Abstract
The present study analyzes the everyday rhythms of a ruin in Bangkok, where middle-class residents are in day-to-day contact with the disenfranchised—mostly migrants from Northeast Thailand. I study the connections between ruined space, non-hegemonic mobility, the body, and everyday resistance. I do so by comparing and contrasting the bodily comportment of the disenfranchised (embodied everyday resistance) with the middle-class gaze over the ruin. The middle-class gaze is informed by Thai/global notions about what it means to be “civilized”, and it contains a primordial fear of “savagery”. The fear of the ruin is a fear of ruination, in the sense of losing material wealth and sliding into the lower class.
An earlier, substantially different version of this chapter, under the title “The Savage Life of Ruins: Resistant Rhythms in a Bangkokian Contact Zone”, was published in the journal Cogent Arts & Humanities (2017), vol. 4 no. 1, pp. 1–16. [Open access]. Fieldwork was conducted throughout 2015.
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Notes
- 1.
Laziness is of critical importance, for modernity is often a question of labor, or rather of laborers upsetting moral and economic standards by testing the limits of unproductivity (Moreno Tejada 2016).
- 2.
Interestingly, the Thai phrase for “informal economy” is sethakit theuan, which literally translates as “wild economy” (Johnson 2012).
- 3.
On chairs, Simon de la Loubère, leader of the French diplomatic mission to Siam in 1687, wrote: “They have no chairs or seat but bulrush mats: no carpets, but what the King bestows on them. The rich, indeed, have cushions; but they are used only to lean on, never to sit on” (in Richardson et al. 1759, pp. 230–1).
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Moreno-Tejada, J. (2019). Out of the Rubble: Affective Infrapolitics in Bangkok. In: Polese, A., Russo, A., Strazzari, F. (eds) Governance Beyond the Law. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05039-9_17
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