to overthrow the conceit of a single, unified, and regimented ‘Thai culture’ or ‘Thai nation’. What remained was something more casual and more subject to personal interpretation. Some conservatives continued to imagine ‘Thai-ness’ as the polite manners of the old hierarchical society. Neo-traditionalists sought it in the face-to-face traditions of a vanishing rural society. Advertisers appealing to the mass audience for beer and energy drinks identified Thai-ness with the martial spirit of Thai boxing and violent episodes from Siam’s legendary history.
Internal borders
The nation retained some subtle internal borders. From the American era of ‘development’ onwards, Thailand’s rulers and the urban middle class increasingly thought of Thailand as a modern nation, enmeshed with the advanced states of the world. Those unable or unwilling to keep up with modernity risked having their membership of the nation challenged. Urban was clearly more modern than rural. Most villagers appeared to embrace development and thus qualified as citizens of the nation, though perhaps of second-class status. Those who resisted centralized development to protect a local way of life or culture were regularly accused of being anti-national and ‘un-Thai’. Most at risk were those who chose to live in remote places, especially in the hills. In the 1950s, the nationality law was amended to bring an element of discretion into the rule that anyone born within the borders qualified for Thai nationality. Ostensibly this amendment was to handle children of the refugee communities that became a constant presence over the next half-century of war and economic imbalance in the region. This discretion was used to deny full nationality to the children of hill peoples. Some were given secondary documents. Others slipped through the bureaucratic processes that conferred nationality. All suffered considerable disadvantages as
a result. This lack of nationality in turn justified social prejudice and governmental aggression. The massive decline in forest cover – brought about mostly by the army, government agencies, professional loggers, and lowland settlers – was squarely blamed on hill peoples’ shifting cultivation and opium growing. This ‘crime’ in turn justified denial of land and civic rights.
Another internal border marked off the Malay Muslim population in the provinces of the far south. Despite the official policy of religious tolerance, the state remained suspicious and resentful of a community that refused to assimilate in language or religious practice. Few people from the region became teachers, bureaucrats, or soldiers. Half-hearted development funding turned the area into one of the poorest parts of the country. Lack of real tolerance for Islam or the local language in education meant that communities created their own pondok schools, and youth went to South Asia or the Middle East for further education. Many went to work in Malaysia, and some used the courts in Kelantan to decide issues under Islamic law. These external links reinforced the state’s prejudice against this area. They also drew people from the area into contact with the changing currents of the Islamic world, especially the trend towards orthodoxy in dress and religious practice.
The secessionist movement in the far south had faded away since the 1970s. A group of local politicians of Malay Muslim origin, including a son of Haji Sulong, had exploited the possibilities of electoral democracy with some success. One of them became interior minister in 2001. Democracy, economic growth, and discreet policing by the army seemed to have overcome extremism.
But by the early 2000s, Thai authorities were apprehensive that the secessionist movements in East Timor and Aceh, and the growth of Islamist extremism on an international scale, could provoke a resurgence in the far south. In 2002, the army structure for overseeing the far south was dismantled, and the police were given control. Acting on intelligence reports of rising activism, the police tried to nip the movement in the bud by covert arrests and killings. Their efforts were counter-productive. On 4 January 2004, an armoury in Narathiwat was raided and some 400 automatic rifles stolen. Over the next four years, around 3000 people were killed in the three provinces, mostly by shooting or small-scale bombing. The largest group of victims included soldiers and other state employees, mostly Buddhist, but others were Muslims, possibly collaborators.