Catalyzed by the dramatic events of April and May 2010, when the Red Shirts staged a massive protest in Bangkok, Thailand, in this book Charles Keyes surveys the major moments in the transformations of the political consciousness of rural northeasterners over the course of the twentieth century. The Red Shirt movement has had its strongest base in the rural northeastern and northern regions of the country. The urban elite who supported the “Yellow Shirts”—their name coming from the association of yellow with the king's birthday—portrayed villagers’ support for elections as “rooted in greed and/or ignorance”; thus in an influential op-ed piece written by Chirmsak Pinthong, the Red Shirts comprised those “who sell their souls for advantage or who are ex-communists who promote class warfare” (pp. 188–89). Expanding upon his earlier seminal work on northeastern regionalism first published in 1967, which I have long considered one of the most important of his writings,Footnote 16 Keyes draws upon his own half-century of anthropological engagement with Thailand dating back to 1962 to trace the transformation of northeasterners from traditional peasants to “cosmopolitan villagers” (p. 14).
Challenging the arguments of the Yellow Shirts, Keyes argues that the underlying problem of the conflict is “an inadequate appreciation by the elite and urban middle class of the legitimate desire of northeasterners to have a significant voice in national politics” (p. xiii). The current problem “lies in a political system that remains defined by assumptions that the Thailand of the early twenty-first century is the same as the Thailand that emerged from the Siamese empire in the late nineteenth century” (p. xiii). Summarizing the transformations that both led to and resulted from the passage of the People's Constitution in 1997 and the implementation of the populist policies of the Thai Rak Thai party following its electoral victory in 2001, Keyes writes, “in the past politics were always controlled by people in Bangkok: today they [northeastern villagers] could see that the votes of ordinary villagers had helped elect a government” (p. 177). The Red Shirts protestors of 2010 were not ignorant peasants, but “were Thai citizens with sophisticated understandings of rights and justice” (p. 184).
Finding Their Voice is divided into eight chapters, organized historically but with shifting thematic emphases. Chapters 2 and 3 outline the region's early history when its population was identified as Lao rather than northeastern (Isan) or Thai. In response to French pressure in Indochina towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Siamese court expanded its administrative control of the region, seeking to redefine the population as part of the Thai nation-state. Siamese efforts provoked millenarian revolts. Over the course of the early twentieth century, the Siamese court implemented a compulsory school system emphasizing loyalty to the Thai nation and expanded railways, roads, and telegraphic and other forms of communication. In the process of these growing linkages, northeasterners came to realize that their cultural patterns “were considered inferior to those of central Thai” (p. 63).
Chapter 4 highlights the importance of the establishment of a parliamentary system following the overthrow of absolute monarchy in 1932, as northeasterners came to recognize that democracy enabled them “to have their voices and interests heard on a national stage” (p. 3). Elected representatives had their political base not with Bangkok elites, but “with the rural people who had elected them” (p. 66). The assassination of several northeastern members of parliament in 1949 only intensified ethnoregional identity. After World War II, growing numbers of northeasterners migrated in search of work in Bangkok. These migrants saw first-hand the gap in the standards of living between the capital and the northeast. Electoral candidates in the northeast increasingly campaigned on socialist platforms calling for economic reforms (pp. 72, 89).
In chapters 5 and 6, Keyes describes the contradictory impacts of the rise of the monarchy and the abuses of the security state, leading to growing support for the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) in the 1960s and later, following the CPT's collapse, the emergence of a strong NGO movement.
In chapter 7, Keyes provides a detailed description of the dramatic changes in the village he studied in Maha Sarakham, noting its transformation from a remote rural community to one fully embedded in the global economy. In contrast to urban portrayals of rural greed and ignorance, Keyes describes villagers who are resisting elite visions of development in order to further “their own morally based vision,” a vision “rooted in their Buddhist traditions” (pp. 157, 173). The “cosmopolitan villagers” of today are participating in the global economy as national and international migrant laborers, as consumers, and as investors in new local enterprises; they are no longer content to be merely citizens without rights to question or participate in national governance.
Thailand's most recent military coup of May 2014 has imposed an apparent calm under which the tensions between Red and Yellow Shirts continue to fester. Paralleling Andrew Walker's important study of northern Thailand,Footnote 17 Keyes's book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the underpinnings of the Red Shirt movement in northeastern Thailand.
