Suchergebnisse

When the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest in "Black May," 1992, it initiated an unprecedented period in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, and the democracy movement had more latitude than ever before in Thailand's history, gaining an institutional presence previously unseen. This extraordinary moment created a unique opportunity for the human rights movement to emerge, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand. Don F. Selby examines this era of Thai political history to determine how and why the time was ripe for such developments. By placing greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological concern, he focuses on the understandings that social actors draw from human rights struggles. He concludes that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engaged, contested, or reworked debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure; political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavowed egalitarian movements; and traditional standards of social stratification and face-saving practices. In this way, human rights ideals in Thailand emerge less from global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics

When the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest in "Black May," 1992, it initiated an unprecedented period in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, and the democracy movement had more latitude than ever before in Thailand's history, gaining an institutional presence previously unseen. This extraordinary moment created a unique opportunity for the human rights movement to emerge, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand.Don F. Selby examines this era of Thai political history to determine how and why the time was ripe for such developments. By placing greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological concern, he focuses on the understandings that social actors draw from human rights struggles. He concludes that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engaged, contested, or reworked debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure; political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavowed egalitarian movements; and traditional standards of social stratification and face-saving practices. In this way, human rights ideals in Thailand emerge less from global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics.

Stanley Cavell took up anthropological works for consideration in a way that we might characterize as staccato, and has informed anthropological work in increasing and increasingly sustained ways. As these works show, it is difficult to lift, so to speak, a single concept—say, the ordinary—out of Cavell's work, and treat it as if it were discrete, unentangled with neighboring concepts like language, or the uncanny, or nextness, to suggest only a few candidates. Still, what I will do here is highlight the fertility of Cavell's elaboration on Wittgenstein's 'form of life' for my ethnographic work on human rights in Thailand. I set out to show that were we to attend only to the register of cultural forms (more or less specifiable sets of customs, traditions, norms, values, habituated practices), as human rights debates that hew to cultural relativisim or 'Asian values' do, we would develop a partial view of how human rights emerged in the progressive, democratic moment surrounding and following the 1997 Thai constitution. More narrowly, the case I make, the case that one cannot make if one only takes form of life in the conventional sense of describing only social conventions, is that a central line of thought in the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand about what human rights were turned not on the nature of rights, but on a picture of the human. The picture at issue was one importantly inscribed within a certain, controversial school of Buddhist thinking. This paper will examine specific contests within Buddhism over what a human being is, with the particular claims to rights that flow from different pictures of the human. That is, it will take these debates, as they appeared in struggles over human rights, as pitching irreconcilable notions of the human form of life against one another. First, though, it is necessary to provide some orientation for readers unfamiliar with Thailand.