Wait and the Sky Will Change: Anticipation and Revolution in Northeastern Thailand

In: American anthropologist: AA, Band 122, Heft 4, S. 840-851

Abstract

ABSTRACT"Wait, and the sky will change its color" is a saying that, in Thai, points toward a future that will erase the unbearable present. But what does it mean to wait? In Northeastern Thailand, I explore this experience of holding the present in tension with an uncertain future via examples drawn from religious upheaval, political revolution, and the lives of migrant workers. Waiting on that which never comes, in this context, is neither nihilism nor escapism, but allows for the opening a space of fantasy—the imaginative horizon that allows a rethinking of the everyday. [anticipation, millenarianism, imagination, waiting, migrant labor, Thailand]