Disciplining the Heart: Love, School, and Growing up Karen in Mae Hong Son
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Disciplining the Heart: Love, School, and Growing Up Karen in Mae Hong Son Dayne Corey O’Meara A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. February 2020 © Copyright by Dayne O’Meara 2020 All rights reserved Statement of Originality This thesis is the original work of the author. All sources used and assistance obtained have been acknowledged. Dayne O’Meara February 2020 ii Acknowledgements I am indebted to a number of people who have helped me over not only the four years of working on this project but also my journey to anthropology before that. The first person I would like to thank has not been directly involved in this thesis but is the person I credit with starting me down this path. She continues to be a valued friend and support. Tanya King was one of my undergraduate lecturers at Deakin University in Geelong, and she supervised my Honours thesis. I entered her introduction to anthropology class in 2009 as a relatively close-minded student. After a few weeks, my whole outlook on the world changed dramatically. My motivations for learning about other peoples shifted, and my passion for the discipline of anthropology was born. The others who taught me at Deakin also influenced me greatly to reach this point. Thanks also to Rohan Bastin, Roland Kapferer, and Richard Sutcliffe for guiding me through anthropology from 2009–2012. After relocating to the Australian National University in Canberra for postgraduate studies, I met Ajarn Chintana Sandilands, to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude for her patience, passion, and tenacity. Ajarn Chintana will for evermore be my Thai teacher, and I am grateful that her lessons never failed to connect language to real lived situations and matters important to Thai people from all walks of life. A number of other scholars have directly offered assistance with my writing or research since I began at ANU. I would like to especially thank Nick Cheesman, Nicholas Farrelly, Graham Fordham, Patrick Guinness, Christine Helliwell, Kirin Narayan, Yasmine Musharbash, Caroline Schuster, Philip Taylor, Matt Tomlinson, and Andrew Walker for the assistance they have provided throughout my journey. Some were more present near the beginning, some near the end, and some the whole way through. I appreciate you all, including anyone else who I have forgotten to mention. I would like to especially thank the chair of my supervisory panel, Jane Ferguson, for never failing to believe in me and my project. Your encouragement and advice have made all the difference to keeping me on track through what has been a tumultuous few years in our school. I would also like to thank Ajarn Amporn Jirattikorn at Chiang Mai University for her assistance in Thailand during the period of my fieldwork. I would like to thank the Australian government for financially supporting my research through an Australian Government Research Training Program Stipend Scholarship and Fee- Offset Scholarship. I give further thanks to The Australian National University’s School of Culture, History and Language for access to fieldwork funding and for awarding me the Marie Reay Prize in 2017 to assist with additional fieldwork expenses. My thanks also to the Kingdom of Thailand and the National Research Council of Thailand for approving my fieldwork. I need to both thank and apologise to my friends and family. Working on my PhD has taken priority over my social life for the past few years. I have valued having a close cohort of iii fellow PhD students with me at ANU, and I wish them all the best as they begin their post-PhD lives or continue to work on their own theses. I wish I had had more time to return home and visit my friends in Victoria. Please know that I have not forgotten about any of you, and I promise to visit again soon. Thank you to my parents and siblings. I have always felt like all of you are by my side. To my partner, Lookkaew, thank you for your love, patience, and support. I was already working on this project when we met, and so there has never been a single day in our relationship until now that you have not had to share me with my thesis to some extent. The most joyous part of reaching the end of this project is that we can finally get to work beginning our future together. I would also like to express my thanks to you for helping me to translate various things from Thai into English, helping me navigate Thai bureaucracy, and discussing thesis ideas with me at all hours of day and night. The final group of people to whom I express my deepest gratitude are the teachers, parents, and students who shared their lives with me while I lived at their school for a year conducting my research. I am certain I was at times a burden, but nobody ever treated me like I was. My thesis deals with some difficult issues that not everybody in my fieldsite saw eye to eye on. I can only hope that I have captured that diversity of perspectives in my writing, but I of course acknowledge that no thesis can do justice to the complexity of lived reality. I have tended to side with the kids when writing about generational tensions, but this does not diminish the immense kindness I have been shown by the adults in the community I refer to as Little Creek. Thank you all for the many meals and conversations we shared and for inviting me into your homes and classrooms. I shared close bonds with many of the students of all ages. Some were especially helpful in terms of the data they led me to, and others were simply wonderful company when I was alone and confused in a place that was initially strange to me. Thank you for waking me up in the morning, for watching movies and playing video games with me, for answering my many questions, and for taking an interest in my life as I took an interest in yours. To Tanchanok, thank you, and please keep on being you. iv Abstract The heart—jai—is a powerful metaphor in Thai language. To succeed at school, students in Thailand must tangjai rian—possess the right discipline, attitude, and ability to set their hearts toward learning and studying. This thesis documents the situated nuances of this everyday Thai concept as it is deployed in the context of a government school, within an upland Sgaw Karen community. Educational success is highly valued as cultural capital at the margins of Thai society, even while the institution of the school actively subjectifies upland groups as internal others—referred to in Thai as chao khao (hill tribes). As tangjai rian is presented as a potential path out of poverty, Karen teachers and parents are highly invested in policing students’ adherence to it as a moral ideal. This ethnography of a Thai government school analyses how Karen students engage with adult expectations of childhood to renegotiate the limits of tangjai rian and the meaning attached to one’s time at school. As Karen students reach adolescence and begin to pursue romance, their status as children who can tangjai rian is threatened. Inference of sexual activity signals a failure to tangjai rian, as focusing on schoolwork is framed by adults as impossible alongside a sexual relationship. This represents a moral failure, as tangjai rian is framed as an expression of love and gratitude towards teachers and parents both. At the heart of the thesis lies the extended case study of a female student who was expelled due to her alleged sexual activity. This exceptional event is used as an entry point to the broader moral discourse about love and school that took place during the Thai school year of 2017. Drawing on social practice theory, this thesis considers how adolescent students reconcile their romantic and educational pursuits through ‘serious play’ in ‘figured worlds’— students jointly author their own moral worlds where they can playfully enact their own understandings of ideas like tangjai rian according to new rules. The dominant figured world of the school frames teenage romance as only acceptable if it serves to directly support a student’s efforts to tangjai rian. The key difference in the figured worlds of adolescent students is that romance and tangjai rian are both framed as integral features of the school experience alongside one another. Schooling in Thailand is an institutional project of ethnonational belonging in which Karen students are set up to fail. At the same time as they learn what Thainess looks like, Karen students are reminded that its embodiment is unattainable for those readily identifiable as belonging to a ‘hill tribe’. By complementing their endeavours to tangjai rian with the pursuit of love, the secondary students at this school add value to their experience of an institution that, realistically, will deliver its promised outcomes to a very small number of those who pass through it. Successfully pursuing love and education simultaneously is made possible by the cultural innovations of children’s serious play. v Notes on Transliteration and Transcription Throughout the thesis I make reference to a number of words and phrases in both Thai and Sgaw Karen languages. Where Thai authors are referenced, I maintain preferred spellings of their names wherever possible, and I follow the Thai referencing style of citing Thai authors by their first name and alphabetising their works by first name in my reference list. All names of research participants throughout the thesis are Thai pseudonyms, and I have chosen commonly used spellings for them.