ARI Working Paper Series

Chiang Mai is a city of culture. This slogan is broadcast by banners hanging over the highway, coffee shops specializing in northern Thai Arabica blends, architectural conferences and seminars, art galleries, et cetera. It is claimed in English and in Thai [meuang haeng watthanatham] Anthropological studies of such culture-saturated sites have often focused upon its hyperreal quality: increasingly manufactured culture continually points to itself as a referent (Baudrillard 1994). In many respects, Chiang Mai is certainly such a place. But what does such a claim that Chiang Mai is a city founded upon and saturated by watthanatham [culture] mean in local middle-class discourses, contestations, and manifestations of power?

Drawing upon two years of field research on magico-religious practices and their reinterpretations in Chiang Mai, I find that local civic groups and advocates for Northern Thai watthanatham paradoxically argue for its uniqueness and for its compatibility with international norms. As such, concepts of Thai watthanatham emerge from Thailand’ss fraught relationship with the West. Here I follow Thongchai Winichakul’s call to understand the patterns or logic of Thailand’s (semi/para/crypto-)colonial encounter (Thongchai 2010:135). Specifically, here I examine the idea of kheut, magico-religious taboos, and how they become re-interpreted from religious practice into local wisdom [phumipanya] during the midst of a debate surrounding architectural change and construction.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as a chapter in Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity, and the Ruins of Progress in Chiang Mai, by Andrew Alan Johnson, in July/August 2014, University of Hawai’i Press.