https://englishkyoto-seas.org/

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson
Thailand’s Plural Identities: Contesting the National Imagination in Fiction andEthnography
Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 255-286.

How to Cite:
Jonsson, Hjorleifur R. Thailand’s Plural Identities: Contesting the National
Imagination in Fiction and Ethnography. Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2,
August 2024, pp. 255-286. DOI: 10.20495/seas.13.2_255.
Link to this article:
https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2024/08/vol-13-no-2-hjorleifur-r-jonsson/
View the table of contents for this issue:
https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2024/08/vol-13-no-2-of-southeast-asian-studies/
Subscriptions: https://englishkyoto-seas.org/mailing-list/
For permissions, please send an e-mail to:
english-editorial[at]cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

Thailand’s Plural Identities: Contesting the National
Imagination in Fiction and Ethnography
Hjorleifur R. Jonsson*

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 identityand of what constitutes socially relevant Thai-language writing. The focus is in parton so-called hill peoples, whom scholarship has generally regarded as irrelevant toan understanding of Thai society. The study suggests a recurring debate among
rival Thai perspectives on society, identity, and inequality. I divide the range ofsocial imaginaries into three groups. Some manifest unambiguous pluralism andinterethnic equivalence. Others express a class-based critique of the harm thatderives from hierarchy and social inequalities. The third view insists on Thai
distinction from and superiority over other peoples. The implications of thischauvinism 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.
Keywords: Thailand, literature, ethnography, pluralism, racism, national
imagination

Thai-language fiction and ethnography manifest local understandings of society anddiversity at particular moments. These works are not policy statements in any direct
sense, but many of them have political implications. For the most part, they are interesting pieces of creative writing that are each very unique. Taken together and situatedhistorically, however, these individual works can be read as clear evidence of considerable
traffic in diverse and contested social visions between Thai intellectuals and the Thai
(reading) public during the twentieth century.
The research behind this study focused on representations of ethnic and otherdiversity in Thai writings during the twentieth century. My examination found a rangeof perspectives on identity and difference, which for analytical purposes I have divided* School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, 900 S Cady Mall
Rm 233, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2402, United Statese-mail: HJonsson@asu.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8624-0608
Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 255–286© Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

DOI: 10.20495/seas.13.2_255

255

256

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

into three groups. These different perspectives manifest divergence and debate about
Thai social principles and priorities. One perspective prioritizes hierarchy and inequality,
another critiques hierarchy and inequality as the source of social ills, and a third emphasizes plural belonging and denies any categorical convictions regarding hierarchy, ethnicity,class, gender, language, or any other lines of identity and difference. The three angles,
I suggest, occur not only in fiction or ethnography. Instead, they express pervasive
diversity in Thai notions of society and identity. I assert no Thai uniqueness; any society
may be based on conflicting principles.
Sons of the Forest, a young adult novel by Mala Khamjan (2008 [1982]), gives somesense of the interethnic realities in Thai writing that have been persistently overlookedor ignored.1) The story follows two boys in Thailand’s North, a lowland Northern Thaiboy named Muangkham and a highland Karen boy named Yachi. The two are about 12–14
years old when they get to know each other and become friends. At a boarding schoolin town, they later come up against certain problems. In one episode of bullying at
school, someone calls Yachi a “smelly Yang.” “Yang” is a Northern Thai reference topeople who call themselves Pga k’nyau. They are known as Karen in English andKariang in Central Thai; “smelly Yang” is certainly an offensive slur.2)
In reaction, each boy evokes what he has been taught: the lowland Northern Thai
Muangkham says that according to his father, “You must fight,” while the upland Karenboy Yachi counters that according to his father, “You must endure things.” Yachi follows
up on this with what seems a complete reversal of Thai stereotypes:“You lowlanders refer to yourselves as more advanced than us. Instead of talking through yourproblems like we [Pga k’nyau or highlanders] do, you fight each other. My father says that settlingdifferences through the use of force is the way of animals.” (Mala 2008, 89–90)3)

Thai society and worldview are conventionally understood in terms of a universal
hierarchy where Buddhist Thais are inherently superior to animist (“tribal”) hill peoples,city people are above rural populations, and humans are far above animals (Hanks 1962,1257). From the regular academic angle, Thais are the dominant national majority andKaren the marginalized minority. In this novel, however, highland peoples such as the1) Mala Khamjan was born Jaroen Malarote in the northern province of Chiang Mai in 1952. He isbest known for young adult fiction. As of 2007, Sons of the Forest was in its 13th printing. The author
had by then published 36 books and received 13 awards, mostly national but also one IBBY—anaward from the International Board on Books for Young People. He received the SEA Write Awardin 1991 and was made National Artist in 2014.
2) Yang, Kariang, Karen, and Pga k’nyau imply the same people but from different angles and indifferent languages. There is no neutral or context-free reference to identity.
3) All translations from Thai in this article are my own.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

257

Karen qualify (from their own perspective but in Thai writing) as human and civilized.
Compared to them, lowland Thais are subhuman brutes, because they use force toresolve their differences. Calling someone an animal (ai-sat or i-sat) is a vulgar insultthat combines disdain and anger. The Karen boy never manifests such an attitude, but
the assessment that he attributes to his father and to his ethnic group is squarelytransgressive and also refreshingly funny.
The late 1970s was a violent time in Thai society. In 1976 a brutal and deadly attackon the Thammasat University campus in downtown Bangkok brought a sudden end to(a few years of) democratic government. A right-wing military government took over,
and all discussion, debate, and even news reporting on the violence was banned except
from the military’s perspective that the perpetrators were Communist vandals who
had threatened national security. There were—and had been—frequent attacks acrossthe country on those advocating for labor rights and democracy. These included assassinations, and it seemed that right-wing vigilante groups had been given a free hand(Anderson 1977; Morell and Chai-anan 1981). Ethnically non-Thai highland settlements
also came under military attack for suspected political subversion. Nobody could publicly
criticize the authoritarian and right-wing violence. The novel Sons of the Forest cameout of this historical moment. It is a relatable and entertaining work of fiction that upends
some standard expectations but does not point an accusatory finger in any alarmist way.
The book does not hammer out any political convictions. Readers can take it any which
way they like.
The story’s ethnic or cultural pluralism and its ability to shift perspectives and see
Thainess from the angle of another identity are somewhat common in Thai writing,though I have not found any recognition of this in studies of fiction or of society. One
reviewer for this journal found my reading overdrawn: This particular novel “by alowland Thai writer [could] surely not [express] the Karen’s own perspective.” This is
an important and debatable point. I do not agree that a Thai writer cannot draw a convincing or credible Karen character, any more than a female writer cannot create credible
male characters or a middle-class writer create credible characters across class lines.
This issue of representation across difference (in writing or otherwise) has to be assessedon a case-by-case basis. It is equally unfounded to assume that no Thai writer can represent a Karen perspective as it would be to assume that all Thai writing about Karen
perspectives or characters is equally realistic or successful. All fiction is teeming withcharacters who do not match their writer’s identity. In the episode that triggered thereviewer’s alarm, the Thai writer used a Karen perspective in order to convey a senseof lowland Thai peoples as subhuman brutes. This was not an attempt at an ethnographic
characterization. It aired, I suggest, a critique of (a) a violent society and (b) the common

258

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

and racist sense of Thai superiority over hill peoples.
In a book on literature and politics in Thailand during 1950–80, the political scientist
Benedict Anderson (1985) called attention, in passing, to the issue of Thai knowledgeof hinterland ethnic minorities. His book contains 13 Thai short stories in translation.
Two of the stories focus on hinterland peoples, one each on Chao Le “sea gypsies” in theSouth and Hmong hill farmers in the North. The two stories manifest historical change:[T]he entry of state and capitalism into the lives of these minorities has simultaneously broughtthem into the field of vision of the Thai intelligentsia, and for the first time into a serious Thai
literature which they themselves are unlikely soon to read. (Anderson 1985, 74)

Anthropology came to Thailand in two ways, both of which manifest American influenceon Thai society. Anthropologists were brought in to study “politically labile” populationsin Thailand’s Northeast, North, and South as part of anti-Communist counterinsurgency
measures. Also, anthropology became a subject
in universities and research institutes . . . One unplanned side-effect [of field studies among the“non-Thai Thai”] was a new sympathy for such minorities among Thai students, and a concomitantawareness of the need for a less narrowly ethnic, and more generously political, conception of
the Thai nation and national identity. The marks of this changing consciousness are visible allover [the two short stories]. (Anderson 1985, 75)

Anderson deserves credit for calling attention to the issue, though his understanding ofThai knowledge about hinterland peoples was not based on familiarity with the subject
matter. During the almost forty years since the book was published, other scholars havenot called attention to or corrected Anderson’s ignorance of the topic. The book has
since been published in Thai translation with additional essays (Anderson 2010). It
shows no indication that Thai scholars have attempted any correction regarding assertions
about Thai knowledge of ethnic diversity. This suggests that we have all been equallyignorant.
Anderson’s book engages with interesting issues that cross academic disciplinarylines between politics, history, anthropology, and literature. Anthropologists have generally confined their research to fieldwork and have not paid much—or any—attention
to literature or other Thai-language writing. Scholars of Thai politics, history, andliterature have in general not shown any particular interest or familiarity with regard
to hill peoples or ethnography. A more grounded understanding of the relevance ofdiversity in Thai society, history, literature, and political life requires interdisciplinary
investigations. My case is intended to encourage and contribute to such efforts.
This study makes no claim to being exhaustive. It insists, however, on the impor-Thailand’s Plural Identities

259

tance of a recurring diversity among societal perspectives in Thailand that has, to myknowledge, had little or no recognition in studies of Thai society or history. I looked forimages of diversity in fiction and ethnographic writing in order to comprehend Thai
notions of identity regarding hill peoples. I used to think that there was a particular Thai
perspective on hill tribes. Most studies of Thai society associate Thainess with ethnicchauvinism, authoritarianism, and state control (Reynolds 1993). When I failed to affirm
my expectations, I searched for a different understanding. I was already familiar withsome Thai ethnographic writing, but the juxtaposition with novels and short stories put
these Thai ideas in a new perspective.
The assumption that Thai people have certain ideas about hill peoples or ethnic
minorities implies that these positions are to some extent unproblematic or even fixed.
In the course of my research, my view shifted to the question of how Thai people
imagine their own identity and society in relation to matters of diversity. How does
one study notions of national identity and ethnic frontiers? Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963)
offers one angle in his structural analysis of myths, with the suggestion that one must
include all versions of any particular narrative.4) This is an impossible goal, considering
the tens of thousands of writings that are potentially relevant regarding Thai views on
Thai identity and diversity. However, the ambitious aim can still counter the tendency
to select only examples that best fit one’s analytical expectations and ignore the rest.
This analysis considers Thai ethnographic reporting in relation to fiction from three
periods: the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s. I also briefly discuss examples from before thetwentieth century, since premodern cases also differ from what is commonly expected.
My study takes each piece of writing, fictional or ethnographic, as an individual entitythat needs to be studied in its particulars (what are the components, how do they differ
and relate, what is the outcome of their interactions?) before it can be compared withother such entities that together make up what I have assembled under the rubric of“Thai writing related to identity and diversity.”
One inspiration for my research focus is the historian O. W. Wolters’s (1982) studyof border poems from fourteenth-century northern Vietnam. He suggested that eachpoem had to be treated as a coherent and unique entity, and that its meaning had to beread from the relations among the components and the social and historical context. The
poets, state officials in an ethnically diverse region near the border with China, were
“witnesses” who expressed their individual understandings of society and history at a
specific moment. They did so for a particular audience and in the spirit of political
4) Lévi-Strauss suggested that myths could be analyzed without any particular knowledge of thesociety, the historical moment, or even the original language in which the story was rendered. My
approach to Thai narratives emphasizes all these elements, so my use of his perspective is selective.

260

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

intervention. My sources are twentieth-century Thai intellectuals of various backgrounds.
Their Thai-language ethnographies, historical fiction, jungle adventure, romance, andofficial documents offer a range of socially relevant writing about identity and difference.
My research question makes them “witnesses” to what could be imagined and expressedin Thailand during the twentieth century.

Pluralism Before 1910
Across island and mainland Southeast Asia and adjacent southern China, trade in forest
products (horns, hides, spices, orchids, beeswax, fragrant wood, etc.; in certain hinterland
areas peoples also mined gold and worked other metals) was an important component oftrans-local and then interregional and international trade for millennia (Cushman 1970;
Dunn 1975; Manguin 2002; Tran 2010). Ayutthaya and Malacca were among the many
Southeast Asian courts that derived significant wealth from such trade. This traderelied on alliances and exchanges linking different environments and peoples, and it
involved marriage relations and the granting of semi-royal titles to hinterland and oceanpeople leaders (Andaya and Andaya 2015). Nothing about Southeast Asian prehistories
suggests that hinterland peoples had ever been isolated or remote from the region’ssocial and political dynamics. Anderson’s notion that capitalism and modernity brought
Chao Le and Hmong peoples out of their previous isolation—and that they were unknown
to various lowland and coastal peoples until Western anthropology and capitalism entered
the scene—draws on (Western and Thai) social theory, particularly the notion that
historical change comes from urban dynamics that transform the otherwise-inert countryside (see Braudel 1972; and Chatthip 1999).
There is considerable indication that pluralism was a customary perspective on thesocial landscape across Southeast Asia and adjacent southern China; multiethnic networks were common (O’Connor 2009; White 2011; Le et al. 2016; Cushman and Jonsson2020). However, each place had its particular networks and dynamics. The court of
Ayutthaya may have been ignorant of the forest people who produced many of the trade
goods that sustained its economy. Ayutthaya was cosmopolitan and multilingual in
relation to trade partners from Java, Japan, Korea, China, India, Persia, and the Malay
Peninsula but ignorant about the people in its hinterland. Other courts, such as Chiang
Mai, Khorat, and Kamphaeng Phet, maintained relations with Lawa, Karen, and otherforest peoples and may have been correspondingly ignorant of Java, Japan, and the othertrade partners of Ayutthaya. In the Ayutthaya-era epic Khun Chang Khun Phaen, one
episode relates how a Siamese couple initiate relations with Lawa people with an exchangeThailand’s Plural Identities

261

of jewelry. Another one shows Lawa and Siamese attending each other’s festivals andyoung people joking and flirting across these ethnic lines (Baker and Pasuk 2010, 386,
485).
The literature scholar Suvanna Kriengkraipetch (1995) studied images of otherness
in Thai poetry around 1800 and found no sign of a stable notion of Thainess or selfhood.
One striking example of pluralism is in a segment of the epic poem “Phra Aphai Mani”
by Sunthon Phu:
[All the enemies in a battle] listened to the teachings of the great [hermit] in order to call a halt to
protracted fighting. After the teaching, which concerned Buddhist ideas, those who listened . . .
explained their understanding in their own way, based on their religious beliefs and the cultural
practices of each group. Sunthon Phu, as a Buddhist himself, did not clarify the meaning of thisteaching, as if wishing to suggest that differences between “us” and “the others” . . . had no needfor set criteria to distinguish each group, permitting one to enjoy the differences and becomeacquainted with each other. (Suvanna 1995, 145)

Thai Field Marshall Jaophraya Surasakmontri wrote about his military missions in the
1880s, when he was involved in fighting against “insurgent” groups in the borderlandsof northern Laos and Vietnam. His account of “various groups of forest people” emphasized identifiable traits such as language, dress, and hairstyle. It showed no sign ofranking people by ethnicity or of insisting on any Thai superiority; there was only aplurality of peoples (Lathi 2015).
King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) wrote a travel poem about the Karen
peoples in Kanchanaburi that did not suggest any ethnic prejudice but rather interestand familiarity. He noted that the Siamese recognized the Karen for their midwiferyskills and herbal medicine (Renard 1980, 104). He also wrote a verse-drama set among
the Koi hunter-gatherers in the far south toward Malaysia (Chulalongkorn 1968 [1906]).
In this, he gave an ethnographic background and noted that both Thai and Malay
peoples valued herbal medicine from the Koi peoples. He also provided a glossary ofdozens of terms from the Koi language and sprinkled the Thai text with these terms.
The mention of the midwifery skills and herbal medicine that were valued and traded
across ethnic lines is indicative of a pluralist tradition, where ethnic difference is maintained in part to cross it with mutually beneficial exchanges. Multilingualism was aregular component of such dynamics.
King Chulalongkorn’s verse-play is not about ethnic difference. Instead, it is a drama
about young lovers who are not allowed to marry because the woman’s parents havedecided on a wealthier suitor for her. At the end of the play, the male rivals have bothbeen killed and the young woman has committed suicide. In my reading, the tragedy
offers (directly or indirectly) a critique of parental overreach, such as was manifest in the

262

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

Thai law that a woman’s parents decided on which man she married (Loos 2006, 138).
King Chulalongkorn could write a drama with Koi characters about contemporary Thaiconcerns (e.g., could a woman marry for love?) because he assumed that peoples were
to some degree equivalent. Nothing in the play asserts Siamese superiority over theKoi or suggests the latter’s deficiency.
The historian Thongchai Winichakul (2000) argues that during 1885–1910, membersof the Siamese elite engaged in nation building in part through an ethnographic project.
He asserts that this project established distinctions through an elite-Siam-ization of
ethnography. Allegedly, the elite established its superiority through an ethno-spatial
hierarchy of the civilized city, the civilizable but rustic countryside, and the strange anduncivilizable ethnic others in the forest and mountains. Thongchai further asserts that
King Chulalongkorn’s verse-play, Ngo pa (Frizzy junglee), was one expression of thisproject. Prior to 1885, supposedly, the Siamese elite and Siamese society were ignorantof the hinterland peoples.
It is possible that some writings by certain members of the Siamese elite express
the views that Thongchai found. But this is far from uniform or obvious in the sources.
There was considerable diversity and debate among the elite on a range of matters.
Prince Damrong, Chulalongkorn’s brother, often expressed ethnic chauvinism in his
writing, but his writings are not representative of the views of the elite in general. My
reading of the report by Jaophraya Surasakmontri, for instance, differs from Thongchai’s
understanding. Some of his entries draw on considerable first-hand familiarity, others
on rather reliable and unprejudiced informants, and yet other entries suggest unreliableand prejudiced gossip about peoples which the Siamese official had no knowledge of.
Thongchai’s study views the Siamese elite as a singular entity with a unified andracist project of nation building and hierarchy. It suggests a critique of the monarchy
and affirms a clear social divide between the elite and the public, both of which aresignificant items in contemporary Thai debates about society and politics. However, I
question the claims regarding Siamese ignorance of ethnically diverse peoples prior to1885, and about the shape of ethnographic knowledge production to boost the elite’s
claims to social superiority during 1885–1910. Thongchai’s article raises important
issues. His case, however, makes it impossible to recognize an indigenous Southeast
Asian tradition of pluralism, including a practical interest in ethnic diversity, that isevident in premodern times and could still be found during 1885–1910, even in writings
by members of the Siamese elite.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

263

Assertions of Essential Difference
In 1932 a democratic revolution changed Thailand from an absolute monarchy to a
democracy with a constitutional monarchy. A book from 1933 introduced the northern
province of Nan to a national readership. The book has a long chapter on history, written
by a “Mr. Good-Luck Lotus” (Nai Bua Chok-di). He opens by stating that in the past
the land of Nan was a small kingdom and thus it was at various times under the administration of stronger powers that surrounded it: to the west lay Chiang Mai and thenBurma; to the north and east were Sipsongpanna (in Yunnan, China) and Luang Prabang(Laos); to the south were Sukhothai and Ayutthaya:
Whenever Nan was under the administration of either the Ayutthaya or Chiang Mai kingdom thenthere was tranquility and happiness among the citizens, because these kingdoms were governedby justice and kindness. This is very different from the waste and destruction that came with being
under the Burmese administration, when there was much despair among the people. The Burmese
never built anything up, they only destroyed things . . . At times, Nan was also attacked by its
neighbors, such as Phrae, Luang Prabang, and Sipsongpanna. (Nai 1933, 212–213)

Prior to the 1780s, Ayutthaya was the Siamese capital, and Chiang Mai was the predominant kingdom in the North and then the administrative center of the Northern
Division (Monthon Phayap) of the Siamese nation-state. The expression of preferredsubordination to Chiang Mai and Ayutthaya comes across as a declaration of allegianceto the new nation-state.
The chapter on the ethnic groups of Nan is more of a surprise. Siri Phetyaprasert(1933), who represented Nan in the national parliament, writes on the various ethnic
groups in the province.5) There are sections on the lowland Northern Thai population
as well as on the Meo (Hmong), Yao (Mien), Khmu, Thin, (Tai) Lue, and Phi Tong Leuang(Mlabri). The entries on the ethnically non-Thai peoples stress their unfamiliarity:“Seven hundred years ago the Lawa people fled from the Thai into the forests andmountains, and they have had no way to progress” (Siri 1933, 283). Peoples are situatedin terms of “blood,” their supposed racial linkages.
Significantly, the chapter on the peoples of Nan opens with a plea to correct a
misunderstanding about “Lao,” which was a common Bangkok reference to the population in the North: “In truth there are no Lao people in Nan [The Lao people live inFrench Indochina] . . . In general, the lowland population is Thai, of true-Thai flesh and5) I have not yet learned any biographical details of this politician. He credits district governors in
Nan with his knowledge of various ethnic groups, which suggests that he may have been unfamiliar
with the province.

264

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

blood and ancestry.” It continues with a mention of “the period when the Thai fled
southward from the oppression of the Chinese [and split into two groups: northerners
who initially were centered on Chiang Saen, and southerners (the Siamese in the Central
Plains)] at Sawankhalok and beyond . . . The leaders of both groups were true Thai”(Siri 1933, 273, 274).
The Meo and Yao are said to be very similar, and both their origins are in China.
There are White Meo and Black Meo, who differ mainly by dress. “Their important
occupation is opium cultivation, and this activity creates considerable burden for theadministration. [The Meo also grow rice and corn and raise animals.] Their dogs have asilky fur, and the lowland peoples buy lots of dogs from the Meo” (Siri 1933, 278). The
entry on the Yao is much shorter. It mentions some vocabulary, typical dress, weddings,
and that “the position of women is similar to that of slaves” (Siri 1933, 279). The racialemphasis is persistent in the entries: “The Lue are of Thai ancestry, but since ancient
times there has been much mixing of blood with the Lua” (Siri 1933, 281–282).
Siri was conjuring untruths for a national audience with his exaggeration of thealienness of the various ethnically non-Thai peoples in Nan. The exoticization of hill
peoples went hand in hand with the declaration that the lowland population was racially“true-Thai.” In the 1880s the leader of a group of Mien (Yao) and Hmong (Meo) people(most likely a few thousand) negotiated with the king of Nan to settle in the mountainsof his domain (they had earlier had similar relations with valley lords in Laos, Vietnam,
and southern China). They agreed on annual tribute or tax payment, the leader was
given a semi-royal phaya title, and the farmers in five settlements were allowed to growand sell opium to the Royal Opium Monopoly. The Mien leader was well known to theauthorities, and he often visited the city and the palace. He delivered tax every year,
and he became quite wealthy from the proceeds of taxation and opium cultivation.
When France took over neighboring Laos as part of Indochina in 1893, the Bangkok
authorities placed Thai soldiers in garrisons along the border in Nan. The Mien population in Nan sold rice to the military camps (Jonsson 2005, 74–94).
It appears largely unknown nowadays that in the 1920s and 1930s, so-called forestand hill peoples were considered regular members of Thai society. One indication ofthis is an announcement in the State Gazette from January 1927 that extends the period
for collecting taxes in order to accommodate the hill peoples. They had difficulty traveling in the rainy season and the hot season, and thus the tax collection would be extended(Suphayok-Kasem 1927, 603–604). Importantly, the people are referred to as ratsadon
jamphuak Meo, Yao, Musoe, Liso.6) The term ratsadon defines them as “citizens” or the6) I owe my knowledge of this document to Suchon Mallikamarl, who is currently conducting researchon interethnic political history in the National Archives of Thailand.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

265“general public”; there is no indication that members of these ethnic groups wereconsidered alien or somehow outside of society. Nor were they labeled “hill” or “forest”
peoples. During the 1920s, the Thai press favored the term ratsadon in reference to“people as the opposite of rulers” (Baker and Pasuk 2022, 128). The People’s Party, thegroup behind the rebellion that established democracy and ended the absolute monarchy,
referred to itself by this term, as Khana ratsadon.
In early 1927, King Prajadiphok (Rama VII, r. 1925–35) made an official journey bytrain from Bangkok to the north of the country. The governor of Chiang Mai orchestrated
a grand reception that gave Mien, Hmong, Lisu, Karen, and other “hill peoples” important
place. There were parades with floats celebrating each ethnic group, and there weremusic and dance performances by Mien, Hmong, and Lisu peoples. The governor had
hosted a large number of hill peoples for a month prior to the event.
In the National Archives of Thailand, photos from this event show interethnic
mingling among cheerful and interested Hmong, Mien, and Northern Thai audience
members. The photo captions refer to the people as ratsadon (the general public). Thereis every indication that the ethnic diversity of Thai society was seen as a normal thing.
The ratsadon suggests that there was no firm ranking of peoples that would markHmong, Mien, or Karen as in any way less central or less important than the other local
populations. Nothing indicates that hill peoples were being viewed or treated as strange
or as inferior to ethnically Thai peoples. The documentary film from this event suggests
a sense of a plurality of peoples who were not being ranked by ethnic identity (Sadet
Neua 1927).
A fiction film, Kariang Sai-Yoke (The Karen people of Sai Yoke), filmed in Kanchanaburi
Province in 1936, offers further support for Thai pluralism and interethnic parity during
this era. The film is set in a Karen village during New Year, and it combines daily
activities with a staged drama of tension between the two suitors of a Karen maiden.
Most of the actors are Karen villagers playing themselves, but the role of the Karen
woman is played by a Siamese beauty queen, Miss Ayutthaya 1936 (Anake 2003, 146).
This film shows no sign of exoticism or of a ranking of peoples where Thai are superior
to others.
The pluralism that is apparent in various Thai writings from the early twentiethcentury suggests the continuation of a sense of the Thai as just one of many equivalentethnic labels in a diverse region. However, there are some clear signs of an alternative
insistence on an ethnic divide between Thai and others. These views represent simultaneous and rival perspectives on Thai identity and society. Prior to this research, I
had not encountered expressions of Thai national identity as inclusive and diverse.
This Thai material suggests parallels to the inclusive, multiethnic sense of modern

266

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

national identity in Vietnam, Laos, and Indonesia. Correspondingly, the apparent emergence of Thai racism and mono-ethnic chauvinism in the 1930s has some parallel withthe situation that developed in Burma around the same time.
Some scholars have suggested that the Thai government used the nationalist label“Thai Islam” (Muslim Thai) to deny Malay identity in the South from the 1940s onward(Jory 2007; Dalrymple et al. 2023, 205–206). Photos in the National Archives from the1927 visit of King Rama VII to Chiang Mai indicate, however, that people were identifying deliberately as Muslims before that time. Some photos show delegations marchingin a parade, with signs declaring their ethnicity. One group holds a printed sign thatsays khaek and a hand-painted banner saying Khana-chat-islam (delegation of Muslim
people). My guess is that the organizers printed the khaek label and that the people
responded by writing their own preferred alternative. As discussed below, khaek is acommon Thai gloss for South Asians, Indians, and Malay peoples that suggests a contrast
to the Thai. “Delegation of Muslim people” asserts belonging and equivalence andclearly counters the otherness implied by khaek.
The above material on identity discourses in Thailand during the 1920s and 1930s
shows clearly that notions of Thai identity as singular, exclusive, and superior to that ofhill peoples coexisted with notions of identity as inclusive and diverse. The notion ofvarious groups of highland peoples as ratsadon that is expressed in a state gazette suggests that at least some agents of the state and national integration were invested in aplural and diverse Thai society rather than being somehow uniformly focused on ethnicchauvinism or on the ranking of peoples through an ethno-spatial hierarchy.

Thai Perspectives during the 1950s
In 1950 Bunchuai Srisawat (2004a [1950]) published the book 30 Peoples of Chiang Rai,
which was in many ways an introduction to the northern province of Chiang Rai for anational readership. The author was a member of the national parliament, representing
Chiang Rai.7) It appears that the ethnographic impulse was triggered in reaction to
Bangkok notions of northerners as “Lao” and a discourse on national credentials interms of pure Thai blood. The people in the province are of three kinds. The bulk arenortherners as well as Thai Yai, Lue, Tai Ya, Indochinese Lao, Karen, and Lawa. There

7) Bunchuai Srisawat (1917–73) was a businessman, politician, and writer, born in Chiang Rai Province.
His travels in that province and in neighboring Burma, China, and Vietnam informed many bookson ethnology that are still popular.

Thailand’s Plural Identities267

are also foreigners (chao tang chat, “people from other countries”) and mountain peoples(chao khao) such as Khmu, Khamet, Meo, Yao, Lahu, Akha, Lisu, and Kui (Bunchuai
2004a, 2). The account stresses that the Yao, Meo, Lahu, and others are from othercountries (China, Laos, Burma). The lowland Northern Thai population is “true Thai.
There has been no mixing of blood from other groups . . . The Thai in the Central region[however] have blood mixed with that of other groups” (Bunchuai 2004a, 12). In theancient past, Thai people migrated southward from China and came into conflict with the
Lawa, who were the previous owners of the land. The Thai were victorious in thisencounter (Bunchuai 2004a, 7).
Bunchuai declared that the Mountain Karen (Yang doi) “are filthy, and they do not
like to bathe. They are fond of their family and relatives. They cling to their customary
ways and live in little shacks” (Bunchuai 2004a, 186). The impression he leaves is thatthe more any Karen group (Yang daeng, Yang khao, Yang kaloe) resemble their lowland
Northern Thai neighbors, the cleaner and more civilized they are. This account of thepeoples of Chiang Rai conjured untruths for a national audience as it exoticized theethnically non-Thai population, like the earlier account of Nan Province. The untruths
were most blatant when it came to hill peoples’ sexuality:
The young [Ko, Akha] people meet up in the evenings at the kalalasoe, “the maiden-hugging
grounds,” where there is a bench where they can hug . . . [and if they like each other] they willcontinue and have sexual relations. [The villagers elect a man to serve as deflowerer, khajirada,
who must initiate all the young women in the ways of sexuality. There is also a woman, mida, who
initiates young men in the same way.] If the young people are reluctant to engage in sexual
activity, then the elders must pull them by the hand to the hugging grounds and get them toembrace. (Bunchuai 2004a, 384–392)

The book 30 Peoples of Chiang Rai went through several reprints, with various changes
in the text.8) Bunchuai (2002 [1963]) then produced a different book on “hill tribes ofThailand” that had no content on Thai peoples. However, the exoticization and sexualization of Thailand’s hill peoples continued in much the same form in this book. In
Bunchuai’s (2004b [1954]) book on the Tai Lue in Yunnan, China, there was no sexualization in the accounts of Yao and Akha. However, “The Ko like to eat dog meat. They
trade goods for [dogs] that they then kill and eat all the time. The women dress beautifully. They wear a short skirt, Hawaiian style” (Bunchuai 2004b, 377). The sexualized
racism regarding Thailand’s hill peoples manifested a particular intersection of author,
topic, audience, and historical moment. When the topic was the same (Ko and Yao, or8) Suchon Mallikamarl (personal communication, April 2022) has found four different editions, whichare, however, never identified as such in the title. The 2004 reprint is made from the second edition.

268

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

Akha and Mien peoples, in the context of Thai) but was situated outside of modern
Thailand, the sexualized racism was absent. That is, the sexualization was contingent
on claiming true-Thai credentials for Chiang Rai lowlanders in relation to Bangkok
through the deliberate othering of hill peoples.
The exoticization of the hill peoples in Chiang Rai was not the only ethnic-frontier
imagery available to a national audience in the 1950s. In his historical novel on Kamphaeng
Phet, Thung Maharat (The great ruler’s plains), Malai Chuphinit (under the pen name
Riam Eng) focused on the river-trader Reun, who later became a local leader.9) Early
on, Reun is at a Buddhist temple with his love interest (and future wife), Sutjai. He
mentions to her that the buildings were long dilapidated but then two brothers, Phaya
Taka and Phapo, financed the restoration. “Don’t forget that they are Kariang, notThai,” says Reun (Riam 1975 [1951], 48). The topic later recurs, about the two brothers
restoring the temple to its former glory: “They are not Thai persons, but they love
Thailand and love the Thai people, because it is here that they established themselves,
it is among these people that they found happiness” (Riam 1975, 294).10) Further on in
the novel there is an outbreak of smallpox. An elderly woman mentions that when she
was young, there was another such outbreak. She recalls that the people in a “Kariang
and Meo village had burned their houses to ashes” (Riam 1975, 455). This is the strategy
that Reun then has the people follow. This shows the interethnic familiarity throughwhich the Siamese in Kamphaeng Phet can learn from the neighboring Karen andHmong peoples about responding to a debilitating and deadly epidemic.
In a short story that is also set in Kamphaeng Phet, Malai writes about an elderly
upper-class woman attending the opening of a health station that her late husband
worked on establishing in his lifetime. Her mind drifts to their decades together; sherecalls the brothers Phaya Taka and Phapo and the idea that by establishing a lowland
trading center the “Kariang and Meo hill villagers” would have easier access to trade
goods (Riam 1961, 412). This suggests how certain lowland traders actively contributed
to plural belonging by placing a priority on enabling relations that were of value to theirhighland neighbors.
Karen and Hmong people appear repeatedly around the Thai in this fiction, and thisrepresentation of diversity seems quite deliberate. Malai grew up in Kamphaeng Phet,
9) The story was translated as The Field of the Great (Malai 1996). Malai Chuphinit (1906–63) was ajournalist and writer recognized for his skill with short stories and novels.
10) Phaya Taka was a titled chief, and Phapo was a wealthy trader married to the daughter of the Siamese
subdistrict official. They were important local characters around 1900. Their one-time importanceis celebrated in the National Museum of Kamphaeng Phet. Their posthumous recognition has
everything to do with the novel Thung Maharat, which is recognized as among the greatest of Thai
novels. It places Kamphaeng Phet Province on the national stage.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

269

where there is a long history of relations between Thai and Karen peoples. By situating
the Kariang and Meo together in these narratives, in the vicinity of the Thai, the author
insists on ethnic diversity as ordinary and important. People were familiar with one
another across ethnic lines, they could learn from each other, and they cultivated good
relations in ways that sustained plural belonging and precluded interethnic conflict anddiscrimination. This fiction directly countered Thai chauvinism such as in Bunchuai’s
assertion that hill peoples were aliens on Thai soil.
Under the pen name of Noi Inthanon, Malai wrote a jungle adventure series in 1955:
Jungle Trails.11) The stories center on three men: the Thai Mr. Sak Suriyan, his Karenmate Ta-Koen (“Old Koen”), and the Thai army captain Reuang Yuthana. Sak is thecentral character and narrator. The series does not romanticize jungle life, but it isnotable for never suggesting the superiority of Thai over Karen or other forest people;
for not depicting forest people as filthy, ignorant, or somehow inferior to the Thai; andnever suggesting that education, urban ways, and Thai Buddhism are superior to theknowledge, behavior, or religion common in forest communities. Each of these elements
is common in the standard chauvinist binary formulation of Thai people as superior tothe hill tribes.
The association of forests with illegality, disorder, filth, backwardness, and wildness
has often been conveyed in scholarship as “the Thai perspective” on forests and forest
people (Davis 1984; Stott 1991; Thongchai 2000, 38; Turton 2000), a claim that I used
to accept. This makes Jungle Trails quite significant in relation to the politics of Thai
culture and society. Sak, the main character, declares near the beginning of one story:
As for myself, I can say this: the forest is the kingdom of my life and the field of my life. Every
year I must leave and seek it out. If I stay for too long in the city then I am like a tree that is in
the wrong place. City life weighs me down and drains my mind. The city and I cannot mix for
too long at a time. It is not peaceful and refreshing like the enlightenment that I derive from theforest and the forest people. (Noi 1990 [1955], Vol. 1, 103)

This work links “civilization” or “enlightenment” (arayatham) with forests and forest
people, which is unusual in Thai writing. Noi’s Sak makes this statement very plainly,
and the attitude rings true for the character in the stories. In one story, Sak has beenhunting when he meets up with Ta-Koen. Before they leave for a trip together, Sak
wants to hold a feast for the Meo people who have been assisting him. He notes, “it is11) The series started as a radio play in 1955 that became very popular. Then the stories were publishedin book form and in 1961 also made into a television drama. The books were published as five
volumes in 1974; I do not know whether that was the original format. I cite from the 14-volume
reissue (of about two hundred pages each) in 2012, which was first published in 1990 and remains
in print.

270

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

in the character of the Meo people to never tell you anything that isn’t true” (Noi 1990,
Vol. 3, 161). This is as far from exoticization as can be. The hill peoples are reliable
and honest, they are an ordinary part of society, and there is collaboration and trust
across ethnic lines. Sak’s feast indicates that he treats the Meo like partners or equals.
In this particular story, a young Karen man gets drunk and begins wielding a torchnear some dry vegetation. A forestry official calls out to him to be careful, otherwise theforest and the villages are at risk. The Karen man says that he does not care: “This is
not my forest. The big people are the owners; what do I have to fear?” The forestry
official, an agent of the state and capitalist expansion, replies:“That is wrong, Maowa. All the people are the owners of this forest, not just the company that has
the license, not just the likes of me who have come here for work. This also belongs to everyone,
Karen and Thai—they are the owners of this forest and of this land. The forest gives shade andlivelihood. Please don’t let it be destroyed.” (Noi 1990, Vol. 3, 183)

Things turn out badly, and the next morning the village headman despairs over the
future: “It’s all gone, the orchards, the hill fields, what will we eat?” Sak replies that
there is taro and tapioca in the ground, there are fish in the rivers and birds in the sky,and lots of game in the forest, so why fear starvation? The two talk this back and forth,and then the Karen leader declares: “I will not forget this; the forest official understands
that all the people are the owners of the forest and of this Thai land” (Noi 1990, Vol. 3,186). This states very clearly that Thailand is not the exclusive domain of ethnicallyThai people. Nothing in this fiction ever associates strangeness with forest or highland
people, or presents them as inferior to Thai.
A different societal and interethnic configuration appears in Lao Khamhom’s (2020[1958]) short story “Phrai Fa” (The lord’s serfs).12) The story is set in a logging camp in
Lamphun Province, near the Ping River. The narrator is Chert, a Thai man. Intha, an
ethnically Khmu elephant keeper (mahout), is central to the story. Intha is in love with
Bua Kham, a young woman from a nearby Northern Thai farming village. Intha has neverbeen to school, and he cannot understand the hierarchical system of Thai society—howsomeone can be considered a lord and be treated differently from other humans. Chert
has no success explaining the logic of this, which would be obvious to any Thai person
12) “Phrai fa” was included (as “Dust Underfoot”) in Damnern Garden’s translation of the short story
collection Fa bo kan (The sky is no hindrance) (Khamsing 1973). Lao Khamhom (1930–) is the
pen name of Khamsing Srinok, who is from Thailand’s Northeast. He has written several collectionsof short stories and one novel. He worked for some time as a journalist and then as an assistantto anthropologists from Cornell University’s Bang Chan research project (near Bangkok) in the
1950s. The short story collection Fa bo kan was for some time on the secondary school curriculum.
Thai assessments of it range from a masterpiece to Communist propaganda (see Platt 2013, 54).

Thailand’s Plural Identities

271(Lao 2020, 33–36). The logging camp receives a visitor, an elite man of royal descent
who is the company owner’s nephew. While the loggers are away in some forest, theelite visitor takes Bua Kham for his pleasure, with the intention of leaving her behindwhen he returns to Bangkok.
Chert learns of the affair and tells the visitor to back off. The elite man takes offensethat a mere commoner is trying to tell him, a Mom Rachawong (his royal rank), how tobehave (Lao 2020, 42–43). Chert insists that it is all about love and human decency(manusyatham, commonly glossed as humanitarianism). The royal person blows off that
notion as nonsense and then adds, “Intha! Since when has that Earholes been as humanas the rest of us? He is a Khmu through and through!” (Lao 2020, 44). During a stormthat night, when the river has swollen with the rain, Intha has his elephant push the hut
where the royal and Bua Kham are sleeping into the river. By the next morning Intha isgone, and the villagers find the two dead bodies and wreckage of the hut washed up on
the river’s banks.13)“Phrai Fa” is a unique and individual story, but it shares a plot structure with somecritical writing from this era that portrays the old order (royalty, the upper class, officialdom) as an obstacle to progress. This old guard kept reform, justice, and humanitarianism at bay. Short stories and novels by writers such as Siburapha and Seni Saowaphong
pitted enthusiastic young people against the agents of privilege and inequality who stoodin the way of a just Thai society (Thak 2018, 57–59). This conflict was never resolved.
It drew on rival views about the implications of hierarchy. The fiction rests on sharp
moral contrasts, and it is in this comparative light that I see the innocent goodness ofIntha, who cannot comprehend the status inequalities of Thai society. Readers willrecognize the elite man as an agent of appropriation and harm.14) As with the fictional
Karen character Yachi from 1982, the fictional Khmu man Intha from 1958 enables a
displaced Thai reflection on Thai society and its problems.
In his scholarly work on relations between Lawa (Lua’) hill peoples and the lowland
Tai population of Chiang Mai, Kraisri Nimmanhaeminda (1965; 1967) called attention to
centuries of political, economic, and religious exchanges and cultural mixing across these
ethnic lines. His work struck some of the same notes as the pluralist fiction that I discuss,
13) The names of the people in the story are somewhat intriguing. Chert is a common name. However,Bua-kham (Golden Lotus) is a somewhat common female name in folktales. Intha refers to the god
Indra. Meanwhile, the royal person is named Paipiin Rachaphreuk (Climber-Royal-Plant), which a
Thai friend suggested means “Royal Monkey” and thus constitutes a thinly veiled mockery.
14) For overviews of social criticism in Thai fiction and the leftist “literature-for-life” tradition, seeManas (1982), Harrison (1994), Ruenruthai (2000), and Thanapol (2011). The class-orientation ofthis discourse tends to leave out the gender-based social critique that was common in works byfemale authors such as Ko Surangkhanang (1994 [1937]).

272

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

and—somewhat similarly—it has generally been ignored.15)

Social Imaginaries in the 1970s
Khajadphai Burutsaphat (1975), a career bureaucrat concerned with national security,
published a book called Hill Tribes in 1975. A second edition followed in 1985, and athird in 1990. The book claims to represent a neutral, learned view on hill peoples. It
notes that opium cultivation and forest destruction are important problems. Hill tribes
are recent immigrants to Thailand and are the source of these problems; their crossingof national borders is a significant security concern. There are chapters on individual
tribes that summarize available knowledge and also draw significantly on Bunchuai’s
generalizations about the promiscuity of highland maidens, the maiden-hugging bench
among the Akha, and the sexual freedom of Yao maidens. The book’s first and second
editions contain a photo of the author on the hugging bench in an Akha village, with his
arm around a teenage Akha girl at night; this was a realm of masculine bravado.16)
Khajadphai’s book suggests that hill people are racially distinct from the Thai, that theircultures stress young people’s sexual liberty, that they are recent immigrants to Thailand,that their traditional ways cause many problems for Thai society, and that things canonly improve to the degree that hill peoples take on Thai ways.
At one point I read this book as presenting the official Thai view on hill tribes.
Now I see it instead as one of several rival perspectives on Thai society. Khajadphai
presents an authoritarian view that is intolerant of Thailand’s diversity. While heborrows from Bunchuai, his concern is different. His subtext is that Thai society isunder threat, and that it is important to obey the directives of the government. The
anthropologist Pinkaew Laungaramsri (1998) has analyzed such “hill tribe discourse”—
how highland people and their ways (shifting cultivation, opium growing, settlement
migration, etc.) were portrayed as constituting “problems” for Thai society that concerned ethnic difference.
15) Kraisri (1912–92) was born in Chiang Mai, in Thailand’s North, to ethnically Chinese parents. They
ran a successful business and sent him abroad for education. He received a BA from the Universityof Pennsylvania in 1932 and an MBA from Harvard University in 1938. Upon returning to Thailand,
he was first a professor at Chulalongkorn University and then worked in government and banking
in Bangkok. However, he later settled in Chiang Mai and established himself as a banker, businessman, and scholar. He sought to bolster northern-ness to counter Bangkok hegemony andCentral Thai chauvinism.
16) The “maiden-hugging grounds” was an idea made up by Bunchuai. However, it was so compellingto some of his male Thai audience that it was staged for a documentary film in 1964, and then theonce-fictional bench became a Thai “fact” that took on a life of its own (see Jonsson 2020).

Thailand’s Plural Identities

273

If descriptions of hill peoples are a Thai way of engaging with identity, diversity,and society, then the subtext of Khajadphai’s book can be read as an authoritarianmanifesto: People are a problem, and they need to be brought under disciplinary control
through state measures for national security. The common labeling of any agitation
for justice, democracy, and equality as Communist propaganda and a threat, and thelicense to use violence against anyone so labeled, reached a horrifying high point in thedeadly attack in Bangkok in 1976. However, the pattern of political abuse has beenmuch more general (see Subrahmanyan 2021).
Sophak Suwan’s (2016 [1974]) novel Pulakong presents an interesting counter tosuch authoritarian chauvinism.17) The story is set in Patani Province in the Muslim
South. The main character is Suphara (nicknamed Tun), a young Bangkok woman whogoes south as a development volunteer after graduating from Thammasat University.
She settles in the village of Pulakong and negotiates to stay with the family of the school
headmaster. Tun becomes a substitute teacher at the school and learns sufficient Malay
to communicate with others. She insists to the students that they are a Thai people
and that they must love the country as a Thai people: “They simply differ in religion andlanguage. These are just matters of local culture and language; they don’t suggest thatthe people aren’t Thai” (Sophak 2016, 138). “She also told the students to call themselves
Muslim Thai (Thai Islam) instead of using the binary-contrast terms Thai and khaek [acommon term for Malay and Indian peoples]” (Sophak 2016, 185) that would mark themas outsiders and as not Thai.
Given the common use of authoritarianism in relations between government officials
and ordinary villagers, Tun’s inclusive sense of Thai identity and belonging and heranti-authoritarianism stand as a clear alternative:
If we don’t bully the villagers but are instead on friendly terms with them and offer them assistancethe best we can, then they will understand us better and will not believe the propaganda of that
other group [Muslim separatists]. She had previously seen villagers’ fear and intimidation toward
the officials who insist on placing themselves above ordinary people . . . The power of that groupcauses real hardship for any assistance to the countryside . . . She wanted to warn [the officials]
that their actions would play into the hands of their opponents. (Sophak 2016, 268–269)

Before Tun leaves for Bangkok, local people commend her on her work and the way she17) Sophak was born Ramphaiphan Suwannasan in 1944. She studied music therapy in Vienna and wasa Thai pioneer in that field. She has written dozens of novels, many of which have been made into
television dramas. She was made National Artist in 2013. Pulakong was serialized in a magazine
before it was published as a book, and in 1977 the Ministry of Education selected the book forindependent (out-of-classroom) reading for students in secondary school (mathayomsuksa). By all
accounts the story was well known.

274

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

has influenced villagers’ understanding of their belonging:
You have done a good job, teacher, not just with respect to development in the village and subdistrict. You have also made this land belong to the villagers more than before. If they know thatthe place where they stand belongs to them, then they will help protect it. No more will anyone
be able to deceive them that they are being oppressed . . . Where they live is Thai land that belongs
to them, the villagers, as a Thai people. (Sophak 2016, 368)

This suggests an echo of the sentiment expressed in the Jungle Trails adventure story:
this land and this forest belong to the Thai and the Karen together. In Pulakong,southern Muslims are not alien khaek but are as Thai as any other people; they belong
in the country, and the land belongs to them too.
The novel Under the Deep-Blue Sky by Sifa (1977) concerns the Hmong man LiJeng and the Bangkok Thai woman Matsi, who fall in love while at Teacher’s College
in Thailand’s South.18) Li-Jeng is from a Hmong village in the mountains of Chiang Rai
in the North, and he wants to establish a school there so that the Hmong people will
not be inferior to the Thai. He is adamant about being of Hmong ethnicity and Thainationality. When he graduates and wants to move north, Matsi decides that they will
get married. Her father gives his consent, but her mother is in tears and never accepts
that her daughter has married a non-status hill person. She wants her daughter todivorce him and to instead carry a family name that brings status. Correspondingly,
Li-Jeng’s mother never takes to Matsi, but his father is very approving and thinks that
Matsi has sacrificed greatly by leaving the city and the lowlands to live with Li-Jeng in a
mountain village.19)
The novel was published at a time when hill peoples were portrayed as alienimmigrants and the Hmong people in particular were vilified as a Communist threat, as“Red Meo.” Matsi’s parents ask Li-Jeng whether he is a Red or a White Meo. “I am Black
Meo,” he says, adding that there is no such thing as Red Meo. Then he tells them thatthe diversity of Tai/Thai groups is comparable, and it turns out that educated and affluent
urbanites are completely ignorant of ethnic diversity in Thailand and beyond. The text
is sprinkled with Hmong phrases that are translated into Thai in footnotes. It seems a18) The story was serialized in a magazine prior to being printed in book form, and it was later madeinto a film. Sifa (1930–2013) was born Mom Luang Si Fa Ladawan. She was of royal descent: hergreat-grandfather was a son of King Rama III. She became recognized as a writer during hercollege days and went on to write dozens of novels. Sifa received many awards for her books andwas made National Artist in 1996.
19) The female name Matsi is best known from Jatakas (Buddha life-stories) as that of the wife ofPrince Vesandorn, Phra Wet, the then-future Buddha who gave away his wife and children as amanifestation of his extreme generosity. Matsi as the Bangkok-Thai wife of Li-Jeng, a young andmodern Hmong man, may be a gentle joke by a determined Thai pluralist.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

275

deliberate choice to have Thai readers voice the Hmong language in order to blur thelines between languages. The marriage of Matsi and Li-Jeng expresses a more obvious
blurring of ethnic difference.
Before they get married, Li-Jeng visits the village on his own. He thinks of courtshipin the highlands, that it is a natural thing between women and men, that it is pure andthere is nothing shameful about it. Li-Jeng thinks about Matsi, who was very disapproving of highland ways. He told her:
My group has had these customs for a long time. Your group may think of this as savage practice,as the shameful ways of stupid hill tribes. But I have heard that in Sweden there is the samekind of free sex. In the minds of your [Thai] group they are progressive and have freedom. And
how is this really different? Or is it just that one group is farang (Westerners) while the otheris hill tribe? (Sifa 1977, Vol. 1, 84–85)

This reversal undermines any expectations of Thai superiority over hill peoples. Sifa’s
framing counters the common notion from Bunchuai that hill people are promiscuousand thus inferior to the Thai. In Sifa’s novel, in contrast, this feature is something that
can also be found in Sweden, whose people the Thai see as liberated and progressive.
It becomes possible to see the Thai as clueless and equally behind both hill tribes andthe progressive Europeans.
Li-Jeng is not interested in hook-ups with young village women, unlike his brother.
Sifa does not assume any ethnic stereotypes in her cast of characters. Matsi and Janjong,her Bangkok Thai female friend and classmate, are different people because of different
class backgrounds and also simply as individuals. Li-Jeng is blind to some of the genderinequalities in Hmong culture that outrage Matsi. She, meanwhile, is not yet conversantin the Hmong language despite spending more than a year in the village. Matsi becomes
pregnant and decides to give birth in Bangkok and recover at her old home. Li-Jengrefuses to accompany her there, knowing that he would be in regular conflict and argument with her upper-class parents.
Surachai Janthimathon’s (1997 [1981]) novel, Before the Light of Day, is set among
the Lua’ people of Nan Province and traces their history from about 1940 to 1965.20)
They initially moved in from Laos, fleeing the war. They enjoyed a good reception20) Surachai (1948–) is from Surin Province in Thailand’s Northeast. In the early 1970s he was playing
folk and protest music with friends, and his band, Caravan, became well known. After the violent
suppression of democracy and activism in October of 1976, Surachai (whose musician name is
Nga Caravan) and his bandmates fled to the jungle and joined the Communist Party for several
years. He has written essays and short stories. Before the Light of Day is his only novel, but hismusic has been far more popular and influential than any of his other writing. He was made National
Artist in 2010.

276

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

from the authorities in Nan and received some official assistance. Later, relations went
sour as authoritarianism took over:When those fighting against French imperialism had lit the fires of a brutal war all across Indochina,
the peace-and-quiet-loving inhabitants of forest villages streamed into Thailand like a flock of
crows escaping a forest fire, and they settled near the farthest north of the country. Once safe
from the fires of war, they arrived from all directions to be quickly registered. The District Office
was crowded with people of many ethnic groups. (Surachai 1997, 23)

Once the people were settled, the kamnan (subdistrict official) came to visit them. He
said:
Now listen all, for the improvement of the locality. You are living on royal land. For the makingof fields there is a tax of 7 baht per year. For wood, 20 baht for big trees, mid-size 15 baht, small
ones 5 baht. Tax on making alcohol is 25 baht, cold season tax is 2 baht, constitution tax 2 baht,
tax on selling buffalo 15 baht, selling pigs 20 baht, on teak trees an extra tax—20 baht for small
trees, 50 baht for large trees. The announcements went on and on. It looked like nobody there
could remember it all, but everybody stood stiffly listening to kamnan Thi. He was like the main
actor of some play on stage. (Surachai 1997, 40–41)

Things went from bad to worse for the Lua’ because of abuses and oppression by theThai authorities. All the men were sent away to prison in Thai towns and cities, andthe only remaining hope was that people bringing red cloth would bring justice to theLua’ (Surachai 1997, 136). There had been a Lua’ holy man on the Laos side who carried
a red cloth. The Lua’ people’s access to him was thwarted by the Thai authorities’ bordercontrol. There was, however, hope for a new group of people carrying the red cloth.
Surachai wrote his novel while with the Arts Division of the Communist Party of Thailand(CPT) guerrillas in the jungles of Nan Province, and while taking shelter with Lua’highlanders who had been alienated from any contact with lowland society. In the novel,
the history of the Lua’ predicts how the CPT will carry the hope for the future, throughthe implied match between the Lua’ holy man’s red cloth and the CPT’s red flag. The
innocent goodness of the Lua’ villagers is repeatedly highlighted through the contrast
with the oppressive Thai authorities.21)
A very different witness to ethnic-frontier conditions in Thailand in the mid-1970s

21) The moral-binary setup is common in Thai fiction from this time (see Khammaan 1992 [1978]).
It is also common beyond fiction writing, in the focus on Karen people’s alleged eco-wisdom(Hayami 2006) and in the more general emphasis on “community culture” that imagines traditional
Thai villagers as endangered by the erosive force of modernity and globalization (Yukti 2005). The
most scathing internal critique of the Thai romanticization of village life may be Chart Korbjitti’s(2001 [1981]) novel Kham phiphaksa (The judgment) (see Chusak 2014).

Thailand’s Plural Identities

277

appears in Thommayanti’s (2019 [1976]) novel Jewel of the Deep Forest.22) The story is
about a Thai man named Songphao and a Karen woman named Miyawaddi. Songphao ishunting in the forest with his friends, and Old-Jan, a Karen man, is guiding him. Old-Jan
is fatally injured by a tiger as he saves Songphao’s life. Before he dies, he asked Songphao
to take care of his daughter, Miyawaddi. Songphao wants to kill the tiger, and though
Miyawaddi doubts his skills, they set off into the jungle. There, however, they comeupon a group of terrorists. Songphao becomes sick, Miyawaddi nurses him, and meanwhile she kills three of the terrorists. Later the authorities defeat the terrorist group,and Songphao is declared a hero. He takes Miyawaddi to live with his parents in Bangkok;
he tells her that the urban jungle will overtake the other jungle, so she would be better
off living with him. An upper-class woman, Wan, is interested in him, but in the end
Songphao and Miyawaddi become a couple.
Miyawaddi returns to her forest-village but then does not want to marry any man in
the village. Songphao goes after her. “Do you love me, Miyawaddi?” he asks when hefinds her. “My father entrusted me to you,” she replies. “You know that if a woman is
entrusted to someone then she must live with that man” (Thommayanti 2019, 470). The
novel says nothing about politics. There is no indication of who or what the terrorists
are; all the reader knows is that they are evil. Nor does the novel try to convey anything
about social life among the Karen villagers when the story begins.
Miyawaddi is a clearly Burmese name that also had currency among Karen peoples.
However, I see no sign in the story that the novelist has paid attention to Karen culture,society, language, or history. Given this lack of familiarity, I think that Thommayanti
simply borrowed from Noi’s Long Phrai series (the radio play or the book version), wherea significant female Karen character has this name (Noi 1990, Vol. 1). In contrast toThommayanti’s token nod to interethnic relations, the novels by Sophak, Sifa, andSurachai describe communities and social life among Thailand’s Malay Muslims, Hmong,and Lua’ peoples with familiarity and interest.
Thommayanti’s novel contains an extended slapstick segment about the difficultyof getting Miyawaddi to wash her hair (Thommayanti 2019, 264–280). The maid ultimately showers her by force. To me, this echoes the racist Thai notion that hill people
do not like to bathe, that they are filthy savages who need Thai intervention. The ending,in which Songphao and Miyawaddi became a couple because they both honor her22) Thommayanti was the pen name of Wimon Siriphaibun (1936–2021). She was a prolific writer, theauthor of over 60 novels and some short story collections. Wimon had strongly right-wing nationalist views and was a minister in the Thanin government (1976–77). She was made National
Artist in 2012. Many of her novels were turned into television dramas, and Jewel of the Deep
Forest was also made into a film.

278

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

father’s decision rather than being in love with each other, fits a certain Thai perspective
on romance and family dynamics. The anthropologist and folklorist Siraporn Nathalang(2000) shows how various folktales and television dramas have been understood differently by members of the Thai audience, depending on how individual people relate tofamily tension and conflict (e.g., between a father-in-law and son-in-law, a wife and herhusband, a woman and her father, and a major wife and minor wife). One implication, shesuggests, is that the “process of listening to and interpreting the folktale [or television
drama] stabilizes real-life conflict situations in the family” (Siraporn 2000, 22). Most
likely, Thommayanti’s book has particular resonance for readers who value a young
woman for following her father’s wishes rather than following her own heart and making
her own life decisions. Of the fiction that I have examined here, this is the only novelthat concludes with the manifestation of a dutiful daughter.23)

Discussion
The Thai writing discussed above shows very clearly a range of simultaneous andalternative indigenous Thai perspectives on society and diversity. In the novels andethnography that I consulted, one perspective assumes Thai identity as plural, inclusive,and diverse. Another perspective assumes that Thai identity is exclusive and singular,
and that ethnic others are inferiors who do not have any claim to belonging in the
country. The third perspective assumes plural identities in Thai society, focuses primarily on class divisions, and depicts the insistence on hierarchy and inequality as sociallyharmful. These three perspectives recur enough times in Thai writing that I view themas credible and meaningful expressions of what Thai people have imagined about theirmodern identity and society.
The sense of multiethnic Thai belonging is perhaps strongest in the books by Malai(as Riam Eng and Noi Inthanon), Sifa, and Sophak—but this sentiment is clear also in theofficial announcement by Suphayok-Kasem in 1927. Calling attention to this perspective23) Herbert Phillips (1987) remarks that Thommayanti’s fiction gets framed as politically inconsequential nam-nao (“stagnant water”) literature by her leftist critics. He suggests that her writing“focuses on the rich inner life of women, not on the outer world of political practice and ideology”(Phillips 1987, 76). In my reading, though, the work is as political as any other. I find the supposed
distinction between inner and outer worlds unconvincing. Because women’s writing in Thailand
often gets bracketed as romance novels of no social or political significance, I insist that there isno commonality between Thommayanti’s novel and the two other “women’s” novels from Sifa
and Sophak. Nothing about the three novels’ content would justify classifying them as the samekind of work.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

279

on Thailand’s diversity is important, given the apparent academic neglect of the pluralist
understanding of society and identity in Thailand and across Southeast Asia more generally (Jonsson 2014; 2022a; 2022b).
The main emphasis of this study has been to substantiate the sense of pervasive
and persistent diversity in Thai notions of society and identity. That point, however,relates to a more general issue regarding understandings of culture and society. Westernanthropology’s ethnographic mode, associated with Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead,and Clifford Geertz, has since the 1930s played up understandings of culture as uniform
within an ethnic label (as in “the Balinese,” “the Samoans,” and the like).24) Prior tothat, the ethnological perspective of Robert Lowie and many others insisted on diversity
and individual variation in any society (Bargheer 2017). Lowie (1927; 1948) also showedthat any social formation was likely to be based on alternative and contradictory principles. Even the smallest community, he maintained, might rest on the separate principles of territory, kinship, and voluntary associations, which might arrange people indifferent ways and could also lead to clashes. The ethnological focus was relentlesslycomparative, regional, and historical and never took ethnic lines for granted.
The political scientist Kasian Tejapira (2009; 2015) has called attention to a rangeof modern Thai views on society and government among Thai intellectuals. His analysis
of debates concerning government among a rather small group of intellectuals andpoliticians in relation to economic and political crises during 1997–2014 shows repeateddiversity that he sorts into three perspectives: authoritarian, liberal, and communitarian.
This diversity of views is similar to the range of perspectives on society that I havefound in Thai-language ethnographies and fiction, though it is not the same. These varied
perspectives are all equally Thai. Their divergent notions of Thainess are simultaneous,alternative, and at odds.
Thongchai’s (1995) study of trends in Thai writings on Thai history suggests an arc
that goes from Prince Damrong’s royalist nationalism, which celebrated the monarchy
and Buddhism as quintessentially Thai, to a Marxist critique of the premodern sakdina
hierarchy of rank and class, and on to a localist orientation that quietly ignores any focus
on Thainess, hierarchy, or the supposed superiority of Bangkok over other parts of thecountry. My study suggests that a similar range of rival perspectives has long coexistedin Thai discourses and social dynamics rather than being a sequence of steps that is
specific to the writing of Thai history. The celebration of hierarchy, the critique of
hierarchy, and the emphasis on pluralist belonging that denies categorical distinctions
are all equally Thai views that have been simultaneous and at odds.
24) These examples draw on American anthropology; the foundational British anthropology on “theTrobriands,” “the Andamans,” and “the Nuer” points in precisely the same direction.

280

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

The airing of different narratives of history and politics or regarding interethnic
relations does not produce an agreement on these matters. As Siraporn found withconflict narratives in Thai folktales and television dramas, people relate to such narratives
from different and potentially antagonistic perspectives. Engagement with the stories
often reinforces rival notions of identity and diversity and sustains differences that can
produce conflict. The studies by these three Thai scholars resonate with Lowie’s
ethnological perspective: There has never been a single Thai culture or a singular social
ideology. Instead, Thai society is built on alternative principles that can be glossed as
elitism, anti-elitism, and pluralism, which trigger a range of rival representations andagendas that sometimes coexist without problems and occasionally generate violent
conflict.25)
Thongchai (2000, 46) argued that the Siamese elite’s ethno-spatial project wasanchored to the idea of hill people’s strangeness (plaek, pralat). I did not find this idea
characteristic of the ethnographic writing for the period that he focused on. However,this idea helped me make initial sense of Noi’s Jungle Trails and Sifa’s Under the DeepBlue Sky. There is no reference at all to strangeness in these works. Without Thongchai’sanalysis, I might never have made the connection or recognized this as an issue. That,in turn, gave me a perspective on the ethnographic writing by Siri, Bunchuai, andKhajadphai. Each of them emphasized the strangeness of hill peoples. Their works
clearly affirm the connection of certain ethnographic writing and racial hierarchy in theThai project of nation building. This connection appears in certain writings from thedemocratic period after 1932 but is not so obvious in works from before that time.
The 1932 revolution that ended absolute monarchy in Thailand triggered contestations and suppression related to tensions between democracy and hierarchy/monarchy(Ockey 2002; Thak 2007; Sopranzetti 2018). One result was creative ethnographic
reporting that insisted on Thai racial divides, ethnic inequality, and an authoritarian
intolerance of diversity. Most of the fiction and some of the nonfiction that I examined,
however, counters this racialized view of ethnic inequalities and emphasizes instead
plural belonging and the ordinariness of ethnic and other diversity in Thai society. The
novels that I discuss in this article manifest a lively, diverse, and sometimes contentious
discourse on Thai identity and diversity.
My study of national imagination in Thailand during the twentieth century grew outof the recognition that certain novels about interethnic relations from the 1950s and1970s contradicted everything I thought I knew about Thai identity. This pushed me25) Several studies by Richard A. O’Connor (1983; 1995) show the contradictory social principles behindurbanism in Thailand and in Southeast Asia more generally past and present.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

281

toward an interdisciplinary territory where I had no particular expertise. During myresearch I came to appreciate the ethnological focus of scholars such as Lowie, who wasrelentlessly comparative, historical, and regional and never assumed that ethnic lines
implied coherent societies or predictable politics. Lévi-Strauss’s structural approach alsooffered some guidance, in the suggestion that one must consider all variants of any one
narrative or topic in order to understand it. This obviously impossible goal encourages
an indiscriminate search for source material.
The research project required an interdisciplinary perspective that combined
anthropology, history, literature, politics, and some grounding in social life and the Thai
language. The research questions defined the project and contributed to my selection ofsources. The combination of romance novels, jungle adventure, leftist social realism,
ethnographic reporting, and official documents came about in the process of the research;
it was not something I could know beforehand. The study has an Area Studies bias, interms of both an interdisciplinary focus and an “openness to a variety of nondisciplinary,nonacademic arguments” (Guyer 2004, 501). My disagreement with the findings ofAnderson (1985) and Thongchai (2000) regarding fiction, ethnography, politics, andinterethnic relations in Thai history is in the spirit of collaboration. Research is an
ongoing social enterprise where we learn from one another, including through debate
rooted in separate and diverse knowledge of events, sources, and histories (Guyer 2004,
501–502).
Jane Guyer suggests that an Area Studies focus can help reshape disciplinary academic practices and ideas through research encounters when “we are challenged, criticized, shamed, or inspired by ‘another’ to whom we are absolutely committed to listening”(Guyer 2004, 518). Reading the fiction, ethnography, and other Thai writing haschanged my knowledge of interethnic realities and social imaginations in Thailand.
Taking the writers and their imagery seriously by examining each individual entity inits particulars and then juxtaposing it to a range of others offered suggestions about
how to revise the current academic understanding of Thailand’s national imagination in
the twentieth century.
Accepted: August 1, 2023

Acknowledgments
This study was made possible by a sabbatical leave from Arizona State University. The National
Research Council of Thailand provided a research permit. Kasetsart University kindly provided mewith academic affiliation. Professor Suchon Mallikamarl was helpful and encouraging in ways too many

282

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

to count. Orawan Tungteekaayu shared her take on some of the novels. In early 2022, professors
Chusak Pattarakulvanit, Puckpan Tipayamontri, Suvanna Kriengkraipetch, and Chetana Nagavajara
kindly shared ideas and advice regarding novels, authors, and the big picture. Generous, insightful, andcritical comments from the editor and anonymous reviewers for Southeast Asian Studies helped mesignificantly improve on an earlier version of this material. However, all interpretations expressed inthis article are my own responsibility.

References
Anake Nawigamune เอนก นาวิิกมููล. 2003. Si-san jak wan-waan สีี สันั จากวัันวาน [Bright colors of bygone
times]. Bangkok: Saithan.
Andaya, Barbara and Andaya, Leonard. 2015. A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 2010. Nai Krajok: Wannakam lae Kanmuang Sayam Yuk Amerikan ในกระจก
วรรณกรรมและการเมืืองสยามยุุกอเมริิ กาน [In the mirror: Literature and politics in Siam in the Americanera]. Bangkok: Aan.
―. 1985. Introduction. In In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era,
edited and translated by Benedict R. O’G. Anderson and Ruchira Mendiones, pp. 9–87. Bangkok:
Duang Kamol.
―. 1977. Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6 Coup. Bulletinof Concerned Asian Scholars 9(3): 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.1977.10406423.
Baker, Chris and Pasuk Phongpaichit. 2022. A History of Thailand. Fourth Edition. New York:
Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009029797.
―. 2010. The Tale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.
Bargheer, Stefan. 2017. Anthropology at War: Robert H. Lowie and the Transformation of the Culture
Concept, 1904–1954. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 53(2): 133–154. https://doi.
org/10.1002/jhbs.21845.
Braudel, Fernand. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of King Philip II.
New York: Harper & Row.
Bunchuai Srisawat บุุญช่่วย ศรีี สวัสั ดิ์์�. 2004a [1950]. 30 chat nai chiangrai ๓๐ชาติิในเชีียงราย [Thirty peoplesof Chiang Rai]. Bangkok: Sayam.
―. 2004b [1954]. Thai sipsongpanna ไทยสิบสองปันนา [The Thai peoples of Sipsongpanna]. Bangkok:
Sayam.
―. 2002 [1963]. Chao khao nai thai ชาวเขาในไทย [Mountain peoples in Thailand]. Bangkok:
Matichon.
Chart Korbjitti ชาติิ กอบจิิตติิ. 2001 [1981]. Kham phiphaksa คำำ�พิิพากษา [The judgment]. Translated by
Phongdeit Jiangphatthana-kit and Marcel Barang. Nakhon Rachasima: Howling Books.
Chatthip Nartsupha. 1999. The Thai Village Economy in the Past. Translated by Chris Baker and Pasuk
Phongpaichit. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.
Chulalongkorn, King พระบาทสมเด็็จพระจุุลจอมเกล้้าเจ้้าอยู่่�หัวั . 1968 [1906]. Ngo pa เงาะป่่ า [Frizzy junglee].
Bangkok: Khlangwitthaya.
Chusak Pattarakulvanit. 2014. Chat Kobjitti’s The Verdict and Somsong’s Appeal. In Disturbing
Conventions: Decentering Thai Literary Cultures, edited by Rachel V. Harrison, pp. 147–167. London
and New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Cushman, Richard D. 1970. Rebel Haunts and Lotus Huts: Problems in the Ethnohistory of the Yao.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

283

PhD dissertation, Cornell University.
Cushman, Richard D. and Jonsson, Hjorleifur R. 2020. Mosquito-Relish Diplomacy: Emperor Ping’s
Charter and Hill-Valley Dynamics between China and Thailand. Journal of the Siam Society 108(2):87–121.
Dalrymple, Graham H.; Joll, Christopher M.; and Shamsul Amri Baharuddin. 2023. Malayness in theThai South: Ethnonym Use and Cultural Heritage among Muslims in Chana District, Songkhla.
Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 38(2): 195–222.
Davis, Richard. 1984. Muang Metaphysics: A Study of Northern Thai Myth and Ritual. Bangkok: Pandora.
Dunn, F. L. 1975. Rain-Forest Collectors and Traders: A Study of Resource Utilization in Modern andAncient Malaya. Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.
Guyer, Jane I. 2004. Anthropology in Area Studies. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 499–523.
Hanks, Lucien M. 1962. Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order. American Anthropologist 64(6):1247–1261.
Harrison, Rachel. 1994. Sidaoru’ang and the Radical Tradition in Contemporary Thai Fiction: Introduction. In Sidaoruang, A Drop of Glass, and Other Stories, edited and translated by Rachel Harrison,pp. 13–62. Bangkok: Duang Kamol.
Hayami Yoko. 2006. Negotiating Ethnic Representation between Self and Other: The Case of Karenand Eco-tourism in Thailand. Southeast Asian Studies 44(3): 385–409. https://doi.org/10.20495/
tak.44.3_385.
Jonsson, Hjorleifur R. 2022a. Revisiting Ideas of Power in Southeast Asia: Introduction. Anthropological Forum 32(1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2022.2052016.
―. 2022b. Losing the Remote: Exploring the Thai Social Order with the Early and Late Hanks.
Anthropological Forum 32(1): 76–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2022.2049698.
―. 2020. Good Attachment in the Asian Highlands: Questioning Notions of “Loose Women”
and “Autonomous Communities.” Critical Asian Studies 52(3): 403–428. https://doi.org/10.1080/1
4672715.2020.1772092.
―. 2014. Slow Anthropology: Negotiating Difference with the Iu Mien. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast
Asia Program.
―. 2005. Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Jory, Patrick. 2007. From “Melayu Patani” to “Thai Muslim”: The Spectre of Ethnic Identity inSouthern Thailand. Singapore: Asian Research Institute, ARI Working Paper No. 84. https://dx.doi.
org/10.2139/ssrn.1317162.
Kasian Tejapira. 2015. Governance in Thailand. In A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual andCultural History of Thailand, edited by Maurizio Peleggi, pp. 181–195. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast
Asia Program.
―. 2009. Thammarat/Good Governance in Glocalizing Thailand. In Words in Motion: Towarda Global Lexicon, edited by Carol Gluck and Anna L. Tsing, pp. 306–326. Durham: Duke University
Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391104-016.
Khajadphai Burutsaphat ขจััดภััย บุุรุุษพััฒน์์. 1975. Chao khao ชาวเขา [Hill tribes]. Bangkok: Phraephittaya.
Khammaan Khonkhai. 1992 [1978]. The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp. Translated by Gehan Wijeyewardene. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.
Khamsing Srinawk. 1973. The Politician and Other Thai Stories. Translated by Damnern Garden. Kuala
Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
Ko Surangkhanang. 1994 [1937]. The Prostitute. Translated by David Smyth. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford
University Press.
Kraisri Nimmanhaeminda. 1967. The Lawa Guardian Spirits of Chiangmai. Journal of the Siam Society284

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

55(2): 185–225.
―. 1965. An Inscribed Silver-Plate Grant to the Lawa of Bo Luang. In Felicitation Volumes ofSoutheast Asian Studies Presented to His Highness Prince Dhani Nivat, Vol. 2, pp. 233–238. Bangkok:
Siam Society.
Lao Khamhom ลาวคำำ�หอม. 2020 [1958]. Phrai fa ไพร่่ ฟ้้า [The lord’s serfs]. In Fa bo kan ฟ้้าบ่่กั้้�น [The sky
is no hindrance], pp. 17–45. Bangkok: Sammati.
Lathi Thamniam. 2015. Lathi thamniam tang-tang phak thi 5: Wa duai chao pa chat tang tangลััทธิิธรรมเนีียมต่่างๆ ภาคที่่�๕ ว่่าด้้วยชาวป่่ าต่่างๆ [Descriptions of diverse customs in district 5: On various
groups of forest peoples]. In Lathi thamniam tang-tang 26 phak ลััทธิิ ธรรมเนีียมต่่างๆ [Descriptions ofdiverse customs in 26 districts], Vol. 1, pp. 219–274. Bangkok: Princess Sirindhorn Foundation.
Le Jiem Tsan; Cushman, Richard D.; and Jonsson, Hjorleifur. 2016. Highland Chiefs and Regional
Networks in Mainland Southeast Asia: Mien Perspectives. Southeast Asian Studies 5(3): 515–551.
https://doi.org/10.20495/seas.5.3_515.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. The Structural Study of Myth. In Structural Anthropology, pp. 206–231.
New York: Basic Books.
Loos, Tamara. 2006. Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Lowie, Robert H. 1948. Social Organization. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
―. 1927. The Origin of the State. New York: Harper & Row.
ั ทร์์. 2008 [1982]. Luk Pa ลููกป่่ า [Sons of the forest]. Bangkok: Khledthai.
Mala Khamjan มาลา คำำ�จัน
Malai Chuphinit. 1996 [1951]. The Field of the Great. Translated by Marcel Barang. Bangkok: Thai
Modern Classics.
Manas Chitakasem. 1982. The Development of Political and Social Consciousness in Thai Short
Stories. In The Short Story in South East Asia: Aspects of a Genre, edited by Jeremy H. C. S.
Davidson and Helen Cordell, pp. 63–93. London: SOAS, University of London.
Manguin, Pierre-Yves. 2002. The Amorphous Nature of Coastal Polities in Insular Southeast Asia:
Restricted Centres, Extended Peripheries. Moussons 5: 73–99. https://doi.org/10.4000/moussons.
2699.
Morell, David and Chai-anan Samudavanija. 1981. Political Conflict in Thailand: Reform, Reaction,
Revolution. Cambridge: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain.
Nai Bua Chok-di นายบััวโชกดีี. 1933. Prawatisat ประวััติศิ าสตร์์ [History]. In Nakhon Nan: Chabab Pathomrikนครน่่านฉบัับปฐมฦกษ์์ [An introduction to Nan], pp. 212–285. Bangkok: Bamrungkulkit and Thaphrajan
Publishers.
Noi Inthanon น้้อยอิินทนนท์์. 1990 [1955]. Long Phrai ล่่องไพร [Jungle trails], 14 vols. Bangkok: Krathom
P.L.
Ockey, James. 2002. Civil Society and Street Politics in Historical Perspective. In Reforming Thai
Politics, edited by Duncan McCargo, pp. 107–123. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
O’Connor, Richard A. 2009. Place, Power and People: Southeast Asia’s Temple Tradition. Arts
Asiatiques 64: 116–123.
―. 1995. Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia. Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies 26(2): 30–45. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463400010468.
―. 1983. A Theory of Indigenous Southeast Asian Urbanism. Singapore: ISEAS. https://doi.org/
10.1355/9789814376174.
Phillips, Herbert P. 1987. Modern Thai Literature: With an Ethnographic Interpretation. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press.
Pinkaew Laungaramsri ปิ่่� นแก้้วเหลืืองอร่่ ามศรีี . 1998. Wathakam wa duai chaokhao วาทกรรมว่่าด้้วยชาวเขา [Thediscourse on hill tribes]. Sangkhomsat สัังคมศาสตร์์ [Social sciences] 11: 92–135.

Thailand’s Plural Identities

285

Platt, Martin. 2013. Isan Writers, Thai Literature: Writing and Regionalism in Modern Thailand.
Singapore: NUS Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1qv1fm.
Renard, Ronald D. 1980. Kariang: History of Karen-T’ai Relations from the Beginnings to 1923. PhD
dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
Reynolds, Craig J., ed. 1993. National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939–1989. Chiang Mai:
Silkworm Books.
Riam Eng เรีี ยมเอง. 1975 [1951]. Thung maharat ทุุงมหาราช [The great ruler’s plains]. Bangkok: Kasem
bannakit.
―. 1961. Chang thao lang ช้างเท้าหลัง [The elephant’s hind legs]. In Riam Eng, Ruam ruang ekรวมเรื่่� องเอก [The best short stories], pp. 405–419. Bangkok: Phraephittaya.
Ruenruthai Sujjapun. 2000. Literature for Life. Manusya: Journal of Humanities 3(2): 92–107.
Sadet Neua. 1927. Rachakan thi 7 Sadet Liab Monthon Fai Neua Pho So 2469 รััชกาลที่่� 7 เสด็็จฯ เลีียบมณฑล
ฝ่่ายเหนืือ พ.ศ. 2469 [The royal journey of King Rama VII to the northern district in 1927]. Bangkok:
Thai Film Archive.
Sifa สีี ฟ้้า. 1977. Tai Fa Si Khram ใต้้ฟ้้าสีี คราม [Under the deep-blue sky], 2 vols. Bangkok: Khlangwitthaya.
Siraporn Nathalang. 2000. Different Family Roles, Different Interpretations of Thai Folktales. In Thai
Folklore: Insights into Thai Culture, edited by Siraporn Nathalang, pp. 1–46. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn
University Press.
Siri Phetyaprasert ศิิริิ แพทย์์ประเสริิ ฐ. 1933. Saphap chonchat สภาพชนชาติิ [The condition of ethnic groups].
In Nakhon Nan: Chabab Pathomrik นครน่่ านฉบัับปฐมฦกษ์์ [An introduction to Nan], pp. 272–285.
Bangkok: Bamrungkulkit and Thaphrajan Publishers.
Sophak Suwan โสภาค สุุ วรรณ. 2016 [1974]. Pulakong ปุุลากง [Pulakong]. Bangkok: Big Book Center.
Sopranzetti, Claudio. 2018. Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok.
Oakland: University of California Press.
Stott, Phillip. 1991. Mu’ang and Pa: Elite Views of Nature in a Changing Thailand. In Thai Constructionsof Knowledge, edited by Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton, pp. 142–154. London: SOAS,
University of London.
Subrahmanyan, Arjun. 2021. Amnesia: A History of Democratic Idealism in Modern Thailand. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Suphayok-Kasem, Minister ศุุภาโยคเกษม เสนาบดีี. 1927. Prakat phonphan khayai wela kankep ngoen, . . .
kae ratsadon jamphuak Meo, Yao, Musoe, Lisaw ประกาศผ่่อนผัันขยายเวลาการเก็็บเงิิน . . . แก่่ราษฎรจำำ�พวก
แม้้ว เย้้า มููเซอร์์ ลีีซอ [Announcing the extension of tax-collecting times for the Meo, Yao, Lahu, andLisu members of the general public]. Racha-kijja-anubeksa ราชกิิ จจานุุ เบกษา [State gazette] 43(January 2, 2469), pp. 603–604.
Surachai Janthimathon สุุ รชััย จัันทิิมาธร. 1997 [1981]. Kon fa sang ก่่อนฟ้้าสาง [Before the light of day].
Bangkok: Samanchon.
Suvanna Kriengkraipetch. 1995. Characters in Thai Literary Works: Us and Them. In Thai Literary
Traditions, edited by Manas Chitakasem, pp. 130–147. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press.
Thak Chaloemtiarana. 2018. Read till It Shatters: Nationalism and Identity in Modern Thai Literature.
Canberra: ANU Press.
―. 2007. Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program.
Thanapol Limapichart. 2011. Literature for Life: The Context and Conditions of Its Emergence inThailand, 1940s–50s. Asiatic 5(2): 40–60.
Thommayanti ธมยัันตีี. 2019 [1976]. Kaew klang dong แก้้วกลางดง [Jewel of the deep forest]. Bangkok: Na
banwannakam.
Thongchai Winichakul. 2000. The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-spatial Differentiation of Siamese
Subjects, 1885–1910. In Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, edited by Andrew

286

Hjorleifur R. Jonsson

Turton, pp. 38–62. Richmond: Curzon.
―. 1995. The Changing Landscape of the Past: New Histories in Thailand since 1973. Journalof Southeast Asian Studies 26(1): 99–120. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463400010511.
Tran Ky Phuong. 2010. Interactions between Uplands and Lowlands through Riverine Exchange
Networks of Central Vietnam. In 50 Years of Archaeology in Southeast Asia: Essays in Honor of
Ian Glover, edited by B. Bellina, E. Bacus, T. Pryce, and J. Christie, pp. 207–215. Bangkok: River
Books.
Turton, Andrew, ed. 2000. Introduction. In Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, editedby Andrew Turton, pp. 3–31. Richmond: Curzon.
White, Joyce C. 2011. Emergence of Cultural Diversity in Mainland Southeast Asia: A View from
Prehistory. In Dynamics of Human Diversity: The Case of Mainland Southeast Asia, edited by N. J.
Enfield, pp. 9–46. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Wolters, O. W. 1982. Phạm Su Mạnh’s Poems Written while Patrolling the Vietnamese Northern
Border in the Middle of the Fourteenth Century. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 13(1): 107–119.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463400014016.
Yukti Mukdawijitra ยุุกติิ มุุกดาวิิจิิตร. 2005. An ‘wathanatham chumchon’ อ่่าน ‘วััฒนธรรมชุุมชน’ [Reading“community culture”]. Bangkok: Fa diowkan.