ARI Working Paper Series

In the past five years, Thailand has been beset by coup d’état, street violence, and most recently the devastating floods of 2011. Looming in the background is the failing health of the Thai monarch, that person which has been for Thais the most potent symbol of development of the 20th century. With these events has come increasing political paranoia. Since 2006, accusations of lèse-majesté have leapt nearly a thousand-fold, and royalist conspiracy theories draw links between all of Thailand’s ills and the plots of sources of power.

Dominic Boyer (2006) and Hoon Song (2010) see conspiracy theorizing as questioning of hegemonic sources of knowledge rather than as alternative cosmologies. I draw connections between the problematizing of “truth” via conspiracy theory to Thai ideas of moral knowledge in the idiom of baaramii. Specifically, I see how conspiracy theories about the Thai monarch serve to question the idea of a truth which is self-evident.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as ‘Moral Knowledge and its Enemies: Conspiracy and Kingship in Thailand’, Anthropological Quarterly, 86(4):1059-1086, 2013.