Constructing a Governing Rationale: Developing Lao Hmong Refugees at Wat Tham Krabok
AbstractIn this paper I argue that Thai discourses of modernization and development have been taken up by the leaders and other prominent monks at Wat Tham Krabok Buddhist Temple (WTK) in central Thailand's Saraburi Province and directed at governing a settlement of mostly Lao Hmong refugees that made their home on temple controlled land from the 1990s to 2000s. Though decoding the motivations on the part of WTK's leaders and other senior monks for allowing thousands of Hmong to settle on WTK controlled land is a complex process, viewing the story through the lens of development teaches new things about their overarching motivations for such an intervention. Furthermore, it allows several aspects of their governing rationale including attention to legibility, territoriality, infrastructural development to stand out and reveals that WTK's leaders enacted specific projects that appear to be directed at governing, reforming, and possibly modernizing the Hmong population at WTK. The styles of this intervention varied between the temples second and third abbots, Chamroon and Charoen, in their respective use of discursive versus material means of intervention. Considering these goals in concert with the history of material construction at the temple highlights how the material and discursive aspects of life at WTK are recursively connected to reinforce regimes of Hmong development toward an ideal of modernity that pays homage to symbols of Thai modernity and legitimizes WTK as a worthy Buddhist institution.Keywords: Hmong, Wat Tham Krabok, Thai Buddhism, ThailandIt could be argued that the way WTK leaders dealt with issues of WTK Hmong development in WTK space is simply a subset of broader governmentalities that occurred in Thai state space, and to some degree this is true; however, because WTK authorities held an uncharacteristically high degree of freedom from Thai government intervention, their programs for development were more autonomous and followed motivations somewhat distinct from broader discourses though they were informed by them. The leaders of WTK along with many of the lower level monks seemed to view the Hmong at the temple, as subjects to be reformed and developed. As hinted, this relationship is a rough microcosm to nation scale discourses and their resulting interventions that have surrounded Thailand's hill tribe "problem" since at least the 1950s (Gillogly 2004:119) This sense of reformist necessity can be seen in several aspects of the relationship between temple authorities and their Hmong guests, both WTK ideas about Hmong people and how those ideas influenced practice. Chief among them is WTK leaders' material construction projects and manipulation of politico spatial relationships including the maintenance of legible landscapes with somewhat strict territorial control, as well as the construction of physical symbols of Thai modernity for the Hmong to frequently see and become habituated to.1. Research Methods and BackgroundThis paper is based on two months of ethnographic fieldwork done in Thailand in May July 2012. My primary means of information gathering was interview and participant observation. A little over a month of my field work was spent living at WTK where I interviewed monks and lay residents of temple controlled land both Thai and Hmong. This included interviewing WTK's most prominent monks, including the fourth (and current) Abbot of the temple, Bounsong, and the four other most prominent monks at the temple Chian, Wichian (Tong) Wanchai, and Sayan.1 Most helpful to the project was Phra Santi who has been a monk at WTK since 1985 and has gained fluency in the Hmong language and an intimate knowledge of Hmong life and livelihood at WTK. Not only were his interviews invaluable, Santi spent the better part of a month leading me down the now abandoned trails of what was once WTK's Hmong village to help me reconstruct WTK's geographic history and it's Hmong experience.