The LST lawyers embarked on programs to address these and other concerns but frequently met with police indifference, expressing the disdain that many Thai feel for the Burmese. The chapter attends to the ways that the lawyers deployed human rights in combination with the social conventions mentioned above, in an experimental fashion, to generate force behind the rights of Burmese (and other foreign) migrants. Beyond the immediacy of the tsunami, though, the lawyers also engaged in NGO work with the LPN and the Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB). I study how they engage in longer-term antitrafficking projects in cities like Mahachai, a port near Bangkok, in industries, like fisheries, that have especially high rates of human trafficking and slave labor.
Chapter 4 studies the long-term struggles of Yai Hai Khanjanata and Rattana Sajjathep with the Thai state and the city of Bangkok to recover, respectively, farmland flooded twenty-seven years earlier by a state dam and a Bangkok house slated for demolition, ten years previous, under dubious circumstances, by the city. Having protested without significant progress toward a hearing with state and city agencies, both Yai Hai and Rattana resorted to desperate tactics. The chapter describes how, having gone unheard for such long periods, they combined the moral authority of motherhood with provocative, extraordinary gestures to gain public support for their demands for justice. These bold gestures coincided with the infancy of the NHRC, which was able to play an important mediating role with state and city officials. The thrust of the chapter, then, is that Yai Hai and Rattana’s ability to embody familiar, potent tropes (like motherhood) to express their determination and dismay through well-executed and highly visible gestures, as well as draw on the institutional power of the NHRC, was decisive in the resolution of their campaigns.
Chapter 5 assesses the changes in fortune of the NHRC as the national organ for human rights promotion and protection after night descended on the extraordinary moment of human rights’ emergence. That is, from the early 1990s through 2006, Thailand experienced roughly fifteen years of unprecedented progressive politics, even budgeting for the excesses of the Thaksin government. That progressive moment (dominated by elected government, the rise in stature and force of human rights institutions and discourse, and a growing freedom of political expression) entered its twilight in 2006 with the coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin.4 This chapter addresses the return of the coup-election-coup cycle of governance, beginning with the royalist Yellow Shirt protests of Thaksin in 2006. The chapter does not intend to present a thorough account of the political maneuverings of the myriad political factions and interests but rather judges the implications of successive military governments, constitutions, and dramatic enhancement and application of the lèse-majesté law for human rights.
Anthropology of Human Rights
Thinking about how one takes human rights as an anthropological object involves this work in ongoing but quite recent discussions within anthropology that have freed themselves of the previous straightjacket of cultural relativism. As I mentioned at the outset, a focus on the social life of human rights5 provides the broad parameters into which this study fits. What human rights advocates in Thailand impressed upon me, though, is that it is less what human rights do to actors in a given situation that allows for a clear picture of human rights’ social force than what social actors do with human rights as ways of working out relations among themselves. That is to say, human rights in Thailand are a mode of relating to one another but a novel, emergent mode that attaches in unforeseeable and unexpected ways to long-established social practices and conventions. This book describes Thai social actors’ preliminary efforts to make sense of and judge the dimensions and implications of this emergent form of relating and attends to the mutually transfiguring force that human rights and the modes of sociality with which they entangle exert on one another.
Chapter 1
Experimenting with Fate
In this chapter, I make the case that human rights emerged in Thailand significantly in relation to experiments with Buddhist morality. These experiments employed everyday ethics turned in specific ways by certain readings and practices of Buddhism that are at once recognizable within the Thai ethos and yet at odds with principles that many Thai take to be intrinsic to Buddhism (especially around questions of kamma, nibbana,1 meditation practices, or merit in relation to social stratification). I examine here how Buddhism, which in principle eschews participation in worldly affairs like politics, becomes a resource for human rights and how, in turn, human rights invite a renewed consideration of debates over Buddhist morality. This is evident in the ways that key figures in the NHRC formulate human rights as available, if latent, in Buddhism and in the way Thai lawyers advocating for Burmese migrants’ rights enact consonant egalitarian principles. In this way, human rights politics and Buddhist politics configure or transfigure one another within a history of Thai Buddhisms that manifest progressive and reactionary faces, engaging sometimes with one another and sometimes with political events of the moment.
This chapter argues that in this contingent nexus of historical, moral, and political forces in Thailand at the dawn of the millennium, human rights emerge as an event that reduces neither to the force of the official human rights discourses and practices of international organizations (like the United Nations [UN], in which the NHRC nonetheless participates) nor to indigenous forces (despite the claims of NHRC commissioners who find human rights in Buddhism but must still account for why they emerge at this time). I argue that human rights appeared as if overheard, involving a construction of understanding around a fragment, with the resources one has at hand rather than a process of vernacularization. Ultimately, such overhearing provides an opportunity, through engaging human rights, to renew stakes in an egalitarian Buddhist morality that provides for an articulation of human rights.
The Event of Human Rights
While Thai did not widely employ the language of human rights in their struggles, I contend that human rights were themselves an emergent event2 in Thai political and moral life, as distinct from a critical event that introduces a break with the everyday.3 To say that human rights are in this way ordinary in Thailand does not mean that they are normal. The way that particular social actors articulate human rights with or through Buddhist ethics is not a normalization of human rights but a turning back to alternatives within Buddhist moral thinking on the occasion of human rights’ emergence.4
In this sense, human rights offered an opportunity to resist dictation or conformity on moral issues, with conformity effectively crushing ordinary efforts to think and act morally or ethically.5 I take suppression of the ordinary to be the suppression of voice through dictation, with the implication that the recovery or discovery of voice may be possible only within the everyday, hence the need not to transcend but to turn again to the everyday. The aversion of conformity, or normalization, is a task that involves declining available discourses where one cannot find one’s voice with them (see Cavell 2003, 192–214). This is not an inability to speak—scripts are available, thrust upon us—as much as it is an inability to have one’s say. Cavell captures this perspicuously when he says that the aversion of conformity is “to turn around, or turn back (Wittgenstein says lead back), the words of ordinary life … that now repel thought, disgust it” (Cavell 2003, 193). Finding or recovering one’s ethical voice takes a turning back, again or anew, to alternatives that have remained suffocated—in the present work, stifled in Thailand’s particular religious, political, and social ethos. Below, I argue that the emergence of voice with or through human rights involved opposing hegemonic Buddhism not through escape but by a turn to specific Buddhist alternatives. In this way, transfiguration, rather than transcendence or rupture, connects the event to the eventual in the everyday.
This is not an inevitable product of human
