Creating the Other Requires Defining Thainess against Which the Other Can Exist: Early-Twentieth Century Definitions(<Special Issue>Redefining "Otherness" from Northern Thailand)

Abstract

This paper discusses "Thainess, " prior to the 1990s. Before then, people in what is nowThailand and also nearby, distinguished socially between tai and kha. Whereas tai wereliterate members of lowland kingdoms that had law codes, professed (local forms of)Buddhism, and sometimes built large architectural structures, the kha were illiterate forestpeople, had oral codes, mostly were animists, and lived in wooden structures beyond thepale of what the tai considered civilization. Ayutthaya and similar centers were multiethnicin nature, with a literate "civilized" elite. These centers only became "Thai" (a kindof back-formation from tai intended to mean "free") when King Rama VI (r. 1910-24) andother rulers adopted and adapted Western ethnicity-based definitions of nationalism.Applied socially, Thainess negatively impacted the newly defined "Other, " people notethnically Thai, in forestry, citizenship, and other areas. Thai was not tai at all.