A View of the South

New academic Studies focus on politics and diverse communities - but no Tak Bai

It comes as a relief to read a volume devoted to the South, after the outpourings of a zillion anthropologists and sociologists devoted to the North. This is not the topical South: the incident at Tak Bai and Kru Se do not figure here. Here we have 12 academic set pieces ranging from traditional nang talung and manora to the dhamma protest walks, so-called growth triangles and a view from the outside, Kelantan, looking in.

All the articles have emanated from a conference held in 2002 at Prince of Songkhla Univesrity in Pattani on "Current Social Transformations". Most show young lecturers cutting their teeth in academic discourse. Inevitably, by the focus is often narrow. There is a subdued amount of socio-jargon-they all have to "reify" things these days - but the result is acceptable.

Only one article, by Omar Farouk Bajunid, specifically tackles the Muslim position in the South, and points to the calm rural traditions of Muslim society being haunted by the spread of "drug addiction and drug trafficking, high unemployment rates, low educational achievements, poverty, high divorce rates, gangsterism and crime". He indicates that Muslim society is not a monolith and embraces many different groups, but says, "it is Thai Culture that provides them with a common identity". The emergence of Muslim political groupings at the national level is seen as a hopeful sign.

Duncan McCargo gives an overview of southern Thai politics, which gets a little muddled with vast generalizations on the southern character ("stubborn and quick to anger"), and speaks of southern tribalism occasionally overcoming common sense. Banditry gets more than a mention, and the author asks "when, how and why southerners turn from robbing and abusing one another to supporting each other politically". Godfathers may be on the way out, along with vote buying.

The article by Piya et al, "Voice from the Grassroots", begin with geographic and economic generalizations which should have come at the beginning of the volume, if they were necessary at all. It runs through all the top-down national development plans, they gets to specifics: unwanted lignite mines, unwanted industrial parks, irrigation canals that do not irrigate, dams that wreck the ecology, wetlands needlessly drained, destruction of sago forest, reclassification of forest land destroying people' s livelihoods and so on. "Decision-making lies in the hands of small groups of people, such as government officials and politicians, who do not have sufficient understanding of the local situation."




	Dynamic Diversity in Southern Thailand Wattana Sugunnasil, Editor Published by Silkworm Books, Bt795
	Review by Michael Smithies

Wattana Sugunnasil, who edited the overall volume, has an article "consuming Modernity in a Border Community", which portrays a fictitious Buddhist village, "Sue Ring", in Narathiwat close to the border, and studies the economic changes as villagers shift increasingly off farm employment. Phil King tackles the hydra of the so-called Indonesia-Malaysia -Thailand growth triangle, IMT-GT, another idea cook up by civil servants at an international meeting in Langkawi in 1991. This simply resulted in the creation of a "narrow corridor running from Songkla to the border at Sadao" and projects scheduled for Yala and Pattani "were often given the lowest priority, despite being projects that the local Malay business community saw as essential to their growth and meaningful participation". The gas pipeline, bitterly opposed by numerous groups, was but one unwanted project. King concludes: "Subregional development in Southern Thailand has proven remarkably adept at engendering conflict where relative social harmony once persisted."

With Paul Dowsey-Magog's article on Nang Talung , we are on familiar cultural ground. He examines the changes in shadow puppetry that have taken place in recent years. The rituals associated with performances are falling away, and the clowns have assumed greater importance in mocking authority and making bawdy jokes, which would not be tolerated on TV. The music has moved with the times into pop songs. Troupes are moving beyond village culture to a wider semi-urban society, their performances somewhat bowdlerized at training colleges.

The Chinese community in the South is as marked as the Malay, and the study by Jovan Maud provides a detailed study of the expansion to Hat Yai from Phuket and Trang of the vegetarian festival celebrating the nine emperor gods. The study highlights Chinese participants from Malaysia and Singapore who developed the new location and the intermingling of Mahayana Buddhism with Taoist beliefs and strong Thai-Chinese input. The result was the transformation of "a local Chinese migrant activity into a major tourist event", once highly profitable to the organizers.

Then come the necessary (in any self-respecting sociological collection) "gender" articles. The first considers the feminisation of manora possession and covers modern trends in the traditional dance form. From being "a supremely masculine magical art ... this dance-drama is becoming a strong base for women 's religious expression". Manora troupes are now fairly large, 12 to 20, including musicians, dancers and singers. The invocations are going by the board, as in nang talung, but the trances remain and have to be seen, so Marlane Guelden maintains, in the context of female mysticism.

*Understanding the South*: One of the gender articles in the book considers the feminisation of 'manora' possession and covers modern trends in the traditional dance form.

The other gender article, by Jawanit Kittitornkool, examines female power-play in the sub-district or tambon councils in two southern villages. "The Dhamma Walk for Songkla Lake", by Theodore Mayer, gives a detailed account of a novel attempt by engaged Buddhist monks to save the ecology of the country's largest fresh-water lake from numerous sources of pollution. This was in part a reaction to the current lay concept of Buddhism, according to one monk: "Lay people often wanted to set the social agenda, however consumerist it might be, and then invite monks to legitimize it with their presence". Suleeman N Wongsaphap studies a single family descended from a Fukien Chinese immigrant to Phuket in the classic rags-to-riches tale, and all the connections which helped make this possible.

The last article, by Irving Chan Johnson, gives the viewpoint of a Thai Buddhist village in Kelantan. The "paradise at your Doorstep", a logo cooked up by the tourist organization and carried on local Malay buses, shows a rather weird paradise: "a place of danger and societal decay", of "lax monks and a faded religious morality", of Aids, bar culture, "urban sprawl, congestion of both people and traffic, overly-spiced cuisine" ... you name it. In spite of perceived discrimination against Thais, "Malaysia was still considered a better place to live than Thailand", yet the Thai-Malaysians only watched Thai TV and were culturally Thai.

Hopefully, more volumes about the South will follow. It is as culturally vibrant as any other part of the country, and the mixing of societies in the border area leads to some astonishing, if sometimes tragic situations. Congratulations to the Prince of Sonkla University for its part in bringing this out.