Nature, Nurture and Nation in Folk Oralities in Thailand and Beyond

This thesis examines the interrelationships between humans and Nature1 as represented in the Thai folk oralities - from folk lullabies to rural belief systems. This includes a consideration of the portrayals of the archaic female guardian spirit (Mae Sue), the folk narratives in the Rathasena Jataka, and the legend of Jao Mae Nang Non (the Great Reclining Lady) of Chiang Rai province. These conceptual materials have represented the relationships between humans and the natural environment in alignment with human emotions and beliefs in more-than-human entities. The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on theoretical insights derived from socio-ecology, political ecology, feminist political ecology, intertextuality, colonial discourses, and religious hybridity. It interrogates cultural deep history in relation to the natural environment and spiritual beliefs and practices connected with Nature, as portrayed in the dayto- day lives of rural people and their oralities. It further examines the ways in which these cultural-natural histories and local peoples’ practices come under the control of Siamese/Thai patriotic epistemologies in the making of the modern nation-state. The study begins by scrutinising the practice of Siamese/Thai hegemony since the late era of the Ayutthaya Kingdom (the eighteenth century) to the early Rattanakosin period (where dominance of grand narrative becomes rigorous during the reign of King Rama V, 1868-1910). The research questions revolve around issues of how environmental politics has created a rift with rural-based traditions; how the nation-state usurps eco-space, both literally and figuratively (in the case of oral literatures); and how nationalistic narratives have exploited rural voices through reinterpretations of folk oralities. The main research methodology focuses on political ecology, intertextual analysis, and colonial discourses, in combination with in-depth interviews of 64 individuals with Thais, with ethnic minorities, with the southern forestdwelling nomadic tribe (maniq), and with Lao people, all of which were undertaken during fieldwork from October 2019 – March 2020. To demonstrate national disruptions to the rural people’s lifestyles and their oralities, the opening chapter foregrounds the socio-ecological dimensions portrayed in regional folk lullabies where surrounding Nature – including both the positive and negative characteristics of Nature - thrives alongside human communities. Within the nature-oriented traditions represented in regional rhymes, the environmental politics of the Thai state reveal the intricate processes of Cultural-Natural intervention. The study further explores the link between matriarchy and nature-based embodiment as represented through female guardian spirits such as Mae Sue in lullabies and the perceptions of the Mother Nature. Here, the re-articulations of female spirits by Siamese/Thai scholars manifest the extent to which the central elites have imposed a coupling of femininity and the natural sphere, in the same way they have imposed a distinction between Cultural and Natural. The attempt to define the uniformity of national identity has resulted in the marginalisation of rural peoples’ cultural heterogeneity and has served to push eco-space into the background of the narratives, as is shown in central lullabies. Furthermore, the breach between humans and Nature has grown more intensely fraught, as seen in a case of Phra Rot Meri story in the Rathasena Jataka. By endorsing an intertextual analytical approach towards the Rathasena Jataka, this thesis uncovers the conflicts that exist between the central and the peripheral people in each transformation of the narratives. Within the aesthetic in each version of the Rathasena story, Nature is closely associated with the insurgency and violence that the state has inflicted on humans and nonhuman others. In light of these core vs periphery controversies, however, the case study of the tale of the sacred mountain of Jao Mae Nang Non reveals how the natural environment becomes a “contested terrain” of negotiation where rural people and Tai Yai ethnic people from the Shan states in Myanmar, who have migrated to the northernmost regions of Chiang Rai province, have redefined their cultural identity in relation to spiritual beliefs and practices towards the mountain. In place of considering folk oralities from a merely aesthetic perspective, as has been the norm in previous Thai literary studies, this thesis proposes a re-examination of their relationships to national and local identities, arguing for the significance of their contested terrain through environmental politics and ecological literary lenses. Folk lullabies and folk narratives do not solely express a harmonious cultural relationship with Nature in which trees, rocks, rivers, and caves, are represented inanimately. Rather, the natural space in Thai folk literature displays a rich diversity in terms of its spiritualistic dimensions, its features of insurgency, and of violence between the nation-state and the local people, the latter always seen as being unorthodox and on a par with untamed Nature. A core feature in the modernised nation-making process is one of taking control over the cultural beliefs and practices of local people and their relations to the wilderness. Instead of regarding culture as static, this study opens up new perspectives on understanding culture in the spheres of fluidity and hybridity. The realisation of how eco-space has been distorted and destroyed by the intervention of the state also has implications for future environmental consciousness as a result of which the natural environment might be made more secure

Postcolonial France?: the problematisation of Frenchness through North African immigration: a literary study of metropolitan novels 1980-2000

This thesis undertakes a literary study of contemporary novels published by metropolitan French writers between 1980 and 2000, and analyses their representation of the changing relationship between France and North Africa. It begins by analysing the specificity of the situation in France, arguing that this is largely due to the functioning of the French Republican tradition, which equates inassimilable difference with inferiority. Consequently, France’s former colonies represent a privileged site of the Republican relationship with difference. This is particularly acute in the case of Algeria, by virtue of its former status as an integral part of the French Republic, and as a result of the large population of Algerian origin resident within France. It therefore offers a useful perspective from which to assess the extent to which French identities and systems of representation have been problematised in the post-colonial era. Part One examines contemporary French attitudes towards the wider Maghreb, including examples from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Drawing on traditions which extend back to Montaigne and Montesquieu, it considers contemporary updating of Orientalist traditions within which French writers have explored other countries as seen from the Hexagon. Part Two concerns the singularity of Algeria’s relationship with France. By focusing on a case-study – representations of the Paris massacre of 17 October 1961 – the thesis draws wider conclusions about the way in which attitudes to the Algerian War are changing, and the key role potentially played by literary and other artistic representation. The final chapter looks at recollections of life in Algeria in the work of two women writers, Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous. It concludes that their early experience there of conflict and otherness was fundamental in shaping the development of their writing project, and that their literary memories destabilise notions of a unified ‘Frenchness’

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Infrapolitics: The Political Life of Infrastructure in a Myanmar Economic Zone

In Myanmar’s southern borderlands, the Dawei special economic zone (SEZ) is one of the world’s most ambitious infrastructure projects. With strong backing from the Thai government and private sector, the project includes plans for a deep-sea port, a vast petrochemical estate, an industrial zone, a dam and two reservoirs, dual oil and gas pipelines, and road and rail links to the Thai border. Yet in 2013, the Myanmar government suspended the SEZ project following limited investment, as well as sustained criticism of the project’s social and environmental impacts. Based on fieldwork conducted mainly over 18 months from 2016-2018, this dissertation follows the political activity and ideas that coalesced around the project—in Dawei town and the villages of the SEZ project areas—as rumors swirled that the project would resume. Against the backdrop of Myanmar’s reform period in the 2010s, I bring together a set of changing material conditions and a series of political projects, locating the political life of infrastructure at that dynamic intersection. This dissertation turns around three central findings. First, the outstanding political fact in Dawei is one of fragmentation over time, principally between town-based youth-led organizations and villagers living in the SEZ project areas. Although condemnation of the project was once widely shared, the period of suspension led many villagers to wish for the project to resume. This fragmentation leads me away from an a priori relational thematization of infrastructure. This theme prevails not only in anthropology’s turn to infrastructure but also in Marxist geography and science and technology studies. Second, I identify two political trajectories, one secular-universal, the other situational-differential. One criticizes the SEZ project through appeals to liberal values, calling for greater transparency, accountability, and local participation. The other sees in the SEZ project a promise of material progress and distributional gain: employment opportunities, financial compensation, better basic infrastructure. These trajectories present less a binary than a set of contingent tendencies that sometimes overlap. Both operate within a normative commitment to development; neither partakes of the rebellious or evasive repertoires of peasant politics past. Third, I argue that this fractured political landscape corresponds to a contradiction at the heart of postcolonial capitalism: between shared desires for developmental progress—a hegemonic complex that drives primitive accumulation onwards—and the splintering force of the accumulation process, which creates a heterogeneous material terrain. Thus, I trace and draw out the political implications of a differentiating accumulation process, tracking how a range of political subjects navigate an uneven landscape as the project’s return loomed. I suggest that the political activities and ideas I find in Dawei offer provisional answers to a pressing impasse: the need for new knowledge and new politics now that earlier promises of capitalist transition—from the farm to the factory, agriculture to industry—no longer hold. I find that for many of my interlocutors, the promise of developmental time remains, even if the absorptive, incorporative notion of capitalist transition does not. The forms and figures of the political in Dawei are not particularly hopeful or optimistic, nor radical or emancipatory. On the contrary, they inhabit and index a time-space out of joint, a difficult political present unmoored from past certainties. In a place supposed to exemplify the transition from farm to factory, I capture instead an elliptical present of incomplete structures and abandoned sites, horizons receding and beginnings fading from memory. Long on hold, the SEZ project has all the presence of a dream. It is now a kind of fantasy, unreal. For many, it is also an aspiration, unmet

The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway; Volumes I-IV

This grammar is based on extensive fieldwork, published and unpublished lore, and recent as well as older recordings, particularly those held in the archives of Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann and Raidió na Gaeltachta. These sources provide a picture of extensive variation and change across the six generations born between 1850 and 2000. The grammar draws on several branches of linguistics: descriptive and historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It is the most comprehensive treatment of any variety of Irish. Volume I provides an introduction and chapters on historical phonology, sandhi and nominal morphology. Volume II describes plural noun morphology, the verb and pronominals. Volume III contains chapters on prepositions, functors, initial mutations, higher register, borrowings and language contact, and onomastics. Volume IV presents transcriptions and a CD containing recordings of a slection of speakers across the generations. The final volume also contains a vocabulary, bibliography and four indexes

The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway; Volumes I-IV

This grammar is based on extensive fieldwork, published and unpublished lore, and recent as well as older recordings, particularly those held in the archives of Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann and Raidió na Gaeltachta. These sources provide a picture of extensive variation and change across the six generations born between 1850 and 2000. The grammar draws on several branches of linguistics: descriptive and historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It is the most comprehensive treatment of any variety of Irish. Volume I provides an introduction and chapters on historical phonology, sandhi and nominal morphology. Volume II describes plural noun morphology, the verb and pronominals. Volume III contains chapters on prepositions, functors, initial mutations, higher register, borrowings and language contact, and onomastics. Volume IV presents transcriptions and a CD containing recordings of a slection of speakers across the generations. The final volume also contains a vocabulary, bibliography and four indexes