Introduction
In March 2010, in the course of their protracted protests, members of the extra-parliamentary opposition movement to the government of the Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, known as the ‘red shirts’, performed an unusual ritual: they collected their own blood, and spilled it outside Government House, the site of the governing Democrat Party headquarters, and the premier's residence in Bangkok. That symbolic deployment of human blood for political ends provoked a fierce controversy regarding its purpose, meaning and appropriateness.
The episode could be seen as a dramatic ‘performance’ in Erwin Goffman'sFootnote 1 sense, or a major ‘image event’ in Kevin deLuca's sense, staged before a virtually worldwide audience.Footnote 2 But such a characterisation does not exhaust its significance. It was an extremely poignant discursive act, which sought to go beyond image making; the desired symbolic effects of that act, and the attempt by the authorities to neutralise them by a medical counter-discourse, constitute the focus of this article.
Blood as a polysemic symbol
In the beginning of her comprehensive study of blood symbolism and ritual Melissa Meyer states that ‘Humans have extensively symbolised and ritualised blood as one of the most powerfully meaningful and multi-vocal bodily substances’.Footnote 3 Human blood carries extremely varied and often polarised symbolic meanings. It generally symbolises life,Footnote 4 but in some instances also death, as in fear of contamination by HIV-infected blood.Footnote 5 It is a symbol of social bonds and of human solidarity, as in ‘blood relations’, ‘blood-brotherhood’, ‘covenant of blood [circumcision]’Footnote 6 or ‘blood donation’,Footnote 7 but also a symbol of social conflict and hostility, as in ‘blood feud’, ‘blood libel’ or ‘sucking blood’, or of separation between ethnic groupsFootnote 8 or social classes (‘blue blood’). Blood has contrasting ritual uses: it might signify commitment, as in ‘written in blood’ or ‘sealing with blood’, serve as an offering to supernatural beings, as in the spilling of blood in animal or human sacrifice, or as a symbolic means to fight one's enemies, as in black magic. Human blood is generally perceived as a precious, even sacrosanct substance, but sometimes also as a polluting one, as is menstrual blood in some cultures.Footnote 9
The dual nature of blood is not restricted to the symbolic sphere, but is also found, in a different sense, in medicine: blood can have a life-saving role, as in the transfusion of medically safe blood, but also a life-threatening one, as in contamination with infected blood. While ostensibly based on scientific criteria, this distinction between medically safe and contaminated blood can, under certain circumstances, also assume a symbolic meaning.
Blood and political struggle
Protesters in contemporary societies have occasionally displayed their anger in ‘uncivilised’ ways, such as throwing faecesFootnote 10 or eggsFootnote 11 at their adversaries, or splattering red paint, an allusion to blood, on buildings or at the police.Footnote 12
Yet, human blood has been rarely, if ever, used in modern political confrontations. Commenting on the blood-spilling episode in Thailand, Jon Henley points out that ‘There appear … to be relatively few examples of [human] blood being poured as a form of modern political protest.’Footnote 13 No studies have been found on the symbolic or ritual use of blood in secular political struggles. Blood, extracted from the protestors themselves, has certainly never been used in a political context in modern times in Southeast Asia, even though other forms of self-sacrifice, such as the self-immolation of protesting Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War,Footnote 14 have been practised to considerable political effect.
The symbolic use of human blood in a secular political context in a country like Thailand is thus all the more perplexing, since blood is not ritually used by either of the major religious traditions, Buddhism and Hinduism, on which popular Thai religion is based; nor is the spilling of blood, animal or human, common in any of the many magical practices of the Thai people. There is no mention of blood in any of the classic works on Thai magic such as those by Stanley Tambiah or Barend Terwiel.Footnote 15 Blood does not play a role in contemporary popular urban spirit medium cultsFootnote 16 or in the Thai Buddhist practice of meditation on corpses.Footnote 17 The blood-spilling episode hence raises some unexplored questions regarding its legitimacy as a means of protest, its cultural roots and its perceived efficacy.
The deployment of blood as a strategy of public protest raises the issue of the dynamics of Thailand's ‘regime of images’ as espoused by Peter Jackson.Footnote 18 That regime is said to be based ‘upon a sharp demarcation under which phenomena are mapped by two cultural logics, one operating in public and the other in private situations, without cultural pressure to resolve … any inconsistencies between these two domains’.Footnote 19 The reflexive recognition of the hiatus between the two levels, however, raises the problem of the credibility of public performances, and hence the need for public actors to demonstrate their personal commitment. The blood episode can be interpreted as such a demonstration, with important implications for the model of the Thai ‘regime of images’, as will be shown in the concluding section of this article.
Researchers rarely happen to be present where critical social events occur; indeed, their significance is often realised only in hindsight. Such events have therefore to be reconstructed. This was the case with the blood-spilling episode. Even though I followed the red shirt protests in Bangkok in the media, and observed parts of the episode live on television, I realised its intrinsic sociological significance only afterwards. This article is hence a reconstructed case study of the episode, based on a systematic analysis of the extensive reports in the Thai and English media.
Reliance on such sources obviously runs the risk of bias, but this is less of a problem in this case study than it might be elsewhere. The basic facts of the episode (summarised below in the presentation of its ‘phases’) are well documented and not contestable, while the reported public statements of the various participants in the media are here deployed to exemplify the contesting discourses regarding factual details and the diverse interpretations of the symbolic significance of the episode.
The red shirt protests
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Thailand had entered a period of a severe, prolonged and deepening political crisis,Footnote 20 which at the time of writing remains unresolved. The ultimate sources of the crisis are related to the future of the Thai monarchy and of the fundamental nature of the Thai political system,Footnote 21 but these cannot be discussed here in detail. The crisis accelerated in 2006, after then prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a wealthy tycoon and the leader of the governing populist Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party, sold his telecommunications company to Singapore's Temasek Holdings at an enormous profit, on which he was not asked to pay any taxes. Following growing protests led by the rightist, ultra-nationalist People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) extra-parliamentary movement,Footnote 22 popularly known as the ‘yellow shirts’ (the colour symbolising the members' strong attachment to the monarchy),Footnote 23 the Thai military staged a coup in September 2006.Footnote 24 A military junta deposed Thaksin, appointed a temporary civilian government under a retired general and abolished the constitution of 1997. A new constitution was drafted and approved in a national referendum. The TRT party was dissolved by a special court, and Thaksin and 111 of his party's functionaries were banned from politics for five years. However, the party was revived under a different name, the People's Power Party (PPP), and won the December 2007 elections, but fell short of an absolute majority. It then set up a coalition government under a Thaksin nominee, who, however, under renewed pressure by the yellow shirts, was soon deposed by the courts on a technicality. Thaksin's brother-in-law was then appointed as prime minister of the PPP-led coalition. The yellow shirts' protests against the continued domination of Thai politics by Thaksin and his nominees now escalated, culminating in the occupation of Bangkok's two airports by the protesters towards the end of 2008. Losing his authority in the subsequent chaos and under pressure from the army, Thaksin's brother-in-law resigned.Footnote 25
The PPP was also dissolved by the courts after one of its leaders was found guilty of electoral fraud. Its leaders again reconstituted the party, under another name, Peua Thai, but not all members of parliament (MPs) of the dissolved PPP have joined it.
Pressured by the Army, a new coalition government was now formed by the second largest party in parliament, the Democrats, under the premiership of the young, Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva. The smaller parties, which had participated in the preceding PPP-led government, were pressured by the junta to join the new coalition. The PAD, proclaiming that its goal was achieved, now formally dissolved itself. But the struggle for the domination of Thai politics was far from resolved.
Several criminal court cases were initiated against Thaksin for abuses allegedly committed during his premiership. In October 2008 Thaksin was found guilty by a branch of the Supreme Court of a conflict of interest in his wife's purchase of land from a governmental company, and sentenced to two years in jail. Thaksin, at the time on a visit to the Beijing Olympic Games, failed to return home, and was declared a ‘refugee from justice’.
The United Democratic Front against Dictatorship (UDD), an extra-parliamentary movement of Thaksin's supporters, was formed by a merger of several groups that had opposed the yellow shirts and the military coup.Footnote 26 Its members became popularly known as the ‘red shirts’: the colour of their shirts was initially a mere sign, chosen to contrast with their royalist opponents' yellow shirts; it became a rather complex symbol only in the course of events.
The UDD's main constituency consisted of people hailing from the impoverished northern and northwestern regions of the country. The movement laid low as long as Thaksin's supporters were in power, and avoided a clash with the yellow shirts. But with the appointment of the Abhisit government, and especially after Thaksin's sentencing and exile, the red shirts became increasingly active. The movement declared the Abhisit government illegitimate because it was not based on the majority party, but on a coalition formed under military pressure. It demanded Abhisit's resignation and new elections. It hoped that the Peua Thai would gain a majority in Parliament and form a government, which would reintroduce the 1997 constitution, revoke Thaksin's sentence, and pave the way for his return to Thailand.
The Prime Minister refused to comply; the red shirt protests consequently intensified, leading to violent clashes in April 2009.Footnote 27 In mid-March 2010, following the confiscation by the courts of about US$1.4 billion of Thaksin's allegedly ‘ill-gained’ assets,Footnote 28 the red shirts initiated an open-ended mass protest rally in Bangkok, to which they brought in tens of thousands of supporters from the country's north and northeast.Footnote 29 The protesters occupied a bridge at a strategic point in the older part of the city. In order to increase the pressure on the Prime Minister, who steadfastly refused to step down,Footnote 30 the movement decided upon a spectacular action: to collect blood from its members and spill it at the seat of the government, the headquarters of the Democrat Party, and the homes of its leading opponents. This is the episode analysed in this article.
Although their actions did not have the desired impact on the confrontation between the red shirts and the government — owing, at least partly, to the manner in which the latter responded — I have chosen it for analysis because of its considerable intrinsic interest as a spectacular and highly controversial symbolic event which attracted wide domestic and international attention.
Following the blood-spilling event, the red shirt protesters intensified their struggle by occupying the Rajaprasong intersection in the centre of modern Bangkok, and barricading themselves in the surrounding area,Footnote 31 thereby bringing much of the life and business in the city to a standstill. The occupation was eventually brought to a violent end during the second half of May 2010, with considerable loss of life and damage to property. Against the hopes of some, the ritual spilling of blood could not prevent the real bloodshed.
The blood-spilling episode
The blood-spilling episode can be conveniently divided into four principal phases: the collection, the spilling, the cleaning, and the analysis of the blood.
Phase 1: The collection of the blood
On 15 March 2010 one of the UDD leaders announced that they would start to draw 1,000 litres of blood from the alleged 100,000 protesters who had converged on the protest site. The blood was to be splashed on the grounds of Government House, the office of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. The UDD ‘begged each protester to donate 10cc of their blood to “soak the Prime Minister's Office”’.Footnote 32
The project elicited some opposition within the protest camp: the ‘underground extremists’ among the protesters condemned the moderate leaders as ‘stupid’.Footnote 33
‘Rogue’ major-general Khattiya Sawasdipol, who had deserted from the army and organised the militant wing of the red shirt protesters (and was eventually killed during the last violent stages of the protests), dissented with the movement's leadership, favouring more drastic means of struggle;Footnote 34 Khattiya disparaged the blood collection, arguing: ‘This is silly. How can you ask your supporters to waste their blood for nothing?’Footnote 35
However, many protesters enthusiastically embraced the idea. A Khon Kaen resident expressed his belief that ‘the blood donation will be one of the most effective political strategies yet to oust the government … and overthrow the elite bureaucracy whom the UDD regards as its enemies’.Footnote 36 A woman from Buriram declared that she was ‘proud to have given blood in order to take back democracy’,Footnote 37 a statement suggesting that the deployment of blood is perceived as nurturing the rebirth of democracy. A protester from Chiang Mai said that ‘the UDD's blood campaign was part of the freedom of expression in a democratic world’ and would ‘tell the international community that we are now fighting for democracy with our soul’.Footnote 38
The UDD claimed to have mobilised about 500 physicians and nurses, who would ‘help take the blood donations … in accordance with sanitary procedures’. However, some protesters were ‘reluctant to donate their blood’; consequently, the number of protesters at the site apparently declined.Footnote 39
The project also elicited considerable criticism from the authorities. The Public Health Ministry ‘warned the protesters against the possible transmission of diseases’.Footnote 40 Some other bodies also opposed the blood-drawing process. The Nursing and Midwifery Council threatened ‘to punish nurses who agree to collect blood from red-shirt protesters’; its president pointed out that the nurses ‘should know that collecting blood is done only for research or medical purposes’.Footnote 41 However, this did not deter about 200 nurses and 20 physicians from several hospitals from volunteering to oversee the blood collection drive.Footnote 42
On the morning of 16 March, the protesters formed a ‘200 meter-long line … to donate their blood’.Footnote 43 In the process, ‘the donors went through the standard blood-donation procedure — showing IDs and receiving blood pressure and heart examinations by physicians’.Footnote 44 Dr Weng Tojirakarn, one of the UDD leaders and himself a physician, ‘confirmed that the blood extraction procedure was safe, new needles were used for every person, and all staff in charge of the blood extraction wore sterilised surgical gloves’.Footnote 45 Among the donors were some Buddhist monks, who had joined the red shirt protest,Footnote 46 though monks are prohibited from engaging in politics.
The organisers seem to have fallen significantly short of their target of a 1,000 litres of blood,Footnote 47 but nevertheless successfully collected a substantial amount — about 300 litres, from approximately 70,000 donors.Footnote 48 The blood was stored in plastic bottles and containers,Footnote 49 from which the protesters intended to spill it on their targets. There were unconfirmed rumours that ‘the blood collected [was] mixed with water…’ and that a ‘large amount of pig's blood was ordered from a slaughterhouse’,Footnote 50 insinuating an intention to mix it with the human blood.
Phase 2: The spilling of the blood
On 16 March, a few hundred litres of blood were ‘ceremonially splashed on the four gates of Government House [the seat of the Prime Minister's Office] and over the headquarters of the ruling Democrat party in a ritual aimed at bringing down the government’.Footnote 51 In the course of the ritual, ‘three demonstrators, including a Hindu Brahmin and a man carrying a statue of Buddha, walked to the first gate of Government House where a religious rite was performed. The Buddha statue was placed in front of the gate’,Footnote 52 although the subsequent ritual was not a Buddhist one. The Brahmin recited spells and incantations, and poured blood in front of the gate. He then ‘took some of the blood from the ground to write letters on the concrete posts of the gates’.Footnote 53 The ritual was photographed by tens of photographers and broadcast live on Thai television.Footnote 54
Soon after that about a hundred men, dodging security guards, approached the headquarters of the Democrat Party and ‘sloshed out another 18 litres of blood’ on the building.Footnote 55
Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, whom the red shirt leaders derisively referred to by his English nickname ‘Mark’,Footnote 56 was a principal target of the blood campaign. One of the more radical red shirt leaders, MP Chatupon Promphan, declared, in reference to an alleged earlier announcement by the Prime Minister that ‘he could not walk on the people's blood to get to work’,Footnote 57 that ‘they had poured blood at both places [namely Government House and Democrat Party headquarters] so that when Mr Abhisit went to work, he would have to cross over the blood of the citizens in order to enter the buildings’.Footnote 58 Another radical leader, the popular singer Arisman Pongruangrong, declared that he would ‘smear blood in front of Mr Abhisit's house. “If Mr Abhisit is home, I would like to know the colour of the blood in his head, whether or not it is red. Tomorrow we will go and take blood from Mr. Abhisit's head.”’Footnote 59
Abhisit was neither at home, nor personally attacked, but his house was. On the morning of 17 March, ‘a massive security cordon failed to stop the red shirt protesters from throwing bags of blood into the home of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva [in Bangkok]’.Footnote 60 At the same time, other protesters marched on the Nakhon Ratchasima (northeastern Thailand) residence of General Prem Tinsulanonda, the chairman of the King's Privy Council who has been accused of being behind the 2006 anti-Thaksin coup, and ‘dumped blood near [his] house’.Footnote 61 At about the same time, some red shirt supporters, led by a senior monk, ‘smeared blood on the statue of King Kawila of Chiang Mai’.Footnote 62
Blood was also employed in some other symbolic activities. Some red shirts painted pictures with blood,Footnote 63 including one of ‘a Buddha image [painted] with candle wax soaked in blood’.Footnote 64 One artist daubed some blood on a portrait of Prem Tinsulanonda.Footnote 65 Others used blood to write political messages on banners.Footnote 66 On 22 March, a few days after the blood spilling, artists associated with the red shirts used ‘Over 45,000 cubic centimeters of blood drawn from red-shirt protesters … to paint 70 meters of canvas with expressions of the red shirts spirit and resolve to oust Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and call on him to dissolve the House.’Footnote 67 The remaining blood was intended to be mixed with resin to dye headbands as souvenirs for the protesters.
The blood spilling was widely criticised by governmental and medical sources. The secretary-general of the Health Ministry stated that ‘The blood extractions [from the protesters] had political reasons, were of no medical benefit, and were not morally acceptable,’Footnote 68 while the Health Minister claimed, ‘for the record’, that any involvement of nurses in the extraction would ‘infringe their code of conduct’.Footnote 69 The Board of Directors of Ramathibodi Hospital declared that the blood extraction was of no medical benefit and raised moral issues.Footnote 70
The action was also criticised as a waste of a valuable resource. The chairman of the Mahidol Brotherhood, a royalist association of physicians and health professionals named after Prince Mahidol (the father of the reigning King, who is officially regarded as the ‘Father of Thai Medicine’), complained that ‘Blood dumping is inappropriate and such a waste. There are still many patients waiting for life-saving blood.’Footnote 71 The Medical Council of Thailand vowed to discuss the ethics of the physician, Dr Weng, who had approved the drawing of the blood.Footnote 72 However, such assertions should be read not just as purely medical, but also as political statements, by bodies closely associated with the establishment.
Other criticisms were based on sanitary objections: the indiscriminate spilling of collected blood was claimed to be a public health hazard. The Governor of Bangkok expressed his concern that ‘the blood from the campaign could spread disease’.Footnote 73 A government spokesman announced that ‘the government would not reverse the curse [inherent in the blood ritual] but concentrate on the clean-up operation’.Footnote 74 This was a significant strategic turn, which switched the ongoing discourse from a politico-magical to a medical one.
Phase 3: The removal of the blood
The city authorities moved quickly to scrub off the spilled blood: ‘as soon as most of the red shirts left, trained officials started cleaning up. Since blood is considered an infectious waste, authorities took all precautions and clean-up measures. Each cleaner had to wear gloves and keep his mouth and nose well covered’,Footnote 75 while the cleaners' bodies were covered in white plastic ‘biohazard dress’.Footnote 76
The cleaners were joined by ‘a 106-strong team from Vajira Hospital [which] spent March 17 and 18 cleaning up after the blood protest in a bid to prevent the spread of disease. The blood collected from the protest sites was disposed of as infected waste in line with prescribed procedures.’Footnote 77
There might have been some sound medical reasons for the precautions taken in the cleaning operation. But that operation was also a public performance, by which the definition of the nature of the spilled blood was implicitly altered from a sacrificial, pure substance to a polluting, dangerous one.
Phase 4: The analysis of the blood
That change in the definition of the blood was intensified by its analysis. Samples of the blood splattered on Government House and the Prime Minister's home were allegedly collected and analysed at Ramathibodi Hospital. A representative of the Mahidol Brotherhood announced in early April 2010 that it was confirmed that the samples ‘tested positive for HIV, and hepatitis B and C’.Footnote 78 The Brotherhood stated that ‘it was concerned about possible outbreaks of disease caused by the UDD bloodletting … because the blood was found to have unusually high levels of infectious virus’.Footnote 79 One of its members even insisted that ‘the blood sample from the red shirts protests contained pig's blood’.Footnote 80
Ramathibodi Hospital initially denied that any blood tests had been conducted on its premises,Footnote 81 but later acknowledged the tests and confirmed their results; however, it declared that ‘it had no way of verifying claims [that] the blood came from anti-government protesters’.Footnote 82
However, a few days later the director of Vajira Hospital confirmed that laboratory tests had been conducted on a sample of blood taken from a container at the Prime Minister's home, and that the tests, conducted ‘at three different hospitals all show that the blood used in the red-shirt protest carried the HIV, hepatitis B and C viruses’.Footnote 83 The hospital director justified the tests by claiming that they were conducted ‘to determine the risk faced by our staff’, who had participated in the clean-up operation. He pointed out that ‘the lab results were hardly a surprise, because there were bound to be some HIV-positive people, as well as some infected by the hepatitis B and C viruses, in the big crowd’. The director, however, declined to confirm the claim by the representative of the Mahidol Brotherhood that the sample tested at Ramathibodi Hospital contained pig's blood.Footnote 84
Though allegedly taken for purely medical purposes, and based on standard blood-testing procedures, the tests immediately became deeply implicated in the ongoing political struggle. The UDD ‘questioned the testing procedures and threatened to “chase after” the doctors who carried out the tests’.Footnote 85 One of its more radical leaders, MP Jatuporn Prompan, said that ‘the test results were unreliable and [that] he believed the doctors’ announcement was aimed at demeaning the red shirt people.' He accused the doctors as ‘servants of the government’ and asserted that ‘claiming that our blood is tainted with diseases and animal blood is an insult’.Footnote 86 His statement thus explicitly resisted any implicit subversion of the red shirts' symbolic act by a medical examination of the sacrificed blood.
Discussion
The blood-spilling rite was widely perceived as an unprecedented event; the Christian Science Monitor selected it as the ‘top of the 10 most bizarre protests in the history of the world’.Footnote 87 People therefore had difficulties in understanding it in terms of the conventional vocabularies of religious and political action in Thailand. The rite became the topic of a public debate, which focused primarily on three issues: its appropriateness as an act of political protest, its religious background and the efficacy of the curse imposed by the rite.
The contested appropriateness of the blood-spilling act
Many Thais and foreigners outside the red shirt movement considered the blood-spilling act an inappropriate means of political protest; some condemned it as ‘repulsive and meaningless’,Footnote 88 or as a ‘repellent publicity stunt’.Footnote 89 The leaders of the red shirts, however, claimed emphatically that the blood-spilling act was a legitimate form of non-violent protest,Footnote 90 which demonstrated the protesters' devotion to their cause and determination to achieve their principal aim: the toppling of the Abhisit government.
Some Thai commentators agreed with the protesters' claim that the blood splashing was not in itself an act of violence. Suranand Vejjajiva of the Bangkok Post, a frequent critic of the Abhisit government, argued that it was ‘certainly in accordance with the ahimsa principles of non-violence’,Footnote 91 while Gothom Arya, the director of Mahidol University's Research Center on Peace Building, declared that ‘The pouring of some protesters’ blood … was rather bloody, but the act did not involve violence.'Footnote 92 One astrologer claimed that ‘the protesters were setting up a symbolic spilling of blood to avoid violent confrontation.’Footnote 93
The blood splashing was in fact seen as less violent than an initially contemplated act, which it had superseded: as a Thai academic pointed out, ‘The pouring of the blood … [was] already a toned-down version of an earlier proposal — which was to throw 50,000 bags of excrement at the residence of Gen Prem Tinsulanonda and another 50,000 bags at Mr Abhisit's house.’Footnote 94 However, the question that elicited controversy was not so much whether the act was violent, but rather, whether it had been a ‘civilised’ one. Being ‘civilised’ is an important component of Thai self-representation. The rulers of Thailand strove for more than a century to project an image of a civilised (siwilai) country to the world.Footnote 95 The collection and spilling of blood were condemned by the opponents of the red shirts as an uncivilised act, which might seriously impair the image of the country, a leading concern in the Thai ‘regime of images’.Footnote 96
Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, one of the principal actors in the confrontation with the red shirts, commented on the blood-spilling rite that ‘The world sees some people in Thailand as believers in black magic and as uncivilised.’Footnote 97
A foreigner's comment reflects such an attitude by pointing out the paradoxical consequence of the blood spilling: ‘Not only is it an attempt at black magic, but the black magic curiously inverts and attacks the meaning of scientific medicine. The same procedures designed to assist people to recover their health are inverted in a way that leads not to wellness but to distress, pain and bacterial pollution.’Footnote 98 The well-known author and composer Somtow Sucharitkul in a ‘Letter to the editor’ called the rite a senseless piece of ‘vodoo politics’,Footnote 99 and others condemned it as a ‘voodoo ritual’Footnote 100 or ‘voodoo nonsense’.Footnote 101 One foreigner opined that it made the red shirts ‘the laughing stock of the world’, and expressed his suspicion that the red shirts ‘portray all Thais as somewhat dimwitted’,Footnote 102 while another saw ‘pouring gallons of blood on the streets of Bangkok as a disgusting act, which [has] been viewed over the entire world’.Footnote 103
The point to note, however, is that such accusations of lack of ‘civility’ of the red shirt protest are not just uninterested criticisms; as DeLucaFootnote 104 has argued, such criticisms tend to be used by the defenders of the establishment to delegitimise the protesters and their goals. The condemnation of the blood spilling as ‘uncivilised’ was thus deployed by the opponents of the red shirts as a political device to delegitimise their struggle.
The contested religious character of the blood-spilling rite
A second focus of controversy concerned the religious origins of the rite accompanying the blood-spilling act. Rather than a purely academic matter, that controversy is also closely related to the struggle over the act's legitimacy.
The protesters' claim that ‘Brahminic rites’ were performed in the course of the event was immediately questioned by the ‘royal palace's chief Brahmin priest’, who proclaimed that the blood spilling was not a Brahmin rite.Footnote 105 He ‘denounced the rite and said [that] Brahmin rites were normally performed on auspicious occasions’,Footnote 106 such as ‘weddings, merit making for a new house, when there is a newborn or they are building a spirit house’.Footnote 107 But that rite was not an ‘auspicious ceremony’Footnote 108 and ‘was not carried out in accordance with proper procedures’.Footnote 109 The chief Brahmin priest pointed out: ‘We do not use blood in our Brahmin rites.’Footnote 110
In Thailand, a ‘brahmin’ (prahm) commonly officiates in popular rituals with roots in Brahmanic religion (or in Thai animism). This is a role symbolised in the officiant's often invented ritual attire;Footnote 111 however, such prahm do not claim to be related to the Brahmin priests of Indian origins, who officiate at royal ceremonies. However, the white-clad person who performed the blood-spilling rite at Government House has claimed to be a ‘real Brahmin’, because ‘he was the son of a former royal Brahmin priest who conducted prayers and prepared ceremonies and offerings for the royal family for decades’.Footnote 112
The chief royal Brahmin priest, however, contested the man's Brahminic credentials. He revealed that the man's father had been ‘dismissed 20 years ago from royal service’, and argued that his son ‘could not be considered a proper Brahmin priest because his actions during the blood splashing were inappropriate’.Footnote 113 To this the man responded that ‘being a Brahmin requires ancestry, so I'm definitely a Brahmin’; he then made an important distinction, claiming that ‘I am not a royal Brahmin, but I am a real Brahmin priest,’ adding that, ‘It is right that such an inauspicious rite could not be performed by royal Brahmins, but I am not a royal Brahmin priest.’Footnote 114 He thus contested the right of the chief royal Brahmin, a representative of the establishment, to determine ‘who is a Brahmin’ in Thailand. By distancing himself from the royal connection, the man thus not only asserted his right to perform Brahminic rites, but implicitly indicated his identification with the anti-establishment (and allegedly, anti-royalist) red shirts.
So, if it was not recognised as a Brahmin rite, what kind of rite was it? Experts on Thai culture appeared nonplussed.Footnote 115 Somtow Sucharitkul wrote in his blog that ‘Thailand's leading astrologers and magicians failed completely to arrive at a meaningful conclusion as to the efficacy — or, indeed, the meaning — of the blood spattering ceremonies.’Footnote 116
Some Thai fortune-tellers identified the rite as a Khmer (Cambodian) black magic ritual.Footnote 117 Somtow, however, suggested that the blood ritual could be based on a legend ascribed to an iconic historical figure, the sixteenth-century Siamese king Naresuan, according to which the king ‘once ordered his army to capture and behead the Khmer king Satha so he could “use his victim's blood to wash his feet in”’.Footnote 118 That legend is, indeed, reflected in the statement of one of the more radical red shirt leaders, the singer Arisman, who declared that ‘Mr Abhisit was lucky he was not at home’ otherwise he ‘would have extracted blood from Mr Abhisit's head to wash his feet’,Footnote 119 an obvious allusion to the Naresuan legend. One of the artists who painted pictures in blood similarly perceived the blood spilling in nationalist–historical terms, claiming that it was ‘a sacrifice for [the people's] beloved country, just like their ancestors had sacrificed their lives to save Thailand from invaders in the past’.Footnote 120 Rather than basing the rite on Brahminic ritual or on Khmer magic, these red shirt protesters sought to find its roots in Siamese history and thus legitimise it in terms of a nationalist ideology.
The contested power of the curse
By roundly criticising the red shirts' deployment of blood, many — particularly foreign — commentators, missed the deeper cultural significance of the act. Only few foreigners realised that when the protesters ‘spilled their own blood … they were not just making a show for the TV cameras’ but took it seriously as an act, imposing a powerful magical ‘curse on the government’.Footnote 121 That act was intrinsically related to popular supernatural beliefs, widespread not only among a broad spectrum of the population, but also among the political and military elite. The respected social historian, Craig Reynolds, in his review of a recent book by Wassana NanuamFootnote 122 on supernatural beliefs among the Thai military, pointed out that:
Foreigners tend to think of astrology, numerology, necromancy, and reincarnation as exotic beliefs that liven up the Thai scene. Political observers tend to think of these matters as an entertaining sideshow to divert a credulous public from the real game being played in the barracks and the safe houses of the capital.Footnote 123
In fact, Thai politics is impregnated with popular ritual and magic. Wassana Nanuam claimed that ‘Deep-seated belief in black magic among the country's movers and shakers has become a crucial factor in the aftermath of the 2006 coup.’ In her book she ‘delves into the black magic war between the ousted prime minister Thaksin and his political foes’.Footnote 124 On the basis of her investigations, she concludes that the ‘struggles in Thailand since [the military coup of] 2006 have been not just about political power, money or the muzzle of the gun, but [also] about the supernatural’.Footnote 125 The importance of magic in Thai politics is shown by the participation of ‘[M]any of the country's top leaders, civilian and military … in magical rituals to seek special powers and enlist them on their side’.Footnote 126 Referring to the blood-spilling ritual, Time's correspondent Robert Horn says that in Thailand, ‘a little black magic is politics as usual’.Footnote 127
Thai politicians can be commonly seen worshipping at shrines; the Democrat Party has a statue of the Earth Goddess, the Party's symbol, installed at its headquarters, and even the thoroughly modern prime minister Abhisit worshipped at it on important occasions.Footnote 128 The curse administered by the Brahmin ‘priest’ was therefore not taken lightly by many Thais, but its intention and perceived efficacy remained moot.
The protest leaders insisted all along that ‘their blood spilling campaign … [was] part of their peaceful protest against the government's refusal to dissolve the House’,Footnote 129 and not to curse any particular individual. The Brahmin ‘priest’ in the blood-spilling rite similarly claimed that ‘he had laid a curse on the seat of power’, but did not name anyone in particular.Footnote 130 Nevertheless, the spilling of blood at the homes of Abhisit and Prem could be taken to indicate such an intention, especially in view of the remarks of some red shirt leaders, quoted above.
While it is not clear how seriously the Brahmin's curse was taken by the government, they decided not to respond overtly in kind. Rather, right after the event, instead of trying to reverse the curse, the government announced that it would concentrate on the clean-up operation.Footnote 131 This official strategic choice by the government transposed the public discourse from the religious–symbolic level to a medical one. Instead of being imbued with magical power, the blood was now declared a dangerous natural substance, which should be eliminated as soon as possible to prevent contamination of the public.
The swift cleaning up of the blood was popularly perceived as a curse-countering act. One source interpreted the clean-up operation as ‘a two-fold exercise aiming at erasing potential public health dangers posed by human blood on the street and countering the curse placed on the PM's home by the blood ritual’, and claimed that ‘after the blood was washed away from in front of the Democrat Party headquarters, prayers were said in an attempt to ward off the impact of the curse’.Footnote 132
The authorities were not completely oblivious to the possible magical effects of the curse. In July 2010, a few months after the red shirt protests were terminated, another ritual to purge the Democrat Party headquarters of the curse was conducted, ‘with flowers being scattered, liquor splashed and pieces of paper burnt in front of the entrance gate to the party's headquarters. A party source said [that] the ritual [was] meant to dispel curses and black magic caused by the blood dumping and cursing rite performed by anti-government protesters ….Footnote 133 An elaborate feng shui adjustment was also performed at the Government House, ‘to try to boost its luck and prosperity’. The Prime Minister, however, refused to take a stand on these activities, declaring that he neither ‘supports nor opposes what feng shui experts have been doing’.Footnote 134
After the red shirt-supported Pheu Thai Party won the elections of 2011, the Brahmin priest who had administered the curse on Government House proposed to conduct a rite to reverse the curse, since it was not intended against the new prime minister, Thaksin's sister Yingluck Shinawatra. He claimed that ‘a new rite is needed to wipe out the curse … or the lasting effects of the curse will also harm this government and Ms Yingluck’.Footnote 135 It is not clear, however, whether the rite has been actually performed.
Conclusion
Blood is a multivocal symbol; in the present study of its unusual deployment as a means of political protest, its symbolism clusters around two contrasting visions. One vision celebrates blood as a pure symbol of unity: the mixing of the protesters' blood symbolises their communitas: ‘One red shirt protester told the BBC he felt his donation of blood was akin to forging a bond of blood brotherhood with fellow protesters as ancient warriors have done.’Footnote 136 The red colour of their shirts, a mere sign at the outset of the protests, became a symbol of their blood, which was spilled for their cause. Giving their blood to achieve their collective aim — to bring down the government — is presented as a mark of the red shirts' sincerity and depth of commitment. They thus sacrificed their individual ‘life’ (blood) to curse their antagonists and thereby bring about their symbolic ‘death’ (fall).
The protesters' vision of blood was contested by a contrasting one, entertained by their antagonists: blood as a dangerous polluting substance, unclean and infectious, unnecessarily wasted by the protesters to attract public attention, instead of devoting it to its proper medical use. This necessitated a swift and careful cleansing of the blood as a sanitary measure, by which the polluted sites would be medically purified. Notably, however, the medical discourse of blood — while formulated in professional and ethical terms — was also deployed as a political device, intended to neutralise the symbolic significance of the blood spilling; and it has also been perceived as having a magical counter-effect to the curse on the government.
It is instructive in this context to compare the contrasting symbolism of blood and faeces. Faeces were thrown in protests elsewhere,Footnote 137 and the red shirts had also considered throwing them on their opponents. But faeces, unlike blood, are a symbol of dirt and potential pollution, and the red shirts agreed with their adversaries that they constituted a health risk. They desisted from deploying faeces, and substituted their own blood for them, considering it, symbolically as well as medically, pure; hence they felt insulted when their adversaries related to it as a polluting health risk.
However, the contrast between the two visions of blood is not as sharp as the struggling parties sought to present it. The boundary between the symbolic and non-symbolic is in fact permeable: the symbolic use of blood in political protest by the red shirts was delegitimised by their opponents by an apparently non-symbolic, medical discourse of blood; however, that discourse had implicit symbolic significance in that it sought to transform the image of the spilled blood from a pure, sacrificial substance to a dangerous, polluting one, while the cleaning of the blood was also perceived as a symbolic act of purification.
By implicitly deploying the medical discourse of blood as a symbolic one, the opponents of the ‘red shirts’ sought to transform the meaning of blood from one that signified ‘life’ (since the protesters sacrificed their ‘life-blood’) to one signifying (potential) ‘death’ (since their allegedly contaminated blood threatened the health of others).
As a final point, the broader sociological implications of the blood-spilling episode will be considered. Many people, especially Westerners, perceived the blood-spilling rite as a mere publicity stunt, offering good photo opportunities, or in the words of the anthropologist Charles Keyes, as ‘marvelous political theatre’,Footnote 138 which has been ‘successful in capturing the public's attention’.Footnote 139 Such interpretations relate to it as just another instance of the Thai ‘regime of images’.Footnote 140
However, the episode could also be conversely interpreted, namely as an attempt to resist that regime. Unnoticed by those commentators was the explicit intention by the protesters to demonstrate their sincerity and self-sacrifice by an extreme, ‘uncivilised’ act, in contrast to the pervasive tendency to mere painless performances in the Thai ‘regime of images’.
The blood-spilling episode thus seems to introduce an important innovation in the conduct of political protest in Thailand, with a wider implication for the study of social change in the kingdom: in choosing to sacrifice their blood, the protesters seem to have sought reflectively to surmount the duality of Thailand's ‘regime of images’, and to demonstrate that their actions were not mere public performance, but a token of real personal commitment. This episode thus introduces a new chapter in the post-structuralist analysis of Thai society: the consideration of the effects of the sophisticated self-understanding of that regime on people's personal conduct, which helps to bridge the hiatus between the public and private domains, as posited in the model of the ‘regime of images’. Our analysis thus suggests that reflectively chosen conduct introduces an element of ‘agency’ into that model, and hereby endows it with a dynamic quality which was lacking in its rather static original formulation.
