TY - JOUR
T1 - (Im) Mobilization and hegemony
T2 - 'Hill tribe' subjects and the 'Thai' state
AU - McKinnon, Katharine
PY - 2005/3
Y1 - 2005/3
N2 - In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon 'hill tribe' people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new 'Thai hill tribe' subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside the 'non-Thai hill tribe'. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its 'others' are redefined.
AB - In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon 'hill tribe' people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new 'Thai hill tribe' subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside the 'non-Thai hill tribe'. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its 'others' are redefined.
KW - Citizenship
KW - Embodiment
KW - Hegemony
KW - Subjectivity
KW - Thailand
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=14844354384&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/1464936052000335955
DO - 10.1080/1464936052000335955
M3 - Article
SN - 1464-9365
VL - 6
SP - 31
EP - 46
JO - Social and Cultural Geography
JF - Social and Cultural Geography
IS - 1
ER -