People At The Rim: A Study Of Border Constructions, Ethnicity And Nationalism In A Thai Border Village

By using key informant interviews and participant observation as main data-collecting techniques, my proposed research has been conducted intensively in Thailand on displaced Shan people (who prefer calling themselves ‘Tai’), whose ancestors had illegally migrated from different regions in Shan States of the Union of Myanmar. A field research site is a multi-ethnic village, once occupied by a notorious drug warlord, close to the Thailand-Myanmar border in Chiang Rai, the northernmost province of the country.

Despite the fact that they have settled in the area for nearly 3 decades, most Tais, who are apparently inferior to Chinese and hill-tribes people in terms of political and socioeconomic status, have not been granted Thai citizenship yet. The government, however, attempts to solve the problem by considering giving citizenship on a case-by-case basis to their descendants born in the country, and by allowing these children to have compulsory education. For the Tais crossing the border to the Thai Kingdom before March 9, 1976, they will be registered as ‘displaced people having Burmese citizenship’, and have rights to apply for Thai citizenship. Because of an inefficient registration system as well as unskillful local officials, the citizenship-granting process is considerably delayed. As a result, the lack of citizenship is the most serious problem to the Tais in the research site, and it is still a controversial issue in Thailand.

Existing in a zone bounded by their Burmese-claimed homeland where they left behind on one hand, and by Thai-influenced sociopolitical context where they have been marginalised in many ways on the other, leads to a question of their ethnic identity assertion and construction in interacting with fellow Tais on the both sides of the border, more powerful ethnic groups, including the Thai state in particular.

Hopefully, this research would help to improve relations and mutual understanding between ethnic people in borderlands and state authorities, and on a broader level to address questions of cultural diversity and nationalism in Thailand. Moreover, this research would contribute to the development of anthropology of borders, both in an international context and, especially, in Thailand where the anthropology of borders is still in its early phase.

Jaggapan Cadchumsang

Department of Anthropology

University of Toronto