Seven stories from experts in the southern border country

Seven academics from six countries share their fascination with myriad aspects - social, cultural, economic - of South Thailand

If a place becomes meaningful because of its stories, Thailand's southern region surely carries a great weight as hundreds of scholars assembled to tell accounts from years of research into the region at the recent Inter-dialogue Conference on Experiencing Southern Thailand: Current Social Transformations from People's Perspectives.

The largest academic gathering held in the region covered a wide range of topics: performing arts, Islam, Buddhism, education, ethnic groups, new trends in historiography and the environment. Seven international scholars who choose to examine this socially and culturally complex area of Thailand shared their stories and accomplishments with The Nation.

Dr Saroja Dorairajoo, Harvard University Department of Anthropology

The name Saroja Dorairajoo could not go unnoticed by anyone at the Pattani conference because she was the one who ignited as well as raised funds for the largest academic gathering ever held in the region. A Singaporean national, Dorairajoo has long been fascinated by the social and cultural complexity of the southern part of Thailand.

Anthropologist Dorairajoo arrived in Pattani in 1999 to start field research for her PhD dissertation at Harvard.

She lived with a family in a Muslim fishing village and observed the fishermen's response to the declining fertility of the sea brought about by the large-scale fishing industry run by Buddhist businessmen.

Her research "Thai-ising Malay men: A local response to an environmental crisis" revealed an intriguing finding. The fishermen, who considered themselves Malay Muslims and refused to adopt Thai citizenship in spite of the government assimilation policy between the 1920s and 1950s, now promote their national identity as Thai in an attempt to reclaim their rights as Thai citizens to the coastal resources.

"These fishermen, who previously hardly spoke Thai, have become more fluent in the language," she said. "Speaking Thai allows them to travel to seminars, meetings and forums around the country to communicate their plight."

Dorairajoo hopes to produce a great book on the southern region of Thailand as a result of the Pattani conference.

Dr Paul Dowsey-Magog, School of Communication, Charles Sturt University

If any visitors to Sydney during the 2000 Olympics recalled a shadow play, nang talung, from Thailand's southern region at a cultural performance, it's worth knowing that Dr Paul Dowsey-Magog was the man both in front and behind the scenes to make the show possible.

Dowsey-Magog, a teacher of performing arts, has long found shadow plays appealing. He went to India and Indonesia, where shadow plays in different styles have long been a part of the culture.

But he finally settled in 1993 on studying nang talung in Thailand. His PhD dissertation was a result of his work around Songkhla, Pattalung, Nakhon Si Thammarat and other southern provinces.

At the Pattani conference, Dowsey-Magog expressed his worries that the traditional performing art that has been popular in the South for hundreds of years was losing its soul from the urge to transform itself to fit new audiences, performing venues (including television and audio cassette), and business practices.

"Performing arts always transform by themselves," he said. "But if it comes too much from external forces, they may lose their souls. Local people love nang talung because of its jokes, be they dirty or political. If it is made too polite to fit a wider audience [on television for instance], it loses its charm and ability to communicate with people."

Dowsey-Magog loves the south of Thailand so much that he plans to settle here after retirement.

Dr Ryoko Nishii, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Since Nishii's first trip to Thailand in 1986 to learn Thai, she has constantly returned to the southern region to study the relationship between Buddhists and Muslims. She has become fascinated by the way believers of the two religions coexist in Satun province. The situation is different from other areas where there are sometimes ethnic and religious conflicts.

At the Pattani conference, Nishii told a little-known and somewhat controversial story of a village in Satun where Muslims temporarily ordained as Buddhist monks or nuns at a Buddhist monastery. She asked why they did this, how they justified an act considered a sin among other Muslims.

"The common answer I got from them was that they were possessed by a Buddhist lineage by having Buddhist ancestors," she said. "A Muslim's ordination is seen as done in return for a boon granted by Buddhist ancestors."

In the village, when children under three years old fall ill, their parents believe it is Buddhist ancestors who cause the illness and pray to them to cure the children.

They promise to let the children become Buddhist monks, novices or nuns when they recover.

In Nishii's interpretation, Buddhist ancestry becomes the "other within" for the Muslims. Physical sickness, however, signals uneasiness between the two religions inside themselves. Therefore, to ordain as Buddhist monk or nun is a way to return the boon as well as to break with their Buddhist ancestry and continue their lives as Muslims.

Ted Mayer, PhD candidate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison

In 1996, anthropologist Mayer actively participated in the Dharmayatra Buddhist Walk to save the environment and livelihood around Songkhla Lake because he is interested in learning how Buddhism transforms itself to fit into a fast-changing world. He anticipated the process would result in the creation of socially engaged Buddhists.

"I'm looking for what kind of Buddhism this social activity will create," he said. "During the Dharmayatra walk, we see an unusual community in that a temple abbot, who usually has the final say in decision-making, did not play the role of the leader. It's a very democratic activity in which young people and women were invited to speak out."

To Mayer the Dharmayatra Walk, which was influenced by Gandhi's idea of peace walks, was also an interesting process in which monks, who are perceived by society as gurus, did not pretend that they knew everything.They are also in a learning process along with other people from the community to find out answers to changing social conditions and ways of life.

Irving Chan Johnson, PhD candidate, Anthropology Department, Harvard University

Johnson has all the right reasons to study Thai people living in the Malaysian state of Kelantan. He speaks Thai with the Chehe local accent, an asset given to him by his mother who was among some 9,000 Thai people living in Kelantan. They considered themselves Thais despite holding Malay citizenship. Although Johnson was born to an American father and now carries a Singaporean passport, he still talks proudly about his Thai middle name, Chan.

He said it was difficult to trace how these people had come to live in Kelantan, just across the river from Takbai district in Thailand's Narathiwat province. Some old people in the village recalled jokingly that they had been encouraged to settle in the area because Muslims found wild pigs from the nearby jungle disturbing and so had asked the Buddhist Thais to live there as a buffer.

"Unlike some scholars who studied ethnic interaction [between Thai and Malay], I'm looking at people there from their own perspective," he said. "I would like to show that these people have their own identity. They are not Malay, yet they are also different from Thai people in the South. I'm hoping to come up with a new idea or theory about these people that may be comparative to ethnic people in other parts of the world."

BAJUNID regards the history of

Dr Omar Farouk Bajunid, Political Scientist, Hiroshima University

Although Bajunid was born in Malaysia and now teaches in Japan, his knowledge of Thai politics, especially in the field of ethnic management, is second to none. When he started studying Muslims in Thailand 25 years ago, there was hardly any academic work in the field except some anthropological research.

Bajunid's PhD thesis looked at how the Thai state managed minority groups living in its territory. He said the characteristic of the Thai polity for centuries had been an attempt to accommodate differences and noted that since the Ayutthaya period rulers had been not only Thai but also Persian, Greek, Chinese and others.

"Siam has long possessed the image of pluralistic society," he said. "Only later on did the problem come about [because] some leaders, Field Marshal Phibul for example, believed in homogeneity. Thai politics went through ups and downs until 1992. Since then there has been uninterrupted democracy, a tangible time of political liberation."

Bajunid said Thailand had entered its most advanced political condition with the 1997 Constitution, which had turned Thailand from a Buddhist state into an inclusive democratic state without discrimination against any religions.

"You're very progressive in term of policy," he said but noted that implementation and the personal bias of those implementing the policy might linger on.

Dr Olli Rouhomaki, policy advisor, Department of International Development Cooperation, Finland

Rouhomaki believes that we don't have to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs to have economic development. In other words, he thinks it's possible to strike a balance between development and environmental protection, and this is a policy recommendation he put forward in his study of fishing villages in Phang-nga Bay.

Although the Nordic region where Rouhomaki comes from seems to be very far from Thailand, he is no stranger to Thai society.

He was born in Thailand of missionary parents who came to teach religion in the country's Northeast Not surprisingly, Rouhomaki speaks fluent Thai.

In his PhD dissertation at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, Rouhomaki suggested that emphasis needed to be placed on the quality of development, ensuring that local people had their say and received an equitable distribution of resources and opportunities.