Thai Cultural Context

This was part of a paper I wrote some years ago to present to my colleagues in a media class, trying to explain the possible difference that could exist between an oral culture (which I think is Thailand) and a textual culture (such as the west).

I somehow thought it might be relevant to discussions raised with fellow bloggers, Krajog and Albert.

Culture, according to Jan Vansina (who has studied oral tradition as history), “can be defined as what is common in the minds of a given group of people.” Culture is a society’s collective representation of ideas, values, and images. Each culture expresses and conceives its messages in its own unique cognitive terms. An understanding of a society’s cultural context is, therefore helpful in any attempt at social analysis.

Two of the most important determining cultural elements of Thai society are the closely related ordering principles of Buddhism and monarchy. The King has always been seen as an upholder of moral Buddhist values who holds the order of Thailand in place. A monarch’s role as topmost center of social power fits with the Thai hierarchical model of the universe.

Thai interpretation of Buddhism is blended with elements of Hindu, Brahmin and local animistic spirit worship. Representations of Thai cosmology can be found in abundance in arts and crafts, architecture, and cultural traditions. Temples jedis, tiered royal umbrellas, mural paintings of the Thai universe, flower arrangements, textiles, pottery, silver/copper/neillo wares, and jewelry designs, all contain some form of circular symbols representing Mt. Meru, the center of the universe, which is defined by its seven concentric rings of alternating lands and oceans.

In mandalic form, this central “mountain” is seen as stabilized by four cardinal points (NW, NE, SW, and SE), placing the concentric circles within a square plane.

Sumet Jumsai (a much esteemed Thai architect who explains Thai cosmology from the architectural structures he has studies) believes that this cosmology could predate Indic influence, and that it comes from an ancient interrelationship with an environment where land and water were constantly shifting. (If you are interested, please look up Acharn Sumet’s “Naga: Cultural Origins in Siam and the West Pacific”)

This “mandala”, as a cosmological model, has been found to be so prevalent in Southeast Asian region that it has been adopted as a model for explaining local power relationships. The center’s power is dependent on its tributary’s perception of the center’s ability to negotiate (balance, relate, or communicate) with internal and external forces to maintain a stable balance. This center is never seen as absolute, and is always seen in relation to other higher or lower centers of power. The circles or centers are infinitely repeating patterns of self-reproducing patterns, in many ways similar to fractals.

This mandalic model of center, symmetric and balanced, produced in Thai society cultural codes that are deliberately contrasted. The tension between this contrast, such as that between the center and its periphery, is designed to intentionally produce paradoxical polarly opposed forms of behavior in which conflict is resolved by means of relationship. Concepts of power versus moral goodness (pradej-prakun), or connections of goodness and debt (bunkun) or what can be called patron-client relationship is found at all levels of Thai society. This highly interdependent form of social relationship originated from strong oral traditions that evolved from ancient aquatic/riverine centered settlement. These processes of relating and resolving of polar opposites form the basis of Thai society’s dynamism. In this way, unpredicted natural phenomena or unbalanced political crisis have been known to make unpopular kings and prime ministers who were not well-versed in manipulating the symbols of change, balancing adversity, and cultivating beneficial relationships.

Control over natural resources such as irrigation, land and capital were not as important as an ability to mobilize people. This worldview of continuous change and the importance of relationships meant that textual codes of conduct and legality usually had less weight than a “gentleman’s agreement” or word of mouth. Example of such flexibility can be found in how royal succession was not “written” and was flexible. If the King did not declare who he wished as a successor, (in some cases, even if he did), it was a council that had ultimate say in who would be the new ruler. In some rare occasions, blood lineage was not a necessarily a legitimizing element, such as King Taksin. Historically, a King had to prove his legitimacy as ruler through moral deeds and demonstration of ability, such as in the case of King Ramkamhaeng.

The emphasis of causal interdependence of all phenomena produced a Thai concept of time where beginnings and endings are not important. The prevalent belief in the laws of karma and belief in rebirth are clear demonstrations of this concept of repetitive time. Space is conceived not only as one-dimensional spatial but also multi-dimensional relational. The Traibhumikatha expresses the Thai belief in the world as a space for not only physical beings such has human and animals, but also for non-physical beings, such as, spirits, angels, demons, gods, and indescribable chaos.

Thongchai Winichakul (in his book “Siam Mapped”) demonstrated how misunderstanding the incompatible concepts of space vis-à-vis colonial powers put Thailand at a disadvantage in the mapping of their territories as it impinged on the traditional Siamese sphere of power, where no clear boundaries need be defined. According to the Thai concept of power, a shifting periphery was tolerated since these outposts shifted alliances and loyalty depending on their perception of which center was more powerful and could offer them better protection.

Thai cultural context is clearly the opposite of Western rationality that is based on reason and logic in which clearly defined space and time are important.

Some images of mandalas from Acharn Sumet's book:

Why Generals have such a strong hold in Thai society

"Shadow play", my husband commented when I briefed him about the Sonthi assassination plot, "Thailand's politics has many levels of complexities not easily understood by outsiders."

I was explaining to him why Thanpuying Viriya can wield so much power in Thai politics. (BTW, can someone knowledgeable about Thai politics tell me: there was one "Khunying" or hi-so lady who was well known for being an arms dealer. Is this the same person, or what was her name?)

My husband once wrote a paper about the role of Generals in Thai politics in his NUS days when we had just first met. His classmate and good friend was a Thai General. So he knew something more than I did, or sometimes it's the fresh eyes of someone a bit removed from it all that can catch certain things we in the midst of can't see. (He's not a Thai national.)

Most people who have observed Thai politics for some time know about the vicous cycle we go through with coup d'état, appointed government, elections, corrupted politicians, and coup d'état once again. A naive conclusion would be that we have a tendancy to like dictators, strong men, etc. Not so....

If you really dig deep and follow the relationships of the Generals, you'd understand what makes a coup succesful or not are the relationships among certain cliques of Generals. The twists and turns of the aborted coup of 1981 would be a good example among others. "Cliques?", you may ask, "How's that?" Not so obvious is also the fact that in a country of only 60plus million with forces of about 300,000 we have around a hundred Generals. Isn't that absurd? Why do we have so many Generals?

You see, the military is like one of the oldest bureaucracies in Thailand older than the bureaucracy which is pretty old itself. People who enter the military service have paid for education, housing, guaranteed employment and job advancement for life, like a bureaucracy, but better (especially the housing and education part). The "modern" armed forces were set up in 1852 by King Mongkut but the heart that is intertwined with a military mind goes back several hundred years when Kings were also exceptional warriors, or exceptional warriors could become King, the most recent being the general that founded Bangkok and modern Thailand. Let's also not forget that it was the military that was behind Thailand's change from Absolute Monarch to Constitutional Monarchy. Their legitimacy to political power is engrained in the minds of military cadets from the first moments of their training.

The Military Academy is, however, the main culprit in why we can't rid ourselves of generals who feel they have political legitimacy. Class relationships are everything in a Thai student's life. It is why parents are willing to pay so much "additional" entrance fees to get their children in select school, because it ensures their kid's social circle for life. These circles are effective ways to get businesses moving, finding you that reliable doctor and lawyer and what not. The military class relationships tops all by being the forces that can define national government.

I had once thought, well, these Generals were all getting old and will eventually fade away, and maybe we can put hope in our new generation of soldiers who would be professionally trained to be just solders and not hope to be coup leaders. I was once optimistic that Thailand had evolved out of that vicious cycle of coups and elections but my hopes were obviously dashed by the coup of 2006. Then came the yellow shirt/red shirt face off, more power to the Generals.

The often not spoken about damage that Thaksin has done to Thailand, apart from a long list of unpardonable things, is that he had sparked hope and taught to the police cadets or other police strong men that maybe they too could become "One" in the country. I also wonder about the line of relationships that he has bought in the Thai bureaucracy that will try to trip good policies initiated by any well meaning government that will take time to wash out and hence make or politics fragile for some time to come.

Maybe I will write a blog about what makes the common mind of a Thai police.

Just some thoughts from one of the silent golden majority who abhors political demonstrations but have a strong opinion about the mess politics has done to our country. So please don't be too harsh in your comments.

Some thoughts from the ground on the pig flu

The following article was one of the more intelligent analysis of the swine flu situation I have found so far. It was written by Mike Davis and printed on The Guardian and can be found at the following link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health

QUOTE:

The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin, H5N1, this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than Sars in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached by the World Health Organisation, that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health. Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with antivirals and (if available) vaccine.

An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often non-existent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases. But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines rather than dramatically increasing aid to epidemic frontlines overseas, as well as to big pharma, which has battled developing-world demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

The swine flu may prove that the WHO/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness – without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global access to lifeline drugs – belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as Madoff securities. It is not so much that the pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the EU.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals. Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

But no one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack".

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

UNQUOTE.

It's interesting to note that Davis identifies the farm written about in the article below about the possible ground zero as a Smithfield subsidiary.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090428/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_swine_flu_mexico_ground_zero

My own thoughts:

Personally, I don't believe in the death toll figure quoted by the Mexican government, amounting to 100+, considering that there hasn't been any deaths reported in other countries where they have reported infection, pointing to the likelyhood that the pig flu is treatable once recieved proper medical attention. Not enough how, when, where these reported deaths took place is coming out from government sources, just the figures.

There was a news article that says the deaths are probably due to pnuemonia, a common enough complication from the common flu. Some reports are saying the death really related to swine flu in the twenties (in a country of 100 million, mind you.)

Last month, I had to fill every container I had in the house with water because the federal government announce a four day water closure in Mexico City. It turned out to be a political game to discredit the capital's administration headed by an opposition hope to be president politician. That's how low politics can fall. There's a mid-term election coming up in July that will hold much weigh on which party will win the next presidential elections. Every party is pulling out some pretty dirty tricks.

Schools were ordered shut across the Mexcan capital city last week and they will open on May 6. I wonder if the Calderon administration believe they have some kind of magic power over the flu so that it will stop infecting on that day?

Rice in Thailand

Some comments and strange ideas about rice are circulating the Nation blog space, so I'm doing some research. There's a lot of interesting things that can be said about the history of rice and it's connection with Thailand. I'm posting a list of links here as food for thought.

According to UNCTAD, Thailand produces only 4.4% of world's production of rice, but last year we exported a third of world rice exports. It was a bonus year because of the global food crisis earlier in the year, and Thailand didn't have production problems like other countries. The high prices is quite likely to come down in the near future once production picks up normally in that bigger 96% of world production.

The structure for exporting Thai rice was built over several decades with a strong government hand. We were lucky that it turned out well. There were once dark times of stock piling, corruption and price distortions and very little of the benefit from exports going to the farmers. With some remarkable people, determined to be fair and inclusive, it got worked out. I remember a very impressionable visit to Kamnan Song's central market for rice at Nakornsawan in the late 80s. Truck loads of rice arriving during the wee hours of the morning before sunrise, and farmers who drove those trucks in themselves auctioning their rice for the best price. The Nation could do service in writing a story about how that market has evolved if I may say so.

Thailand does have a reserve of rice, controlled by the Ministry of Commerce. It is used for stablilizing the domestic price of rice when prices go too high, also used for foreign aid to poor countries. I think it would be a grave mistake to morph the value of rice (a food crop) into something else, especially, something so closely linked to just monetary value, as proposed by Khun Tanong in his blog "When the UK prints money" . Look at what happened to the price of corn when the US decided to use it for biofuel. People down in Mexico were suffering because their staple food was corn (imported from US). (Thais can count their blessing that we never took the route of Mexico and completely believed WTO's and US free trade agenda and destroyed their agriculture sector to build a "industrial sector" for export in order to import food!)

Thailand also has an Agricultural Futures Exchange of Thailand where rice futures can be traded. This and technology have helped new players enter the market recently, all hopefully playing a role in increasing market efficiency and maybe production quality.

However, the idea of a rice bond, which "wch" posted as comment on an earlier post of mine had me intrigued. After some research on the net, I discovered that it is quite plausible. The Bank of Canada and some other academic institutions have funded researches about commodity-backed bonds as a way to help developing countries ease their debt problems. My protest against that would be that a rice bond is first of all a financial instrument and doesn't really help the farmer, it would only be useful as a hedge for government debt, which in my view the government should really be going easy on creating more public debt for future generations.

"Le Monde Diplomatique" in its March 2009, English editions printed "Fragrant Thai Rice" by Xavier Monthéard. He opens his article with a bit of drama, but I like how the article was started with a quote, ‘We need to find a balance between profit and holding the country back’.

Another noteworthy site is the Thai Rice Foundation (thairice.org), its list of webpages related to rice.

Asian Financial Chiefs Move to Fight Crisis

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/22/AR2009022201964.html?hpid=topnews