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David in Siam provides this nice juxtaposition of images of Thailand’s entrant in Miss Universe, Fahroong Yutitham. The background is provided in an impassioned statement about cultural racism from the Bangkok Post’s Sanitsuda Ekachai. Here is an extract:
The exclusive quality of being Thai
SANITSUDA EKACHAIA National Dress? This question in bold letters was placed under the picture of a Thai beauty queen who is vying for the Miss Universe crown in Mexico City. The picture, splashed on the front page of a Thai-language newspaper, shows 19-year-old Miss Thailand, Fahroong Yutitham, in a colourful, navel-displaying costume that has the ethnic Hmong look, complete with Hmong-like headgear and silver ornaments. Such a costume, the caption states, has stirred many to question whether it should be called a national Thai dress or not. The answer was quickly forthcoming from the culture police.
No, this is definitely not a Thai national dress, said Ladda Tangsupachai, director of the Cultural Surveillance Centre of the Culture Ministry. The Thai national dress, she stressed, must be Thai. It also must be in line with the official, royal designs and it must be used for proper occasions. She also criticised Ms Fahroong for failing to do her duty as Miss Thailand to show the outside world an authentic national Thai dress. Furthermore, wearing an ethnic dress but calling it Thai could confuse young Thai minds and set a bad example for the youngsters to emulate.
Don’t dismiss her answer too quickly yet, however narrow and obsolete it sounds. For hers is a prevailing mindset that refuses to budge in our society. We need to understand where it comes from, what nurtures it, and what it entails if we want to have the chance to uproot it at all. Like it or not, Ms Ladda’s views reflect the mainstream belief that the Thai identity is one and the same with the ethnic Thai. It is also linked with court culture, which entails the belief that Thai-ness is refined, sacrosanct and inviolable.
Critics blame this narrow view of Thai identity on the ethno-centric national history which deals mainly with the Thai courts, ignoring the locals’ collective memories of a rich cultural and ethnic diversity. This hegemonic history, perpetuated by all forms of popular media, has brainwashed society to believe that the country belongs to the ethnic Thai only, reducing other ethnic groups to “outsiders”. This rigid, national identity forces ethnic groups to drop their ethnic names, adopt Buddhism and learn to speak Thai without an accent in order to be accepted as “true” Thai.
Cultural protector Ladda Tangsupachai (pictured below in traditional dress) has featured in New Mandala before with the enlightened statement that “Coyote Girls have to be in the right place, like an animal has to be in the zoo.” Well my suggestion is that Ms. Ladda belongs well and truly out of any position of public influence. She is a cultural dinosaur and it’s time for her to go.
Well, she is “Miss Thailand”, not “Miss Maew”. I have no issue with some Laos or Burmese wearing a national costume like that, but it’s absurd to see a Thai girl wearing that. She and her costume designer should be ashamed of themselves. She should also offer to give up her crown to display some spirit.
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But why would the costume represent Laos or Burma any more legitimately than Thailand?
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IMHO Ms. Fahroong is just doing her job as Ms. Thailand. Showing what a fun and creative place Thailand is. TAT loves her, I bet. That is a pretty offbeat and wacky skirt-jacket-headress combo. New Mandala will get a jump in traffic because of the Ms. Fahroong photos, I bet. IMHO contemporary Thai culture is fusion culture.
This reminds me of the time I assigned explaining northern Thai Supphasit [proverbs] in English as an oral presentation assignment and the students chose the most raunchiest proverbs they could find in the book, proverbs about old wilting rice stocks or comparing tangible solid results with the distinction between flatulence and solid waste matter. I was shocked and expressed displeasure, of course, because I was an Ajaan. I certainly didn’t laugh, but I actually was pleased to learn more about Tai sayings. Later when I told my rather prudish supervisor, I got thoroughly upbraided, for what it’s not clear, since I didn’t realise the full extent of Thai folklore!
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It is bizarre to reduce the complexity, richness and contradictions in everything experienced in Thailand to a debate over the authenticity of a costume. People who engage in this kind of simplification are struggling to be identified as authorities who define public representations as being acceptable or otherwise to a broader social group. I guess the wider population must take such debates and such people seriously. But every country/minority group from Indonesia to Burma has a sarong with stylized patterns on it that its elites champion as a feature of ‘authentic’ and original identity. Is this such an ‘outsider’ observation or can most Thai people see the absurdity of such a thing too?
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Appropriate picture of Ladda. Very Orwellian!
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Ms. Ladda Tangsupachai is a very, very dangerous woman. In various interviews, she has described current Thai society as “sick” and lacking “traditional values.” Indeed, her
statements are chillingly evocative of the Nazi Party’s concept of entartete Knust .
To those who would see Ms. Tangsupachai as merely a bueaurcatic old prude who does nothing of much influence, I would admonish them that Ms. Tangsupachai’s position very
closely resembles that of Reichminister f├╝r Volksaufkl├дrung und Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. While “the Generals” represent the hard power of the junta, people like
Ms.Tangsupachai are its soft power. Soft power, is just as important, if not more important, to the creation and maintenance of hegemony.
In her comments concerning Thai national dress, the view of Thai culture that Ms. Tangsupachai puts forth clearly shows her allegiance to Fascist theories of Volkstum, that is
Thai culture is defined by the popular imagination of a pre-industrial rural Utopia, where the aboriginal Thais (that is, the central, “pure” ethnic group) possessed all they needed from
the land (calls for self-sufficency were a big part of the völkisch movement), to which they had an almost magical attachment. Layered on top of this mythical nostalgia is an
sentimental, irrational patriotism defined by ethnic terms. Local history (e.g. the Thai school curriculum that spends more time having students memorize the local crafts produced in every
amphore than it does having students memorize the Periodic table) and local folklore (e.g. the morally didactic government produced cartoons based on the Ramakien and
Khun Phaen) are promoted as away to protect the “purity” of the culture as a reaction to feelings of cultural alienation due to increased participation in globalization.
Thailandisch Volkstum, as Sanitsuda Ekachai points out in her article, is centered around the court culture of the Central plains; that is, the Palace is the final arbiter of what is
“Thai,” all other discourses are “othered.”
The MoC’s “othering” of competing cultural discourses serves the same purpose as the concept of jahiliyyah (the belief that all culture and cultural artifacts, regardless of origin,
that originate from before the revelation of the Qur’an are worthless and should be erased from historical record) does for Islamic colonialism/Arabization; the purposeful devaluation of
the products of a peoples’ culture as a means of establishing control over them. If the products of the collective intellectual work of a people are devalued, then the people themselves are devalued as well. They come to see themselves as “othered,” inferior, and submissive.
Is any more commentary necessary when the first person who responded to this post used an ethnic slur in his/her argument? Truly, is any more commentary necessary when the fact is that the vast majority of Thais wouldn’t even know which word I’m referring to and why it’s offensive?
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Err, who is marketing the “non-Thai” “Maew” and long neck Karen in TAT tourism package?
The Thainess in beauty contest have to get a face lift. No culture police needed to approve “culture.”
To sum up what this MoC do in our tax, a fellow said during Songkran, they monitor tiny tops, super short shorts, powder playing and how actress dressed. They make sure to give every Thai culture clean— by referring this is not the ways our ancestors did. Her ancestors are Victorian version of high class Thais, the cleaned and censored version of elite. That might be her victorianization of her Thai values. I won’t take that.
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No matter what miss dinosaur, Ladda Tangsupacha, might say, I think Ms Fahroong showed great creativity and sensitivity towards those who the ‘elite’ would love to keep down and out of sight. The skirt Ms Fahroon wore was made out of cloth patches produced by the real people of Thailand. What do the ‘elite’ produce that is so useful? Even the Thai silk costumes (boring!!) they tout as the official dress are created from fabric produced by poor Esarn people in their homes. Perhaps Ladda should get out of her cocoon and go upcountry to meet some real Thais.
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First of all, I reckon the dress as a Akha-Hmong mix…
If Khun Ladda is consequently promoting Thailand as a “Volksgemeinschaft” of the Siamese, then she should kick herself out of the office as she herself is of Chinese descent (her name indicates that – unless it is a married name…).
IMHO Miss Fahroong is doing justice for the ethnic minorties in Thailand who are denied citizenship, blamed for environmental destruction but being exploided excessively for the tourism industry. Virtually no pictoral representation of Thailand can forbear the inclusion of the so-called hill tribes who are used as the “noble savage” and the last stronghold of a exotic fairyland.
But want it or not: Unconsciously, common Thai people have included the hilltribes into the mindset of ‘Thainess’ to a certain degree, at least abroad. If a farang is wearing a Hmong shirt in Europe and meets a Thai, the Thai would say: “Oh you have a Thai shirt!” rather than: “You have a Meo shirt” (The question of who actually made the shirt left aside). As distance grows the national imaginary gets more inclusive and regional differences get blurred. Ms. Ladda seems to have forgotten about that.
She also seems to forget that outside Thailand, what is presented is as much Laotian as it is Thai – done by people from Isan.
And she definitely needs a lesson on what “culture” is meant nowadays….
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[…] head providing a nice touch of royal authority. I’m not sure if Thai cultural guardian Ladda Tangsupachai would be impressed with this cross-border appropriation of Thai national […]
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Khun Ladda is indeed fighting a losing battle. Thailand today has passed the point of certain “national” dresses. Khun Ladda herself is not wearing any selblance of Thai dress either in her photo. So this subject amounts to what Shakespeare aptly says: “It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Incidentally, what would Khun Ladda say about Madame Srirasmi’s nude photos?
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Maybe the real context for the combo-ethnic minority outfit is the tiger-stripe bra she wears in the other photo. Both the tigers and the supposedly-unruly hill-tribes are from the wild outside of Thai society proper. The display is pleasantly ambiguous. It used to be the domain of men only, guys writing about hunting trips and hilltribe visits. In the 1990s, Sangkhit Janthanaphoti wrote several books, among them Saneh Sao Phukhao, The Charm of Mountain Girls, that deal with the ethnic outside as the realm of tough guy adventurers. The Thai beauty is perhaps signaling the end of an era for male privilege. But she is also playing with undervalued signifiers from “the top”; no actual ethnic minority person would get this kind of attention (or dress this way). This is an act, for sure, with no connection to the realities of ethnic minority peoples or poor farmers. Thai people can dress up for photos for the fun of it, and in Chiangmai during the 1990s the outfits seemed to be of two kinds; colorful hilltribes and classical royalty. Several studios in the north offer pre-modern royalty dresses for special-occasion photo shots. In the 1980s and ’90s, most of the westerner researchers had a soft spot for wearing mo-hom (the blue, collarless, peasant shirt) and sporting a (somewhat ethnic) shoulderbag. I was in that crowd, and rather than take a stab at the beauty queen I suggest that the rest of us have also looked quite funny on occasion.
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i agreed with Amateur. miss thai only promote the minority group that did not have a voice. I don’t think that the dress would be that of a big issue. As human, we should respect every culture within our boundary. treat other as you want to be treat. Miss thai just did her job by giving and promoting the many ethnicity of Thailand. Any country would not get far if they only look within their own area. Every country with pride need to open up their door for others to get in. thank other ethnicity for living and taking pride by being a part of the thai people. Go miss thai. U rock. Do whatever you do and feel. They already vote for you and you are crowed as miss thai. Now, it is your time to shine. Don’t let anybody tells u what to do. Well, they can tell you, but remember that the decision is in your hand. The only force that can stop you is yourself. Love, Sek Loso fan
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Wearing a hmong shirt is very good
This is my hmong t-shirt see detail
http://mt-shirt.blogspot.com
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I would love to see MOC comments about the ridiculously funny group Ponglang…
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