Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand

Fitting In and Sticking Out

Anjalee Cohen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351127721
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Derecho
• Categoría: Ley de vivienda y urbanismo

Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand examines how young people in urban Chiang Mai construct an identity at the intersection of global capitalism, state ideologies, and local culture.

Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic research, the book explores the impact of rapid urbanisation and modernisation on contemporary Thai youth, focusing on conspicuous youth subcultures, drug use (especially methamphetamine use), and violent youth gangs. Anjalee Cohen shows how young Thai people construct a specific youth identity through consumerism and symbolic boundaries – in particular through enduring rural/urban distinctions. The suggestion is that the formation of subcultures and "deviant" youth practices, such as drug use and violence, are not necessarily forms of resistance against the dominant culture, nor a pathological response to dramatic social change, as typically understood in academic and public discourse. Rather, Cohen argues that such practices are attempts to "fit in and stick out" in an anonymous urban environment.

This volume is relevant to scholars in Thai Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Urban Studies, and Development Studies, particularly those with an interest in youth, drugs, and gangs.

1 Introduction

Prologue – Northern Thai youth in transition

I am an Australian-Thai or what the Thai call luk khreung¹ – of racially mixed parentage. My interest in Thai youth culture stems in part from my Thai background and my own experiences and observations I have made over numerous trips to Thailand since my childhood. My mother, born in 1951, grew up in northern Thailand, in a small market town some 30 kilometres south-west of Chiang Mai city called Ban Kat. Prior to moving to Australia in her late teens with my father, she lived with her parents and eight siblings in a two-storey teak wooden house. I still have vivid memories of that house; the wonderful smell of the old teak wood blended with the faint odour of my grandmother’s native tabacum. I similarly recall the earthy scent and texture of the ochre clay pot and the wooden ladle from which we drank well water, as well as the large terracotta pot out of which we would scoop cold water to bathe ourselves. The sound of the neighbour’s roosters calling in the early hours of the morning, the splashing of water against the concrete ground as one performed one’s ablutions in the outdoor bathroom, and my grandmother crushing chillies mixed with fragrant Thai herbs with a mortar and pestle remain equally lucid in my mind. I also reminisce about the bumpy drive perched on the back of a utility truck from the city to Ban Kat on the dusty dirt road bordered by lime-green paddy fields. These are but distant memories.

Today, my grandmother lives in a single-storey brick house with a corrugated iron roof. She claims she had the rustic teak house demolished after my grandfather died because she feared his spirit would haunt her. However, her family is convinced that she built a brick house so she could be modern like her neighbours. When I visit my grandmother’s house now, I drink bottled filtered water from a plastic drink dispenser and, prior to my parents having a second house built nearby, I would bathe myself in her modern bathroom with a gas hot water unit, ceramic floor tiling, and a Western-style flush toilet (one no longer has to squat). The road from the city to the village has also significantly changed. The road is now completely paved and divided most of the way into four to six lanes to service the hundreds of cars, motorbikes, trucks, and buses that travel to and from the city daily. Most of the rice fields that once ran adjacent to the road have been replaced by a continuous row of factories, restaurants, convenience stores, car dealership outlets, and a host of miscellaneous shops.

One only has to compare the typical teenage lifestyle of my mother’s generation to that of contemporary northern Thai teenagers to realise just how rapidly northern Thailand has changed since the late 1960s. To begin with, rarely did my mother travel beyond the village as an adolescent. In fact, my mother claims that as a young female, she was not even free to wander around the village at night unless she was accompanied by an adult. When she reached 16, her parents permitted her to attend the local village temple festival with a group of friends, one of the few means of entertainment available to my mother at the time. Other forms of entertainment included radio and then television, which arrived in my mother’s village in 1968, when she was 17 years of age. She remembers the first television that was bought by one of the local households who generously invited other villagers to join them in the evening in viewing this exciting new technology. The television shows were mostly Thai or Chinese productions. She used these television gatherings as an opportunity to earn extra pocket money by selling sweets and sugarcane to the audience, which she saved in order to buy a beautiful dress to wear to the local temple festivals. Another form of entertainment my mother eagerly anticipated was the free open-air movie theatre which screened films once every six weeks as a means of advertising and selling medicines; hence, it was called “movie that sells medicine” (nang khai ya).

The temple festivals and theatre were among the few opportunities to meet young males. However, as my mother recalls, her heavy workload and endless domestic chores (particularly as the eldest female child) meant time for leisure activities was limited. In fact, one was more likely to meet the opposite sex in the rice fields than at a festival. My mother explained that although my grandmother was a market trader, each year during the harvest season her family would help her relatives, who were farmers, harvest rice for which they received a share of the crop. She remembers that it was arduous work but also quite fun as it was a chance to flirt with the boys. However, touching was forbidden as this was believed to invite punishment from the ancestral spirits. Any physical contact was considered an offence against the spirits who had to be propitiated. For instance, my mother mentioned that a local village boy once accidentally brushed against her arm in a rice mill. This was witnessed by others and thus he was quickly forced to make amends, that is, provide a pig’s head for my grandmother as an expiatory offering to the spirits.

Occasions for meeting men were clearly restricted and usually supervised. Inappropriate advances were rapidly adjudicated. My mother explained that when she was 16, her boyfriend at the time was allowed to visit her after dinner; however, her parents would have to be present. During my grandmother’s era, the boy was expected to be adept at a special courting language (kam u saw) of which there were two kinds: one was in the style of formalised conversation and the other in the style of poetry or song. Whilst the boy was singing or talking, the girl was obliged to continue with her household chores, which may have involved spinning and weaving or pounding rice. My mother claims she was very shy of men, at the time considered a virtue in young women. Girls and young women were required to dress modestly (usually in a long sarong), as well as speak and move in a self-effacing manner.

In modern northern Thailand, the attitudes and behaviour of young people have drastically changed compared with those of my mother’s era. From the early 1980s, rapid economic development has had a marked impact on the lifestyles of Thai youth. For many young northern Thai,² their social universe now revolves around the city rather than the village. The bustling city of Chiang Mai offers teenagers abundant forms of entertainment that now extend far beyond movie theatres and temple festivals. Courting practices no longer take place in the privacy of one’s parent’s house in the village but rather in an urban sphere of conspicuous consumption. Today, most young northern Thai females are considerably less diffident in the way they dress than in the past. In fact, many contemporary teenage girls deliberately attract male attention by wearing tight stretch denim jeans, revealing spaghetti strap tops, miniskirts, and sexy high heels, all of which are now commonplace among the new generation of Thai females. With the growing influence of global culture and fashion, young men are similarly dressing in ways that aim to capture female attention, sporting styles that signify very specific youth identities. As these overall changes occur so too are young Thai people’s life experiences changing, although the goals of youth remain relatively the same in that they aim to establish one’s place in the world and shape a sense of self.

Youth agency

Apart from sensational journalistic reports depicting the excessive lifestyles of Thai teenagers, few studies focus on contemporary Thai youth culture. In fact, until recently there was very little anthropological research on the cultural practices of young people in general, both in Thailand and in the West. Most studies on youth culture³ have typically been the domain of sociology and cultural studies. Such research tends to focus on Western youth culture (or subcultures) in the context of deviance or resistance.

After the late 1980s, growing anthropological attention to popular culture and globalisation began to generate an interest in youth. Prior to this, studies in various social sciences seeking to understand the social category of youth, and what it meant to posit such a category in the first place, were influenced by a paradigm of socialisation and focused on adolescence as a life-cycle stage. Within this developmental model of youth, young people have been typically depicted as passive receptors of adult culture. An important contribution anthropology has made to the study of youth is its shift “from a concern with adolescence as a life course stage to an interest in youths as cultural producers and consumers” (Amit-Talai, 2002: 16657). This approach to youth is not only characterised by a concentration on youth cultural agency, but also an interest “in how identities emerge in new cultural formations that creatively combine elements of global capitalism, transnationalism, and local culture” (Bucholtz, 2002: 525).

Consistent with an “anthropology of youth”, I demonstrate the way in which young people of Chiang Mai city and peri-urban areas⁴ actively negotiate the profound changes Thai society has undergone in relation to rapid urbanisation and globalisation in recent decades. I focus on a few high-profile elements of youth culture, including drug use, conspicuous youth subcultures, together with violent youth gangs, as a means for illustrating this. I examine certain social and cultural practices through which Chiang Mai teenagers construct their own worlds, rather than how their lives are shaped or socialised by adults (although the two are not unrelated). I also show how these practices cannot be separated from local, national, and global forces.

Rapid socio-economic development has led to greater youth mobility and arguably greater agency in specific arenas; however, at the same time, it has also given rise to a heightened sense of displacement and disconnectedness among adolescents. As old forms of village community gradually crumble, young northern Thai people are creating symbolic forms of community in new urban spaces. Thai identities are less shaped by a sense of community strongly symbolised by an idealised village network but are now chosen through myriad acts of consumption primarily influenced by a growing mass media and a global youth culture.

Whilst consumerism now plays a key role in the shaping of Thai youth identities, it has created mounting concern among those who no longer consider themselves as youth. In fact, the changing behaviour and practices of contemporary Thai teenagers in general has been the cause for much social anxiety. Modernisation and Westernisation have been commonly blamed for increasing “immoral” and “deviant” behaviour among young Thai.

Mass media coverage of youth issues often suggests that the new generation is becoming more materialistic, promiscuous, and violent. Young people in contemporary Thailand are perceived to be a threat to the conventional social order and to “traditional” Thai values. Dramatic economic and social changes in Thailand (e.g. urbanisation, youth mobility, and consumerism) have created tension and anxieties among an older middle-class and elite generation. This “moral panic” is encapsulated by a Bangkok Post journalist in the following editorial. In classic fashion, the source of such fears and the contamination they descry is perceived as coming from outside:

I am worried about conditions in our country today. In my view, there are too many evils in our society that can intoxicate people, especially the youth, and lead them astray along the pathways of evil, extravagance, and promiscuity, which is all a far cry from the good old Thai values. Western ways have taken our country hostage and our vulnerable children fall prey to them.

(Bangkok Post 3 November 2002)

Views such as these are clearly influenced by imaginary, nostalgic, and essentialist values idealised in nationalist ideologies, values that hold limited meaning for most contemporary Thai youth. The growing fear surrounding a so-called dissolute, hedonistic, yet “vulnerable” Thai youth was expressed through the implementation of a state “social order” campaign in 2001 and, as I shall demonstrate, a punitive “war on drugs” in 2003 and to a lesser extent in 2008. Ever since reaching epide...