Thailand’s Plural Identities: Contesting the National Imagination in Fiction and Ethnography

Abstract

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