The Owners of the Map: motorcycle taxi drivers, mobility, and politics in Bangkok

This dissertation offers an ethnography of motorcycle taxi drivers: Bangkok's most important and informal network of everyday mobility. Drawing on over eight years of experience in the region, six months of archival research, and 24 months of fieldwork, I analyze how the drivers, mostly male rural migrants, negotiate their presence in the city through spatial expertise, bodily practices, and social relations. Their physical mobility through traffic, I argue, shapes their ability to find unexplored routes in the social, economic, and political landscapes of the city and to create paths for action where other urban dwellers see a traffic jam or a political gridlock. My narrative builds up to the role of these drivers in the Red Shirt protests that culminated in May 2010 and analyzes how their practices as transportation and delivery providers shape their role in political uprisings and urban guerilla confrontations. My main finding is that when the everyday life of the city breaks down the drivers take advantage of their position in urban circuits of exchange to emerge as central political actors in contemporary Bangkok by blocking, slowing down, or filtering the circulation of people, goods, and information which they normally facilitate. Owners of the Map proposes an alternative view of contemporary urbanism in which the city is constructed day after day through the work of connection and mediation, its frictions and failures, the tactics adopted to resist them, as well as the political tensions that emerge from these struggles.Anthropolog

Excerpts from The King of Bangkok

This is an excerpt from The King of Bangkok. Originally appearing in Chapter 3, the section we present is a flashback that follows the book’s protagonist, Nok, on his journey to the island of Koh Pha-Ngan in the Gulf of Thailand. Nok has secured work on a construction site there during the height of the country’s economic boom. The section demonstrates how opportunity and precarity, excitement and devastation are fundamental forces animating and shaping the experiences of migrant workers like Nok

The Possibilities of Graphic Ethnography: An Interview with Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri and Chiara Natalucci

Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri, and Chiara Natalucci are the team behind the new graphic ethnography The King of Bangkok (University of Toronto Press 2021). The King of Bangkok tells the story of Nok, an urban migrant from Thailand’s northeastern region as he moves back and forth from his home village and attempts to build a life in the country’s capital across periods of massive economic growth and collapse and periods of democratic expansion, state violence, and political closure. Structured around a series of flashbacks, The King of Bangkok shows how these historical events shaped Nok’s life and how Nok’s life came to shape those events. The book was originally published in Italian (Add Editore, 2019) and was subsequently translated into Thai as Taa Sawaang (Awakening, อ่านอิตาลี 2020). In this interview we ask Claudio, Sara, and Chiara about their experience creating this text, its relationship with more traditional ethnographic genres of writing, and the effects their project has had in Thailand. We are delighted to feature a small section of the book following the interview

Designing Politics: the limits of design

What are the limits of design in addressing the political and/or when has design not been enough? A collection of thought pieces written by Theatrum Mundi’s Designing Politics Working Group following a workshop at the Villa Vassilieff in Paris on 25th May 2016. This working group is supported by the Global Cities Chair at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris

Beyond vernacular and metropolitan concepts: Good governance, translation and word coinage in Thailand

This article explores the emergence and transformation of the concept of good governance in contemporary Thailand after the 1997 economic crisis to reveal how it morphed from a technocratic category to a moral one, central to conservative and anti-democratic discourses in the country. By reconstructing historical and contemporary debates over word coinage and translation in Thailand, this article questions the easy distinctions between “metropolitan” and “vernacular” concepts. In so doing, I propose to carve a new space for an ethnographically grounded political anthropology that neither assumes a flattened and universal conception of political categories—such as state, power, or government—nor seeks refuge into pristine “vernacular concepts” but rather explores the processes through which specific people, organizations, and institutions are constantly reworking and diffusing concepts on multiple scales while aligning, challenging, or creating “global hierarchies of value,” in the plural, along which those concepts are positioned

Shifting informalities: Motorcycle taxis, ride-hailing apps, and urban mobility in Bangkok

This article reconstructs the shifting uses of local concepts of “informality“ (nǭk rabop) over the last 35 years in the streets of Bangkok, with a particular attention to the birth of the motorcycle taxi business in the 1980s, its development after the 1997 economic crisis, and its transformation since the arrival of ride-hailing apps in 2016. Based on more than 10 years of qualitative and quantitative research with motorcycle taxi drivers, state officials, city planners and everyday users in Bangkok, this archaeology of informality expand on contemporary theorizations of informality as a logic of planning, a heuristic device, and a practice. I do so by focusing on the highly relational, contingent, and ultimately contested nature of informality, the role of non-state actors in shaping it and, the performative power of informality as a categorical label. In this sense, I propose a double conceptualization of informality: on one side as an ever-shifting relationship between established and codified practices (whether regarding land, labor, property rights, or everyday actions), a governmental and legal system, and people who control and interact with these practices; on the other, as a label, often deployed tactically by actors trying to make sense and make do with the world around them. In this duality between a shifting set of relationships and an almost intuitive and referential label that allow for categorical assessments resides, I show, the central efficacy of “informality” as a concept good to think with, to govern with, and to resist with.Published versio

Dialogues: The King of Bangkok: A collaborative graphic novel

Published versio