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One of the things that struck me at the Critical Transitions in the Mekong Conference is the ongoing researcher interest, especially among MA and PhD students, in the Shan (or tai yaay). This research interest is to be applauded. Travelling around northern Thailand it is hard not to be struck by the enormous contribution of migrant Shan workers to the service sector, construction projects and agricultural enterprise. Relatively cheap Shan labour seems to be playing an increasingly important role in Thailand’s labour in-sufficient economy. Research that casts light on this fundamentally important economic, demographic and cultural shift is very welcome indeed.
But research interest in the Shan is not always so pragmatic. For some Thai scholars the Shan represent a desirable ideal of lost Thai/Tai community. The nostalgia for Shan community is expressed in two ways. First, the Shan “village community” is often portrayed as the “authentic” Thai community, featuring forms of communal solidarity long-lost in the rapidly modernising Thai heartland. And, for some, the “trans-border Shan community” (community writ large) recalls the pre-modern and pre-nation-state linkages between the various Tai peoples. This recent culturalist echo of earlier pan-Thai sentiments delights in the linguistic and cultural similarities between the Thai and the Shan.
These are some of the issues that are addressed in an important thesis written by my co-blogger, Nich Farrelly. Nich submitted this thesis at the ANU in 2003 and I think it is time that it got some wider coverage (he is much too modest to post it himself!). Here it is:
The current crop of researchers working on the Shan may be provoked and stimulated by Nich’s critical reflections.
Thanks for the thesis. I’d definitely agree with your conclusion:
“To improve the situation [for Tais] requires going beyond reminiscences of social and ecological harmony.”
I think Tai Lue, at least, are slowly but surely finding their way into Tai society. I have undieing respect for my Tai Lue uncle-in-law. He has always acted very honorably towards me and I have returned the respect he has shown me. His whole family is thriving due to his leadership.
His cousin seems to be an intellectual in the Tai Lue community serving as a priest. He presided over my Tai Lue wedding with his niece and he has one young son who recently graduated with a PhD from Thammasat. Was running a computer school too.
The new university in Chiang Rai has provided Tai Lue in Chiang Rai with new educational opportunities. I actually taught some of my uncle-in-law’s neighbors. I was very sad though that ***they were embarassed about their Tai Lue identity at the university***.
Check out the annual Tai Lue festival in Chiang Kham. The show during the Khantoke dinner in the evening features a talent show of women who are divorced or whose husband is deceased, (I know this may seem rather sexist). When I was reading Anatole-Roger Peltier’s translation of a Tai Kheun text on marriage recently (below) I noted some interesting parallels. It’s worth further study.
1999 Kalè Ok Hno, le Kalè bourgeonnant (Jataka populaire tai kh├╝n de Birmanie), Bangkok, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre.
http://www.efeo.fr/biographies/cadreindexcherch.htm
Ratanaporn Sethakul has a wonderful economic history of northern Thailand that I used in my economic history class. My favorites of Sompong Witayasakpan are his translations of the Hsenwi and Mong Mao chronicles.
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Unlike Jon,I’ve had only a relatively brief encounter with the Thai Lue-5 weeks in what I was told was a Thai Lue village ,east of Chiang Rai.
The only Thai Lue I met who emphasised she was Thai Lue was a woman who lived near Chiang Saen.The others referred to themselves as Thai,as least to me ,a foreigner who could not speak Thai.
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I am new to New Mandala. I’m glad that the first visit I found this interesting thesis by Farrelly. Thanks very much.
A good critique of the village romaiticism and the nationalstic Tai studies is very much needed. The interesting thing is that among many Thai intelligentsia, the former is part of the “progressive” views, while the latter is not seen as nationalsitic at all.
Have you seen a Thai book by Yukti Mukdawijit — a critique of Chatthip’s “writing villages”?
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On Chatthip and others also see
Chatthip Nartsupha. 1991. The ‘community culture’ school of thought. In Thai Constructions of Knowledge, eds. Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton, pp. 118-141. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. (reprinted 1995)
Chatthip Nartsupha. 1999. The Thai Village Economy in the Past. Translated by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. 131 pp.
Kitahara, Atsushi. 1996. The Thai Rural Community Reconsidered. Historical Community Formation and Contemporary Development Movements. Bangkok: The Political Economy Centre, Faculty of Economics, Chulalongkorn University. 190 pp.
Kemp, Jeremy. 1993. On the Interpretation of Thai Villages. In The Village in Perspective. Community and Locality in Rural Thailand, ed. Philip Hirsch, pp. 81-96. Chiang Mai: Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University.
Kemp, Jeremy: Seductive Mirage. The Search For the Village Community in Southeast Asia. Dordrecht: Foris Publ., 1988
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I have not had time to read the paper quite yet, but I am very familiar with one village mentioned, Baan Mai Mok Cham, one of whose founders was the late Sao Chaang, who I believe was son of Sao Shwe Thaik, the first president of Burma. Thus I am not surprised that there is a strong sense of communal Shan identity in that town. Now that housing extends to the new bridge across the Mae Kok River, it hardly qualifies as a village, and the recent population growth of Mok Cham was certainly not generated internally, so I am not surprised that it now houses a much more diverse population than it did when I was a regular visitor.
Not quite the most northern village in Mae Ai province, as Muang Ngaam, Baan (the ever notorious and now incarcerated) Laota, Hua Muang Ngaam, and Baan Linchee are even a bit further afield, it is the last large village in the district. When I lived nearby in the early 1980s it was, to the best of my knowledge, almost entirely Shan, with a few Chinese, such as the owner of the small petrol station along the river and this chemist who had worked in Switzerland and who had retired to Mok Cham and married two young teenage sisters a fraction of his age. There was also a small Border Patrol Unit (BPP) stationed in Mok Cham, as well as a very tacky Karaoke place to cater to those at that station.
As idyllic as a Shan village as it appeared walking around, rice in the fields and saa paper drying in front of the homes, reality is not quite as pleasant. A number of the younger women worked the red-light district in Fang. And I think it was in the late 1980s that a good acquaintance of mine, Kamnaan Sang, the head of sub-district and the head of Mok Cham, was brutally murdered. Rumors were it involved land disputes and no doubt that much of the neighboring land came into the possesion of agribusiness and was turned into large orange groves.
But the local area around Mok Cham remains one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods I have encountered in Thailand. Within a few hours walk, now mostly a short drive, one can visit Khon Muang (Tamakeng), Karen (Muang Ngaam), Lisu (Laota), Lahu (several flavors), Mien, Akha, and a KMT Chinese village. At the time I lived in the area, the lingua franca of the region, once you crossed the bridge at at Thaton, was still Lahu. And other than when Laota was flexing his muscle, blessedly no longer possible, this diverse group of people all got along remarkably well with very minimal government presence.
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Thank you for your very informative thesis .
Although not entirely relevant : I have an interesting angle to the etymology of the Burmese term Shan and the confusion that exists in the modern Thai ( Siamese ) identity .
The assumption that one can use evidence from the Burmese language to link Shan and Siam is heavily flawed .
Siam ( based at the Chao Phraya basin ) was an assimilated product of Tai suzereinty over an existing Mon-Khmer ( plus malay ) population . The original population had already been recognised as Siem ( presumed to mean dark ) by the Angkor empire even prior to the traditional founding of the southern Tai polities of Sukhotai and Ayutthaya . ( Siam come sfrom a Khmer term ) The Burmese have never confused the Siamese with the more northern Tai or Lao . The Burmese term Shan extends to northern Lao , Lan Na and parts of Yunnan and NE India but not to the the polities further south which have been refered to since mandala overlap in the 1500s as Yodaya ( and never as Shan or even as Siam ) . This would presumably have been attributed to the observed phenotypical as well as language differences between the Tai and the Siamese : the central Thai dialect is very much a heavily Khmer influenced Tai dialect with many loanwords from Khmer and a tendency not only to use Rs but also to roll them .
The Tai migrated in a southerly direction and this is illustrated by the lesser influence of Tai culture by Khmer , Mon or Burmese the closer one gets to the epicentre of the original Tai culture which is in southern China . There is also a phenotypical change as ones goes north . ( the Bangkok anomaly is created by the Chinese presence ) . It seems unlikely given this assumed migratory path that either the Khmer or the Siamese themselves would have adopted a Burmese term and similarly it would be unlikely that the Burmese would adopt a Khmer word to refer to the Tai in their immediate vicinity. Indeed it is often postulated that Shan , Siam and Assam all have the same route meaning when infact these are names given to Tai by non-Tais in very separate areas . Therefore the similarities are probably coincidental .
The word “Shan” in Burmese is indeed written as S( with Y diacritic )- an and not R( with H diacritic ) an as one would expect conventially to create the Sh sound ( nevertheless both spellings create the same sound ) . Additionally when a diacritic is used to alter the primary sound it is always very merged into the one sound rather than creating 2 syllables ( therefore the Burmese rendering of Siam would be written as 2 words and not one : ie S-y -A-n and not Sy-an ) . More likely the term Shan comes from the Chinese term mountain . The lowland Burmese still and have always perceived the Shans as the original highlanders . ( the Kachin / Jingpo came much later )
I have also been exposed to ( as someone interest in Tai-Burmese history ) a recent wave of Tai nationalism in Laos , the Shan states and Sipsongpanna ( particularly from their diaspora abroad ) . Some of this nationalism lauds Thailand as THE successful Tai state and includes a desire to be part of this success but there is also a recognition that the similarities in culture and even language are greater between the peoples of Lan Na , Laos the Shan states of Burma and the Tai of Yunnan than with the Thais in and around the original Siam .
I have not come across Tais of any group using any term sounding like Shan or Siam to refer to themselves . The fashionable argument explains that the term Tai does not mean “free” as advertised by Thailand but simply refers to smaller groups of people from a particular locale : the correct original name of the Tai speaking collective is fashionably speculated as being Ai-Lao , from the mountain range Ai-Lao Shan .
There is also a small but growing dissent in Lan Na and Issan fueled by Lao nationalism against the perceived oppression of older Tai/Lao/ Lan Na identity by the heavily the Khmer influenced culture of central Thailand ( Siam ) . Ironically the Khmer also feel that not enough credit is given to them by the Thais regarding cultural interchange and influences .
It seems to met as if Bangkok continues to have an identity crisis . It appears that the modern elite ( mainly made up of SinoThais ) since the formation of the Chakri dynasty have been largely successful at : the promotion of a Tai identity which is Thai-centric and not Taicentric ; the suppression of Khmer heritage and identity ; the utilisation of Burma as the bogeyman . It is interesting that there is renewed interest in the Tai heritage but no interest in researching their Khmer heritage . I do feel that trying to link the etymology of Siam and Shan is far fetched and comes across as a symptom of a desperate to be fully included as Tai .
Perversely although Thailand is the most well known “Tai” nation it is the furthest from the Tai culture and identity as one could get .
( I am Burmese of Chinese-Shan descent )
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