Bangkok is a city that epitomizes sprawl. Most of the life of the city—offices, factories, homes, restaurants, etc.—lies on a network of narrow lanes (sois) far from the central, gridlocked streets where bus and train lines run. Navigating these sois in a car is often impossible owing to the traffic; on foot uncertain pavement, darkness, heat, and stray dogs make for an even less appealing prospect. For most Bangkokians, motorbike taxis become a necessity. But this phatic labor (to borrow, as Claudio Sopranzetti does, the term from Julia Elyachar), like the sois themselves, is an accident. Motorbike taxi drivers began and often remain at least partially within the underground economy, staffed by migrants from Thailand's Lao- and Khmer-speaking northeast and watched over by semi-criminal state officials, and the drivers exist in political, social, and cultural tension with Bangkok's hegemonic rule.

One could approach the issue of motorbike taxis in a number of different ways. One could chart the development of the industry via Bangkok's rocky political and economic history, noting how economic booms and crashes led to their growth and the emergence of post-Fordist economics led to their political mobilization, or one could follow the migrants themselves as they move from nearly invisible working-class laborers within Bangkok to well-heeled cosmopolitans in the countryside. One could ask about the effects of such a group on the political and economic future of Bangkok.

In Owners of the Map, Sopranzetti does all three, weaving each theme into each chapter. The technique is effective and highlights the idea of mobility—within economics, society, and urban environments—as well as the concept of political mobilization. For instance, in the fourth chapter, “The Paradoxes of Freedom,” Sopranzetti provides a compelling ethnographic account of freelance motorcycle taxi drivers who work in a more dangerous setting for less wages than they had previously done in factories. Despite being beholden to shadowy organized crime figures (many of whom are based in the police or military), they characterize their lives as that of “freedom.” Sopranzetti weaves this seeming contradiction into the history of informal labor practices and calls into question too-neat categorizations (including my own) of post-Thaksin Thailand as “neoliberal” or “precarious.” How can we talk of precarity, Sopranzetti challenges us, when safety nets expand? How can we talk of neoliberalism when, at some scales, regulation expands? It is an account that appeals to readers interested in the lives of taxi drivers and the political history of Thailand, but also thinks in an informed way about how we talk about theory.

But there is another kind of ethnography, a genre too-often represented in Thai studies: an ethnography of massacre. Works such as Katherine Bowie's Rituals of National Loyalty and Alan Klima's The Funeral Casino document the mass killings of Thai citizens at the hands of its military in 1976 and 1992, respectively.Footnote ¹ It is a tragedy that Owners of the Map is also within this genre, detailing as it does the killings of nearly one hundred “Red Shirt” protesters at the hands of the military in 2010, and focusing on the motorcycle taxi drivers’ key role within this movement providing—and denying—the mobility upon which the city relies.

Where Sopranzetti's book shines is in the attention that he pays to the unintended social consequences of the consumption-oriented policies of Thaksin-era Thailand and how these policies affected and effected the rise of northeastern political aspiration. Rather than consumption fulfilling consumer needs, the northeastern proletariat saw, Sopranzetti argues, consumption as enabling their participation in the dreams promised by discourses of development and modernity put forward by the capital. Thus, in the post-Thaksin years, as these desires were recast by unelected governments as untenable (not “sufficient,” in the parlance of the Thai state), a Bangkok previously seen as remote suddenly became recast as a thief of rights deserved by the rural poor. In this way, Sopranzetti's argument becomes a twenty-first-century retelling of Benedict Anderson's 1977 study of the generational conflict underlying the 1976 massacre: a nuanced account of the tectonic forces of class and region underlying Thai politics.Footnote ² For Sopranzetti, this rising conflict was an unintended consequence of Thaksinomics, one that seems to come as a surprise to both Thaksin and the military/monarchy elite that opposed him. Indeed, as the book progresses, the shadow of the massacre looms large, and the breakdown into violence seems as inevitable as it is tragic.

Owners of the Map consists of two main parts. The first of these details the growth and inevitability of the motorbike taxi industry given Bangkok's urbanization. It follows taxi drivers to and from their hometowns in the northeast as well as on their daily commute and shows the necessary role that they serve in Bangkok's urbanism. In the second, the fruits of this growth ripen in the conflict between rural/democratic and urban/elite forces. Each of these sections moves seamlessly from a theoretical, national, and intensely personal frame, embodying the best that ethnographic work can offer.

A word about the language in this book. Sopranzetti is a particularly lucid writer. For instance, in characterizing the myopia of urban dwellers and urban theorists, he describes cities as “glass shop[s] full of kaleidoscopes pretending to be monocles” (p. 14). Elsewhere, Sopranzetti's descriptions of driving through the city on motorbike, rural homes refashioned as facsimiles of Bangkok apartments, and, most harrowingly, the urban landscape turned into a war zone, are truly beautiful pieces of writing. Herein lies a few flaws, too. Sopranzetti occasionally dives into the heads of his interlocutors, or even of Thaksin himself. As another point of minor critique, there are a number of typos that, while they do not detract from the beauty and significance of the work, occasionally take a reader familiar with Thailand out of the text: for example, the town of Ubon Ratchatani is written “Udon Ratchatani,” a significant confusion, as another major northeastern city that Sopranzetti visits with his interlocutors is named Udon Thani (p. 91); a trip to the city center across Taksin Bridge is described as coming from the east, when it should be the west (pp. 65–66).

I would say that Owners of the Map is indispensable as an ethnography of mobility and infrastructure, but this is not entirely true. It is at the same time as this an indispensable work on migrant labor, the Thaksin era and its aftereffects, and even the interplay between masculinity and migrant work. The research done here on Thai economic and political development is exhaustive, and in no way detracts from its careful ethnography. This is a work that has a permanent home in my own courses on infrastructure, migration, and Southeast Asia. My graduate students found the prose accessible and compelling, and the theoretical arguments provocative and persuasive. I am sure advanced undergraduates would find the same.