Working Towards the Monarchy and its Discontents: Anti-royal Graffiti in Downtown Bangkok

Khmer Potent Places:Pāramīand the Localisation of Buddhism and Monarchy in Cambodia

“…The potency and subsequent power of the kings stemming from their commitment to the protection of the Sangha and their ability to rule following the Dharma is known in Cambodia and Thailand as pāramī. As I have shown in this case study, places associated with the monarchy and Buddhism act as sources of paramī; a fact which has been observed through various configurations but rather obliquely by other authors for Thailand (Johnson 2011;Ünaldi 2014) and Cambodia (Bertrand 2001). Although land guardian spirits merged in their specifically shaped natural environment also produce similar energy, they have a lower ranking vis-à-vis Buddhist deities and Buddhism as a whole and are therefore attributed an energy with a slightly different name, paramī.…”

Mourning a Late King through Portraiture: Articulations of the Sacred and Profane in the Primate City of Bangkok

“…Bangkok’s role was thus based on enabling a royal transcendence in the libidinal materialism of the area, set off not by monks, but ironically by its venues of conspicuous consumption. Thus, in a dreamscape where a surfeit of goods signifies the good life, the presence of mourning portraits honoring Rama IX makes it fertile ground for the population to conceptualize materiality, morality, and mortality together through what Thongchai Winichakul describes as ‘royal visualscapes’ (cited in Ünaldi, 2014: 380). To illuminate such a process requires us to view the city of Bangkok as a protagonist and subject.…”

“…Furthermore, he witnessed the country’s return to civilian rule in the early 21st century, along with the paroxysms of periodic grassroots protests that spanned the period. Yet this narrative is made possible by the powerful pro-royal classes of Thai society ‘working towards the monarchy,’ a process where re-enchantments of the monarchy’s ‘sacred charisma’ are in turn ‘rewarded with social distinction and material benefits’ (Ünaldi, 2014: 382). As a heuristic device, the notion of working toward the monarchy allows observers a larger panorama of royalist maneuverings that bring ‘broader structures into focus…beyond clear-cut networks and the immediate royal circle as units of analysis’ (Ünaldi, 2014: 383).…”

“…For Ünaldi, working towards the monarchy is a process by which Bangkok’s elites legitimize their class accumulation of material, cultural, and social capital, but only to the extent that the monarchy’s ‘sacred charisma can be efficiently reproduced’ in ways that validate their class stratum (Ünaldi, 2014: 382). This perspective follows from Fong’s (2009) illumination of a parallel process set into motion decades earlier under Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat who during the late 1950s and 1960s orchestrated the exodus of the king from his palace into the hinterland of the country, an activity deliberately curtailed under the previous ruler, the anti-royal Field Marshal Phibun Songkram.…”

War of words

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AbstractThai grassroots activists known as 'redshirts' (broadly aligned with former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra) have been characterized accordingly to their socio-economic profile, but despite pioneering works such as Buchanan (2013), Cohen (2012) and Uenaldi (2014), there is still much to learn about how ordinary redshirts voice their political stances. This paper is based on a linguistic approach to discourse analysis and builds on Fairclough's (2003) arguments concerning the ways in which speakers use intertextuality and assumption to construct social and political difference and consensus.

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