Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the “Thai wisdom” supposedly lost is emerging as a national phenomenon, a significant form of response to the forces of globalization and a perceived “world culture.” Revitalizing Thai wisdom has become part of the comprehensive educational reforms that followed Thailand’s economic crash of 1997—the National Education Act of 1999. Recourse to Thai wisdom, and more specifically local wisdom, is a strategy aimed at revitalizing cultural knowledge and practices. I believe that this revitalization represents a form of resistance to the homogenizing aspects of globalization enacted through movements to enhance the capacities of local communities to chart their own cultural and economic paths.
About a hundred years ago, King Rama V strategically thought of ceding power over some small areas of land to Britain and France to protect the greater part of the Kingdom, instead of fighting in the battlefield where traditional weapons could not compete with the more advanced war equipment of the Europeans. When reinforced by implementing a strategic alliance with Russia to balance the superpowers, the country was saved and became the only one in the region never to have experienced being colonized. However, in the dynamic pattern of the economic battleground in the era of Globalization when “information and currencies move across the national border at lightning speed” (Prawase 1998), the country was defeated. Historic Thai wisdom, containing the ability to think strategically, had been lost. With weakness of the macro-economic structure … the country collapsed on July 2, 1997, and the negative results of this collapse were felt by all Thai. (Supradith Na Ayudhya 2000:1)
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© 2003 Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt
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Jungck, S., Kajornsin, B. (2003). “Thai Wisdom” and Glocalization. In: Anderson-Levitt, K.M. (eds) Local Meanings, Global Schooling. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980359_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980359_2
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