In her introduction to Rights to culture: Heritage, language and community in Thailand the editor Coeli Barry points out that from the 1940s until the 1980s cultural rights remained one of the most ‘underdeveloped’ concepts in international human rights. From the 1990s onward, however, claims of rights to and through culture have proliferated internationally (p. 1). This diversely cast volume demonstrates that the explosion of what might be called ‘culture talk’ has had broad and complex effects in Thailand. Its chapters demonstrate that the uses and abuses of the culture concept by a diverse range of actors exacerbates the complexity of what is a deeply contested conceptual category. Culture is used to govern the powerless and to resist the effects of power; to preserve some versions of heritage while eroding dissident traditions; and to protect and enhance some identities while dissolving or attacking others. The volume emphasises this diversity over offering a unifying theory to explain this range of phenomena. In doing so, it offers several interestingly situated vantage points from which to survey the ways the culture concept figures into a variety of struggles over belonging in contemporary Thailand.
Barry's introduction frames these complexities, pointing out the broad historical contours of the relationship between culture and rights, offering a brief discussion of the relationship between culture, national identity and development in Thailand, and some thoughts on what it means to bring these concepts together in a single volume. As she points out, examinations of the relationship between culture and rights inevitably raises the question ‘who decides?’ (p. 20). Although the chapters cover a lot of ground, the ubiquity of this question suggests that culture, in all its contested complexity, is fundamental to Thailand's contemporary ‘language of contention’ (see William Roseberry, ‘Hegemony, power, and languages of contention’, in The politics of difference: Ethnic premises in a world of power, ed. Edwin Wilmesen and Patrick McAllister, 1996).
The volume is divided into two broad sections; the first examines questions of ‘culture and rights’ while the second examines questions of the ‘right to culture’ from the perspective of minority communities. In the first chapter Alexandra Dennes and Tiamsoon Sirisrisak consider the way distinct conceptions of heritage have shaped the struggle for access to the Khmer-era temple of Phanom Rung in Buriram province. Next, Kong Chong Ho and Pornpan Chinnapong examine what happens when poor urban communities make claims to space in the city through the language of heritage. The third chapter, by Bencharat Sae Chua, explores how cultural claims to environmental protection can both mobilise and limit the power of groups facing eviction from national forests.
Tyrell Haberkorn's examination of Thailand's contributions to the UN Human Rights yearbooks from 1958–1988 is a bit of an outlier in the volume. Haberkorn uses close readings of the Human Rights yearbooks to trace the historical transformations of what she calls ‘human rights culture’ in Thailand. Although this conceptual use of culture is distinct from the others in the volume, the chapter will be useful for scholars trying to think about the chequered past and murky future of human rights as a field of praxis in Thai politics.
The last four chapters all grapple with questions of minority–majority relations. Here, culture is closely associated with (occasionally ambiguously) defined ethnic or linguistic groups negotiating with the state and each other to demonstrate their belonging and preserve their identity simultaneously. Peter Vale and Panuwat Pantakod's excellent chapter on Northern Khmer debates over script orthography, language instruction and identity reflects on the ambiguities and conflicts associated with identity construction through language preservation.
The next three chapters by Sirijit Sunata, Mike Hays and Matt Mullins, and Mukdawa Sakboon respectively explore the experiences of minority groups in various parts of Thailand, mainly considering the question of citizenship. Sirjit's study of a Phu Thai village in Northeastern Thailand demonstrates how villagers leverage their cultural difference to gain access to development funds and bring state benefits to their community. In chapter 8, Hayes and Mullins offer a more ambiguous take on minority questions of citizenship by comparing less-studied minority communities in Bangkok, including Sikhs, undocumented migrant Mon workers, and the city's short-term West African migrants. This provocative but broad chapter shows the very different postures towards the state adopted by each group.
The final chapter by Mukdawa Sakboon returns to more familiar terrain, describing the ways that highland minorities in Northern Thailand are included and excluded in the Thai polity. The chapter describes how the ‘problem of drugs’ supplanted the ‘problem of communists’ as a logic of governance in this region. This chapter engages closely with the entangled effects of ethnicity, borders, security and citizenship to show how notions of good citizenship offer a diffuse strategy of governance to include certain groups while excluding others.
The volume eschews providing a neat programme for how other scholars should think about the politics of culture in Thailand. Instead, the diverse cases make the book a valuable tool for educators and researchers interested in the complexities of culture and rights in Thailand.
