[ Southeast Asia Sessions, Table of Contents ]
[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Session 122: Permeable Borders: Migrants, Refugees and the Re-configuration of "Thailand"
Organizer and Chair: Charles F. Keyes, University of Washington
Discussant: Aaron M. Stern, University of Michigan
In November 2003 the Thai government announced that "undocumented migrant workers had sixty days to register with the government or face arrest and deportation". This order was directed primarily at the over one-million Burmese "undocumented migrants" living in Thailand. At the same time that the Thai government granted permits to legal guestworkers from Burma to work in factories along the border between Thailand and Burma, hundreds of thousands of citizens of Thailand traveled abroad to work for extended periods, to meet the demands of an international sex trade, or to resettle permanently.
Although governments in Thailand in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century sought to make the borders of the state correspond with the boundaries surrounding a people who made up the Thai nation, the borders of modern Thailand have always been permeable. In the late 19th and early 20th century, millions of people from southeastern China migrated temporarily or permanently to Thailand. But today, Thailand’s borders remain permeable as much for citizens who seek to find employment or new lives in other countries as it does for those from other countries who seek to migrate into the country.
The papers presented at this panel each explore particular cases of the crossing of Thailand’s borders. Together these papers contribute to an understanding of how new flows of migrants and refugees across the borders of Thailand are today laying the foundations for another re-configuration of the Thai nation.
Re-Imagining Nation: Women’s Rights and the Transnational Movement of Shan Women in Thailand and Burma
Pinkaew Laungramsri, Chiang Mai University
This paper explores the relationship between nation-state and transnational women’s practice. It addresses the way in which transnational networks allow the possibility for negotiation between national, local, and women’s identities. By employing the feminist critique of nationalism, the paper explores the relationship between women and nation within the Shan women’s movement in Thailand, particularly the international campaign to stop the systematic rape of Shan women by Burmese soldiers. The paper argues that although increasing intergovernmental cooperation has generated a transnational economy which has redefined the territorial power of nation-states, the authoritative power of nationalism remains at play and has deepened the suppression and silencing of the transnational subjectivity of women.
The Shan women’s movement thus represents an attempt to transform the constricted interstice between women and nation into a meaningful site of contestation and subversive form of struggle beyond the confinement of territorialized nation-state. By presenting this issue as its own form of politics, the transnational women’s network has brought women’s rights and thus the international community into the national and local contexts of ethnic conflict and sexual abuse. It is this transnational networking and interconnection that help to make possible the unmaking and remaking of the notion and practice of the nation in relation to gender differentiation.
Narratives of Border-Crossing: Thai Migrant Workers in the Making of Singapore’s Underworld
Pattana Kitiarsa, National University of Singapore
This paper deals with the transborder mobility and fixity of Thai migrant workers in Singapore. While a number of recently published works on the anthropology and sociology of borders and transnationality argue for the central roles of nations, states, or transnational institutions in defining and redefining borders and frontiers of identity, I take a contradictory stance by paying more attention to the agencies of individual border-crossing people. I consider unskilled migrant workers, both legal and illegal, documented and undocumented, sojourning from the rural villages of the Thai countryside in search of their hard-earned wages in Singapore’s construction industries, as one of important means and forms of international border crossing.
I argue that, while the states have maintained their economic, political, and jural authorities and controls over foreign workers, their power structures do not prevent Thai migrant workers from negotiating and defining their own transborder identities. They create "betwixt and between" spaces to sustain the multiple processes of identity making, negotiating, and experiencing for mostly discriminated and marginalized workers. Indeed, Thai migrant workers have produced and reproduced their temporal diasporic ethnocultural, nationalist, and gender identities through their symbolic and sociocultural narratives of border-crossing in their day-to-day lives away from home.
This paper will draw on primary and secondary sources, which have been gathered through in-depth ethnographic studies in Singapore during the author’s postdoctoral fellowship tenure at the Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
Women and Transnational Migration: Voices of "Mia-Farang" from Rural Northeastern Thailand
Ratana Boonmathya, Mahidol University
This paper argues that mia-farang, referring to Thai women from northeastern Thailand who marry Western men, retain a strong sense of belonging and connection to their original homes no matter where they are currently residing. Through transnational migratory experiences, these women have created a social space where traditions, norms and practices of gender roles and relations, marriage, and sexuality are exposed to inquiry and negotiation.
Villagers from northeastern Thailand have long engaged in significant migration both within Thailand and across the boundaries of the country. Many have migrated abroad due to marriage while others want to seek better educational opportunities and enhance their learning experiences. Thousands of women in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia have experienced women’s trafficking in the international sex trades.
In recent years there has been a marked increase in mia-farang. In some northeastern Thai villages it is reported that as many as one-third of families have members who have opted for Western husbands.
This paper aims to provide an inclusive narrative of mia-farang’s transnational migratory life experiences with special reference to their social relations and connections with family and friends at their original homes, their social and cultural adjustment abroad, and their perceptions and practices related to changing gender roles, marriage, and sexuality. Data is drawn from research in villages in which a large number of women have become mia-farang.