ARI Working Paper Series

Who are farang (White Westerners) in the Thai construction of knowledge? How have farang become parts of the discourses of Thainess? What are the effects of farang on Thai national and popular cultural identities? This paper focuses on the deconstruction of Thailand’s Western other through an identification marker of “farang,” arguably one of many key pan-Orient Occidentalizing projects. I venture to reverse a widely accepted Orientalist discourse and reiterate some historical agencies of an Oriental nation, e.g., Siam or Thailand, in their historical and cultural contacts with the powerful Westerners. I try to show that farang is far from a mere Thai identification marker of the West produced primarily by the Siamese and other indigenous Tai-speaking population living in the boundaries of Thai state and its neighbors, nor is it a blurred ethnocultural reference of Western otherness.

In light of Said (1978)’s influential work on Orientalism, I argue in an opposite direction that farang is an Occidentalizing project conceived and developed through Siam’s historical and cultural experiences with/against the West. The most productive ways to understand the discourses of farang in the making of Thai identities are (1) to read farang as a ‘Thai production system of power/knowledge concerning the West’; and (2) to take it as a ‘reflexively tactical method’ to produce the Thai-ized version of the West as superior but suspicious others based on specific historical and cultural encounters with/against them.

In short, farang has rarely been a matter-of-factly representation of the West in the Thai construction of knowledge. It is more an ethnocultural mirror measuring and projecting the hierarchical distance and otherness between the imagined Thai ‘We-Self’ and the constructed ‘Western Others’ among many non-Thai ‘They-Selves.