Disciplining the Heart: Love, School, and Growing Up Karen in

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 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 University for her assistance in 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 . 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 ‘’. 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. When writing Thai, I generally adhere to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription for simplicity and consistency. This official system of transcription does not fully differentiate between all of the different sounds used in Thai and does not indicate tone, but it is quite straightforward for an English-speaking reader to get a basic idea of what a word might sound like. One modification I make to this system is to represent the consonant ‘จ’ using the letter ‘j’ in place of the standard ‘ch’. This is to avoid confusion with the ‘ช/ฉ’ consonants, which are also usually transcribed using ‘ch’ according to this system. The consonant I write with ‘j’ is frequently used throughout the thesis, as I analyse in-depth the terms jai (ใจ), tangjai rian (ตงั ใจเรยี น), and a number of other compound words containing the jai morpheme. I also include the original Thai spellings in parentheses the first time a word is used in a chapter, so that it remains possible for interested readers to correctly identify the exact words I am using. Sgaw Karen can be written using one of two main writing systems. One writing system is based on Burmese orthography and is more commonly used among Karen in and Protestant Karen communities in Thailand. The other writing system is based on roman orthography and is more commonly used among Catholic Karen communities in Thailand. In this thesis I use the romanised system, as outlined in the dictionary compiled by Father Joseph Seguinotte (2007). Sgaw Karen includes no final consonants, so the final written consonant in this writing system is not pronounced but simply used to indicate the tone and vowel length of a word.

vi Table of Contents Statement of Originality ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Abstract ...... v Notes on Transliteration and Transcription ...... vi List of Maps, Tables, and Figures ...... ix Chapter 1 – Introduction ...... 1 Theoretical Framework ...... 4 Issues and Setting: The Karen in Thailand, Educational Inequalities, and Early Marriage .. 8 The Primary Fieldsite: Little Creek School and Village ...... 14 Research Participants ...... 17 Physical Layout of the School ...... 20 Other Sites of Data Collection ...... 24 Thesis Outline ...... 25 Chapter 2 – Teacher, Friend, Researcher, Other: Methodology, Role Negotiation, and Ethical Considerations ...... 30 Methodological Approach: Working with Children ...... 31 Logistics of Entering and Exiting the Field ...... 35 Participating as Teacher-Researcher: Classroom Observation ...... 39 Interviews and Conversation: Setting Appropriate Boundaries ...... 41 Participating as Friend-Researcher: Games, Banter, and Visual Media ...... 43 Ethnography of Social Media ...... 46 Conclusion ...... 48 Chapter 3 – In and Out of Classrooms: Locating Students in Institutional and Gendered Space ...... 51 The School as Institutional Space ...... 53 Morning and Afternoon Assemblies ...... 55 Schooling and ‘Thainess’ ...... 58 Upland Teachers Making Thai Citizens ...... 63 Playing Games: Engaging with Institutional Space ...... 66 An Introduction to Games at Little Creek School ...... 66 Claiming Classrooms: Reflections on Fun ...... 69 Conclusion ...... 73

vii Chapter 4 – Disciplining the Heart to Be a ‘Good Student’: The Policing of an Ideological Concept (Tangjai Rian) ...... 76 Defining an Ideological Concept: Tangjai Rian ...... 78 Managing Expectations: Stories of Success and Failure in the Classroom ...... 82 Samroeng ...... 83 Narirat ...... 87 Female Sexuality as Antithetical to Tangjai Rian ...... 89 Somjai ...... 89 ‘Beautiful’ Girls as Risk and At Risk ...... 95 Conclusion ...... 101 Chapter 5 – Love is Beautiful: Learning about Love at School ...... 104 Connections between Love and the Heart in Thai Language ...... 105 Sex Education at Little Creek School: A Warning against Illicit Love ...... 108 Sacrifice and Gratitude: The ‘Beauty’ of Teacher-Student and Parent-Child Love ...... 117 Conclusion ...... 124 Chapter 6 – Close Facebook, Time to Study: Social Media in Teenage Courting and Relationships ...... 127 Accessing Social Media and Understanding the Facebook Interface ...... 131 Playing Facebook: Managing Those Who Meddle ...... 137 Conclusion ...... 146 Chapter 7 – School is Spelled L-O-V-E: Balancing Figured Worlds ...... 149 Managing Moral Panics ...... 151 When Girls Wander: Midnight Excursions and ‘Sniff Kisses’ ...... 155 Parodying School Romance: A School Play about a Beautiful Girl ...... 164 Conclusion ...... 173 Chapter 8 – Conclusion: Lighting Candles in the Rain ...... 176 We Have to Endure: Being a Thai-Karen Student in Upland Mae Hong Son ...... 178 Disciplining the Heart ...... 181 Succeeding at Love while Studying: Serious Play in Figured Worlds ...... 182 Saying Goodbye: Implications and Further Questions ...... 185 References ...... 190

viii List of Maps, Tables, and Figures

Map 1.1 Building layout of Little Creek School...... 21

Table 1.1 Little Creek School map key...... 20 Table 5.1 ‘Love’ survey responses...... 109 Table 5.2 Summary of student life skills presentations...... 114

Figure 1.1 Main entrance to Little Creek School. Building at centre of image shows an example of the lower floor being below ground level relative to main building entrance. Lower building in bottom left corner shows relative height of mathayom area (photo supplied by Little Creek School)...... 22 Figure 1.2 Overhead shot of prathom area, taken from the bottled water facility at the edge of the boys’ dormitories...... 22 Figure 1.3 Overhead shot of prathom area, taken from veranda in front of the P6 classroom upstairs...... 22 Figure 1.4 The mathayom classrooms...... 23 Figure 1.5 Gardening along the slope in the mathayom area, overlooking some of the teachers’ dormitories (photo supplied by Little Creek School)...... 23 Figure 1.6 Lining up for dinner outside the student dining room...... 24 Figure 1.7 Cleaning in the student kitchen (photo supplied by Little Creek School)...... 24 Figure 2.1 Participating as a teacher in a wai khru ceremony (photo supplied by Little Creek School)...... 40 Figure 2.2 Writing on a noticeboard while P2 student films and photographs. Text at top teases that 'Dayne loves Li [another teacher].' A similar statement about two students is at the bottom...... 45 Figure 2.3 Photographer of our noticeboard graffiti takes a partial self-portrait, capturing anthropologist in the background...... 45 Figure 3.1 A P2 student sits in the doorway to the classroom while finishing her work. Some of her friends are playing outside...... 52 Figure 3.2 Posing with the national flag...... 55 Figure 3.3 Posing with the royal flag...... 55 Figure 3.4 Sweeping loose dirt from a dirt road near the P2 classroom...... 57 Figure 3.5 A Buddhist monk leading students in meditation...... 60 Figure 3.6 Students meditating during a Buddhist morality camp on Christmas Day...... 60 Figure 3.7 Layout of the P2 classroom...... 61 Figure 3.8 Layout of the M3 classroom...... 61 Figure 3.9 A teacher at work in the classroom...... 64 Figure 3.10 A teacher sitting with students on sports day...... 64 Figure 3.11 A group of P2 girls playing elastics (photo taken by P2 student)...... 68 Figure 4.1 P2 at the end of class (photo taken by P2 student)...... 85 Figure 4.2 M3 students relaxing in the school car following an English competition in Mae Sariang...... 88 Figure 4.3 Somjai and Bunmi on their wedding day...... 92 Figure 4.4 A photograph posted by Patcharee on the morning of her wedding, showing her middle finger to the camera. Her caption reads, ‘I’m ready’...... 100

ix Figure 5.1 Survey question about ‘love’, distributed to students by teachers...... 109 Figure 5.2 'Dao's Story', in Thai and English...... 112 Figure 5.3 'Duean's Story', in Thai and English...... 113 Figure 5.4 Students performing wai khru on 'Teacher's Day'...... 120 Figure 5.5 Wrist-tying ceremony for graduation of anuban 2, P6, and, M3 classes (photo supplied by Little Creek School)...... 120 Figure 5.6 The song, ‘My School’, performed by M3 students at Children's Day (Pongsit 2008)...... 122 Figure 6.1 Mathayom students chatting in the back of a teacher's car...... 128 Figure 6.2 Prathom students watching online videos on a smartphone (photo taken by P2 student)...... 132 Figure 6.3 Too many friend requests, at 757. Caption reads, ‘#Too many? Only accepting people that I know. No offense.’ Post includes screenshot of friend request page, which is usually only visible to the account owner...... 135 Figure 6.4 Vouching for others. Comment reads, ‘You should go ahead and accept [name]. You can trust him.’ The second sentence is knowingly spelled incorrectly, following common online convention. One vowel is completely omitted while another is written using alternative characters representing the same sound...... 135 Figure 6.5 An M2 girl's post expressing frustration with a particular boy who has been annoying her. The ‘mood’ at the top reads, ‘sick of people like this’. A classmate comments, ‘What's happened this time?’ ...... 137 Figure 6.6 Post berating someone for not minding their own business. The second profile tagged in the post belongs to the friend that the poster is defending...... 140 Figure 6.7 Post featuring screenshot from private message conversation. Censoring in red added by me, while censoring in white included by the student in original post. Caption from the student reads, ‘Hahaha #Don’t know what to say next. Not tagging you. You can see for yourself.’ The conversation shared is a boy explaining to a girl that he has not been chatting to her much lately due to an ongoing dispute with her best friend...... 141 Figure 6.8 ‘Your account has been temporarily locked. We have locked your account due to a recent login attempt from an unknown location. Please help us to confirm it was you who was trying to log in.’ ...... 144 Figure 6.9 ‘You have not been able to confirm your identity. Sorry, we cannot confirm your identity with that information. You may try again later.’ ...... 144 Figure 6.10 Patcharee being sardonically polite...... 146 Figure 6.11 Patcharee cursing...... 146 Figure 7.1 A group of M1–M3 students being reprimanded over mobile phones and other banned objects recently confiscated...... 153 Figure 7.2 Teachers, mothers, and students watch Mother's Day performances from each year level...... 164 Figure 7.3 A classroom scene from the M3 Mother's Day performance...... 165 Figure 7.4 The breakup scene from the M3 Mother's Day performance...... 168 Figure 7.5 A scene from the M2 Mother's Day performance, showing the range of costumes used...... 171

x Chapter 1 – Introduction

Chonticha, one of the eight-year-old dormitory students, saw me sitting alone and shot a big smile my way as she sat down next to me with her blanket. It was the night before National Children’s Day, and so the kids were up much later than usual. They were either helping set up or watching final rehearsals for the following day’s performances. I was doing the latter. We sat in empty rows of chairs that had been moved from the classrooms out to the schoolyard. I saw her teeth chattering through her smile. ‘Cold night, huh? I’m wearing about four layers of clothing’, I said. She laughed at how rugged up I was. ‘Yeah, I only have this one jumper, so I need a blanket’, she replied. ‘It’s so much colder here than at home.’ I was confused at first because I thought she was simply referring to the weather, but her village was only a few kilometres away. Surely the weather there was the same? She explained further. ‘Well, at home I’d just go lie under lots of warm blankets and watch TV. But I can’t do that while I’m here at school. I have responsibilities. I’ve got things I need to do in the evening.’ ‘Ah, I see.’ ‘It’s not a big deal though. We have to endure.’ The ‘we’ here was referring to people who live up in the mountains of —in this area, predominantly from the Sgaw Karen (Pgaz K’Nyau) and Lawa ethnic groups. I had heard the phrase, ‘we have to endure’ (rao tong otthon noi; เราต้องอดทนหน่อย) many times around the school, usually from teachers or in stories and songs. People in the area prided themselves on their resilience and perseverance, their ability to derive happiness from things that do not require money, and on their connections to each other and to God that gave them the strength to deal with the harsh economic realities they faced on a daily basis. This was the first time I heard Chonticha, unprompted, relate the phrase directly to her own life in a way that was meaningful to her. The phrase was a gesture of solidarity with potentially several different groups that Chonticha belonged to—Karen, ‘hill tribe’, Thai citizen, girl, farmer, Christian. And even just people in general who have important things to do when they would rather be somewhere else. One grouping was particularly salient, that day and throughout my fieldwork: dek doi (เด็กดอย), or ‘mountain children’, as people from the lowland towns called them. Some of the locals told me mountain children are perceived as dirty and uneducated. People from town sometimes told me mountain children are well-mannered and unfailingly honest.

The virtue of endurance/patience (khwam otthon; ความอดทน) was expressed in slightly different ways by some of the older kids. Nattaya, one of the 15-year-old students, announced in the bio of one of her Facebook profiles, ‘Society doesn’t understand teenagers’

1 (wairun sangkhom mai khaojai; วัยรุ่น สังคมไม่เข้าใจ). For Nattaya, otthon meant enduring the strictures of school for just a little bit longer until she could graduate and feel freer to openly be herself. She longed not for adulthood but for the opportunity to enjoy her teenage years in the way that she wanted. For the time being though, she had to ‘be a good child’ (pen dek di;

เป็นเด็กดี) and tangjai rian (ตงั ใจเรยี น)—be attentive in her studies. This term—tangjai rian—refers to various aspects of studiousness. During the period of my fieldwork, it was one of the most salient concepts in all of the students’ day-to-day lives, both in and outside of school. Tangjai rian means to focus on one’s studies, but in the lives of school children in Thailand it also operates as a powerful ideological concept. It literally means to set one’s heart upon learning and studying. It is tied to student morality through its explicit association with being a ‘good child’ in the eyes of parents and teachers. One of the features of this concept that initially flagged it to me as worth critically investigating was what seemed like an incompatibility with expressions of adolescent sexuality—especially female adolescent sexuality. Supposedly, one cannot focus on school if one is sexually active. The phrase tangjai rian itself is not explicitly gendered. The moral standard is nominally applied to boys and girls equally, with the phrase tangjai rian used to classify particular students as adhering to the ideal. If one pursues romantic relationships that are physical or sexual in nature, then one cannot properly be classified as tangjai rian. In practice, I observed that the girls’ love lives were policed far more heavily than those of the boys at Little Creek School. This gendered aspect of a highly salient student ideal made it a fruitful avenue of research that was important to continue exploring in greater detail throughout my fieldwork. This thesis is based on approximately 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork throughout 2017 and 2018, exploring the lives of Thai-Karen students attending a small Thai government school based in an upland Sgaw Karen village in . The school is referred to throughout the thesis using the pseudonym, ‘Little Creek School’. The students were of mixed Christian and Buddhist religious backgrounds, and they ranged in age from five to 16. Some were from the village where the school was located, and some were from elsewhere and boarded at the school, where I also lived. Almost the entire cohort were from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, with families living on very limited financial resources and usually engaged in both subsistence and commercial agriculture. As with most projects based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this project’s aims and objectives have evolved over time. The prominence of tangjai rian (beyond obviously academic matters) and preoccupations with adolescent female sexuality in my fieldsite were not anticipated prior to commencing research. The prominence of tangjai rian in general in the children’s lives became apparent to me gradually, but the extent of its powerful ties to gender

2 and sexuality, ultimately prompting the argument put forth in this thesis, was initially revealed to me by a single major event at the school during fieldwork. One of the 15-year-old girls, Somjai, was expelled partway through the first school term after being caught sleeping at her 27-year-old boyfriend’s house on the weekend. She married him shortly afterwards, much to the school’s disapproval, although it was seen as the inevitable outcome of her situation by the staff. I set about gathering as much information as I could about this family’s experience of the events preceding and following the expulsion—this extended to Somjai’s two younger siblings who were also students at Little Creek School. I reprioritised my data collection to focus more on topics related to this event. The specific circumstances of this event are explicitly analysed and discussed in later chapters, but the event has in many ways informed every part of the thesis leading up to and following it. While conducting my fieldwork, I was frustrated, angry, and confused when faced with the harsh and abrupt end to this girl’s schooling. I wanted to know why Somjai could not return to class. I wanted to know why everybody there—both those sympathetic to Somjai’s situation and those not so—were reacting to this significant event in such a fundamentally different way to how I was. Regardless of how individual people felt about the situation, it made sense to everybody there except for me. Tangjai rian was the main concept used to explain Somjai’s situation to me. ‘She didn’t tangjai rian’, was the beginning of any explanation that people offered. The research questions I set out to investigate at the beginning of my fieldwork were as follows. What does it mean to be a child at Little Creek School? What moral expectations are placed upon Karen children in Thailand? In what ways do Karen children either acquiesce to or circumvent those expectations? What meaning do the children attach to their own behaviour? My investigation of these questions led me to the moralising Thai concept of tangjai rian, along with its relationship to adolescent sexuality. Somjai’s situation served as an important case study for exploring this topic. My research questions developed further based on the issues I struggled to make sense of, the apparent contradictions I struggled to reconcile, at the time of collecting the ethnographic data. This brings me then to the more specific set of core research questions that this thesis ultimately addresses. That is, what is required for a child to be considered someone who can tangjai rian? What happens when these moral standards are either not met, breached or outright rejected? Why is sexuality tied to tangjai rian in such a significant way? In what ways is tangjai rian related to gender and ethnicity? How do the adolescent children in my fieldsite navigate and negotiate both tangjai rian and romantic love? I address these questions by first ethnographically mapping the sociocultural landscape of the school and outlining the moral discourses that the children there are exposed to. Ultimately though, I emphasise the ways that students at Little Creek School have their own

3 understandings of moral ideals like tangjai rian that are generated through practice among peers. I conduct my analysis by drawing on social practice theory as developed by Ortner (1996, 2006) and Holland et al. (1998). In the next section, I outline this theoretical framework. Then, I review some of the literature pertinent to key topics covered in the thesis—Karen studies, education, and early marriage—before moving onto information about my fieldsite and outlining the structure of the rest of the thesis.

Theoretical Framework

Throughout this thesis, I draw on social practice theory to analyse the ways that students engage with the moral ideals they encounter while at school. Within the institutional space of the school, students experience multiple modes of inhabiting and constructing space. Students are taught to understand the morality of their elders and know that they are expected to emulate it. But they also have their own understandings of morality that are produced through practice. Concepts like tangjai rian do not have a single fixed meaning. Even though teachers think that some students seem to be rejecting this moral value when they pursue potentially sexual relationships, I argue that tangjai rian remains an important value even to those students. The multiple modes of inhabiting and constructing space that I speak of can be usefully described using the theoretical concept of ‘figured worlds’ (Holland et al. 1998). The concept of a figured world is developed as an extension of practice theory, aiming to balance agency and structure in similar ways to anthropologists like Bourdieu (1977, 1983, 1986), who wrote about the intersections of habitus and capital (social, economic, and cultural) within cultural ‘fields’ that characterise particular moments in history. The concept of figured worlds emphasises how change operates not just between generations but also in the present moment (Holland et al. 1998: 31). The term, ‘figured world’, draws heavily on Leont’ev’s (1978) notion of ‘activity’ as the mediating interface between person and environment through practice. It is within the context of a particular activity that the dialectic between person and environment is formed, each becoming constitutive of the other (Holland et al. 1998: 39). A figured world then, is a Leont’evian activity, authored by groups of social actors, which has a particular set of rules and norms. Figured worlds are historical phenomena that we must be recruited into before we can participate in their development—social position greatly affects our access and exposure to various figured worlds (ibid.: 41–2). Importantly, the landscape is filled with a multitude of figured worlds that humans move through and with. The theory of figured worlds has been useful to many scholars of education, in particular. It has proved useful for making sense of the interplay between diverse actors

4 coming to a school from different backgrounds. It has also been used as a means of formulating interventions that promote spaces for the authoring of new figured worlds within schools that will benefit disadvantaged students (Urrieta 2007: 112). Such research shows that this theoretical approach has a tried and tested track record for investigating issues similar in many ways to the ones I address in this thesis. Luttrell and Parker (2001) have discussed how the dominant figured world at a school may disadvantage students whose literacy is at an advanced level but operating in the alternative figured world of their hobbies. Wortham (2004) has used the theory of figured worlds to describe how a ‘good student’ may later come to be reframed as a disruptive outcast within the school. Figured worlds have been used by Hatt (2007) to analyse different interpretations of ‘smartness’ among students—‘book smarts’ vs ‘street smarts’—just as I will use it to look at different interpretations of tangjai rian among the student cohort of Little Creek School. The features of figured worlds have been likened to games and play. Holland et al. (1998: 5–6) emphasise the role of play in the authoring of figured worlds, citing the works of Bakhtin and Vygotsky as informing their theory. Framing play metaphors as part of the interpretive turn in anthropology, Geertz (1980: 168) has noted how the idea of society as an elaborate machine has lost favour to metaphors likening society to a ‘serious game’. In a study of American high school students’ text-messaging behaviour, the authors describe students’ interactions and varied uses of language as ‘serious play’ within the broader ‘game’ of schooling (Eisenhart & Allaman 2018). Serious play describes activity taking place within figured worlds—serving to simultaneously author, reproduce, and transform them. I follow the usage of Eisenhart and Allaman (ibid.) for this terminology, who developed their application of this theory based largely on the work of Holland et al. (1998: 272). The ‘seriousness’ of a serious game or serious play refers to its potential to foster social change of some kind through reproduction and transformation at the point of practice. This synthesis of structure and event has been described as the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ by Sahlins (1985: 125)—‘a set of historical relationships that at once reproduce the traditional cultural categories and give them new values out of the pragmatic context’. The games metaphor is appealing to Ortner (1996: 17) because it directs focus towards what she calls the ‘slippages in reproduction’ at the conjuncture of structure and event, and it is therefore useful for research involving subaltern populations. For Ortner (1996: 12), the concept of a ‘serious game’ suggests,

…that social life is culturally organized and constructed, in terms of defining categories of actors, rules and goals of the games, and so forth; that social life is precisely social, consisting of webs of relationship and interaction between multiple, shiftingly interrelated subject positions, none of which can be extracted as autonomous “agents”; and yet at the same time there is “agency”, that is, actors play with skill, intention, wit, knowledge, intelligence.

5 It is also important to note that ‘there is never only one game’ (ibid.: 13). Several of these ‘serious games’ or ‘figured worlds’ exist at Little Creek School alongside each other. Some are more prominent for teachers and some for students. Within the student cohort there are important cultural divisions that can be observed. Individuals are not bound to any one figured world. Rather, they move through several and renegotiate the features of each through serious play as they go. One caveat I would add to the terminology of this body of theory is that my research with young children leaves me a little uneasy about the reasoning behind describing social action as serious games. The implication being that games without the qualifier do not share the same ‘serious’ relationship to society and culture. Within the thesis, I use literal games and play among primary school-aged children to test this theoretical framework precisely to demonstrate that even children’s games are ‘serious’ in the same way as general social action described by Ortner (1996) as serious games is. This raises the question, if literal games can be fruitfully analysed as ‘serious’ games, then is the ‘serious’ qualifier actually necessary? I argue that it is not for games, but I maintain its use when describing acts of play. It is due to my unease with the ‘serious’ qualifier that I use the term ‘figured worlds’ from Holland et al. (1998) to describe sites of practice throughout the thesis. But in doing so, I draw heavily on what Ortner (1996) is describing as ‘serious games’. I do nonetheless use the term ‘serious play’ to describe activity taking place within figured worlds. I have similar misgivings about the idea of serious play as I do with serious games but acknowledge the need to overcome connotations of non-seriousness inherent in the everyday use of the English words ‘play’ and ‘game’ (Ortner 1996: 12). I describe human practice as serious play within figured worlds in order to avoid undermining the seriousness of the literal games I played while collecting data but to maintain the games/play metaphor in my analysis. I am more willing to maintain the terminology of serious play because although seemingly mundane play is often ‘serious’, the case could more easily be made that play is sometimes just play, without larger ramifications. The same cannot be said for games. Even if the players at a particular point in space and time are not engaging in what could be described as serious play, the game as figured world always maintains the potential for its participants to engage in serious play. Thus, the distinction between a ‘game’ and a ‘serious game’ becomes rather arbitrary. Another advantage of theorising serious play within figured worlds is the way that it frames intentionality. Focusing too much on the intentions of actors has been cautioned against by some theorists of agency. There is a risk of formulating agency in a way that neglects the significant effects of unintended consequences and the way that outcomes are shaped by forces beyond the actor’s awareness or control (Ortner 2006: 132). Giddens (1976: 77) is wary of overemphasis on conscious intentionality, citing a need for theory that can account for two key scenarios with regards to intentionality: where an alternative outcome is

6 produced instead of the intended outcome, and where the achievement of the intended outcome also brings with it a range of other unforeseen consequences. It is the latter scenario I am analysing throughout the thesis. In the case of Somjai, she achieved her intention of pursuing a long-term romantic relationship, but the unintended consequences were expulsion from school and early marriage. Giddens’ approach does not give too much weight to intentionality in light of its limited impacts on actual structural outcomes. This leads him to a theory that incorporates structure into his conceptualisation of intentionality. He frames intentionality as a routine process of human conduct that is constantly being subconsciously revised in conjunction with practice, with the conscious voicing of intention representing an abstraction from this process that neglects the bigger picture (Giddens 1979: 56). By viewing social practice as taking place within particular figured worlds, intentionality, even as an abstraction from a larger process, becomes a relevant part of the analysis. While the conscious and voiced intentionality of a particular action or set of actions may not be directly associated with structurally determined outcomes in one figured world, they may nonetheless be crucial to making sense of other figured worlds a person occupies. The benefit of this kind of approach can be seen in Mahony’s (2018) ethnography of young people growing up in Bangkok’s Khlong Toey slum. Mahony uses the terms ‘realms’ or ‘spheres’ of practice where I would use figured worlds, but they are described in a very similar fashion. Her ethnography engages with three such spheres: ‘living the teenage life’, ‘doing the right thing’, and ‘forging the future’ (ibid.: 5). The young people in Mahony’s fieldsite earnestly strived for success in all three of these matters, but their success in one sphere often meant their failure in another. This approach explains how agency can simultaneously be emancipatory, seemingly inconsequential, and productive of negative outcomes. It depends on the sphere, realm, or figured world of cultural practice that one is interested in exploring. Using a framework of serious play in figured worlds, the ‘agent’ is never essentialised. The ‘mutual determination(s) of agents and structures’ is kept intact by framing ‘the game’— the figured world—as the methodological unit of practice (Ortner 1996: 19–20). This conceptualisation of agency and structure is useful for my thesis because it well captures the wide range of subjectivities and institutional structures coming into contact with one another in my fieldsite. This concept can be applied to situations of classroom instruction, morning assemblies, schoolyard interactions, social media use, teenage practices, and also literal games and childhood play. The games metaphor has been particularly useful to Ortner in her research into gender, and I make use of it for similar reasons given my focus on the policing of the gendered bodies and sexuality of young girls in my thesis. The ethnographic data I have collected concerning actual games and play allow me to develop this theoretical framework in a way that is informed by the social practice of purportedly ‘non-serious play’ in my fieldsite.

7 Issues and Setting: The Karen in Thailand, Educational Inequalities, and Early Marriage

The Karen are one of a number of ethnic minorities who live in the highlands of northern

Thailand, known collectively by the Thai government as ‘chao khao’ (ชาวเขา)—‘hill tribes’.

Although the majority of the global Karen population resides in neighbouring Myanmar, they are nonetheless one of the most populous highland ethnic groups in northern Thailand (Platz 2003: 473). Under the label ‘Karen’, there are two major subdivisions—Sgaw and Pwo—as well as a number of smaller groups with various cultural and linguistic differences. As with some other ethnic minorities in Thailand’s north such as the Lawa, who also live near my fieldsite, Karen settlement in the region goes back at least to the establishment of the northern Thai Lanna kingdom in the 13th century and probably even earlier. Anthropologists have written about Karen folklore commonly portraying the group as metaphorical orphans, having lost land, kingship, language, writing, or knowledge over time (Gravers 2012; Rajah 2008). Analysing Karen identity discourse across Myanmar and Thailand, bridging religious, cultural, and linguistic differences, Cheesman (2002: 204) found that many Karen frame their ethnic group as historically, ‘oppressed, uneducated and virtuous’. I will move through each of these three characterisations in turn, reflecting on how they relate to material and topics covered throughout the thesis. The oppression faced by Karen in Thailand is both a result of historical neglect from the government and discrimination from other people in Thailand. The Karen have had to work hard to assert their position as citizens of modern-day Thailand. There has historically been a large number of Karen and other upland ethnic minorities in Thailand who have been denied citizenship. For a long time, the only form of identification many Karen had was an ID card that restricted their movement to their home province and did not afford them the full rights of a citizen (Toyota 2005). In my fieldsite, this was no longer an issue, but there remain Karen in other areas who exist in this ambiguous state of being a subject of the nation without citizenship. The classification of upland peoples as ‘hill tribes’ and, by implication, non-Thai others was tied to national security concerns at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw the Karen and others targeted by a range of government counterinsurgency policies that aimed to combat activities of the Communist Party of Thailand. The Thai government sought to either relocate upland communities to lowland areas or centralise previously scattered settlements—whether there was any actual communist activity in a given area or not (Forsyth & Walker 2008: 46–7). The mobility of these communities, as well as the prevalence of opium cultivation by certain groups, were identified as key challenges to the relatively recently territorialised Thai nation-state (Pinkaew 2003: 32). Economic development

8 projects were pursued with the goal of reducing any possible communist sympathies in the hills of Thailand. Many of these projects were overseen by the Border Patrol Police, a force that was created with the support of the following the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (Buergin 2000: 7–8). Much of the anthropological research conducted over these decades through Chiang Mai’s Tribal Research Centre has also been connected to international efforts to prevent communist insurgency via state-driven social and economic development (Flanagan 1971). Pinkaew (2003: 33) notes that compared to the Hmong, the Karen often received relatively benign treatment by state agencies in recognition of their earlier settlement of the region. Nonetheless, this did not override the power and efficacy of the broader ‘hill tribe’ discourse, with the Karen readily labelled as rebellious and corrupted by communism in cases where they did not submit to state authority (ibid.). Much of the discrimination that Karen have faced in Thailand in more recent decades is specifically due to their controversial interactions with the natural environment. Both state policy and public opinion view traditional Karen agricultural practices as destructive of the environment and thus damaging to the national economy as well. Following severe flooding and droughts in Thailand during the 1980s, commercial logging was banned nationwide in 1989. The natural disasters had been attributed to deforestation, and so the government began large-scale efforts to protect its watersheds from perceived threats (Hares 2009: 382). As a result of this shift in policy, Thailand’s Royal Forest Department transitioned quite quickly from its traditional role as brokers of forest resources to that of protectors of forest resources (Delang 2002: 490–91). These developments were significant for the Karen, as many upland farmers from various ‘hill tribes’ were blamed for contributing greatly to the nation’s deforestation problem through their traditional swiddening farming system. This was in spite of the fact that the Thai government’s assumptions about the ecological effects of Karen land use practices were demonstrably incorrect in most cases (Forsyth & Walker 2008). The immediate consequences of this situation included loss of land security, stigma from lowland populations and authorities, and even environmental damage due to poorly thought out reforestation schemes. The resulting conflicts are ongoing to this day, with stories not uncommon of villagers throughout Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai Provinces being arrested and imprisoned because of their use of forest resources. The characterisation of the Karen as uneducated is today perpetuated by structural inequalities in Thailand’s education system. Rural students in Thailand are considerably disadvantaged academically compared to their urban peers. This is not due to an absence of schools but issues with the quality of education available. Figures from 2010 suggest that Thailand has almost achieved 100 percent primary school enrolment across all levels of wealth (Dilaka & Sondergaard 2015: 11). For the poorest citizens of Thailand, such as those living in

9 the area of my fieldwork, secondary school enrolment is between 70 and 80 percent. It was not until the introduction of the 1999 National Education Act that compulsory education was extended to include lower secondary levels. As recently as 1995, the level of secondary enrolment for the poorest wealth quartile was only 50 percent. Going back to the 1980s this figure drops below 10 percent (ibid.). The existence of primary schools in Thailand’s remotest communities has a relatively long history. As early as the 1930s, Thailand’s national network of schools reaching out into every corner of the country was far better established than those in neighbouring countries (Keyes 1991: 96–8). In recent years though, the large number of remote schools has been identified as a potential problem by the Thai state. Some researchers have advocated measures such as the merging of small schools that are nearby one another in rural areas to avoid spreading resources too thinly (Dilaka & Sondergaard 2015: 37; Tussatrin et al. 2014). Dropping birth rates in Thailand mean that the population density of students in many areas is now much lower than when the schools were originally opened. This approach of school merging has begun to be implemented in many rural parts of Thailand following such advice. On the one hand, this allows for a concentration of scarce resources to fewer locations, theoretically leading to more efficient investment in education. On the other hand, a rural school often serves as a focal point for community activities and may be highly valued as an asset outside of its purely educational role (Ortiz 2016: 265). Any decisions regarding the closure of a rural school therefore need to be taken very carefully with due regard for the local circumstances and any unintended flow-on effects. Despite the increases to secondary school enrolments in recent decades, a number of factors continue to impact education quality in rural Thailand. Some have identified aspects of Thai culture such as conflict avoidance and deference to superiors as possibly interfering with proper implementation of pedagogical reforms (Hallinger & Pornkasem 2001). Others have placed greater emphasis on structural and socioeconomic barriers, including: staff shortages; poor quality training of teachers; lack of resources and funding; low formal education of parents, who therefore struggle to assist with study at home; high private tutoring and transport costs for impoverished parents; language barriers for students who speak a language other than Thai at home (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2013; OECD & United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] 2016). Many of these structural and socioeconomic factors were readily observable in my fieldsite. When Karen are described as ‘virtuous’, this has often been in reference to their reputation for lifelong monogamous marriages and an apparent absence of divorce. There is a stereotype of upland Karen villages as peaceful and harmonious moral communities. These images of traditional Karen village life left positive impressions on Western Christian missionaries when they were first visiting upland northern Thailand in large numbers in the

10 1950s. Karen tradition emphasises the importance of mutual love between two people as the primary factor in selecting a marriage partner, and sex outside of such a relationship is detrimental to the religio-political order of the entire village community, not just those close to the offending pair (Hayami 1993: 754). Residence after marriage has traditionally been matrilocal in Karen communities. Although traditional Karen households resemble Western ideas of a nuclear family, there is no direct translation of ‘family’ (nor the Thai equivalent, khropkhrua; ครอบครัว) into the Karen language (Hayami 2012: 297). The organising principle behind household units in Karen villages has traditionally been based upon the ritual identification of the hearth with the woman of a household. This is why matrilocal residence has typically been the norm, as a daughter’s spirit is believed to be compatible with that of her mother’s and can share the same hearth (Hayami 2004: 100–3). Karen women thus serve as the foundational node of Karen kinship networks organised around the wife-husband and mother-child relationships and are therefore respected as important figures in the community. But they also face great stigma if they fail to fulfil this role by being unmarried, childless or orphaned (Hayami 2012: 302). There have never been strict rules about endogamy or exogamy, but marriage to non-Karen partners has historically been seen as less desirable (Hayami 2003: 121; Kwanchewan 2012: 323). Lifelong monogamous marriage based on love remains the moral ideal today, across both Buddhist and Christian households. Certain aspects of the ideas and practices associated with marriage, however, have changed a great deal in recent years. The rules surrounding marriage and household composition are far more flexible than in the past. This is particularly the case in villages like my fieldsite, where the majority of households have converted to either or , and very few families still fully engage in the ritual cycle associated with household spirits that has been elaborated in older ethnographies of the Karen and which provided the reasoning behind the traditional marriage rules (Rajah 2008). A newly married couple can now more or less freely choose their living arrangements based on their own circumstances. If the bride’s household already has a large number of occupants or has limited financial resources, it may be more convenient for the couple to go and stay with the parents of the groom. Couples may also choose to relocate to the city for work after marriage. It is now quite common for marriages to take place between members of different ethnic groups, and exogamous marriages are increasingly common due to the available opportunities for meeting potential spouses (the prevalence of boarding schools and social media are key factors here). There are certain key aspects of Karen marriage I encountered during my fieldwork that continue to resemble past accounts of Karen tradition. One rule that still remains important is that one child, ideally the youngest daughter, must remain living with her parents after marriage in order to care for them in old age. Another feature of Karen marriage that has not

11 fundamentally changed, and one that I directly engage with in my analysis of Somjai’s expulsion from Little Creek School, is the age at which girls may marry. In the past, girls in the area of my fieldwork would commonly marry soon after reaching puberty. Since the introduction of secondary schooling in the area, this has been postponed in most cases to at least 15 years of age, but marriages earlier than this do occasionally take place. The United Nations defines any marriage involving someone below the age of 18 as ‘’. It predominantly affects girls and is often referred to in scholarship as ‘early marriage’. Child marriage is framed by the United Nations as a violation of children’s human rights, as it acts as a barrier to realising many of the rights enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and is specifically denounced in several other UN conventions and international agreements (United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF] 2018). In addition to acting as a barrier to education, it often leads to early pregnancy, which then has implications for both the young mother and the rights of her soon-to-be-born child (UNICEF 2016: 16–7). Girls under the age of 15 face significantly higher risks for a number of complications during childbirth, and adolescent girls of all ages who become pregnant are more likely to suffer from poor nutrition and general health, thus further increasing the risks inherent in childbirth (United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA] 2015: 9–10). In Thailand overall, approximately 23 percent of the population is married before the age of 18 (UNICEF 2017: 184). I do not wish to overstate this as a rampant issue affecting enormous numbers of girls where I conducted my research. The majority of girls in my fieldsite are typically not married until their early twenties. However, enough girls are married before completing their education that the issue was raised as a serious concern by several community members, particularly teachers at the school and the girls themselves. The school takes a hard-line approach and forbids students from pursuing any kind of physical romantic relationship while enrolled. The school claims this will reduce the incidence of early marriage and teenage pregnancy, thus increasing average levels of education in the community. Parents, meanwhile, may take issue with their children’s education ending early, but they may not necessarily see marriage from ages 13–17 as ‘early’ and thus inherently as problematic. Many of the mothers and grandmothers of students in my fieldsite were themselves married during their early teenage years. In many places of the world, early marriage is cited as both a cause and a consequence of low enrolment of girls in school compared to boys (McCleary-Sills et al. 2015; Murphy- Graham & Leal 2015; Wodon, Nguyen & Tsimpo 2016). Proposed solutions to the issue of early marriage therefore often involve measures to improve access to schooling for vulnerable girls (Hervish & Feldman-Jacobs 2011; Lee-Rife et al. 2012; Malhotra, McGonagle & Lee-Rife 2011; Svanemyr et al. 2015).

12 Any intervention into early marriage of course needs to rely not on stereotypes about the practice but on data specific to each context, ideally emphasising the perspectives of the girls themselves (Archambault 2011; McCarthy 2016: 99; Ngo 2002). Although extreme cases of very young girls being forced to marry significantly older men are documented as being fairly common in the south of Thailand (Ellis-Petersen 2018), this is not the kind of early marriage taking place in Little Creek Village. The majority of early marriages in my fieldsite nowadays take place between girls aged 15–17 and men aged from 18–30. In most cases these are pre- existing consensual relationships that are pressured or forced into proceeding to marriage. Pressure may come from parents, or it may be felt more internally. Kwanchewan (2012) has found that many young Karen girls in Thailand choose to follow their friends into early marriage once one girl in a friendship group gets married, so as not to become socially isolated from one another. This is a trend that teachers at Little Creek School were wary of, and that I discuss later in the thesis. The law in Thailand is somewhat ambiguous regarding early marriage (Thai Civil and Commercial Code sections 1435–1535 include all laws pertinent to marriage). According to sections 1435 and 1448 of the Thai Civil and Commercial Code, a betrothal or marriage can legally take place only when both parties have reached the age of 17. But section 1448 also states that the court may, having ‘appropriate reason’, allow a pair to be married before such age. Furthermore, provisions exist in sections 1436 and 1454 for minors to be legally betrothed and married with parental consent. There is no clarification of a minimum age of marriage under these provisions. The legal age of consent for engaging in sexual activity in Thailand is 15, meaning anyone doing so with those under 15 years of age, including other minors, can be charged with statutory rape. It is a compoundable offence to engage in sexual activity with an individual between the ages of 15–17. Section 277 of the Thai Criminal Code allows that a man might not be charged with statutory rape for sexual activity with a girl between the ages of 13–15 if the court approves an immediate marriage between the two parties.1 Within the Child Protection Act of 2003, the term ‘child’ refers to anybody under the age of 18 but specifically excludes those who are legally married. There is no other mention of child marriage in the 2003 Act. Despite the existence of legal pathways to early marriage in Thailand, most of the cases discussed in this thesis are not legal marriages but technically informal unions. A wedding is held according to local customs, and the couple henceforth live together and are treated in the community as married, despite not being registered with the district official. Under normal circumstances, for all intents and purposes, the couple is effectively married, and so I refer to these unions as marriages despite their legal ambiguity. Once the girl reaches the age

1 Marital rape is not recognised as a crime in Thailand.

13 of 17, the marriage can then be formalised with a marriage certificate. Although this situation still renders girls who marry young vulnerable in a number of ways, with the most immediate consequences often being to their education, the lack of a legal marriage has benefits as well. Should a girl find herself in an undesirable marriage of this kind, she is still under the protection of the 2003 Child Protection Act and an abusive partner would be subject to the full force of the law concerning indecent acts with minors. The most immediate issues to be better understood in my fieldsite regarding early marriage then, are not necessarily legal ones but those related to the way these girls are treated in the community following the formation of sexual relationships that may or may not lead to marriage. Schools play a pivotal role in anticipating and responding to these situations as they arise, are able to influence attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and can equip adolescents with vital knowledge to minimise the risks associated with sexual activity. They also have the potential to actively contribute to the social isolation of girls who marry early. By conducting participant observation at an upland school in a Karen village, this project is well placed to provide insights about how this issue is being engaged with in rural and upland areas of Thailand.

The Primary Fieldsite: Little Creek School and Village

Little Creek School first opened in 1983, at that stage with only primary school classes. The school began to grow in prominence after it was administratively merged with the primary school from the neighbouring village of Big Creek, when Big Creek School closed in 2000. The school director during the time of my fieldwork had been appointed in 2010.2 In 2013, this director oversaw the addition of compulsory lower secondary classes at the school. The dedicated secondary school building which existed during my fieldwork was built in 2016, a year prior to my arrival. There is a considerable lack of financial resources available to Little Creek School. Primary and secondary education at public schools is nominally free in Thailand, so the school receives very little in the way of fees from parents (approximately 2,000 Thai baht per term for students staying in the dormitories). 3 The school only receives government funding to feed the primary students and has had to seek funds elsewhere for its overall food budget that includes the lower secondary cohort. The need for provision of disposable menstrual products since the

2 Since completion of my fieldwork, this director has taken up a new posting as director of a different school. 3 Education begins to become more of a financial burden on parents once students continue to upper secondary schooling at a lowland school. There are technically still no term fees, but dormitory costs are typically higher than at Little Creek School—one alumnus of Little Creek School told me her parents pay 500 Thai baht per week for her accommodations in Mae Sariang. Schools also charge fees for school upkeep and things like air conditioning, with these fees effectively functioning like term fees. This is on top of the additional costs parents must bear to transport their children to and from lowland dormitories every time students visit home.

14 addition of secondary year levels is another strain on costs. The administration has put in a lot of work to compensate for this where possible through fundraising activities, charitable donations from Bangkok and abroad, and making the school as self-sufficient as possible by raising animals and planting vegetable gardens on the school grounds. Students and teachers work together to maintain these ongoing development projects at the school. The village where the school is located, Little Creek, is an upland Sgaw Karen village in Mae Hong Son Province, at an altitude of approximately 1,200 metres. While the Lawa communities nearby are considered to be indigenous to the area, Karen settled in these particular hills around 200 years ago. There is a sealed asphalt road leading from the lowland town of Mae La Noi up into the hills and ending shortly after Little Creek Village. It takes about 45 minutes to drive into town. Beyond the end of the sealed road, there are dirt roads interspersed with shorter sections of sealed road, often quite deteriorated due to infrequent maintenance. Many of the students came from the more remote villages along these dirt roads. Little Creek Village is known locally by a different name, as the Thai government assigned it a new Thai name rather than transliterate the original Karen name into Thai for official purposes. A villager once told me with pride the story of the late King Rama IX being confused when somebody mentioned Little Creek Village to him. According to the story, the person then offered the Karen name instead, and the King recognised it immediately, fondly recalling the times he had visited the area. Having been based at the school, the Thai name for the village is more familiar to me, but the villagers usually use the original Karen name amongst themselves and other Karen. At the time of my fieldwork, the village contained roughly 80 households, with a population of about 600.4 Approximately two thirds of the village population were Catholic, and the remainder were Buddhist. As such, there is both a church and a temple in the village. Christian missionaries first visited the area around the 1950s. Karen traditionally engage in a range of ritual practices based around belief in spirits (k’laz and k’caj in Sgaw Karen) and the importance of maintaining good relations with them. A detailed study of the past importance of Karen rituals associated with household spirits has been made by Rajah (2008), while a more recent study by Hayami (2004) documents how this belief system has begun to change following mass conversions to both Buddhism and Christianity among the Karen of Thailand. Hayami (2004) found that for many Karen, conversion to new religions did not reflect a fundamental change in beliefs but was related, at least in part, to economic matters. As regular household rituals requiring the use of pigs and chickens became a burden, alternative means of placating household spirits became necessary. Some found their solution through Buddhist exorcisms to remove household spirits

4 These are only estimates provided by villagers, as I did not conduct a village census.

15 altogether. Others took solace in the absolute power of the Christian God to overcome any potential threat posed by mere spirits. This aspect of religious conversion in Thailand has been described as a ‘contest of power’ by Cohen (1991). In Little Creek Village, many people told me that the community mostly stopped participating in traditional ritual practices after converting to Christianity and Buddhism. If these new religions did not offer solutions to particular issues (such as recovering from attacks of sorcery), then ritual practitioners located in other villages were consulted. Besides the school, church and temple, other public buildings throughout the village include a pre-kindergarten nursery (sun dek; ศูนย์เด็ก), a village meeting hall, two general stores, a café, and a subdistrict informal education centre (ko so no; กศน.). Little Creek Village has power lines connecting all of the homes to Thailand’s power grid. Lengthy blackouts are not uncommon, particularly during the rainy season. Villagers use their mobile phones to access the internet, with the only locally available high-speed broadband connection belonging to the school. In years past, the school only had a rather slow and unstable satellite connection to the internet. The more reliable broadband was connected around the time I began my fieldwork and was used by both the teachers and the students. Life for most of the villagers in Little Creek is built economically around both subsistence and commercial agriculture. The main purpose of rice cultivation in Little Creek Village is for subsistence rather than for sale. There is a rice bank in the local area allowing villagers to borrow rice in years when their harvest is insufficient, to be repaid in rice from more successful harvests in the years following. In the past, villagers exclusively relied upon dry- rice agriculture, utilising traditional Karen forms of rotational swiddening that require the yearly burning of fields. The traditional farming system requires more land but also requires less inputs and is arguably healthier for the local environment if sufficient fallow periods are able to be maintained. A Karen environmentalist and land rights activist known widely by his Karen name, Buhpau, has published a detailed record of what this traditional method involves (Thaworn 2004). Unfortunately, by the 1960s when anthropologists and agricultural scientists began documenting the environmental situation in this area, increasing population pressures had become detrimental to rice yields (Kunstadter 1978). In 1980, the Mae La Noi Royal Project Development Centre was officially opened, promoting permanent wet-rice agriculture, among various other initiatives aimed at reducing the poverty of upland communities while preventing deforestation. Terraced paddy fields are now the more common mode of cultivation in Little Creek Village, although some households still make limited use of older forms of shifting cultivation. Shifting cultivation remains much more prominent in some of the more remote villages where many of Little Creek School’s dormitory students come from.

16 Besides rice, a number of herbs, fruits, and vegetables are grown for subsistence or collected from the forest. Pigs and chickens are raised for household consumption and as a source of eggs. Villagers also use rifles, traps, and slingshots to hunt for animals in the forest, such as barking deer or various large rodents like bamboo rats and squirrels. As for commercial crops, there are three main varieties grown in large amounts at Little Creek Village. Cabbages, red beans, and coffee are all grown for sale at lowland markets. The One Tambon One Product (OTOP) program has actively promoted Arabica coffee from this area. The OTOP program is a local entrepreneurship stimulus program designed to market products unique to each subdistrict (tambon; ตําบล) across Thailand. It was based on ’s similar ‘One Village One Product’ program. Coffee was originally introduced as a crop by missionaries and then later directly supported by the late King Rama IX and the Royal Development Project as a viable source of income in place of shifting cultivation of rice. The coffee is processed, marketed, and sold locally and also exported in large quantities to the American coffee chain, Starbucks. Coffee plants are interspersed throughout other trees in the forest surrounding the village and harvested once per year. Cabbages and red beans are grown in dedicated fields, with multiple harvests throughout the year. Some households raise buffaloes for sale, and between harvesting and planting seasons, it is common for both men and women to temporarily migrate to Chiang Mai or Bangkok in pursuit of wage labour, with money being sent back to their families at Little Creek Village. While food security in Little Creek Village has improved considerably since the development of coffee as a cash crop, the community is still considered quite impoverished relative to the rest of Thailand. Many families rely on charity offered to the school to provide material goods like new clothes and shoes for their children.

Research Participants

The children involved in this project, as noted already, were mostly in the range of five to 16 years of age at the time of research. Although the older students were arguably the most important research participants in this project due to the focus on adolescent sexual morality in the thesis, I also collected a substantial amount of data from the younger students. I quickly bonded with several of the eight-year-old students shortly after commencing fieldwork and spent much of my time around them. The younger students were not yet directly involved in the same policing and performance of sexual morality as the older students, but they were nonetheless present in the same ideological space, where their morality was carefully managed by themselves, their peers, and their teachers regarding gender, hierarchy, and other institutional values. This younger group of students are therefore prominent earlier in the thesis

17 as I establish the ideological foundations within the school that I analyse throughout the rest of the thesis in relation to sexual morality. The age range of the children involved in my project is due to the years taught at the school where the majority of fieldwork was conducted. People in this location are generally regarded as children—referred to as dek (เด็ก)—for as long as they are enrolled in school or university. After leaving school, be it at 13, 16, or 18 years of age, people begin to be treated locally as full members of adult society. If people go on to study at university, however, they are not considered fully independent as adults until they graduate. Given the significance of schooling within this thesis, I refer to various children using their year level at school more often than their age.

Thai schooling consists of anuban (อนุบาล; kindergarten), prathom (ประถม; primary school), and mathayom (มัธยม; secondary school) stages. There are two to three years of anuban, depending on the school, and six years each of prathom and mathayom. Throughout this thesis, I use the shorthand of either ‘P’ or ‘M’ followed by a number from 1–6 to refer to year levels in prathom or mathayom, respectively. Little Creek School has two years of anuban, followed by P1–P6 and then M1–M3. Students must go elsewhere to complete upper secondary year levels M4–M6. Students typically begin anuban the year they are turning five and complete M3 the year that they turn 15. While it is not uncommon in many poverty-stricken areas for older teenagers or adults to be enrolled in earlier years of schooling, this was not the case at Little Creek School. In some year-levels there was an age variance of 1–2 years within a particular class, but for the most part, ages consistently aligned with their corresponding year levels. Teenagers who had previously dropped out of school or adults returning to complete their education were enrolled locally at the subdistrict informal education centre (ko so no) rather than returning to school. All of the children in my fieldsite were referred to by various people both locally and elsewhere in Thailand as dek doi—‘mountain children’. Dek doi uses the Northern Thai word for mountain, reifying the children’s relationship with the north. This categorisation is sometimes used in reference to the linguistic and cultural difference between upland and lowland children, stemming from the different ethnic groups living in upland areas. Other times it is a specific reference to the widespread poverty experienced by children in the area where my research was conducted. Two other important categories that research participants were locally placed into are dek ban (เด็กบ้าน) and dek ho (เด็กหอ)—‘village children’ and

‘dormitory children’, respectively. Throughout the thesis, I translate these terms as ‘village kid/boy/girl’ and ‘dormitory kid/boy/girl’ when describing individual children. The village kids came from Little Creek Village or sometimes Big Creek Village (still within walking distance of

18 the school) and returned home each day after school. The dormitory kids came from close to a dozen different villages in the surrounding area, including some in the neighbouring province of Chiang Mai. Dormitory kids lived at the school during the week and went home on weekends if they wanted to and if transport was available. Students from the villages in tended to remain at the school for several weeks or months at a time during term before getting the opportunity to visit home. The majority of dormitory kids were mathayom students, as most upland villages only have prathom year levels offered at their local schools, and many parents therefore send their children to begin mathayom at a school like Little Creek School. The youngest dormitory kids during my fieldwork were in P2 and mostly had older siblings in M1–M3 at the school as well. The total number of students at Little Creek School during the time of my fieldwork was approximately 150, with roughly 70 of those residing at the school’s dormitories. The mathayom classes averaged about 20 students per class, whereas the prathom classes averaged about 10. Roughly 30% of the students were from Buddhist households, with the majority of the cohort being a fairly even split between Catholic and Protestant.5 All of the students were from upland villages and came from similarly impoverished socioeconomic backgrounds, with many receiving financial support from Western charities including World Vision and Enfants du Mékong.6 They all identified as Sgaw Karen (Pgaz K’Nyau), though a few of the students had one parent who was Lawa. Multiple teacher transfers took place during my fieldwork, but there was consistently about 20 staff members teaching at the school. A few teachers were from the local community and returned home each day after school, but most came from further away and thus lodged at the school throughout the year just like the dormitory kids and I did. Some teachers were able to return home on weekends if they were from a nearby town, but yet others came from distant provinces and rarely had such opportunities. The teachers came from a range of different ethnic backgrounds including Karen, Shan, Lawa, and Northern Thai. Many of the teachers were from similar socioeconomic backgrounds to the students and were therefore held as important role models of educational success. There was a fairly even mix of male and female teachers during my stay, across both prathom and mathayom classes. Teachers were addressed using the Thai word for teacher, khru (ครู), followed by either their nickname or given name. Throughout the thesis I pair the title, Khru, with teachers’ names upon their introduction to clearly indicate when I am talking about a teacher.

5 Little Creek Village has a Catholic church, whereas neighbouring Big Creek Village has a Protestant church. 6 The province of Mae Hong Son is one of the poorest regions of Thailand according to various different measures (United Nations Development Programme 2005, 2014).

19 Physical Layout of the School

Little Creek School is located on hilly terrain, immediately east of Little Creek Village, at an altitude between the upper and lower sections of the village. To the north, east, and south are hills and valleys where the villagers’ fields are located. I have divided the school into five main areas for reference, although these categories are largely for convenience, and there is a certain amount of crossover in terms of the uses of each area. These areas are described as: prathom area, boys’ dormitories, dining area, mathayom area, and girls’ dormitories. Teachers’ dormitories are spread across both dormitory areas as well as the mathayom area. There are, in total, four entry and exit points around the school compound. The only gated point is at the northwest corner of the prathom area and leads to a road with access to both the upper and lower sections of the village and to the Buddhist temple. This road also provides the village’s access to the main road leading up and down the mountain. At the westernmost point of the boys’ dormitories is a small path leading to the upper section of the village. At the southwest corner of the prathom area there is a road leading to the Catholic church and some of the villagers’ fields. Finally, at the northwest corner of the mathayom area, there is a small path connecting to a road between the lower section of the village and most of the villagers’ fields.

Main Room Types Unique Locations

• Classroom (CR A1–2, CR P1–6, CR • Bottled water facility (X1) M1–3, CR Music, CR IT, CR Library, • Motorcycle parking (X2) CR Thai) • Snack shop (X3) • Meeting space (MS 1–4) • Mushroom farm (X4) • Teacher dormitory (TD 1–12) • Pig pens (X5) • Storage (STO 1–10) • Chicken coop (X6) • Bathroom (BR 1–10) • Dishwashing area (X7) • Student dormitory (SD 1–4) • Catfish pond (X8) • Kitchen & dining area (KD 1–3) • Firewood storage (X9) • My room (X10)

Table 1.1 Little Creek School map key.

20

Map 1.1 Building layout of Little Creek School.

21 Around the school, there are several multi-storey buildings built on slopes, resulting in different ground levels at different floors. There are no indoor hallway areas in the school, with each individual classroom’s doorway opening up to an outdoor area. The most contained non- classroom spaces around the school are the verandas of various buildings.

Figure 1.1 Main entrance to Little Creek School. Building at centre of image shows an example of the lower floor being below ground level relative to main building entrance. Lower building in bottom left corner shows relative height of mathayom area (photo supplied by Little Creek School).

At the centre of the prathom area is a concrete football field, surrounded by a flagpole, motorcycle parking, and several buildings. This is the largest area of flat terrain in the school and is the main gathering and socialising area. Three out of the four main buildings have their second floor at the ground level of the football field, while the building housing the P1, P3, P5, and P6 classrooms has its first floor at ground level and requires a stairwell to access the second floor. Besides prathom classrooms, this area includes the information technology (IT) room and the library, used by both prathom and mathayom students. The main meeting room, which is also the director’s office, is located in this area. There is also a room opened at lunchtime for selling snacks and drinks to the students, operated by mathayom students under teacher supervision.

Figure 1.2 Overhead shot of prathom area, taken Figure 1.3 Overhead shot of prathom area, taken from the bottled water facility at the edge of the from veranda in front of the P6 classroom boys’ dormitories. upstairs.

22 The boys’ dormitories are at the highest and westernmost point in the school, reached via steep steps. There are also male teachers’ dormitories and a facility for producing bottled drinking water for sale, which is operated by mathayom students. Some of the teachers’ dormitories are located at the same altitude as the prathom area, by the southwest road leading out of the school. The mathayom area is the most recently built, located considerably lower than the rest of the school and reached via a long and winding staircase down the slope. Besides the mathayom classrooms, there is an assembly area in the open-air lower floor that is sometimes used instead of the football field for gatherings. There is also a classroom used by both prathom and mathayom students for remedial Thai language study. Along the steps leading up a steep incline to the prathom and dining areas there are a number of small buildings and gardens used to produce some of the food eaten at the school, such as chicken eggs, vegetables, mushrooms, and pork. Some of the female teachers’ dormitories are located near the lower end of the steps.

Figure 1.4 The mathayom classrooms. Figure 1.5 Gardening along the slope in the mathayom area, overlooking some of the teachers’ dormitories (photo supplied by Little Creek School).

The dining area includes separate cooking and dining facilities for teachers and students and includes buildings at three different levels. The buildings here range from a few steps to two whole floors lower than the football field. This area includes social/assembly areas in the form of a meeting hall and a café. The café is opened some lunchtimes and operated by mathayom students under teacher supervision. The student dining room doubles as a kind of classroom space for an hour each evening when the dormitory kids gather together to study or complete homework under teacher supervision. I have also included the anuban classrooms in this area, as they are located on the eastern side and at the lowest level of the dining area, distinctly separated from the other classroom areas of the school.

23

Figure 1.6 Lining up for dinner outside the student Figure 1.7 Cleaning in the student kitchen (photo dining room. supplied by Little Creek School).

The girls’ dormitories are at the lowest and easternmost point in the school, reached following a gradually declining path that first passes several male and female teachers’ dormitories. At the higher end of the girls’ dormitories, adjacent to the dining area, there are some vegetable gardens. At the lower end there is a pool for raising small catfish.

Other Sites of Data Collection

Although I consider Little Creek School to be my primary fieldsite, it was certainly not the only location I collected data. Nor was my project purely multi-sited in the sense of collecting data from distinctly separated groups of people in different locations. Gupta and Ferguson (1997) have written about the pitfalls of earlier work in anthropology that essentialised ‘the field’ as a bounded site where anthropologists study ‘a’ culture in its entirety. A few years earlier, Marcus (1995) had published a review of multi-sited methodologies being used by ethnographers who were gathering data across not just shifting intellectual space but from multiple geographically distinct locations. The lives of the students at Little Creek School may be shaped by various distinct locations, but they are not bound by them, and so throughout my fieldwork I followed the kids to other places of significance in their lives. Through this process I came to gather data from people already existing in those other places, with their own networks of place to which I was not privy. The majority of my data nonetheless came from the staff and students whom I came to know through our shared habitation of Little Creek School. These intersections of places and people fluctuated throughout my fieldwork. In addition to Little Creek, I also visited several other villages and schools in the area. I occasionally travelled to other locations for inter-school English camps, sports days, academic competitions or other extra-curricular activities. This gave me an opportunity to speak to students from a wider variety of locations and of different ethnic backgrounds, as well

24 as to network with teaching staff at other locations. This then resulted in invitations to go and visit other schools independently later on. The other villages I visited near Little Creek were the homes of students from Little Creek School. Some of these villages lacked electricity, in which case car batteries were typically used to power individual homes. The agricultural situation was similar in most villages in the area, but some grew maize as another major cash crop that was not present in Little Creek Village itself. Sometimes I visited these places accompanying teachers on school business, but sometimes I visited independently using my own transportation. Other minor, but regular, points of data collection worth mentioning are the city of Chiang Mai and the lowland towns of Mae La Noi and Mae Sariang. When in these locations I met with Little Creek School alumni and a handful of M4–M6 students studying at the larger schools where Little Creek graduates would continue their schooling.

Thesis Outline

This thesis includes six substantive chapters. The earlier chapters address some of the more general research questions that I began my investigation with, particularly what ‘being a child’ entails at the broadest level in this context. Answering this question in relation to institutional space provides the necessary background to address the core research questions I identified as important during the conduct of my fieldwork. Middle chapters move onto analysis of the Thai notion of tangjai rian as a moralistic and ideological concept that is opposed to adolescent romance involving physical or sexual intimacy. Later chapters focus on spaces of serious play where mathayom students navigate and negotiate both tangjai rian and romantic love side by side. In chapter two, I describe the implementation of my methodology. This included participant observation, classroom observation, interviews, social media, and visual methods. I recount my arrival to the field and emplacement as a kind of ‘teacher’ at Little Creek School. As I discuss each aspect of my methodology in turn, I also reflect on my positionality as an adult male teacher-researcher and on the ethical concerns and decisions I encountered during fieldwork. I devote an entire chapter to this topic in acknowledgement of the vast power differential between myself and my research participants. In particular, my investigation of matters relating to the sexuality of adolescent girls necessitated the establishment of clear boundaries and precautionary measures. In order to maintain ethical conduct, my pursuit of direct lines of questioning on certain topics was deliberately quite limited. I focused not on actual sex acts and individual girls’ opinions on specific illicit behaviour but on the publicly expressed attitudes to such things in a more general sense, or regarding events that were alleged or implied in a public setting.

25 In chapter three, I frame the school as an institutional space of the Buddhist Thai state. I argue that the teachers inhabiting it—many of them locals or at least ethnically Karen—have a complex relationship to this institutionalism. In some ways, the staff embrace the institutional goals of the Thai state, while in other ways the institutional space is consciously and explicitly challenged at the local level. I argue, however, that these challenges do not necessarily work as intended, resulting in a double bind whereby student life outcomes are negatively affected whether the institution is embraced or challenged. I then go on to consider how children’s play activities engage with institutional and gendered space. I analyse how although children’s games are less consciously directed at challenging institutional space—the voiced reason for playing games is because they are fun, not because they are subversive—they are often more successful at subverting institutional space than the efforts of their sometimes-disillusioned teachers. By highlighting the implicit and incidental effects of childhood games on the moral and gendered world constructed by the school institution, I develop the theoretical tools used later in the thesis to analyse teenagers’ engagements with sexual morality within this same institution. In chapter four, I frame tangjai rian as having moral implications that make Little Creek School a ‘risky geography’ for certain students, particularly adolescent girls identified by teachers as ‘beautiful’. Students who are identified as potential troublemakers at Little Creek School are at risk of either dropping out or being expelled prior to completion of their secondary schooling. After defining tangjai rian, this chapter introduces the term’s gravity by exploring the immediate consequences of failing to meet its moral and academic standards. Within the classroom, even while living up to ideals of tangjai rian, the pressures of being a ‘good student’ weigh heavily on many. Moving on from the classroom context, I outline the opposition of tangjai rian with adolescent sexuality, and how girls are disproportionately at risk of having their love lives scrutinised according to this opposition. This is done through reference to the expulsion of Somjai from the M3 class due to sexual indiscretion. I argue that the teachers and director were compelled to make sense of Somjai’s actions through the concept of tangjai rian and its opposition to sexuality, despite her troubled home life and her expressed enthusiasm for learning. While I describe ‘beautiful’ girls as at risk, the teachers of Little Creek School framed them as risk to other students and the moral fabric of the school. This is contrasted with student explanations of early marriage that more readily acknowledged a wider range of factors besides one’s beauty and level of focus on school. In chapter five, I explore the reasons why tangjai rian and expressions of adolescent sexuality are mutually exclusive. I begin by analysing a key morpheme within tangjai rian—jai

(ใจ)—which refers to the heart and is closely bound to personal projects of love. Next, I chart the various ways that love is taught as a virtue in the school setting. I argue that understandings

26 of love are key to making sense of the incompatibility between tangjai rian and sexuality. Tangjai rian is a desirable state of being because of its relationship to virtuous love. In school, children are graphically warned against inappropriate love relationships, which are presented as dangerous to their moral selves. To demonstrate this point, I analyse the presentation of sexual health education material during a ‘life skills’ workshop held for the mathayom students once a year at Little Creek School. This workshop focused not on biomedical information about sexual activity but on the implications sexual activity has for one’s ability to tangjai rian and thus be a good child. After identifying the key themes raised during the life skills workshop, I describe how both the parent-child and teacher-student relationship are idolised in Thailand as an act of sacrifice (sia sala; เสียสละ) requiring immense gratitude (khwamkatanyu; ความ

กตัญู). This gratitude is framed as a moral duty of the child—a duty that can never be fulfilled but which is served, in part, by a child who endeavours to tangjai rian. This love relationship is threatened when a child enters into an alternative relationship of love, one which is based on sexual activity that signals one’s move away from childhood. In chapter six, I provide a detailed ethnographic description of how the teenagers in my fieldsite made use of social media, particularly with a view to understanding its role in their pursuits of romance and understandings of privacy. The social media platform of Facebook, accessed primarily through smartphones in my fieldsite, is the medium through which most romantic partners are first met by mathayom students. Early in the chapter, I explain what this platform is and how its interface is used. Courting via Facebook is contrasted with older forms of traditional courting in Karen communities, which often took place at ritual events such as weddings and funerals but also involved supervised visits to adolescent girls’ homes. I argue that the culture of Facebook use among my teenage research participants bears similarities to the physical play analysed in chapter three, allowing them to craft a ‘figured world’ where moral values like tangjai rian are open to experimentation. This provides a means for them to earnestly claim adherence to standards of tangjai rian, while also pursuing relationships that are of concern to teachers and parents. The concept of yung (ยุ่ง)—to meddle—is identified as important in understanding mathayom students’ approaches to privacy. Although many of the students’ posts were set to ‘public’, there was nonetheless an expectation that outsiders— such as teachers—would not interfere with students’ social matters on the platform of Facebook. In chapter seven, I turn my analysis to the ways that mathayom students’ subversive behaviour is balanced with the moral ideals valued by adult authorities in their lives. Romance is integrally bound to the mathayom school experience, despite the opposition between romantic love and tangjai rian espoused by the moral authority of the school. The virtue

27 associated with tangjai rian is deeply meaningful to mathayom students, and their renegotiations of how this ideal may be attained do not remove the concept’s overall significance or belittle the love and gratitude they feel toward their parents and teachers. While the students themselves do not necessarily see a contradiction between their particular romantic pursuits and their efforts to tangjai rian, adults generally do and thus attempt to actively monitor and police the students’ social lives, both online and offline. In this final substantive chapter, I analyse settings where these multiple understandings of tangjai rian come into contact, including the policing of surreptitious mobile phone use, a failed attempt by M3 girls to sneak out of the dormitories at night, and a comedic performance about a promiscuous teenager written by the M3 class. The moral ideals presented to students by the institution of the school delineate two clear paths for students to choose from as they enter their teenage years. They must choose education or romance. There are allowances for certain kinds of romance within the moral ideal, but for many students, this is not the kind of romance that they want. If they pursue illicit kinds of love, then, according to their teachers and parents, they do not tangjai rian—set their heart towards learning. Those who choose the path of romance are seen as opting out of the path of education. The case study of Somjai’s expulsion and early marriage serves as a strong example of the gravity of this moral discourse. But other students succeed at walking the line between education and romance, flirting with illicit love in ways that concern teachers and parents but without their behaviour eventuating in expulsion or marriage. In this thesis as a whole, I am mapping this third path, which balances education alongside romance. I explore the ways various obstacles either were or were not dealt with by the students of Little Creek School. Mapping this third path is how I address the research questions I have posed. I was able to locate these Karen students within an institutional framework that both aids and discriminates against them—it offers cultural capital and possibilities of higher future income but does so by casting the Karen as internal others who can never quite reach the ideal of ‘Thainess’. Intimately familiar with their precarious position in Thai society from a young age, these children grapple with immense pressure as they carry out their duties. Despite the burdens placed on them, they forge powerful bonds with their peers and seek various means of enjoyment and self-expression. Sometimes children’s own priorities clash, as in the case of the simultaneous pursuit of education and romance. I found that both of these areas of one’s life are inherently tied to local understandings and obligations of love. Balancing the two is indeed possible, despite protestations to the contrary by many, but it is a path fraught with obstacles. I argue that a nuanced understanding of the concept of tangjai rian, the guiding ideal of how to be a good student in Thailand, is necessary to map that path. Through ‘serious play’, both online and offline, the mathayom students at Little Creek School author new ‘figured

28 worlds’ that provide space for their own interpretations of love and tangjai rian. They thus actively pursue tangjai rian as a moral ideal that they value dearly, but they often do so in ways that seem to adults to contradict that moral ideal. In my concluding chapter, I integrate my arguments from throughout the thesis to finish telling the story of the students at Little Creek School. I reflect on how these students, like eight-year-old Chonticha at the beginning of this chapter, know that they must endure. They endure in many ways and value the solidarity of the teachers and parents who must endure alongside them. Living in poverty on the margins of Thai society, proudly Karen—but looked down upon as a ‘hill tribe’—these students have a complex relationship to the institution of the school. They ‘discipline their hearts’ and devote themselves to learning and studying—they tangjai rian. This is one way that they endure, and it means a lot to everybody in my fieldsite, including those, like Somjai, who are seen by many to be rejecting the merits of tangjai rian. Despite the barriers to romance while studying, many students succeed at balancing the two. There is a saying in Thai that students shared with me: ‘finding love while studying is like lighting a candle in the rain’ (rak nai wai rian muean jut thian klangsai fon; รักในวัยเรียนเหมือน

จุดเทียนกลางสายฝน). In retort, many teenagers playfully respond along the lines of, ‘no worries, I have an umbrella’. With the rest of the thesis in mind, the final chapter reflects on how that metaphorical umbrella operates, and how mathayom students succeed at lighting candles in the rain.

29 Chapter 2 – Teacher, Friend, Researcher, Other: Methodology, Role Negotiation, and Ethical Considerations

Siwaporn, one of the village girls in P2, pulled me aside on our way from the classroom to the meeting hall. A group of us were going to play tag during a spare period. ‘Why do you wear that same outfit every day?’ she asked. ‘I don’t though’, I replied defensively, becoming self-conscious about my wardrobe choices. ‘I have a few different outfits I wear.’ ‘Yeah, but what I mean is, if you’re a scientist, why don’t you wear a white coat?’ she asked. We quickly ducked out of the way of the P5 and P6 boys’ football game we had been walking through. We had to cross the concrete football field to get from one building to another. ‘Well, I’m not that kind of scientist’, I began, as I attempted to explain what anthropology is all about. Siwaporn listened attentively. I told her that since the beginning of the year I had been recording where we went, what we were doing, who was friends with whom, what we talked about, what people thought about various things, and so forth. Explaining why I was doing this was more difficult. ‘I have to write a thesis—a book—so I can graduate’, I said, this being the most straightforward and honest answer that came to mind. I was going to try and explain further, but this was sufficient for Siwaporn for the time being to relate to my stage in life and shift the conversation in that direction. ‘Oh, like my mum? She’s doing an extra degree too. She has to go to Bangkok sometimes.’ A couple of the other kids walking with us ran off to chase a stray puppy around some building materials at the edge of the football field. Before long, we arrived at the meeting hall, where several of the other P2 kids were already playing. Siwaporn and I broke off our conversation to join the game of tag, which soon evolved into making paper planes using torn out pages from one of my notebooks. People’s understanding of my research in the field was something that evolved over time, as were expectations of my role there. These matters were negotiated on an ongoing basis with staff, parents, students, and other community members who I came into contact with during my 18 months in Thailand. In this chapter, I outline and reflect on the methodological and ethical choices I made in conducting this research project. The reasons for doing this at length are twofold. Firstly, while I have stated already that participant observation was the primary method used to collect data, this is a research method that is inherently ambiguous and will be implemented very differently in different contexts. This chapter allows for an explanation of precisely what I mean when I use the term, ‘participant observation’, going into how I planned my research, how that plan was adapted after my arrival in the field, and ultimately how I went

30 about collecting data on a daily basis. This allows for a better understanding of the data presented throughout later chapters. Secondly, given the sensitive nature of my research topic, it is necessary to go into extra detail about the ethics of my research conduct, and how my positionality as a foreign adult male researcher was navigated in practice. On top of ethical issues relevant to any anthropologist working with ethnic minorities in impoverished areas, I have had to take precautions due to the sensitive nature of working with children and, in particular, with adolescent girls. Being placed as a kind of teacher at the school added an additional power dynamic for me to be wary of around the children. The centrality of sexuality and early marriage to my overall research was not something I had fully anticipated prior to entering the field. Nonetheless, the ethics protocol I completed for the Australian National University prior to fieldwork prepared me to address these issues as they arose. Regardless of the topics I ended up actively investigating, I had planned to take ethical precautions whenever interviewing children, especially students at the school. I was never alone with individual students and did not ask direct questions about sexuality. If any problematic issues were to arise, I planned to step away from the situation and consult with others before proceeding. While my positionality as an adult male researcher did therefore limit some of the kinds of data that I was able to collect, my status as a teacher also opened doors that would otherwise have been closed to me. As a teacher, I was present in the everyday lives of adolescent girls in a way that I would not have pursued outside of this professional role. The remainder of this chapter is divided into six sections to address issues of methodology, positionality, and ethics. In the first section I outline the theoretical underpinnings of how I approached engaging children as research participants. In the second section I discuss the circumstances surrounding entry into my fieldsite and how I introduced research participants to myself and my project. In the remaining four sections, I recount the implementation of various research methods at Little Creek School, including participant observation, interviews, visual media, and social media. In describing each of these methods, I also reflect on relevant ethical concerns and decisions pertaining to them.

Methodological Approach: Working with Children

Children have long been the subjects of research in a number of fields, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The theoretical frameworks underpinning that research have changed quite significantly over time, trending towards increasing acknowledgement of the role that social constructions play in our understanding of the concept of childhood (Ariès 1962; Lancy 2008). This thesis places great importance on making sure children’s voices are heard

31 on their own terms, making efforts wherever possible to minimise the influence of my adult perspective of what an appropriate or ideal child should be like. The category of the child is central to the questions addressed by this thesis, but I do not treat that category as inherent. First and foremost, I approach children, methodologically and theoretically, as actors in the social world (Waksler 1986: 71). When defining local conceptions of childhood, although I have spoken with a wide variety of people in the community, including many adults, I have placed greater importance on the ways that children themselves articulated their childhood to me— verbally and otherwise—whenever encountering contradictions. Often, children are conceived of by adults as less than fully human, merely passive appendages to adult society (Caputo 1995: 22). But far more than just cultural works in progress, children inhabit their own cultural worlds that are worthy of study in their own right. Hirschfeld (2002) has challenged anthropologists to reconsider typical approaches to studying children. The example used by Hirschfeld concerns ‘cooties’ lore among American schoolchildren. Cooties is an ‘imaginary’ infection that is passed between children through physical contact. It is often associated with children of the opposite sex or children who are ostracised for some reason, such as due to physical or mental disability. Hirschfeld found that cooties lore exists as a set of beliefs and practices completely separate from ideas about race or germ theory. Cooties had previously been wrongly assumed to have been simply a juvenile underdeveloped form of these adult cultural artefacts. Hirschfeld and others since the 1990s have argued that although there has been a long-established tradition of child-centred ethnographies in anthropology, many of them ultimately sought to use children as a means to understand elements of adult worlds. That in itself is not necessarily a problem if better understanding adult worlds is one’s main objective, but the critique put forth by Hirschfeld and others since the 1990s was that many such projects claim to be doing otherwise (Caputo 1995; Schwartzman 2001). As this thesis argues, it is crucial that anthropologists interested in children’s worlds do not fixate on children’s incompetency as adults-in-progress but, rather, focus on their competency as children. In this way, the emic meanings and ethnographic detail of cultural phenomena like ‘cooties’ can be better understood. These theoretical advancements can be seen being used effectively in more contemporary anthropological research with children in Thailand and around the world (Allerton 2016; Cohen 2020; Mahony 2018; Montgomery 2001; Tanu 2018). Sociologists James and Prout (1997) have outlined the central tenets of what they see as an emergent paradigm in the sociology of children. These tenets are observable in Hirschfeld’s and others’ work in anthropology and have guided the development of this project. Firstly, the concept of childhood is taken to be a socially constructed interpretive frame for understanding those who are biologically immature. Secondly, childhood should not be separated from other variables of social analysis such as gender, ethnicity, and class. And

32 most importantly, it is recognised that children play an active role in the construction of the social relationships and culture of both themselves and those around them (ibid.: 3–5). James and Prout see ethnography as a useful research method to move beyond simply studying schooling and family but to also learn from children’s ideas and understandings of things such as work, politics, health, food, and the passage of time. Orientation to time lies at the heart of why so many researchers are drawn to neglecting certain aspects of children’s agency. By focusing too much on the inevitable march towards adulthood, children are framed as people who are in a constant state of ‘becoming’, with insufficient attention paid to them as people who are ‘being’ (Qvortrup 1994: 4). It is all too easy for researchers to inadvertently become preoccupied with children’s futures when collecting data from them. Institutions such as schools where children spend much of their time have a vested interest in cultivating certain futures for students, and parents tend to raise their children with certain kinds of ideal futures in mind. In my own fieldwork, I often found my conversations with children steering towards the subject of their future plans and wishes. Many of these same children though were just as preoccupied with what was going on that week in their personal lives, or things that they were unhappy with regarding their present material living conditions. For research aiming to move away from the ‘child as incompetent adult’ model, it is important to make sure attention is being paid to the present world of child participants and the significances that children give to things in the here and now. It is also important to consider salient aspects of children’s pasts, however brief those pasts may seem to adult observers, in order to present children in research fully as also people who have ‘been’ (Hanson 2017). Of course, it is not only adults who are preoccupied with children’s futures. Children themselves take great interest in potential and expected futures for themselves and those around them. The ‘arrow of time’ does apply to us all, and we all have our own ways of relating to it in the present (Nielsen 2016). Embedded within the concept of children as ‘being’, is an acknowledgement of the importance children place on their own development but with an emphasis on their present perspective on such matters. As Uprichard (2008) has written, it is this merging of children as simultaneously both ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ that brings us closer to accurately learning about children’s worlds from their own perspective. When conducting research with predominantly adult communities, it is generally taken for granted that our interlocutors’ lives are interpreted through interacting frames of ‘been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. Thus, calls for present-oriented research on children are not calls to abandon appreciation for the multiple ways that children are ‘becoming’ but rather to balance this with an oft neglected appreciation for their ‘being’. They may or may not be ‘complete’ members of adult society in a given context, but children are still complete human beings and should be approached as such by anthropologists.

33 A way of achieving this goal methodologically, while minimising the power differential between researcher and participant, is to assume the ‘least-adult role’ (Mandell 1988). This approach acknowledges that an adult researcher can never pass as a child but also recognises that for many children, the barrier between adulthood and childhood is less fixed and absolute than it is for most adults. Children are well versed at negotiating and renegotiating a range of ambiguous power dynamics among their peers of varying age and status, because as observed by Sim (2016: 79), ‘there is not simply one schism that occurs upon adulthood…but a continual revising downwards of the agency experienced at prior times’. This is particularly true in a hierarchical Thai context, where children must learn to relate differently to other children depending on relative age and status. While an adult researcher cannot work their way into the category of child, it is possible to learn how to listen to and speak to children on their own terms and thereby reduce social distance considerably. The researcher’s adult status never becomes completely invisible but may instead be strategically drawn upon by children as a useful resource, indicating their awareness of the differently negotiated power dynamic present in the relationship. I attempted to locate myself within a kind of ‘least-adult role’ where appropriate, but at the same time, I did not wish to reject the categories intuitively assigned to me by my research participants. For this reason, I balanced being both a teacher and a friend to many of the children I became close with throughout my fieldwork. This quality of our relationship was valued by many of my research participants. For example, I was sometimes used as a lookout who could be trusted to know about rule-breaking behaviour while being immune to getting in trouble if I was the one spotted. Or another example would be children using me to pilfer useful items such as elastic bands from areas accessible only to teachers. By negotiating this kind of working relationship with the children in my fieldsite, I gained partial insight into their day to day life experiences in a way that would not have been possible had I completely embraced the role of teacher and relied more upon the administration of surveys and interviews to collect data. Nor did I reject the teacher role though. Rather, I used the power I had as a teacher to take the side of the children whenever I could in a way that would assist them. In writing about these people, I recognise that the individuals described in my thesis are my own interpretations and representations of them. They are characters, not fully realised persons. Reflecting on her work on gender with preschool children, Davies (2003) has written about how this affects the way individual subjects are created in the pages of her ethnography. Although Davies’ character, George, represents a real person in real situations, her interpretation of the meaning that may be attached to his subjective experience is not produced as a record of who and what George definitively is, not even when presented in his own words. Rather, it serves to help readers to understand a particular context. She says, ‘I do not wish that George, with his butterfly cape, should be fixed in place with pins’ (ibid.: 147). Likewise,

34 my own interpretations of individual children’s perspectives are not singular and fixed. They facilitate the ‘thick description’ that is necessary to draw meaning from ideas and actions, in an exercise that is inherently interpretive (Geertz 1973: 14).

Logistics of Entering and Exiting the Field

I first visited Little Creek Village in 2013, in order to begin learning Thai while volunteering as an English teacher at the school there. The location was recommended to me by contacts I had made in Chiang Mai while training to teach English as a foreign language. I already had a scholarly interest in the Karen at that point and wanted to go somewhere relatively remote to minimise my everyday exposure to English over the six months I was there. When it came time to settle on a fieldsite for my PhD research in 2017, I drew on my pre-existing connections to this community to gain access to a suitable village for my project. I made use of a staggered entry and exit from ‘the field’ to make the data collection process go more smoothly. I arrived in the northern city of Chiang Mai in January 2017 to begin my preparations. Over a period of four months I finalised attainment of a research visa, liaising with the village headman at Little Creek Village, the director of Little Creek School, the National Research Council of Thailand, and Chiang Mai University. This involved a visit to Little Creek Village for a few days and a couple of trips to the nation’s capital, Bangkok. Over this period, I sought out a Karen language tutor who was a student at Chiang Mai University, in order to develop my very basic Karen language proficiency. From the beginning of the fieldwork period, I was already literate and conversational in central Thai, the primary language used in the classroom at Little Creek School and among the teachers. The children and most of the villagers were bilingual in Sgaw Karen and Thai, but when talking among themselves they would usually speak in Sgaw Karen. My comprehension of Sgaw Karen improved throughout fieldwork, but Thai remained the main language I used to interact with research participants. This did limit my understanding of many of the conversations I was present for with the children or gossip they engaged in during class. I used these limits at first as opportunities to focus more on non-verbal aspects of personalities and relationships. If something seemed interesting or important, I would ask for somebody to translate into Thai for my benefit. As my Karen language ability improved, I was sometimes able to at least discern the topic of ongoing conversation, which helped guide my questions in Thai. My arrival at Little Creek School to begin fieldwork in earnest coincided with the beginning of the 2017 school year in May. I kept an apartment in Chiang Mai throughout the entire period I was in Thailand, storing extra belongings and staying there if I had any business in the city from time to time or retreating there a few days at a time to take a break and catch

35 up on typing notes. When the school year ended in March 2018, and after a short trip back home to , I remained based in Chiang Mai until the end of June 2018. During this final period of fieldwork, I began planning my thesis and sorting and analysing my data. At the same time, I conducted follow-up interviews with several key individuals during visits back to Mae Hong Son Province and made brief visits to other schools in the area around my fieldsite. I also met with former students who had completed or left school and were at that point in time living in Chiang Mai. Although I had always planned to focus on the children in the community and spend time at the school, I had originally hoped to stay with a family in the village to immerse myself more fully into the local community. Upon arrival, however, I was unable to find an appropriate household to live with and was accommodated at the school in the meantime. Teachers were reluctant to ask too many people to host me for fear of the burden I would place on households with limited space and financial resources. Although eventually I did identify a few families I could potentially have lived with, I had by that point become accustomed to my living arrangements at the school. I was pleased with the ongoing data collection made possible by living in close proximity to the school dormitories. Had I lived with a family in the village I may have gathered more data about the domestic situation of some students, but by remaining at the school, I forged closer bonds with the dormitory kids. My decision to remain living at the school for the entire year meant my data collection in the village was limited mostly to weekend visits, but it greatly strengthened my school-based data. The room where I slept was once a classroom at Little Creek School but had not been used as such for several years. Now it served as an out of the way storage space for decorative paraphernalia such as plastic flowers, costumes, and large plastic banners printed to promote various events at the school. Artefacts of the room’s past remained untouched. An old TV cabinet sat gathering cobwebs in one corner of the room, the cathode-ray tube television still there but no longer functional. A large stack of chairs occupied another corner. The walls were adorned with a range of posters with pictures and information about Thai culture, places, history, and tradition. My own habitation of the space was layered upon these other uses. To one side of the room was a table with my electric kettle, drinking water, cutlery, and crockery. Next to that rested my motorcycle helmet and gloves, favourite props of the P2 kids when playing in my room. Some of the plastic student desks had been stacked on one side of the room, but several of them were arranged in a line near the back, acting as a dividing barrier between the rest of the room and my sleeping area, with just enough space to walk through at one end. Between this barrier and the blackboard was my two-person tent. My bags sat beside it, but some of my personal belongings and a stash of instant noodles, coffee, and chocolate bars were arranged

36 inside. The tent helped to keep me warm and kept me safe from insects, but it also separated my sleeping mat from the rest of the room, which made me more comfortable having the kids spend so much time hanging out with me there. They had a space they knew they could spend time with me away from class but recognised my tent as my own private space where they did not enter. The director of the school was very enthusiastic to have me living at the school and conducting my research. He valued the positive impact a foreign teacher would have on the public image of the school and was optimistic that I would be able to offer useful advice on teaching and learning there. He remained supportive of my presence throughout the year. The director encouraged me to help teach English whenever I could, but for the most part he gave me complete independence to carry out my research according to my own priorities. The school had that year begun participating in a ‘professional learning communities’ (PLC) project being rolled out on a trial basis at a few hundred select schools across the nation. The PLC initiative involved regular staff meetings with the express purpose of discussing teaching problems encountered in the classroom and working as a group to collectively come up with solutions to be implemented uniformly across the school. This sometimes also involved guest trainers coming to the school to deliver workshops or teachers travelling to larger towns to attend workshops. The director was keen to get my input on this and other professional development efforts at the school, with the hope that I could help him in his efforts to improve the test scores and overall quality of learning taking place at the school. I offered what advice I could throughout my stay, with the repeated caveat that I was not, in my home country, a schoolteacher. All of the staff were aware that I was a PhD student, but many assumed I had a background primarily in education and were unfamiliar with the discipline of anthropology. Despite my reluctance to offer too much advice regarding education, my regular observation across all the year levels and subject areas being taught at the school gave me a unique perspective that was valued within the context of the PLC initiative, which aimed to promote a collaborative approach to teaching and learning. My intentions as a researcher were communicated to the various different sections of the community in several different ways and on an ongoing basis. As mentioned above, I first met with the village headman to explain the purpose of my research and obtain his formal permission to spend time in the village collecting data. This was a requirement of the National Research Council of Thailand for obtaining my research visa. A teacher I already knew at the school arranged this meeting and personally came along to introduce me. I explained that I was interested in learning about the lives of the children in the community—about what it means to be Karen, what traditional ideas and practices are relevant in their lives, what they like and do not like about school, what kind of things they are learning and how. I explained

37 my planned methodology: that while there I would be conducting interviews with various community members and spending time with the children at school. I emphasised that my data collection was not limited to formal interviews but would also include my observation of day to day activities and participation in casual conversation. Once the school term began, I was invited by the director to introduce myself to various members of the school community. I used these opportunities to explain my research project and to formally open a dialogue with everybody directly involved with my research. During morning assembly on the first day of school, I was introduced alongside two other new teachers. This solidified my role as that of teacher during my stay, even though I did not ordinarily teach any class. I took the opportunity to explain my presence to the entire cohort of students, in a similar manner as I had done with the village headman. Later that week I was given another opportunity during a special assembly to welcome new M1 dormitory students who were beginning at Little Creek School for the first time. There were laughs of disbelief from the mathayom students when I promised them that if they shared any secrets with me then I would not tell the director or other teachers. I told the group they could come to me any time with any questions or concerns and that they were free to choose how much or how little they told me in response to my inquiries. Within the first few weeks of term, there was a meeting held with the parents of the students. This meeting took half a day and served as an orientation to the school for parents of new students and also served to update parents of continuing students on changes at the school. The parents were introduced to every single staff member and told about all of the various subjects being offered at the school. Details of ongoing development efforts at the school were shared, along with information about life in the dormitories and the logistics of students getting to and from school. As a part of this meeting, the director invited me to join him at the front of the meeting hall and introduce myself to the parents. I once again outlined my research plan and invited anybody with questions or concerns to approach either myself or the school director at any time. While these kinds of meetings and introductions were important for me to conduct at the outset of my project, obtaining consent to collect and use data was and remains an ongoing process. I made a habit of continually reminding people I spoke to about how our activities and conversations related to my research. The interaction with which I opened the chapter represents one example of this sort of encounter. This was especially important in the village, as it was far more difficult to communicate my purpose to the entire community simultaneously given my limited presence there each day. As my research focus shifted throughout the year, I had regular conversations with people about how I was becoming more interested in certain things such as the kids’ dating practices or attitudes towards marriage, to make it clear that these subjects not strictly related to schooling were not ‘off the record’ in relation to my project.

38 If I had a specific question for somebody about a potentially sensitive topic—early marriage, for instance—I would clarify within my question that I was interested in possibly including their anonymous thoughts on this in my thesis.

Participating as Teacher-Researcher: Classroom Observation

When I say participant observation, the meaning of my participation is multifaceted. In terms of how I was literally categorised by other people, I participated as a teacher at the school—a role I had less ambiguously occupied already in the past and was slotted back into. I was usually referred to using the Thai title, khru (ครู; teacher), followed by my first name, just as the other teachers were. This usually extended to my interactions with people in the village, although I was sometimes also called s’raf (Karen for teacher, literally ‘master’ of some field of knowledge—so also used for experts of various trades) and also ajan (อาจารย; ์ university lecturer or upper high school teacher) by a few individuals. My identification as a teacher was somewhat ambiguous as I did not actually have any scheduled classes to teach. Nor was my attendance expected at compulsory staff activities such as meetings or training workshops—although I was welcome at these kinds of events if I expressed interest. To make myself useful within the school though, I did do my best to spend at least one period with each prathom and mathayom year level per week during an English class where I would either co-teach, lead specific activities, or assist in marking and giving feedback on student work and presentations.7 On some occasions, if a teacher was absent from a scheduled English class, and I had no other pressing tasks, then I would teach the class myself. I also regularly helped students who asked for help with English homework or who required assistance preparing for extra-curricular activities to do with English. Outside of activities directly related to schoolwork, I participated more fully as a teacher. By this I mean that I ate most of my meals with the other teachers, joined them for various social activities outside of school hours and participated in some ritual activities that involved the teachers such as wai khru (ไหว้ครู) ceremonies, where students ritually express their gratitude, respect, and affection for their teachers.

7 During the year of my fieldwork at Little Creek School, there were three different English teachers. One responsible for P1 lessons, one for P2–P5, and another for P6–M3. There was also an additional teacher who was conversational in English but taught in other subject areas. Many other schools in the area only had one English teacher.

39

Figure 2.1 Participating as a teacher in a wai khru ceremony (photo supplied by Little Creek School).

On school days, I would usually sit in on classes according to a timetable I had made for myself and periodically updated so as to balance my time between different year levels and subject areas. This timetable was only a rough guide, however, with classes often cancelled for one reason or another or ongoing events leading me to focus on particular groups of students at various times. My interactions with the students could be divided roughly into two different kinds. The students from anuban through to P4 interacted with me in ways notably different to students from P5 through to M3. The younger students generally played and spoke more freely around me, responding more to my attempts at occupying a ‘least-adult role’. The older students remained more guarded around me for the duration of my fieldwork, barring a few key individuals. While observing classes, I tried my best wherever possible to sit alongside the students, either doing the same work as they were or at least discussing it with them while they did it. Some lessons were not conducive to this approach, and so, if necessary, I would just observe in silence, taking notes about not only the content of the lessons but also the various interactions going on between everybody in the classroom. I participated either more or less in each class depending on how disruptive my participation would be. I had previously discussed with the director and the teachers that I would be popping in and out of their classes throughout the school year to learn about how they worked. I took care not to interrupt ongoing lessons for the sake of my research. To avoid causing disruption or annoyance, I did not attempt to pull individual students out of class to conduct one on one interviews with them. I

40 waited until the teachers were finished with their explanations and demonstrations before engaging the students in conversation during class. One significant advantage to my classification as a teacher was that it allowed me to form legitimate and appropriate professional relationships with adolescent girls in the community, whose life experiences are central to the topics explored in this thesis. Had I been based in the village conducting my research, approaching young girls with any sorts of questions about their lives would likely arouse suspicion regarding my intentions. Male teachers are among the very few non-relatives who are expected to be acquainted with young women platonically. While there were of course ethical limits to what I could discuss with female students, being a teacher enabled me to collect what data I did as an adult male researcher.

Interviews and Conversation: Setting Appropriate Boundaries

During my fieldwork, I rarely conducted formal one on one interviews. On occasions when I attempted to engage individual students in interviews, we would almost without fail be quickly joined by other students who would jointly participate, making it into a group discussion. Furthermore, the topics I was most interested in revolved around illicit behaviour and ideas. Direct questions from a teacher about rule-breaking or inviting criticism of school and parental authority were generally met with silence, seemingly scripted responses, or noncommittal responses. Even discussions of the most general moral ideals usually followed fairly predictable trajectories. Most of my interview-like data were derived from spontaneous conversation, which I may have guided in a particular direction based on my research interests and priorities that day. By spending enough time with particular groups of students, I aimed to be present when they decided of their own volition to initiate conversation about topics I was interested in their opinion of. Through this approach I did not simply hear them repeat moral ideals they had learned in class, but, rather, I saw how these ideals were either applied or subverted in their day to day lives. Common timeframes for more in-depth conversation with the students were while hanging out before school, at lunchtime, or after school. I found spending time at one of the village’s shops a convenient place to run into villagers for conversation, as was the church on Sundays before and after mass, which I regularly attended. With the other teachers, my most effective means of gathering detailed interview-like data was by sitting beside the driver on car trips into town or further. The teachers were burdened with lots of administrative work when not teaching, so I did not wish to take up their time with formal interview schedules. Social settings were a less disruptive means of collecting data about the teachers’ views.

41 During the ethics stage of my research design, I decided I would not be alone with students one on one, making group discussions the default form of interview available to me if I wished to interview them. This was in line with community expectations of male teachers, and so the students had similar boundaries in mind. They often helped to ensure there were no issues encountered that saw me risk crossing these kinds of boundaries. For example, one evening the following strategy was proactively used by the students to enable our conversation to occur in the appropriate manner. Kotchakorn, an M3 dormitory girl, had been practising an English language speech in preparation for an upcoming academic competition and required my assistance. It was after dinner—around 7:30pm—and I was sitting alone in my room working at my computer. Rather than come and see me after dark on her own, Kotchakorn came with her friend Duangporn and knocked on my door. I agreed to speak with Kotchakorn about her speech, and the two M3 girls promptly suggested we go elsewhere to do so. We relocated to the veranda area of the IT classroom that was at ground level, above my room. The seating there was out in the open for all to see. As Kotchakorn and I sat editing and practising her speech, Duangporn sat quietly next to us until it was time to walk back to the dormitories with her friend. Another precaution when interviewing the mathayom students was being wary of sensitive or inappropriate topics of conversation. Knowledge about actual sexual experience of the students is not part of this research. My understanding of attitudes towards sexual acts is based more on things that people, of all ages, have either implied or assumed to have taken place. The focus of my analyses in this thesis is not on sex acts themselves but, rather, the relationships that they are assumed by others to be an inevitable part of. The policing and performance of sexual morality does not necessarily require actual sex acts, so I have not speculated about what may or may not have happened ‘behind closed doors’ and have never asked the students about such things. The most pointed a question I would pose along these lines would be simply to ask if somebody has a boyfriend or girlfriend when the topic came up in conversation. Usually this type of question very quickly ended conversations with mathayom students who were quite guarded around me regarding their personal affairs. It was often more effective to discuss the topic of dating in general, asking non-sensitive things such as what people usually look for in a partner, or how courting works for some hypothetical other. Unlike the maintenance of physical boundaries, which were always mutually respected, topics of conversation did at times become riskier and require careful management. While on my part, I refrained from asking questions about topics relating to sex, the subject was occasionally raised with me on the part of my research participants. On a handful of occasions without prompting, students—both boys and girls—asked me directly about my own experience and attitudes towards sex. When mathayom students chose to raise inappropriate topics with me it was usually a kind of joke for them, knowingly putting me in an uncomfortable

42 position. In those cases, it was simple for me to carry on without discussing the inappropriate topic. The students who asked me about such things most frequently were a few of the P2 boys, who knew in theory what sex is and knew that as an adult, I had knowledge of it that they lacked. When prathom students asked about such things or drew lewd pictures in my presence, I simply told them that I was not willing to discuss it with them and that they should wait until they are older. This was not necessarily the exact course of action I would normally choose when addressing questions about sexual health from prepubescent children, but it was the typical response given by other teachers when fielding such questions from prathom students, and so I followed suit.

Participating as Friend-Researcher: Games, Banter, and Visual Media

Another way I participated, which blurred the boundaries of my role as teacher, was as a friend of sorts to the children. Unlike the other teachers, I specifically devoted much of my spare time to joining in with the kids’ games. I did not outright reject the role of teacher that had been given to me, but I did encourage the students to speak freely with me and engaged with them on a more casual basis than if I were teaching a class. I was particularly close with the earlier prathom year levels and several of the older prathom boys. I spent the most time engaged in social activities with the P2 class as a whole. While I had productive research relationships with several of the mathayom students, in general they were more guarded about speaking to me about their own personal ideas and behaviour. The younger students, however, would more often speak or act candidly in my presence, trusting that I would not get them into trouble for any rule-breaking I observed. I shared especially close bonds with the P2 class for a number of reasons. Firstly, the physical location of the P2 classroom was conducive to me spending a lot of time there. The P2 classroom was the nearest homeroom to my private quarters. And unlike most other classrooms, which were in close proximity to one another, the P2 class was located in a separate building. With these two facts in mind, it made sense for me to pass by the P2 class whenever coming or going from my room throughout the day, and the P2 students often passed by my room as well. Furthermore, in other classrooms I would often move in and out of adjacent rooms throughout a period, but I tended to remain in the P2 classroom for longer stretches of time to save walking back and forth across the schoolyard multiple times. The P2 class was placed in this larger classroom to accommodate the unusually large size of the class. While most prathom classes had between six and 10 students, the P2 class that year had 17. This larger cohort also afforded research advantages, giving me access to a wider range of personalities and relationships in one space.

43 Besides the size of the cohort, another peculiarity of the P2 class of 2017 was that there were two girls and three boys living in the dormitories, where the youngest students are usually in P4 or P5 but are mostly mathayom. Being so young, these five students were not encumbered with as many chores as the older dormitory kids and existed in a somewhat anomalous category, much like myself as an anthropologist who did not exactly fit in and did not share the same duties as other ‘teachers’. At times when the teachers were doing teacher things (meetings, professional development, lesson planning), and the dormitory kids were doing dormitory things (cooking, cleaning), these younger dormitory kids would often seek me out for company. While the older students treated me more like a teacher, the younger students were more likely in my presence to break the rules, fight with one another, or swear at one another or even at me. This kind of behaviour was seen by other teachers and older students as something to be corrected, but I eagerly joined in with the P2 kids’ antics and made the most of the insights they gave me access to throughout the year. While the teachers disapproved of some of the students’ behaviour around me such as hitting me or speaking rudely, they were happy that I was willing to supervise the kids and spend time with them. Because these younger students were considered by the teachers to be less fully socialised than older students, minor breaches of etiquette like this were relatively tolerated. If any of the older students had treated me so informally then there would have been more serious reprimanding of the students by other teachers. The younger students did know the rules, and they carefully observed them around other teachers. But they knew that I, as a foreigner, would not care about the rules in the same way. I avoided intervening in conflicts or incidents of rule breaking. Exceptions to this were when somebody appeared to be in immediate physical danger, if I noticed crying or bleeding, or if something valuable was about to be broken. I used my discretion in such cases to either immediately intervene myself if necessary or, preferably, to go and inform a teacher of what was going on. Much of my data collection with the kids outside of class involved chatting to them while playing various games. Games were played not just around the schoolyard but also in classrooms, in the meeting hall, at students’ homes, and in my own room. While interacting with them, I participated in the playful teasing relationships shared by the kids. I would often playfight with the P2 kids and exchange banter with them. Building this kind of relationship also involved more affectionate behaviour. Whenever hanging out, anybody with snacks, including myself, would always share with others present. When seated to look at something together, be it a book, a phone, or a computer screen, we would always huddle close together and lean on one another.

44 While initially my use of visual media simply served as a means of documenting events, it proved particularly useful for learning from the younger prathom students. Much of the affective communication between the children involved hugging, touching, leaning on one another, hitting, kicking, and all manner of code switching—not just through verbal language but also body language. Being able to watch these things back in great detail through photo or video proved invaluable. Furthermore, the kids themselves greatly enjoyed participating in these methods. Throughout fieldwork, I increasingly gave the P2 kids opportunities to be in control of the camera, with themselves recording what they thought was interesting or requesting that I do so for them. We would then regularly sit down together and look through our various photo and video recordings and discuss the recorded content.

Figure 2.2 Writing on a noticeboard while P2 Figure 2.3 Photographer of our noticeboard student films and photographs. Text at top teases graffiti takes a partial self-portrait, capturing that 'Dayne loves Li [another teacher].' A similar anthropologist in the background. statement about two students is at the bottom.

Drawing was another participatory research method I made extensive use of with the younger kids. I would sometimes elicit a general theme, or other times the kids would dictate what we were drawing or writing from the outset. The kids then had the freedom to express their ideas in whatever form they pleased. I always carried a second notebook with me, in which I completed classwork alongside the students. The P2 kids made a habit of requesting access to this classwork book to make drawings for me. Other times we would draw together in students’ own books or on loose sheets of paper. Much of the data I got from the younger kids regarding more sensitive topics such as adult sexuality and romantic relationships was gained through the medium of drawn pictures that the kids chose to provide me with without prompting or explicit discussion. I could then follow up with open-ended questions such as, ‘What/who is this a picture of?’, ‘What does this mean?’, or ‘Why did you choose to draw this?’

45 Ethnography of Social Media

Throughout my day to day activities during fieldwork, I regularly checked social media for updates from the students and interacted with them through public comments or private messages.8 Despite many adults regularly lamenting that for many teenagers, social media is nothing more than a ‘time suck’, it is typically a critical arena for socially meaningful activity in their lives (Miller 2011: 78). It is important for anthropologists to document how social media functions in different contexts, as the activity that takes place is not determined solely by the framework provided by the platform. Across the world, the same group of platforms have seen the rise of a diverse array of social practices and norms that are moulded by the communities engaging with them (Miller et al. 2016). Even within my fieldsite, there were noticeable differences in the ways teenagers and adults made use of social media. But beyond the ‘hype’ of new media studies, the ethnographic study of social media is a basic part of the methodological toolkit most contemporary anthropologists must draw upon while conducting participant observation (Dalsgaard 2016: 97). While some aspects of studying social media use are indeed novel, many of the methodological goals, motivations, and dilemmas faced by researchers in this area are nothing entirely new to ethnography. My engagement with Little Creek students over social media was not something I treated as separate to my offline interactions with them. It came about as a matter of course after observing the salient sites of social activity in my research participants’ lives and became integrated in my daily ethnographic routine. Facebook was the social media platform of choice in my fieldsite, and my understanding of people’s everyday social lives would be missing a key element had I not engaged with them through this platform.9 Research methods that include collection of data about online activity offer insights into the ways that we construct and present our identity to others when we have greater control over what people see compared to in our ‘real’ lives (Boellstorff 2008; Kendall 2002; Nardi 2010; Turkle 1995). The themes explored in this kind of research mirror the earlier works of scholars such as Goffman (1959) and Butler (1990), despite the very different setting. When it comes to social media, in particular, relationships regularly move between online and offline environments, necessitating research methods that encompass all of these realms of social interaction simultaneously (boyd 2014; Gershon 2010). In many countries it has been controversial for teachers to engage with students on social media due to concerns about privacy and potential abuse (Asterhan & Rosenberg 2015). In Australia, for example, state education departments provide guidelines to facilitate the use of social networking sites as educational tools but explicitly prohibit teachers from befriending

8 Social media may also be referred to as ‘social networking sites’. 9 Information about the Facebook platform and its user interface is covered in chapter six.

46 students using personal accounts. This was not the case in my fieldsite, as it was culturally expected that teachers forge strong personal bonds with students, and this extended to online forms of interaction. While some students chose not to befriend teachers on their Facebook account, teachers were ‘friends’ with many of the students and regularly engaged with them on the platform. I was therefore comfortable sending and receiving friend requests to and from the mathayom students with my personal Facebook account, in my capacity as a teacher- researcher. I also connected to several teachers, parents, and other villagers on Facebook. I engaged in one-on-one conversation with students through private messages, read and commented on their posts, and they read and commented on mine alongside my personal friends from Australia. Nonetheless, I took precautions to ensure that my interactions over Facebook remained appropriate and did not raise any ethical concerns. Facebook was useful in giving me access to an abundance of casual conversation between students on topics that they might not normally discuss with me and that I would not normally raise explicitly with them—namely, matters relating to sexuality and romance. While exchanging private messages with students directly, I exercised the same precautions as when interviewing in person regarding sensitive topics of conversation, as well as reminders of how various topics related to my ongoing research practice. Facebook was advantageous in that it allowed me to speak to mathayom students on a one-on-one basis and therefore hear their responses without the influence of other people present, which I was unable to do in person. Of course, I still had to carefully manage these conversations so as to avoid crossing boundaries. Under normal circumstances, I did not exchange messages with students after about 10pm at night. The advantage of collecting data from students’ online and offline lives simultaneously was that I could wait to ask questions either privately online or in person in a public and group setting, depending on which approach would be more appropriate in any given situation. I was also able to observe in real time how these different realms of social life related to and contrasted with each other. The specifics of how and why mathayom students used Facebook throughout my fieldwork are explored at length in chapter six, but my participant observation on Facebook was a crucial part of my data collection regarding all topics discussed within my thesis. Many details of the students’ engagement with social media will have been missed by my research. Due to the sensitive nature of the conversation topics I was interested in researching, except in very rare circumstances, I was not able to personally view the students’

47 private messages to one another, having to rely instead on what they were prepared to tell me about their one-on-one conversations and video calls.10 The biggest impact this had on the data I was able to collect, however, was that the behaviour of male students whom I knew on social media was less visible than that of female students. As the girls were the ones usually posting photographs or providing social commentary, the posts from boys that I observed were predominantly in the comment sections of posts by girls. This meant I had greater insight into the broader personal lives of the girls’ posts I was seeing and could ask follow-up questions in person or via private messages, whereas many of the boys’ posts I was exposed to were from people unknown to me. The mathayom boys at Little Creek School were actively using Facebook and posting comments, but unless I happened to be friends with the girls they were publicly courting, then I was not able to easily view those posts. I was able to make general enquiries about Facebook use with the boys I knew but could not link these to as many concrete examples of actual posts I had seen. Future research into adolescents in Thailand and social media use should keep this in mind and take extra steps to ensure that sufficient data can be collected from both boys and girls. In the period since completing fieldwork, I have remained connected to research participants on Facebook and continue to see their daily posts. They remain available to me to send messages with any further questions at a moment’s notice. While in the field, I was able to observe people’s activity on social media alongside their daily lives in person, affording greater insight into both realms of life. By only seeing people’s social media activity detached from offline environments, I am more likely to miss key elements of some content. I therefore have avoided reading too much into more recent posts. The utility of being able to easily ask questions post-fieldwork is largely in clarifying factual details about events that took place during fieldwork, as people’s feelings, attitudes, and ideas are likely to change over time. For people’s reactions to events that took place while I was in the field, I give priority to data collected at the time or right at the end of my fieldwork period.

Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the methodological approach I used in my fieldwork, along with its theoretical underpinnings. I aimed to make use of methods that prioritise the voices of children, and to keep their interests in mind as I conducted my research. The way I was able to do this

10 In their study of text messaging in the lives of American high school girls, Eisenhart and Allaman (2018) were able to get around this constraint by arranging the ability to monitor only text messages exchanged between the small group of girls included in the study. Because of this, every participant in these private conversations was able to consent to the conversations being closely monitored by the researchers. Some sensitive information was readily revealed by the girls, but it was noted that they likely engaged in self-censoring around certain topics, including romantic relationships (ibid.: 240).

48 was by living as a special kind of teacher at Little Creek School. I sat alongside students in class as I both observed and participated in their lessons, and I played games or chatted with students in our spare time. Visual methods provided a means for the younger children to actively collaborate in the creation and collection of data, while social media provided a space where I could observe and participate in social interactions with the older children who were often less candid in my physical presence. I was clear with older children about my observation of their posting behaviour for my research whenever befriending students online, allowing them to choose what information they were willing to give me access to. Although I was not assigned the same duties and responsibilities as a regular teacher, I was treated much like any other teacher within the community. This position facilitated regular access to the children in my fieldsite and the establishment of relationships that were understood locally to be both inherently affectionate and professional. The close familial bond and kin-like expectations between teachers and their students in Thailand, especially at smaller schools, is discussed at length in chapter five. It was the expectation of that bond, combined with my conscious efforts to reduce the social distance between the children and myself through participant observation in their games and activities, which enabled me to collect data reflecting students’ everyday lived experiences. My position did not grant me leave to act however I wished though, and as it became apparent that my topic related explicitly to sexual activity, I took extra care to ensure that my actions were not harmful or exploitative towards any of the people I was working with. In particular, my investigation into the sexual morality of adolescent girls was not conducted by asking direct questions on this subject. My positionality as an adult male made the ethical conduct of such an investigation impossible. Rather than attempting to collect data on the actual sexual behaviour of specific girls, I focused my investigation on public discourse relating to this subject. I noted the kind of gossip that was engaged in and the moral assessments people made about alleged, implied, or hypothetical actions. My direct questions were kept to appropriate topics for conversation such as attitudes towards education or gender expectations more broadly. Several chapters of this thesis focus largely on the older children in my fieldsite and deal with how transitions into adulthood are managed and tied to adult concepts of morality. I of course discuss at length many of the topics that I have noted at the beginning of this chapter as overdone through preoccupation with adulthood in child research. The subject matter of early marriage, entry into the workforce, and expulsion from school necessitate this focus to an extent. Nonetheless, I have aimed to approach the states of transition and liminality dealt with in this thesis in a way that makes every effort not to neglect alternative interpretations framed from the perspective of my research participants, who were not necessarily in such a rush to leave their childhood completely behind them. I acknowledge that even where

49 individuals may move into adult worlds, the cultural worlds those individuals had inhabited up to that point do not cease to exist but continue to be shaped by their younger peers. Given the theoretical focus on older children as the thesis progresses, it may be asked why I continued to collect a large amount of ethnographic data from primary school students. This was partially a matter of efficient time management. Much of my more useful data regarding the mathayom students came from social media outside of school hours and from observing public responses to significant events that occasionally took place at the school, such as breaches of rules or extra-curricular activities prompting discussions of morality. In contrast, mundane social interactions with prathom students always yielded lots of data, and so I filled downtime by hanging out with them as much as possible. The ethnographic data I obtained among prathom students did nevertheless continue to prove useful in addressing my mathayom-focused research questions. By spending time alongside the younger prathom students, I came to learn about how they are introduced to the gendered moral worlds that become so life-changing later on. While data explicitly about sexual morality mostly (but not exclusively) came from adults or mathayom students, my young friends in the prathom classes taught me a great deal about everyday beliefs and values relating to love, gender, poverty, and education—all integral to understanding how sexuality is navigated alongside education.

50 Chapter 3 – In and Out of Classrooms: Locating Students in Institutional and Gendered Space

It was period three on a Friday. I was walking from the P1 class to my room when I came upon Narirat, a P2 girl, crying on the steps leading up to the football field. I saw that the door to my room had been left ajar and wondered if she had perhaps come looking for me there. I tried to ask what had happened but got no response. I went back up the stairs to get help and found her classmate, Wipa, in a similar state but more willing to talk to me than Narirat. ‘Pipat was choking us. It hurts’, she said, sobbing. The students had been unsupervised all morning due to a staff meeting. At Wipa’s request, I interrupted the staff meeting to inform them of the situation. Khru Nong came over and corralled the P2 kids who were outside, leading them back into the classroom to their desks. ‘How are we going to get you to stop doing this?’ Khru Nong said to the offending boy. ‘You’re friends. You shouldn’t treat your friends like this. You should love each other. You can’t be so rough with the girls.’ She scolded Pipat in front of the class, quite frustrated due to having had this same conversation with him a week prior. Pipat was made to apologise to Wipa and Narirat. Nong asked the class if it was necessary to hit him with the cane as punishment, and several of the kids thought that was a good idea. She got the cane and hit him lightly twice on the behind in front of the class. Pipat winced for a brief moment and then went and sat down. I stood next to Wipa and Narirat, watching and listening as they were. After Pipat was hit, I felt Wipa grab my hand. She squeezed it affectionately and looked up at me, tears still in her eyes, and smiled at me. Then without a word, she went and sat down. Before long, Nong returned to the staff meeting, and I remained to play games with the P2 class. In the brief encounter just described, there are multiple aspects of space, gender, and institutionalised power at work in conjunction. The tale revolves around a classroom, but it is not as a learning environment bound in time and space. Rather, the classroom is a fluid space that students, teachers, and the state are actively negotiating through practice. Although a portion of the P2 class is physically present in the classroom at the beginning of the story, quite a few of them are outside. Still, they are identifiably staging their action from the P2 classroom. The door to the classroom is propped open, and students readily move back and forth or sit by the doorway, engaging in conversation with people both inside and outside the walled space. The first instance of violence in this vignette is gendered and takes place among the children. The second is directly tied to the institution of the school as an act of corporal punishment. There is a particular time-space regime outlined on a timetable stuck to the wall, but the authority figures capable of enforcing it are all preoccupied with an institutional meeting that violates its own structuring of the day by disrupting scheduled classes.

51

Figure 3.1 A P2 student sits in the doorway to the classroom while finishing her work. Some of her friends are playing outside.

This is the arena in which students learn about many different moral principles and aspects of their identity. They learn how to speak a national language; they learn what is appropriate for boys, and what is appropriate for girls; as Karen, they learn the difference between themselves and other children in Thailand. Some of these lessons are explicitly taught, while others are picked up over time through observation and immersion in this institution. As pervasive as the institutional structures of the school may be in enshrining any number of systemic inequalities, the social significance of different school spaces is still shaped to an extent by the people using those spaces. For better or worse, the final designer of a building is not the architect but the people who use and modify the space through practice (Brand 1994; Star & Bowker 2002: 159). Depending on the context, a classroom could be a stressful place to navigate for unpopular students (Finders 1997), or a place of relaxed interactions shielded from outside pressures and custom (Sarroub 2005). Even very young children excel at deliberately disrupting planned activities and actively taking a role in the construction of their own childhood (Markström & Halldén 2009). The purpose of this chapter is to map the institutional and gendered space of Little Creek School in a way that emphasises how it is actively renegotiated by the various actors

52 within it. I do this by describing and analysing the range of quotidian activities that took place during the year of my fieldwork. This provides important context for understanding the exceptional events that are discussed elsewhere in the thesis regarding student violations of sexual morality. The small everyday challenges to institutional and gendered space discussed in this chapter bear certain similarities to the illicit behaviour of mathayom students that I discuss later in the thesis. Through acts of play, anuban and prathom students learn how to navigate morality through a number of ‘figured worlds’. I argue that in order to understand engagements with institutional and gendered space, it is necessary to consider the internal logics and priorities of the figured worlds that these spaces come into contact with. The chapter is divided into two main sections. In the first section, I clarify what I mean by the term ‘institutional space’ and set about mapping its reach within the school. I analyse how Buddhism and the Thai nation-state frame most things within the school and, in doing so, create disadvantaged ‘hill tribe’ subjects. I also consider how these institutions are mediated by teachers who have their own goals and interests. As institutional actors themselves, teachers are often acutely aware of institutional power and may actively attempt to subvert it, with both positive and negative consequences for students. In the second section, I turn to the games played by anuban and prathom students in order to analyse how the younger children navigate and negotiate the boundaries of both institutional and gendered space. In renegotiating these boundaries, the students are not necessarily aiming to be subversive so much as practising their own embodied ideas about the spaces they occupy and share with others. I argue that the insights gleaned from this analysis can fruitfully be applied to older students dealing with issues of sexual morality, whom I turn to later in the thesis.

The School as Institutional Space

Little Creek School is the most prominent physical manifestation of the Thai state in the local community. It includes the largest individual buildings and is the largest single compound within Little Creek Village. While other elements of local life, such as the district royal development project, tie activities in the village to state goals and philosophies, the school gives the state a brick and mortar presence right at the centre of Little Creek Village. This enables the institutional placement of various symbols of the Thai nation. For example, the centrepiece of the school’s layout is a Thai flagpole. The walls are adorned with images of the Thai royal family. The architecture is distinct from the rest of the village. It is a profoundly Buddhist space in a majority Christian community. The teaching staff are formally classified as public servants of the kingdom. It is a space where Thai language and custom prevails. The books it holds are mandated by the Thai government.

53 All of these features contribute to the process of making young into ‘good’ Thai citizens. When asking parents and teachers about the purpose of school, they would consistently speak about the importance of socialising their children. This is phrased in Thai as guiding young people to ‘enter society’ (khao sangkhom; เข้าสังคม) successfully.11 This was framed more in terms of moral and civic values than skills and knowledge (that is not to say that skills and knowledge are unvalued). Moral values were not just pursued as an end in themselves though—to the parents of students, they represented the possibility of either escaping or coping with poverty by becoming valued Thai citizens. As a piece of community infrastructure, a school becomes a powerful tool for the state. Scott (1998) has described the assimilation of people into the same cultural and administrative system as ‘state simplification’, arguing that it serves primarily to increase state power. State simplification has historically been highly valued by governments largely because it facilitates the collection of taxes and prevention of rebellion (ibid.: 2). These functions became incredibly important to the survival of Siam as a sovereign nation throughout the colonial period, along with a corresponding reimagining of what the nation constituted in terms of people, culture, and territory.12 The project of constructing the modern-day map of the country now known as Thailand involved enormous efforts of state simplification across what was and is an incredibly diverse socio-political landscape (Thongchai 1994). Things such as school enrolments and registration of a mobile population serve to map not territory but a population and render them more legible to those in power. Institutions such as schools facilitate efforts to map the peopling of a landscape, such as through censuses. It has been noted by Anderson (2006: 169) that projects of population mapping through census are not always about taxes but may assist central authorities in imagining a national community. People who are arbitrarily labelled using the same racial category on a census form may initially only share an imagined connection. Anderson described how such connections could nonetheless become reified through what he called ‘traffic-habits’—people adorned with the same label are forced to frequent the same bureaucratic institutions as one another, and so they come to have a shared social experience that gives reified meaning to the previously arbitrary categorisation (ibid.). This process can be seen in the history of ‘Karen’ being used as a broad ethnic label in Thailand and Myanmar. Derived from terminology referring simply to ‘uncivilised’ people of the forest, the word Karen

(kariang; กะเหรยี ง) saw no use in the Central Thai language prior to the 19th century (Hinton

1983; Renard 2000). At the same time as the population is mapped and labelled for the

11 The same phrasing was encountered by Jonsson (2001: 154) while conducting research with upland Mien in northern Thailand. 12 Siam was first renamed Thailand in 1939.

54 convenience of central authorities, each individual is interpellated as a particular kind of subject that they come to recognise themselves as (Althusser 1984). By attending a Thai school, the students of Little Creek School are further subjectified as Thai-Karen people.

Figure 3.2 Posing with the national flag. Figure 3.3 Posing with the royal flag.

On the one hand, this process of making subjects who are legible to the state is not inherently bad, as it does allow for more effective implementation of benevolent goals like welfare provision. On the other hand, the design of particular infrastructure may implicitly exclude certain groups of people from the benefits, either intentionally or unintentionally (Star 1999). Ultimately, using a school for state simplification and subjectification reinforces the stability and security of overarching state powers, which can have both positive and negative consequences for the people being mapped.

Morning and Afternoon Assemblies

The school day at Little Creek School is divided into seven periods according to a timetable, running from 8am to 4pm. Although this timetable is subverted in various ways, it nonetheless provides a base structure for daily events at the school. Linear time in schools as determined by timetables has been described by Hohti (2016: 185) as an essential hegemonic tool in the process of crafting children as beings in a process of ‘becoming’. It has been argued that ‘coordination across time is the basis of the control of space’ (Giddens 1990: 18). It is against clearly structured timetables that everything in a school takes place and against which

55 achievements are judged. A day of school considered going well is typically conceived of as a day running according to the schedule dictated by the timetable without disruptions. The most indispensable part of the daily timetable in every Thai school is the ritual of the morning assembly and, to a lesser extent, the afternoon assembly. The daily singing of the national anthem at 8am in schools across Thailand has been described as a powerful symbol of loyal citizenship by Vachararutai and Sriprapha (2018: 41). They note that in instances where individuals have questioned the value of this tradition and called for change, the negative response from the public, especially teachers, has been harsh and angry.13 At Little Creek School, students stand lined up according to year level and gender before the national anthem is sung along with the raising of the flag. Next is the recitation of both a Buddhist and Christian prayer. Then, another song is sung, ‘Song for the Father of the Land’ (phleng pho haeng phaendin; เพลงพ่อแห่งแผ่นดิน), in honour of the late King Rama IX. This is followed by the singing of the school anthem and recitation of official school values. Finally, the first section of the assembly is brought to a close as each class in turn, beginning with anuban 1, turns to face their elders and formally exchange greetings with them using the Thai wai (ไหว้) gesture.14 Once this is done, everybody sits, and a teacher makes any important announcements for the day and gives a brief lecture about any ongoing issues at the school, such as behavioural problems, cleanliness, hygiene, homework, dormitory rules or chores, bullying, etc. A few times each week there is also a short break during this section of assemblies where students break up into their assigned cleaning groups to tidy up the schoolyard and bathrooms. Before cleaning begins, the nominated mathayom leader of each group stands before the assembly in turn to announce their duties for that day. These pronouncements rarely change and always include the statement, ‘the school is still not particularly clean’ (rongrian yang mai khoi sa-at; โรงเรียนยังไม่ค่อยสะอาด).15 As the students sweep dust and dirt from the schoolyard, they learn that cleaning the school is a mission always underway but never completed.

13 This part of the ritual is not exclusive to schools. The Thai national anthem is played on public loudspeakers in urban areas and on television and radio twice a day, at 8am and 6pm. Anybody walking around outdoors must stop what they are doing and stand in place for the national anthem, as in the schoolyard. 14 A wai is made by placing one’s hands together in front of the body and bowing the head. The gesture is usually reciprocated by the other person. Hands are placed higher in relation to one’s head when giving a wai to older people or those senior in status in some other way. When two people are not of equal status, it is the junior person who initiates the wai. The wai is used in Thailand when meeting someone for the first time each day, when requesting permission to enter a room, when expressing gratitude, when receiving a gift, and when apologising. 15 Afternoon assemblies follow the same basic structure as morning assemblies, except the first section includes only the national anthem as the flag is lowered, and the greeting of peers is replaced with students lining up on their way out of the schoolyard to wai the teacher on duty one by one following announcements.

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Figure 3.4 Sweeping loose dirt from a dirt road near the P2 classroom.

Structures like timetables, year levels, and morning assemblies are described by Tyack and Cuban (1995) as the ‘grammar of schooling’ and exist to serve both educational and organisational goals. It is because of the ingrained nature of grammars of schooling that ineffective pedagogies often persist even where alternative approaches may be demonstrated to yield better outcomes. Other examples they list include the conventional demarcations between different subjects of knowledge and the practice of assigning a single teacher to a single classroom (ibid.: 9).16 Like grammars of speech, grammars of schooling are long established and taken for granted, not requiring conscious thought or attention to be enacted (ibid.: 85). Any grammar is not prescribed but, rather, emergent in prevailing practice. Even where new practices are explicitly introduced to replace old ones, the teachers may either knowingly or unknowingly continue to perpetuate past approaches to pedagogy (Ahn 2015). In order to make sense of the grammar of schooling in Thailand, it is necessary to first look to how it historically developed.

16 One departure in this context from the prevailing Western grammar of schooling is that in schools in Thailand, both primary and secondary students have different specialist teachers for different subjects. In Western education systems, it is more common for primary students to spend the majority of their class time with a single homeroom teacher for most academic subjects. At Little Creek School, this is the case for anuban students, but beginning from P1, students have a number of teachers responsible for their education.

57 Schooling and ‘Thainess’

Formal Thai education began in monastic schools for boys but was overhauled during the reign of King Rama V in the latter half of the 19th century to include schools modelled after Western standards of education (Keyes 1991; Wyatt 1969). These reforms in general aimed to give the central government more direct control over the periphery so that outlying areas could not be easily claimed by colonial authorities from Britain and France (Watson 1980: 2). Missingham (1997) describes how the bureaucratic structure of Thai schools is closely tied to the nation’s political history, particularly regarding the role of teachers in rural schools as representatives of not just education but also the state—more so the latter in many cases. The standardisation of Bangkok’s dialect of Thai as a national language and marker of national identity was another key goal of this initiative. ‘Thainess’, or khwampenthai (ความเป็น

ไทย), is rarely given a clear definition but is regularly held as an important value in Thailand and is always at least partly tied to one’s ability to speak Central Thai with the appropriate accent (Diller 2002; Keyes 2003; Pavin 2005; Thongchai 1994). A uniform language can limit what is thinkable, determine what kind of knowledge is valuable and contribute to the maintenance of a particular symbolic order (Bourdieu 1977: 21). The supposed ‘clarity’ of one’s Thai speech has been described as ‘an acute technique of ethnolinguistic gatekeeping’ (Ferguson 2010: 234–5). People who do not speak Thai with the appropriate privileged Bangkok accent—regardless of fluency with the language—are admonished for speaking ‘unclearly’. For Thongchai (1994: 15–6), Thainess is so vaguely defined because it relies so heavily on defining who is not Thai. While Thainess may be valued by the state because it makes for more easily governed subjects, its acquisition through education is valued locally as cultural capital. The theory of cultural capital was used by Bourdieu (1986: 243) to explain inequalities of academic achievement of children from different social class backgrounds. Bourdieu’s discussion of cultural capital focused largely on what he called its embodied state—the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that we acquire over a long period in the domestic household. Cultural capital is initially inherited from one’s parents and other caregivers, and so children raised in households lacking the more valued kinds of cultural capital go through life at a disadvantage. The school system implicitly assumes that students will arrive with a certain amount of cultural capital already. In Little Creek Village, many parents have minimal literacy and rarely use Thai language in their daily lives around the village. The cultural capital passed down in Karen households is more often related to farming, forest management, and traditional practices and belief systems (Yos 2004). Unfortunately, this cultural capital is not highly valued in Thai

58 society generally. Children from this community thus commence school lacking the embodied cultural capital that allows their urban Thai peers to excel in school and beyond. If students are able to succeed at school despite this disadvantage though, they acquire cultural capital in what Bourdieu (1986: 247–8) described as its institutionalised state—cultural capital that is objectifiable independently of its bearer in the form of academic qualifications. Over many years, they may also come to embody cultural capital as they learn to embody Thainess as part of their schooling.17 The acquisition of cultural capital in both its embodied and institutionalised states is what motivates parents to send their children to Little Creek School, recognising that their children must excel at being Thai in order to get ahead in Thailand both economically and socially. Another aspect of Thainess that is conveyed to the students at Little Creek School on a regular basis is Buddhism. As Van Esterik (2000: 65) notes, ‘To be Thai is to be Buddhist’, and this truism holds despite the approximately six percent of Thai citizens who are not Buddhist (National Statistical Office of Thailand 2010: 3). Buddhist morals and logic are thoroughly embedded in every Thai institution, whether or not religion is explicitly invoked. On paper, the school is respectful of the fact that approximately two thirds of its students are either Catholic or Protestant. There are Christian prayers included in the morning assembly and before meals, and students are taught in class that all religions are valued because they purportedly teach us how to be good people.18 Despite this position though, Christian philosophy is not institutionally present in the school, whereas Buddhism most certainly is. Besides the pictures of the Buddha stuck high on the walls of every classroom, the school owns a large Buddha image that is prostrated to by the director whenever welcoming special guests and opening various other special events. Weekly ‘morality and ethics’

(khunatham/jariyatham; คุณธรรม/จริยธรรม) lessons are nominally secular but are based on teaching Buddhist fables that convey moral lessons. Buddhist monks regularly visit the school, be it to bless special events, provide moral instruction, or in association with charitable projects. No church representatives were ever incorporated into the school in the same manner

17 Not all realms of culture are administered through schooling though. Even the most diligent upland student will miss out on certain kinds of domestically acquired cultural capital that would benefit them in Thai society. Regarding class divisions in France, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 74) observe that disparities in cultural capital between working class and upper-class high school graduates become ever more apparent as the relevant cultural competencies shift, ‘…from classical drama to avant-garde theatre or from school literature to jazz…’ An analogous example in the Thai context may be experience with sports or musical instruments typically associated more with middle- and upper-class households (tennis and violin, for example). Even after graduating with the exact same piece of institutionalised cultural capital then, young people in Thailand can readily distinguish between people of different class backgrounds with more or less cultural capital. 18 My own status as a ‘good person’ despite my lack of religion was difficult to explain. One teacher told her prathom social studies class that the Thai government was poetjai (เปิดใจ; to be open-minded) by allowing the populace and that Western governments like mine were even more so, indicated by the prevalence of foreigners with no religion.

59 during my time there. Through the institutional presence of Buddhism in the space of the school, even Christian students acquire fluency in Buddhist belief and ritual. I was quite surprised to find that a Buddhist morality camp had been scheduled at the school for the mathayom students on Christmas Day. Even village students camped out in tents at the school overnight, where they practised Buddhist meditation with the monks instead of being at home with their families on one of the most important days of the Christian calendar. Christmas celebrations both at the school and in the Little Creek Village community were postponed a few days.

Figure 3.5 A Buddhist monk leading students in Figure 3.6 Students meditating during a Buddhist meditation. morality camp on Christmas Day.

The organisation of schooling in Thailand relates not just to historical Thai structures and priorities but also European ones. Any institution incorporates multi-faceted agendas from multiple actors, past and present (Atkinson 2011: 337–8). The grammar of schooling that students come to know in Thai classrooms is largely carried over from teaching traditions that were developed in Western countries. In both schools and factories in 19th century Europe and USA, ‘standardization, formalization and the imposition of punctuality and discipline’ were afforded high priority (de Swaan 1988: 61). The complex sociological conditions leading to the institutional logic driving the grammar of schooling as we know it today no longer exist in the same way, but they still incidentally inform many aspects of school organisation and curriculum design even in Thailand. One of the more visually apparent similarities between schools and factories is the spatial organisation of people within the space. Clustering students within year levels, each with their own teacher who can visually monitor the entire group simultaneously is crucial to the orderly functioning of the school. Students at Little Creek School typically may sit wherever they wish at the beginning of the year, but once seats are chosen it becomes uncommon for them to change. This is made so not by explicit rules from the teachers but by the fact that students store their own belongings in their desk, thus it would not be practical to be regularly

60 changing seats. Most classrooms have the tables arranged in rows all facing the front of the class, although these arrangements are sometimes changed by teachers. In almost every classroom, there is the exact number of tables and chairs to seat the number of students in that year level.19 The more common arrangement of tables in rows facilitates the copying of work from the board and rote learning that involves the class repeating after the teacher in unison. The layout seen in the picture of the P2 classroom below is more conducive to group work and one on one interactions between the teacher and individual students.20

Figure 3.7 Layout of the P2 classroom.

Figure 3.8 Layout of the M3 classroom.

The most strongly felt effects of institutional space in Little Creek School are those specific to this particular context, rather than general features of Thai schooling. Due to the importance placed on Thainess in a Thai government school, all of the students at Little Creek School, with its entirely Karen student body, are placed in an environment where their ethnicity is a handicap. Karen language is not to be used in the classroom, not even when the teacher is Karen, and it should be kept to a minimum when interacting with teachers in the schoolyard.21 Within the village, children never wai (respectful Thai greeting) local adults nor are otherwise expected to display Thai manners, but they are reprimanded if they do not wai appropriately whenever crossing paths with a teacher or other adult in the schoolyard (Howard 2009a). Thainess and the associated models of gender and hierarchy are embodied as students are physically instructed in the correct way to wai and girls are encouraged to perfect the fluid hand motions of classical Thai dance (Van Esterik 2000: 206). Reinforcing the importance of Thai language and manners was a common subject addressed during morning assemblies. It was

19 After Somjai’s expulsion, there was one less chair present in the M3 classroom. 20 In the second term, the P2 classroom was rearranged to have rows of desks. 21 Although about half of the teachers employed were native speakers of Sgaw Karen, the school does not employ any form of bilingual education. Even the Karen language subject (one period each week from P1–M3) was taught predominantly using Thai language for classroom management and instruction.

61 also a point of pride when welcoming Thai visitors to the school, who would often comment on the impressive quaintness of upland children embodying Thainess with such commitment. Another feature common to almost all students of Little Creek School is their experience of poverty. There is of course variance within the population of the school. Some kids have parents with salaried government jobs while others’ parents are farmers with very little or sporadic financial income. All understand the financial hardship that comes with living in upland villages and can appreciate the stark differences between their lives and those represented in the images and stories in their textbooks and in the soap operas they watch on television. The advantage of this shared experience is that it is rare for children to be bullied by their peers regarding poverty or about belonging to a ‘hill tribe’—prejudices they will no doubt have to contend with if they move to Chiang Mai or Bangkok for work or study later in life.22 Whatever social solidarity Little Creek students gain by passing through school alongside similarly vulnerable peers, this does not alleviate the large gap in academic achievement between their school and middle- and upper-class schools in large urban centres like Chiang Mai or Bangkok. Schools in rural areas of Thailand with student cohorts of low socio-economic status regularly perform poorly when compared to the academic achievements of their more advantaged peers in urban locations (OECD 2013; OECD & UNESCO 2016). Even students who are academically gifted and excel compared to their classmates will struggle later on, as their families lack the social and cultural capital of middle- and upper-class urban Thai schoolchildren. The prejudices of wider Thai society can be felt in the space of the school as the children are instructed both directly and indirectly about what is and is not valued in Thailand. Academic education often takes a backseat to preparing students to ‘enter society’ (khao sangkhom) as good citizens. This phrasing is usually explained as guiding children who are entering adult society, but analysis of upland classrooms suggests that a more apt explanation would be guiding Karen who are entering Thai society. At a Thai-Hmong school, Johnson

(2005: 186–7) regularly observed teachers’ efforts to ‘develop’ (phatthana; พัฒนา) the Hmong students by helping them to overcome stereotypical characteristics regarding hygiene, manners, and moral values. The end result of these efforts, according to Johnson, is that students are set up to fail and are effectively taught how much they are not Thai through overemphasis on these topics. The historical school experiences of Thai-Lahu adults

22 This situation bears similarities to other communities of children who face discrimination or conflict in wider society. Lanclos (2003: 124–5) found that despite the tense politics of sectarian division between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, children did not often explicitly invoke this divide in their games and banter at school as the entire school community usually belonged to one side or the other of the divide. The children studied by Lanclos were not unaware of these societal tensions, but they were not usually salient in their day-to-day interactions among peers.

62 interviewed by Juelsgaard (2013) mirror the direct observations of Johnson. The ideals can never be completely lived up to by people of certain backgrounds—their accent is heard as unclear, their politeness is seen as quaint, and dirt from the forest always returns no matter how many hours the students spend sweeping it after they sing the national anthem. It is not as simple then as these students being ‘made Thai’ by passing through this institution. Such an interpretation assumes they were already ‘hill tribes’ before, along with all the baggage that that term carries (Jonsson 2002: 192). The institution that teaches upland children what a ‘good’ Thai student is like also teaches them what they themselves are in the eyes of the rest of Thailand; they learn how unlikely it is that they will ever realise the ideal model. In efforts to make them Thai, these students are simultaneously made Karen, Hmong, Lahu, Mien, and more, as the translocal connotations of these ethnic categories are created and maintained. The internal other is produced through the teaching of unattainable standards of ethnonational belonging.

Upland Teachers Making Thai Citizens

The teachers, although agents of the school as an institution, are also their own subjects and may at times act in ways counter to the design of the school. Some institutionally subversive action is driven by intention to achieve better outcomes for students, while some is a cynical reaction to the pressures placed on teachers by the institution. Neither of these drivers of subversive action result in universally positive or negative effects for students. The way that teachers mediate the institutional space of the school is affected by their own cultural and class background. Most of the teachers had experienced upbringings in socioeconomically disadvantaged households. About half were Sgaw Karen themselves, and some others were Shan and Lawa. Almost all were from the local and neighbouring districts. For those who had passed the certification to be enlisted formally as a public servant

(kharatchakan; ข้าราชการ), their job gave them financial stability and family healthcare benefits as a government official.23 The monthly salary, even for kharatchakan, was still quite low for many teachers, ranging from about 10–25,000 Thai baht depending on years of service.24 For some local teachers this is the only regular salary in their household, and it is therefore used to help support parents, siblings, and other extended family whose income comes from sporadic agricultural profits and seasonal wage labour. Most of the teachers at Little Creek School were passionate about the doors that could be opened through education once students learn to ‘enter society’ appropriately. Like the

23 Teachers who are not kharatchakan receive a lower salary with fewer benefits. 24 Minimum wage in Thailand is 308–30 Thai baht per eight-hour working day depending on province— somewhere from 8–9,000 Thai baht per month.

63 parents, teachers were ever mindful of the generational poverty in the local community and the discrimination the children would grow up to face in Thai society. This position leads to a certain ambivalence towards the institution of the school. The cultural capital students can acquire from a school is seen as necessary to succeed in life. And yet it is that very same institution which perpetuates many of the foundations of the discrimination that upland peoples face in Thailand. Some of the Karen teachers shared with me that it frustrated them seeing young Karen consciously hiding their ethnicity after moving to the city. Those same teachers are routinely made to encourage that kind of behaviour at school. Some of the ethnically Thai teachers may have earnestly wished to paternalistically ‘develop’ the upland children like those encountered in Hmong communities by Johnson (2005), but with the majority of teachers having comparable life experiences to their students, there was a general awareness of how students’ cultural identities were being actively shaped by this Thai institution.

Figure 3.9 A teacher at work in the classroom. Figure 3.10 A teacher sitting with students on sports day.

One approach to reconciling this ambivalence has been to devote resources to extracurricular activities based around practical life skills, student confidence, and critical thinking.25 The director had been attempting to find ways of increasing active student participation in shaping their own educational goals and priorities.26 For example, the mathayom students learn entrepreneurial skills by managing the production of bottled drinking water for sale to nearby communities. As part of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) initiative, teachers hold class meetings where students are invited to openly give feedback on teaching quality and class content. There are student council meetings where general issues about school management can be discussed directly with the director. Yet none of these efforts

25 This approach is possible because the rhetoric of critical thinking has been adopted in Thai educational development policy and is called for by various international development organisations. This shift in policy language has done little to affect usual classroom pedagogy, however. 26 The director of the school was Northern Thai and came from a large lowland town.

64 alters the national curriculum and pedagogy in normal classes. Students are being told to think critically and voice their own opinions in one context, but then they are being exposed to lessons that implicitly teach them not to act in that manner if they want to be good people. The teachers thus find themselves in a difficult situation; they are trying their best to help but in doing so impose a double bind on students. If the students work hard to become ‘good citizens’ according to the institutional framework then they are more likely to acquire the cultural capital on offer through schooling. If they successfully subvert the institutional space with the help of their teachers then they may leave with more useful social and thinking skills and practical knowledge, but their measured outcomes at school will suffer, and they will likely still be worse off than the students in better-resourced urban schools. The various ongoing endeavours at Little Creek School aimed at improving non-institutional outcomes for students detract from the time students are able to spend in class mastering the values, skills, and knowledge the state expects them to have acquired by graduation. It could be argued that students who would drop out of school early will only benefit from a rejection of the institutionalised pedagogy and an increase in alternative school activities. But for the students who expect to do well in school, such an approach further compounds their disadvantage. Teachers were regularly burdened with a wide range of tasks beyond classroom instruction, and many often complained about the time and effort these duties demanded. For every individual student in a homeroom teacher’s class, there was a lot of associated paperwork for monthly progress reports—several pages per student. Teachers’ evenings were often occupied visiting students’ homes, and weekends were spent writing reports. There was also paperwork associated with lesson planning for each new term and extensive documentation of activities completed in class. All of this material was periodically compiled in binders and submitted to the director for inspection. As teachers engaged in what Gupta (2012: 143) has described as constitution of the state through bureaucratic writing, they most acutely felt the tensions within their hybrid role as both teacher and state official. Teachers shared all other administrative tasks involved in running a school, as there were no dedicated staff for tasks such as managing student records or conducting the school’s accounting. There were also regular staff development workshops and meetings throughout the year, often held during the day while classes were left unsupervised. Some of the teachers became quite disillusioned, feeling that their time was being wasted with forms, training, and meetings. ‘We just do the same thing every time we have training’, one teacher complained to me. The onerous demands on teachers’ time often impacted time available for lesson preparation, leading to many lessons where students were simply instructed to read a textbook passage with minimal explanation or engagement from the teacher. Teachers who were behind on their administrative duties would use class time for that purpose after assigning an activity. Students were often left to watch a movie or entertain

65 themselves if some administrative matter required a teacher to be out of the classroom—be it elsewhere at the school or even in town in many cases. The scheduling of miscellaneous tasks and duties meant that even the most diligent and devoted teachers were regularly forced to leave their classes unattended. Those who were exhausted by the juggling of institutional roles were often late to class or looking at their phones instead of helping students with their work.27 The institutional exhaustion felt by the teachers translated to classrooms where the institutional space was sometimes weakened and always negotiable to some extent. Rather than being fixed in space and time according to year level, the classrooms at Little Creek School were quite fluid spaces despite the institutional structuring in place. Both teachers and students often physically moved between classrooms during any one period. From a young age then, students learn to navigate this space in subversive ways. Games were not confined to the playground at Little Creek School. The next section looks at how the students engaged with institutional and gendered space through play at school.

Playing Games: Engaging with Institutional Space

An Introduction to Games at Little Creek School

Through play, the students assert a certain degree of control over the institutional space they occupy and give lived meaning to abstract concepts like gender. Childhood play is often characterised as ‘unruly’ by adults—seen to disrupt the appropriate power relationship between adults and children (Galman 2015: 312). Disruptive play forces the adult’s gaze to shift from seeing a child as a person in a perpetual process of becoming, to a person who is actively being (ibid.; Qvortrup 1994). Various kinds of play—including, but not limited to, structured games—were an integral part of the school experience for the students. Rather than just filling time while gradually taking on cultural practice from adult worlds, children’s play is ‘serious business’ as they actively participate in cultural production (Goodwin 1985; Howard 2009b: 340–1). Children, playing alongside their peers, are constantly involved in processes of performance and negotiation that play a key role in determining the values they bring with them as they eventually do enter adult worlds as fully recognised members of society. They also actively impart these newly reshaped values to the next generation of children. A wide range of games were played at Little Creek School during my time there. Although many games were initially introduced to Thailand from other countries, they are now maintained and altered almost exclusively through child-to-child transmission across

27 The cynical disengagement of teachers here, as reinforcing the status quo, is akin to the disruptive behaviour of students in Learning to Labor (Willis 1977), which leads to the perpetuation of existing class divisions in the cohort.

66 successive generations. There were particular games played either mostly by boys or mostly by girls, and some games were played by boys and girls together. Usually girls’ games were accessible to boys who would sometimes join in, whereas boys’ games were less accessible to girls. Some of these gender dynamics were maintained as children became older, even as the specific games played changed.

An example for girls would be the game known in Thai as ‘kradot nangyang’ (กระโดด

หนังยาง)—‘jumping over rubber bands’. Similar variants are known around the world in English as ‘Chinese jump rope’ and ‘elastics’. Elastics requires a long rope made by tying many rubber bands together (the girls teach one another this skill) and can be played anywhere with a relatively flat surface and sufficient space for a few people to stand in a line. The rope is tied at each end to form a loop, which is stretched around the legs of two players standing opposite one another. The height of the rope varies throughout the game and according to the variant being played. A third player then has to jump in and out of the loop in certain patterns while reciting the appropriate list of words. Usually at Little Creek School, this would be a sequence of the days of the week in Thai. As the rope is shifted higher, it becomes more difficult to jump without tripping. Boys would often join in with this game, but it was usually initiated by girls, who played it for longer and far more regularly. It was played by anuban and prathom girls of all ages.

An example of a boys’ game would be marbles (lukkaew; ลูกแก้ว). Players take turns ‘shooting’ their marble towards a shallow indentation dug into a patch of dirt, then must capture the marbles of other players after landing in the hole. The rules are similar to the marbles game known as ‘Poison’ in English. I have seen a girl playing marbles with the boys on one occasion, but she did so by borrowing a marble from one of the boys. Marbles was most seriously played by prathom boys, with anuban boys often watching and having a go. Mathayom boys also sometimes joined in and were highly skilled players, but they did not play as regularly or in as large numbers as the prathom boys. A wide range of games included both boys and girls playing together. There were a few variants of tag, where children chase one another. There was a group variant of ‘rock– paper–scissors’. There were a few variants of draughts played with stones. There was a rubber band game with similarities to marbles—children play for keeps, risking one of their own rubber bands to try and capture those of other players in a flicking game on any flat surface. Most of these games were highly popular among prathom students. Sports were the more popular games among mathayom students, but similar gender divisions existed. Most of the girls enjoyed playing volleyball, but boys also happily participated in this game. Football was an

67 exclusively male game that the girls never played. As the students came closer to entering mathayom, mixed play between girls and boys became far less common.

Figure 3.11 A group of P2 girls playing elastics (photo taken by P2 student).

The very same kinds of games I encountered at Little Creek School have been studied by researchers in various different settings, far removed in both space and time. Rich catalogues of the rules involved in children’s games have been amassed by past researchers (Bruner, Jolly & Sylva 1976). The goals of such research were initially driven by cognitive and evolutionary psychology. When Piaget (1950: 3) conducted a study of the game of marbles in Switzerland, he was not interested in the sociological implications of the game but, rather, the insights it could reveal about the cognitive capabilities of young children to formulate and understand complex systems of rules. The Opies catalogued enormous amounts of games in the United Kingdom; they famously took children very seriously as the experts on the games they played (Opie & Opie 1959). Their research potentially reinforces stereotypes of ‘innocent’ children, however, in that it frames games as a space completely shut off from the real world, with usual social relations suspended (Opie & Opie 1969: 3). They describe childhood culture as,

…unnoticed by the sophisticated world, and quite as little affected by it, as is the culture of some dwindling aboriginal tribe living out its helpless existence in the hinterland of a native reserve. (Opie & Opie 1959: 1–2)

Childhood sociality may often be unnoticed or ignored by adult worlds, but it is rarely unaffected by them. Much like the myth of the noble savage that the Opies draw on here, this bounded and primordial view of childhood has been rejected by most contemporary researchers.

68 More recent ethnographic research with children highlights the ways that everyday issues of relating to others are incorporated into games, albeit not merely as restatements of maxims taught by adults. Davies (2003) has written about how binary gender relations are both maintained and negotiated through games played by children in Australia. In Ireland, Lanclos (2003: 48–9) has turned to what she terms ‘dirty’ folklore—often that concerned with sexual material—as evidence against a view of childhood play as completely separated from adult concerns in the ‘real world’. A key insight from the Opies, however, was that children’s games tend to have their own rules and goals which are not always directly concerned with the adults in their lives (even if they do draw on issues conventionally conceived of as ‘adult’ matters). Play and games may be subversive of institutional space, but this is often incidental rather than the result of deliberate acts of directed resistance such as the kind suggested by Scott’s (1985) ‘weapons of the weak’ or de Certeau’s (1984) ‘tactics’. When the children initiate a game that reclaims institutional space, they typically are not doing this alongside conscious reflections on power and space. The voiced reason for their subversive behaviour is primarily because it is fun, and because it has some social significance in their own life. The intentionality is not necessarily attached to the subversive outcomes, but I argue that the intentionality is still important to consider.

Claiming Classrooms: Reflections on Fun

The children did not frame their play as oppositional to or competing with institutional regimes of power—at least not in terms of institutional categories such as religion, class, ethnicity, or nationalism. Their play was valued as a source of both fun and platonic intimacy, and so it was control of their bodies that they most deliberately challenged. The boundaries of play were not always clearly delineated, and this sometimes made it more obviously disruptive from the perspective of teachers. For some of the children I played with and spoke to, the bonds they forged with others through play were the only reason they felt they could put up with the tedium of going to school in the first place. They were not immediately concerned about being made into Thai citizens, so much as being made bored. Many of the most valued interactions in their daily lives took place in classrooms, though not as institutional spaces of learning and subjectification. Whether during a spare period, after class had finished, or while a lesson was being taught, classrooms were just as often spaces of play at Little Creek School. Defining an activity as fun is a tricky prospect. What we find entertaining, and why certain things do or do not make us laugh depends greatly on our sociocultural location and background (Dwyer & Minnegal 2008; Musharbash 2008). In Thailand, fun, enjoyment, and humour can be described using the word sanuk (สนุก), which is often tied to a sense of

69 national Thai character and is emphasised at state-sponsored events in minority areas for this reason (Jonsson 2001: 153).28 Despite applying to many frenetic events—sports, karaoke, or dancing, for example—Mulder (2000: 65) describes sanuk as valued for the pleasant and relaxing feeling that is experienced in relatively informal situations among peers, where hierarchy is less relevant. This state of interpersonal informality is described by the phrase, pen kan eng (เป็นกันเอง). For the younger students at Little Creek School, fun was associated with activities or people that facilitated freedom to explore in one way or another, with motivations and goals varying depending on the individual student’s background. To demonstrate this, I contrast two P2 girls’ experiences of fun—Narirat, a village girl, and Chatchaya, a dormitory girl. Narirat enjoyed performing in front of my camera to experiment with different modes of self-presentation—shouting, pulling faces, changing her voice. This exaggeration of bodily action also characterised her play behaviour away from the camera. Being as ‘silly’ as possible during play presented quite a contrast to Narirat’s usual classroom behaviour where she tended to be still, soft-spoken, and orderly. She was generally identified as a particularly intelligent and high-achieving student. Having fun gave Narirat an outlet to relax in the face of the community pressure and expectations she had to deal with every day during class. Narirat thus became an expert at code-switching through bodily comportment. I felt this code-switching in the ways she interacted with me in different contexts. When we were all playing together, she was always friendly and chatty with me. Whenever I tried to discuss schoolwork or interact with her during class, she treated me as though I was unwelcome, refusing to answer me and turning her head away from me. I did not experience this with her classmates. Although Narirat was rarely, if ever, actively disruptive during class, her play behaviour at other times could still be described as subversive of institutional space. Her self- management of bodily comportment saw her adhering strictly to the rules in some contexts but challenging norms in others. She engaged in serious play alongside her peers in ways that challenged the gendering of their bodies. Proper bodily comportment is given a lot of importance both in Thailand generally and specifically in the institution of the Thai school. In order for Thai social relations to carry on in an orderly fashion, behaviour appropriate to a particular conjunction of space and time must be maintained (Van Esterik 2000: 36). This knowledge of context is described in Thai using the phrase ru kalathesa (รู ้กาลเทศะ). By itself, kalathesa refers to a metaphysical concept of space and time intersecting. Once a person knows (ru) kalathesa, then they are able to act appropriately and respectfully in a given situation. Children of school age are expected to

28 Thailand’s self-characterisation to tourists as ‘The Land of Smiles’ draws on similar associations.

70 demonstrate their knowledge of kalathesa through speaking and acting according to the situation and their relative social position. A permanent and authentic self is conceived of as ultimately unknowable (following Buddhist notions of non-self and impermanence), and so greater significance is afforded to changeable surface appearances (ibid.: 203).29 This makes charges of hypocrisy very difficult in Thailand given the different standards applied to words and actions arising out of different contexts (Jackson 2004). The importance of knowing kalathesa is usually implicitly understood by social actors in Thailand, with the word itself heard mostly when correcting the conduct of children (ibid.: 38). Narirat demonstrated knowledge of kalathesa (time and place) in the classroom during class time, but she redefined how her body occupied that same space during play. From Narirat’s perspective, this is potentially in line with demonstrating knowledge of kalathesa, as the context has changed across time. Teachers, however, had stricter ideas about how to appropriately know and respond to kalathesa within the school at all times. The most common minor incident of policing girls’ gendered behaviour was related to sitting position while wearing a skirt (a mandatory part of the girls’ school uniform except for one day each week that included physical education). If girls sat with their legs apart for whatever reason, then they were promptly told off by any passing teachers. Many of the P2 girls had a habit of sitting on railings in front of the classroom in a manner that was considered unseemly by adults. They would dangle one leg over each side of the railing to balance themselves. Narirat was one of the worst offenders of this, despite her status during class as a star student who always listens and works hard. Narirat also flouted these kinds of rules when playing structured games. A key example of this is in the game of elastics, where skirts make advanced play more difficult and tripping more likely. The initiation of this game often followed the near complete reclamation of classroom space by students at the end of a lesson, with the teacher having left the room. With no teacher present to immediately police properly gendered bodily comportment, the girls’ solution to this issue was simply to remove their skirts while playing. The girls were comfortable wearing just the shorts or leggings that they already had on underneath anyway, with their skirts all laying in a pile in the corner of the classroom while they played. The figured world of elastics, in which P2 girls are the most powerful agents, provides space for serious play such as this, stepping out of the usual confines of how their bodies are gendered and policed in other contexts. Narirat, through her selective code-switching, very clearly displayed how her

29 It seems anthropologists agree with Buddhist teachings on this point. Describing the importance of practice theory approaches to understanding agency and identity, Holland et al. (1998: 31) note, ‘behavior is better viewed as a sign of self in practice, not as a sign of self in essence’. This also resonates with Butler’s (1990) description of gender as always performed.

71 bodily comportment was self-managed in a way that was sometimes, but not always, consistent with the expectations of adults. Chatchaya particularly enjoyed escaping supervision in order to have fun. Unlike Narirat, Chatchaya was always restless and animated during class and had relatively low grades. When I asked what represents ‘fun’ for her, Chatchaya described wandering her home village on her own and climbing the trees there. Chatchaya would often sneak away from the other students in the morning or after school to get out of chores and watch cartoons with me instead. Running off on her own was also her usual reaction to being upset, pushing away anybody trying to comfort her. Chatchaya valued her way of having fun as a means to cope with her experience of hardship. She was an expert at subtly changing the subject and tone of a conversation. She occasionally opened up to me about feeling trapped in the village in a life of poverty. It seemed to me as though she was embarrassed or felt silly when revealing greater ambitions for her future. In such instances, if I tried to probe deeper with follow-up questions about difficult subjects (e.g. food, money, family troubles), Chatchaya would turn my question into a joke and begin laughing, then either question me about something unrelated or initiate a game. The reason boisterousness like Chatchaya’s was problematized by the school institution is that it subverts the institutional goals described earlier in this chapter. Whether we consider the goal of the local teacher—to equip students with cultural capital—or the goal of the institution—to create Thai ‘hill tribe’ citizens—these goals are subverted when there is someone throwing paper or laughing loudly in the middle of the classroom. Chatchaya was never setting out to be institutionally subversive though, so she is genuinely confused when those sorts of outcomes are attached to her actions. Parents and teachers were not categorically excluded from fun. When complaining to me about school being no fun, Chatchaya clarified that a few teachers actually were fun, because they were willing to play with her. She wondered why other teachers could not do the same. She had never set out deliberately to antagonise the teachers or the institution. Contrasting the intentionality of Narirat and Chatchaya during play, it could be said that their agency produces comparable outcomes vis-à-vis the institutional space of the school. They each habitually reclaimed parts of the space and, in doing so, disrupted the institutional goals I have outlined earlier in this chapter. But my aim here is to understand the alternative figured worlds occupied by these students, not just a single overarching structure represented by Thai society and its various institutions. To do this, it is crucial to pay attention not just to social practice and outcomes but also actors’ discourse about the meaning they themselves attach to their practice, and how this meaning is determined. Chatchaya’s and Narirat’s differing intentionality may be somewhat irrelevant to the figured world of the school—even where they have agency to affect it—but the approach of serious play in figured worlds reveals

72 the significance of their intentions in other realms. The respective motivations, values, and goals of Narirat and Chatchaya work in concert to affect the figured world of play among the prathom cohort at Little Creek School.

Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the institutional and gendered space of Little Creek School, establishing the context in which the events included in this thesis play out. Space within the school is carefully managed by the Thai state to develop young Karen students into Thai citizens. This is accomplished through the policing of language, the disciplining of bodies, and the institutional presence of Buddhism. Disadvantaged ‘hill tribe’ subjects are created through this process whereby the full achievement of ‘Thainess’ always remains beyond reach. The meanings attached to the institution, however, and even the ways in which state objectives are enacted, are not the same for everybody in the space. Even where people are critical of the prejudices held in Thai society against those from upland Karen villages, the cultural capital associated with any semblance of Thainess is highly valued in the local community. Teachers are not a unified bloc of institutional actors who act in harmony with the state. Teacher-driven subversion of institutional space occurs in various ways, sometimes through efforts to achieve alternative positive outcomes not offered by the default grammar of schooling and sometimes through disillusioned teachers who neglect one or more of their duties. The students themselves, considerably outnumbering any other occupant of the space, are the source of a very wide range of subversive practice. Drawing on social practice theory, I have described such subversive actions as ‘serious play’, taking place within and producing ‘figured worlds’ (Eisenhart & Allaman 2018; Holland et al. 1998; Ortner 1996). Serious play refers to social practice that at surface level may appear quite casual and light-hearted but has lasting ramifications for larger systems of social norms. The theory of serious play affords weight to the role of individual agency but acknowledges the constraining influence of structural factors. Serious play offers a space of experimentation that may be emancipatory or may inadvertently function to reproduce the status quo. A particular ‘figured world’ is authored by groups of social actors through serious play. Serious play then continues to reproduce that figured world on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, my observation of childhood subjectivity engaging with institutional structures reinforces the value of the games/play metaphor with respect to other realms of practice. I am able to more confidently deploy this metaphor in my analysis of events involving teenagers and young adults by basing it not purely on theoretical discussions but on direct ethnographic engagement with actual instances of games and play among young children, which as it turns out, are a lot more ‘serious’ than conventional understandings of the words

73 ‘play’ or ‘game’ suggest. The games/play metaphor fits general social practice so well because actual games and play are so thoroughly connected to social practice beyond the confines of a particular play session or group of friends, as I have demonstrated in this chapter. If one sets out to do so, it is not overly difficult to clearly mark a beginning and end point of a structured game like elastics or marbles. The school day can be similarly bounded. Whether the entry and exit through the school gates or the ringing of the bell is used as a marker, such points are recognised as clear boundaries. In both scenarios though, the ‘game’ does not definitively end. The banter from a lunchtime play session may carry over into the classroom, and elastic bands may be confiscated. Students will pass teachers who are on their way to the village shop in the evening and will promptly adjust their bodily comportment and speech accordingly. The value of the theoretical approach I have elaborated on in this chapter is that it reveals how games—‘serious’ and otherwise—‘collide with, encompass, or are bent to the service of, other games’ (Ortner 1996: 19). By representing these games, these figured worlds, in this way—as multiple, colliding, overlapping, clashing—social practice can be analysed in a way that respects Thai conceptions of time and space. While the influence of Thai institutions like the school are not absolute, concepts like ru kalathesa (knowledge of time and place) feature prominently in the daily lives of Karen villagers just as in the lives of people elsewhere in Thailand. A theory of social practice that is receptive to this emic mode of ordering the universe is of great benefit to anthropological research in Thailand and especially pertinent to considerations of gender (Van Esterik 2000). My aim in this thesis is to make sense of the figured worlds authored by mathayom students as they pursue their own goals of love and romance, balanced against their own understandings of moral ideals of educational focus and attainment. To this end, it is the incidental features of child sociality attacking the weak points of institutional space in the school that I am interested in more than subtle acts of intentional protest. My focus towards the end of this chapter on the serious play of two prathom students highlights how different figured worlds can clash in institutional space, with subversive behaviour operating according to its own rules and values. I argue that these same processes of serious play can be seen at work across both the prathom and mathayom cohorts at Little Creek School, despite the very different array of figured worlds each group is involved with. Much of the subversive behaviour I consider throughout the thesis features intentionality that is at odds with the actual subversive outcomes—a disruptive student’s goal is not always explicitly to be disruptive. There are of course several instances of targeted resistance going on in Thai classrooms. The ‘making out games’ described by Foley (1990: 112–34), where students collaborate to slow the course of a lesson and get out of work through

74 deliberate schemes, are observable here too. But often students subvert institutional space for their own reasons that do not necessarily concern the institution directly. I have contrasted the intentionality of the play behaviour of two P2 girls, Narirat and Chatchaya in this chapter. The significance of their respective intentionality with regards to other figured worlds they each ‘play’ within will be further explored in the next chapter, as I unpack the moral ideals of being a good student using the term, tangjai rian (ตงั ใจเรยี น). Narirat’s status as star student is contextualised using this concept, and Chatchaya’s insecurities are vicariously realised through the experience of her older sister, Somjai, who was expelled from Little Creek School for sexual indiscretion—a failure to tangjai rian.

75 Chapter 4 – Disciplining the Heart to Be a ‘Good Student’: The Policing of an Ideological Concept (Tangjai Rian)

Somjai, Tirayut, and Chatchaya sat side by side in the backseat of Khru Bon’s car, as we made our way back to school one Sunday evening. Bon and I had stopped by their village on the way back up the mountain from the town of Mae La Noi. The three siblings seldom had anybody at home who could take them to school in time for Monday’s classes. The kids were chatting among themselves when Khru Bon received a phone call from another teacher back at the school. He learned that one of Somjai’s M3 classmates, Ratchanok, had sneaked away from the dormitories to spend the night with her boyfriend. Bon spent the remainder of our drive talking to Somjai about her own love life. Her brother and sister, in P4 and P2 respectively, sat and listened quietly, as did I in the front passenger seat. ‘What about you?’ Khru Bon asked accusingly. ‘Are you still with that guy?’ ‘No, we broke up’, Somjai answered. ‘I’m not ready for a relationship yet. I want to focus on school.’ ‘Mm.’ Khru Bon seemed sceptical but carried on. ‘If you do get together [i.e. have sex], you need to tell a teacher, okay?’30 ‘Of course.’ ‘We can’t force you not to. It’s up to you to decide’, Bon said. ‘But it would be a real shame if you did. You need to think about your future. It would be better if you tangjai rian instead.’ ‘Yeah, I know. School is important to me’, Somjai assured her teacher.

The term used at the end of this exchange, tangjai rian (ตงั ใจเรยี น)—‘to set one’s heart on learning/studying’—is an important ideological concept for students in Thailand, often associated with moral character. A ‘good child’ or ‘good student’ must be many things, but such a child is almost always one who can be described as tangjai rian. In theory, anybody can turn things around and tangjai rian, but it may be easier or more difficult for certain people. Achieving ideals of tangjai rian is not a simple matter. One must possess the right attitude, intelligence, focus, and behaviour. Importantly, not all of the indicators of tangjai rian are directly tied to intellectual matters. Sexual activity jeopardises one’s ability to tangjai rian, as do various other illicit behaviours. And even if one can tangjai rian, this does not guarantee academic success. Why even bother then, if all that pressure and commitment may amount to nothing but disappointment and

30 The phrase used in this conversation was mi arai kan (มีอะไรกัน), a commonly used Thai euphemism that literally means, ‘to have something together’. It is usually understood to mean sexual intercourse. I was surprised that Khru Bon spoke so directly with Somjai about sex. This was the only time during my fieldwork that I heard a teacher use this phrase with a student.

76 missed opportunities in other avenues? Some students certainly felt that way. The pressures and expectations associated with tangjai rian are a source of stress whether or not one manages to live up to the ideal. Little Creek School can be described as a ‘risky geography’ for students who struggle with tangjai rian in certain ways, especially among girls who are involved in potentially sexual relationships. The term ‘risky geographies’ has been used by Thomson, McQuade, and Rochford (2005: 171–2) to describe school spaces that continuously expose particular groups of students to risk of conflict with the institution based on their everyday presence in the space. Students who are identified as potential troublemakers at Little Creek School are at risk of either dropping out of school or being expelled prior to completion of M6. While in Somjai’s case, the director of the school directly enforced the distinction between tangjai rian and sexuality by not allowing her to return to school, this was not the only way that the distinction was maintained. It was also quite possible that girls would drop out of school on their own or at the behest of their parents if they were to commence a sexual relationship. While not all mathayom students actually pursue romantic relationships involving physical intimacy or private encounters—it is indeed a minority that engage in conduct like Somjai or Ratchanok—almost all of them are interested or involved in romance of some kind in their daily lives. The additional scrutiny placed on girls within the school makes it a risky geography for them. The values that are important to them are rendered invisible or unwelcome through the curriculum and institutional space of the school. As a result, ‘problem girls’ form identities that are in opposition to their education, completely independent of scholarly ability or educational desire (Thomson, McQuade & Rochford 2005: 176). This can lead to disillusioned students who increasingly engage in rebellious behaviour that is deemed immoral or disruptive by teachers. Girls sought out their own spaces within the geography of Little Creek School to enact parts of their identity that clashed with the acceptable ideal. Online romances were constrained spatially and temporally, being pursued and maintained in locked bathroom stalls after school and in dormitories after dark. These carved out spaces of action are still ultimately within the risky geography. Somjai was a student labelled by all of the teachers as failing to tangjai rian, and that assessment became solidified following her eventual expulsion due to suspected ongoing sexual activity. Based on what I have discussed with Somjai, her family, and her friends, I do not believe she was being disingenuous when she told Khru Bon that school was important to her. It is possible she was lying about no longer being in a relationship. It is also just as possible that she had genuinely attempted to end the relationship. A number of factors affected Somjai’s decision-making in this matter, but the outcome of her expulsion ultimately hinged on embodied definitions of tangjai rian as a moral and ideological concept.

77 This chapter interrogates the meaning of tangjai rian at Little Creek School, highlighting both its general salience in students’ lives and its mutual exclusivity with sexuality, particularly female sexuality. I argue that the ideological meaning of tangjai rian can be divided into two broad spheres: behavioural and academic. Both of these spheres are bound to ideals of being a ‘good’ student or child. The more behavioural sphere is described in Thai as khwamdi (ความ

ดี)—goodness. The more academic sphere is described in Thai as khwamkeng (ความเก่ง)— ability. The division of tangjai rian into these two spheres is not something that anybody explicitly highlighted. Rather, I observed that the terms khwamdi and khwamkeng were regularly used to describe individual students in ways that corresponded to that student’s recognised inclination to tangjai rian. Two other important terms are Buddhist virtues that can be said to be necessary if one is to tangjai rian. These terms are wiriya (วิริยะ; persistence/effort) and panya (ปัญญา; insight/wisdom/intellect). The chapter includes three main sections. In the first section, I discuss the literal definition and etymology of the phrase tangjai rian and then compare this to its ideological meaning, which incorporates the pairings of khwamdi (goodness) and khwamkeng (ability), and wiriya (persistence) and panya (insight). The rest of the chapter then uses case studies of individual students to demonstrate how tangjai rian contributes to the risky geography of Little Creek School. In the second section, I analyse the significance of tangjai rian in relation to younger students’ academic success or failure in school. I contrast a boy and a girl from the P2 class who both struggled with different aspects of tangjai rian during my fieldwork. In the final section, I discuss how sexual activity is framed as incompatible with tangjai rian, through reference to Somjai’s expulsion from Little Creek School. I do not yet explore why sexuality is opposed to tangjai rian but for now ethnographically map what this opposition looks like from the various perspectives involved.

Defining an Ideological Concept: Tangjai Rian

Tangjai rian may be translated into English as, ‘being attentive to one’s studies’, ‘being studious’, or ‘being devoted/committed to studying’. It can be either a verb or an adjective describing a person. It also exists as a noun if the right prefix is added—khwamtangjai rian

(ความตงั ใจเรยี น) might be translated as ‘studiousness’. It was not often spoken about in abstract terms as a noun. For convenience, I use the one base term to also refer to the noun form. In Thai, tangjai rian is put forth by adults as both a character trait that children should possess and also, something they should actively do—a virtue they should strive to embody

78 in every aspect of their life as a student. Below are a few examples of various ways it is used in complete sentences, utilising a few different possible translations of the term:

They are a studious child; khao pen dek tangjai rian (เขาเป็ นเด็กตงั ใจเรยี น) Today they are working really hard at their studies; wanni khao tangjai rian mak (วนั นีเ ขาตงั ใจเรยี นมาก) They are cute, but they do not generally focus much on their schoolwork; khao narak tae mai khoi tangjai rian (เขาน่ารกั แตไ่ ม่คอ่ ยตงั ใจเรยี น) You have to be a good child for your mother and father and focus on school; nu tong pen dek di hai pho mae lae tangjai rian (หนูตอ้ งเป็ นเด็กดใี หพ้ ่อแม่ และตงั ใจเรยี น)

If you manage to tangjai rian then you will be able to focus your listening properly when the teachers are speaking, absorb the information you are reading and hearing, and have the self- discipline to study sufficiently while at home. It also means keeping romance and other distractions from constantly entering your subconscious thoughts. Valorising a child’s level of focus and commitment to schoolwork is not unique to Thailand. In the United Kingdom, for example, there is discourse around ‘getting one’s head down’ in class (Thomson 2007: 120). ‘Getting your head down’ is a strategy of conformity used by students with a reputation as troublemakers. If successful at deploying this strategy, ‘problem’ students may succeed at remaining in school until graduation, despite having a history of bad behaviour. Such students would otherwise be at risk of expulsion or dropping out. Children in schools everywhere are often burdened with the pressures and expectations of their parents and teachers. However, the values underpinning those pressures and expectations are not universal. When considering tangjai rian specifically, rather than studiousness generally, its relationship to love and sexuality set it apart, as I demonstrate in this chapter and the next. The term itself consists of three parts that make up its overall meaning. Firstly, there is tang (ตงั ), which is a verb meaning ‘to affix’ or ‘to set’ something. Next comes jai (ใจ), which is a noun commonly used as either a prefix or suffix combined with another word to change its meaning, usually to do with emotions or states of mind. Taken by itself, jai could variously be translated as heart, soul, or mind depending on the context. This first half of the term, tangjai

(ตงั ใจ), by itself is similar to the English verbs, ‘to intend’ or ‘to strive’ but in certain combinations takes on a deeper meaning than expressing simple intention to do something. It involves disciplining one’s heart in pursuit of a particular goal or outcome, meaning it can then be tied to judgements of moral character. The final part of the term is rian (เรียน), which is a verb meaning both ‘to study’ and ‘to learn’. In a literal sense then, the phrase tangjai rian could

79 be taken to mean ‘setting one’s heart and mind on a path of studying/learning’. Another way to put it would be ‘to affix the essence of studiousness to the essence of one’s being’. When speaking to the students at Little Creek School, teachers would often oppose tangjai rian to another action, tamjai (ตามใจ), or ‘doing as one pleases’/‘following one’s heart’. Students who tamjai are framed as pursuing their natural inclinations to more short-term enjoyment. Another meaning of tamjai is following along with what somebody else wishes to do. Parents who tamjai their children are those who give their children whatever they want and do not discipline them. This other kind of tamjai is also a potential barrier to tangjai rian, in the case of friends acting as a bad influence. If you tamjai your friends or love interests, then you may find it difficult to tangjai rian. Students who succeed at tangjai rian have successfully overcome such inclinations and made the sacrifices and adjustments necessary to succeed at school. Another word that is demonstrative of the comparatively broader implications of tangjai rian is khayan (ขยัน), meaning ‘hard-working’, ‘industrious’, or ‘diligent’. In the simplest sense, this word is very similar in meaning here to tangjai rian, but people rarely applied it as broadly as tangjai rian in the students’ lives. A student working hard at a particular task at school, or even a series of individual tasks, may be described as khayan, whereas a student described as tangjai rian is more often being praised regarding not only their actions in the classroom that day but in the way they have aligned their internal attitudes, motivations, and priorities. Khayan in this context is more associated with the accomplishment of specific actions in a particular space and time, while tangjai rian encompasses more fully both physical actions and internal character traits. I am of course speaking in relative terms between these two words in this specific context. In general usage, khayan (hard-working), like tangjai rian, is also an enduring trait that beyond immediate actions has implications regarding a person’s general character and state of mind. In fact, khayan is, according to its definition, the more general of the two words normally, being applied to any situation involving work, not just regarding education. This inversion of the relative generality of each word within the school environment highlights the significance of tangjai rian in this context. Research participants provided me with two potential translations of tangjai rian into Sgaw Karen, and I found a third while searching through Karen dictionaries. All three are based around the phrase, maz lo taj, which, like rian in Thai, means to study or to learn. The term I found in a dictionary was, av sav of neij taj maz lo (Seguinotte 2007: 14). This term is translated as, ‘he puts his heart in his studies’. It is constructed in quite a similar way to tangjai rian, including a Karen word used very similarly to the Thai word, jai. The Karen word, sav, also refers to the self, the heart, or the mind and is used to form a wide range of compound words

80 in Sgaw Karen. The pairing of of neij means to set something a particular way, combining words used to express possession and measurement. The meaning of of neij in this phrase is similar to the way tang is used in the Thai phrase. The first translation I was provided with by research participants was, sof mof maz lo taj. This phrase is a reasonably direct translation of tangjai rian. It literally means to instruct or discipline oneself to be enthusiastic and passionate about one’s studies. The other translation I was given was, maz lo taj mux. This phrase means that one studies and learns with happiness or is content in their studies. The fact that this sentence was offered as a potential translation highlights an additional layer of meaning I observed in the term tangjai rian. This Karen phrase about happiness directly translates to another common Thai phrase, ‘to have happiness in one’s studies’ (mi khwamsuk nai kanrian; มีความสุขในการเรียน).

Happiness (khwamsuk; ความสุข), along with tangjai rian, is another trait of the ideal student. Students accomplish both through similar means, and people often speak of these two concepts alongside one another. The director and other teachers would speak about how in order to have happiness, students must first have two other things—goodness (khwamdi) and ability (khwamkeng). Both of these traits together lead to happiness because they enable a student to tangjai rian; once you tangjai rian, you are therefore happy, having realised the moral ideal for schoolchildren. Goodness and ability are both enduring traits, but while the former is brought about through intentional acts, the latter is more related to aptitude. An analogy can be drawn here to two Buddhist moral ideals that are valued in Thai society. Among the ten Buddhist perfections (thotbarami; ทศบารมี), are wiriya—meaning persistence or effort—and panya—meaning insight, wisdom, or intellect. These two virtues are closely related, because it is through wiriya that one may acquire panya. An example of this would be insights one acquires through focused meditation. In order to achieve a state of perfectly focused meditation, mastery of wiriya is a prerequisite. Only then can the insights available through meditation become accessible to the person meditating. If you meditate without wiriya, then you cannot achieve panya. These terms were not explicitly invoked by my research participants but are relevant to interpreting tangjai rian, as there is similarly a division of internal states that rely upon intentionality and knowledge—goodness and ability, respectively. According to the Buddhist understanding of tangjai rian then, a pre-existing aptitude for a particular subject is not necessary to succeed academically. One’s heart can be set upon a path that will lead to panya as a result of wiriya. One does require an aptitude for wiriya though, meaning some people can come to see their own academic failure as inevitable. The analogy between wiriya/panya and goodness/ability is only partial. The terms I am translating as goodness and ability are a lot broader, thus more open to different interpretations

81 by different people. Ability (khwamkeng) could also be interpreted to suggest an upper limit to some students’ intellectual potentials, regardless of how well they demonstrate goodness (khwamdi). This would be an inversion of the relationship between wiriya (persistence) and panya (insight) I have outlined above. To further explore how all of these ideal states factor into tangjai rian, it is necessary to use them in analysis of specific cases. In the rest of the chapter, I analyse the experiences of three students regarding their alleged ability to tangjai rian. I begin by contrasting a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ P2 student and then move onto a more in- depth analysis of Somjai’s expulsion from the M3 class.

Managing Expectations: Stories of Success and Failure in the Classroom

The concept of tangjai rian plays an important role in the lives of all students, whether they live up to its ideals or not. In this section, I describe two prathom students’ experiences with tangjai rian at school. I begin by focusing on younger students because their engagements with the concept of tangjai rian are not yet complicated even further by the sexual morality that becomes relevant as students grow older. Once students reach their mathayom years, there are simultaneously both new expectations and new freedoms in their lives. The dynamics of tangjai rian most relevant for the prathom students are nonetheless still present through mathayom years, alongside additional concerns discussed in the final section of the chapter. I first introduce Samroeng, a village boy in P2, whom adults typically framed as someone who either does not or cannot tangjai rian. Then I move onto Narirat, a village girl in P2, whom the community lauded as a role model when it comes to tangjai rian (Narirat was also featured in the previous chapter). Even for students like Narirat, who consistently tangjai rian, this concept is always hanging over her, affecting how she fits in, and how others treat her at school. Common sense in Thailand suggests that a student should maintain the possibility of achieving ideals of tangjai rian or else they do not properly belong in a school. ‘Why are you here if you don’t want to learn?’ was a common remark from frustrated teachers in a classroom filled with difficult students. ‘You might as well just go and work in the fields now’, they would say. Therefore, for students who enjoy some aspect or other of school, or who place high value on their education, the demands of living up to ideals of tangjai rian can become a source of feelings of stress and inadequacy, independent of one’s literal desire to learn. If coupled with additional risk factors later on—such as a reputation for dating widely or perhaps domestic problems—then the likelihood of a particular student having their education cut short due to expulsion or dropping out increases. Being from rural and impoverished communities, the

82 students of Little Creek School are already vulnerable to a number of extraneous factors that place their educational success at risk. Although in this section I am using a boy to demonstrate failure to tangjai rian and a girl to demonstrate success to tangjai rian, it could just as easily have been the other way around. Somjai’s story in the next section provides a clear instance of a girl being framed as failing to tangjai rian. Regardless of one’s eventual success or failure at school, tangjai rian operates as an ideological concept that places considerable pressure and expectations on all students at Little Creek School. For both of the students focused on in this section, the expectations placed on them had negative effects on their school experiences and relationships.

Samroeng

Samroeng was the last at his table still working one day during maths class. The lesson was on addition involving double digit numbers. The others had already submitted their completed problems and had begun playing at the back of the classroom. Khru Tao sat at her desk in the corner marking completed work and doing other administrative duties. Samroeng had written a random number as his answer for the first problem and was staring down at his page confused, not having attempted any others. He was on the verge of going to find someone else’s book to copy from. I sat down and talked through the second problem as we completed it together. He still did not understand the process, so I opened to a blank page in his exercise book and came up with my own examples to use as I explained how to interpret the problem, which way to draw it up as an equation, where to carry numbers, and so forth. Samroeng was at first reluctant, but he began to show progress, and I was confident he would be able to complete a problem on his own before too long. During my initial demonstration of the method, Paiboon, another of the boys, interrupted me. ‘You’re not allowed to tell him the answers’, Paiboon said as he tried to physically move me along, grabbing hold of my writing arm and pulling. I assured Paiboon that I was not simply giving him the answers; I was explaining how he could find the answers himself. Paiboon had grown accustomed to interacting with me as less of an authority figure compared to the other teachers. He rejected my uncharacteristic assertion of adult authority. I grew impatient and tried to insist that because I was a teacher it was okay for me to share the answers where I felt it was beneficial. My efforts to explicitly draw on multiple roles simultaneously in the classroom—teacher and friend—produced tension and confusion. Paiboon let me be, but he seemed quite perturbed and walked away in a huff. Next to confront me were Siwaporn and Wipa a couple of minutes later. ‘Khru Tao said you’re not allowed to help him’, I was told. I assured the girls that I was showing Samroeng

83 different examples to those in the workbook and was not simply providing him with the answers. Surely, Khru Tao would be okay with this, I assured the girls. Siwaporn clarified for me after relaying my response to the teacher. ‘Khru Tao already explained how to do it at the beginning of the lesson. He wasn’t listening.’ The teaching portion of this lesson was over. Samroeng had made a poor showing of his goodness (khwamdi) by not taking any interest in the lesson. He had shown a lack of wiriya (persistence) when it counted. The girls agreed that not only did he not deserve my attention but also that my efforts would ultimately be fruitless anyway. ‘He didn’t understand because he has no brain’, Wipa added. Wipa’s choice of words was quite rude and stuck with me (khao mai mi samong; เขาไม่มีสมอง). Wipa was questioning Samroeng’s ability (khwamkeng) and felt this rendered him unable to perform as a good student should. If one were to apply the concept of panya (insight) here, then it could be argued that Samroeng could still succeed at this lesson given he had demonstrated to me that he was applying himself. He could ‘get a brain’, to use Wipa’s words. The understanding of ability that Wipa was suggesting, however, did not allow for that possibility. She felt that Samroeng was a lost cause. While I argued my case with the girls, another boy approached from behind me and gave his completed workbook to Samroeng. When I turned back around to finish helping, Samroeng had already copied several answers from his friend. He was no longer interested in paying attention to my explanations. Defeated, I left the room frustrated and went to take a break. I was anxious that I may have upset my relationship with Siwaporn and Wipa by openly contradicting them in my efforts to assist Samroeng. I was pleased to bump into them again later that day and realise that the incident during maths class had not changed their usual demeanour towards me. I considered at first that perhaps my assistance to Samroeng had offended Paiboon so much at the time because he was treating me like a fellow student. Sharing the answers was cheating and therefore needed to be stopped. Successful immersion in Paiboon’s group of peers! But were that the case, why did the other students sharing the answers not equally bother him? Copying from one another was quite commonplace, sometimes surreptitiously but just as often completely openly. I never saw the students actively try to police it among themselves. On the one hand, the students’ willingness to argue with me in a manner they would not dare with the other teachers suggests some level of successful immersion on my part. On the other hand, they still recognised me as a clear outsider. Since the person who was unambiguously their teacher had decided Samroeng was not to receive any help, my actions just did not make sense. My protestations fell on deaf ears because I was the one who was missing the point. Samroeng did not tangjai rian. Until he did, my intervention would not

84 help, nor would he deserve it. Samroeng did not have panya (insight) because he did not demonstrate wiriya (persistence) when it counted. The appropriate time to draw on one’s wiriya to make sense of addition problems is when the teacher is explaining it, not after the fact when everybody else has already finished. I had thus also misunderstood the grammar of schooling that was in place. Although I disagreed with Wipa’s assessment of Samroeng’s intelligence and potential, I could not argue against the overwhelming evidence before me that he was a student who does not tangjai rian according to the standards expected by the school—a label often quite explicitly attached to him by teachers. He often napped in class or talked to his friends while the teacher was giving a lesson. His grades were abysmal. He would regularly leave class with his friend, Pipat, to play instead of doing his work. One time, he killed a squirrel with his slingshot on the way to school and then brought it into the classroom so he could chase the girls with it. Not the actions of a student who is likely to tangjai rian any time soon. My continued efforts to engage Samroeng in learning did not make much sense to the other students nor even the teacher responsible for that particular period. My own efforts would be wasted on this student who had neither the ability nor the commitment to learn. I had witnessed a hint of wiriya (persistence) in our one-on-one interaction at the end of class. But when Samroeng’s overall social identity at the school was taken into account, he lacked wiriya in a more general sense and therefore also lacked panya (insight). He had neither goodness nor ability.

Figure 4.1 P2 at the end of class (photo taken by P2 student).

85 While it would be unfair to say that the teachers had given up on students like Samroeng—a few individuals worked very hard to help this particular student do better at school academically, socially and behaviourally—there was a certain sense of the inevitability of poor grades associated with students who gained a reputation as not tangjai rian. According to Buddhist conceptions of personhood, children come ‘preloaded’ with personalities and other traits that have carried over from their previous lives (Eberhardt 2006: 81). Although not always couched in explicitly religious terminology, children at Little Creek School were often spoken of as having certain unchangeable traits. This was not just a Buddhist way of discussing scholastic potential. Even where terminology and concepts may well have Buddhist origins, they are reinterpreted according to Christian beliefs as well. I spoke to a young Christian villager who had dropped out of school to get married at 17 years of age. She told me that she had prayed every night to be able to tangjai rian, but in the end it had been up to God to determine how well she was able to focus on school. Because wiriya (persistence) is framed as an internal characteristic driving our actions and persistence in the world, it is not necessarily the case that everybody is capable of taking the necessary actions to acquire panya (insight). Wiriya drives us to action, but it is not itself an act; it is a character trait. For Buddhists, pre-determined characteristics are associated with past lives. For Christians, it is God who determines how much wiriya each person has. Everybody must test their mettle at learning and do their best to discover if they have sufficient wiriya, let alone panya, to demonstrate both the goodness and ability required to tangjai rian. Students like Samroeng were noticeably out of place in the classroom, always itching to be elsewhere—even though their moral failings were made apparent in the playground as well. A common response to this kind of experience was for Samroeng to physically leave the classroom at every opportunity. I seized upon the chance to offer some tutoring to Samroeng on the day described above, because it was rare to see him still working at his desk at the end of a lesson. Despite my own identification of Samroeng as a student with the potential and desire to learn, the nuances of tangjai rian placed him within a risky geography, where his educational wants and needs were not effectively being met. His preferred space was the dirt road behind the P2 classroom, where he could play marbles or venture into the trees nearby. Samroeng’s parents were also dissatisfied with the match between Little Creek School and their son. When Samroeng’s classmates moved onto P3 at Little Creek School at the end of my fieldwork, Samroeng was relocated to a different school.

86 Narirat

Narirat, whom I introduced in the previous chapter, was a student viewed by many to be a paragon of tangjai rian. She is a good example of how tangjai rian and associated ideas can affect an individual’s attitudes and behaviour differently in different settings, even if they excel at embodying it. Being the ‘smart kid’ in her class was not a stigma but a pedestal to be placed upon, and she felt the weight of everybody’s expectations. Narirat’s unusually high grades impressed all of the teachers, who speculated that her performance was attributable to having a highly educated aunt who could help tutor her at home. They also noted, however, that Narirat’s grades were quite average if compared to the grades achieved in most urban Thai classrooms. One day, after school had finished, Khru Kwang invited me to help her tutor Narirat for an upcoming English competition in Mae Sariang. Narirat had agreed to enter the competition on the condition that Khru Kwang, one of her favourite teachers, helped her to practice. Narirat was to give a speech for a few minutes on the topic of ‘my family’. I helped Kwang to write a short passage on this topic, with input from Narirat on her likes, dislikes, and facts about her life. I had already written a first draft of the speech for Khru Kwang, but she felt it was too difficult, so we worked together to make edits. Kwang also raised the possibility of adding in some positive points about life in the hills. It was important to Kwang that Narirat serve as a good example of the Karen community in order to counter Thai stereotypes about ‘hill tribes’. ‘Some people in the lowlands look down on us’, she said. ‘They think that we’re dirty. That we don’t speak Thai clearly.’ Kwang hoped if they just saw for themselves what Karen were really like then Thais would no longer rangkiat (รังเกียจ) them—meaning to scorn, abhor, or despise. She hoped Narirat would impress them. As the three of us sat in the library together, a small group of Narirat’s friends hovered outside waiting to walk home with her. They would routinely poke their heads through the doorway to see how things were going. Narirat said that she was not very good at English and would lose. ‘You don’t need to worry about losing’, Kwang said. ‘Winning or losing lies with us, in our hearts. Even if you lose, I’ll give you a prize.’ We went through the speech line by line with Narirat but were met with near silence. Narirat looked at the floor and spoke very softly. This was beyond her usual quiet demeanour while in class. Kwang grew increasingly impatient and shifted from an encouraging tone to a demanding one. Narirat began refusing to even try. Narirat was soon dismissed by Kwang, who was frustrated by what she saw as a lack of effort. As a student usually known for her wiriya (persistence), her disengagement in this instance was especially disruptive. Practice would have to continue in the days to come.

87 On the morning before the English competition, I was sitting in the P2 Thai class. Across the room, I heard Narirat telling Chatchaya all about being excited to go to the English competition. The teacher noticed and joined the conversation, announcing it to the class. ‘Everyone wish Narirat luck! Tomorrow she gets to go to Mae Sariang with the mathayom students’, she said. Everyone turned to Narirat, who sat up and smiled as she looked around the room.

Figure 4.2 M3 students relaxing in the school car following an English competition in Mae Sariang.

After school once more, Narirat was looking for Khru Kwang to get in some final practice for the following day. She made her way over to the other prathom classrooms where there was a final meeting among a few of the teachers regarding the competition. Narirat was confused because it seemed Kwang had gone home to Mae La Noi for the evening on her motorbike. She asked another English teacher, Khru Pong, what time she should arrive at school the next day to leave for Mae Sariang with everybody. ‘I didn’t think you were going’, he said. ‘Khru Kwang said you’re not ready yet.’ Somebody had forgotten to pass this information along to Narirat. Narirat went quiet but looked up at Pong, nodding her head enthusiastically to correct him. He asked if she still wanted to go anyway. ‘I want to go’, she said softly. Pong asked her how much of her speech she could remember. ‘If you can recite it for us here now, then I’ll let you come tomorrow’, he said. Narirat stood there in silence. ‘There’ll

88 be a lot more people there tomorrow, you know’, he continued. ‘If you can’t do it now with just us, I think it will be too hard for you tomorrow.’ Narirat opened her mouth for a moment but said nothing.

‘Never mind, luk (ลูก; child)’, said Khru Payom. ‘Maybe you can go next year.’ Narirat looked at the ground and nodded. Payom put her hand on Narirat’s shoulder and walked her back across the football field to get her things from the P2 classroom. Narirat was a student who by all accounts was a perfect example of a student who can tangjai rian. Although in the previous chapter it was shown that she sometimes pushed the boundaries of the gendering of her body, it was also shown that she carefully managed her conduct during class so as to fit the moral ideal. Her usual classroom behaviour was sufficient to suggest both goodness and ability. Samroeng’s playground behaviour tarnished his image because he both figuratively and literally brought it into class with him. Narirat was described as a student who has happiness in her studies. Blessed with both wiriya (persistence) and panya (insight), she had the tools needed to tangjai rian successfully. This incident did not change any of that, but, rather, it highlights the scrutiny and pressure that even students who tangjai rian experience. During prathom years, the serious play that Narirat engages in by removing her skirt to play elastics (discussed in the previous chapter) is tolerated by teachers without immediately undermining her ability to tangjai rian. As a girl prone to challenging gender norms in her play, however, the school will take shape as more of a risky geography for her as she enters mathayom year levels in a few years’ time. At that time, scrutiny of her scholarly ability and potential will extend to serious play involving her gendered body. For mathayom girls, their sexuality is rendered highly visible and framed as incompatible with tangjai rian. In the next section, I demonstrate this through the case study of Somjai’s expulsion from the M3 class, followed by her early marriage.

Female Sexuality as Antithetical to Tangjai Rian

Somjai

The moral implications of the concept of tangjai rian can act as a barrier to educational success for boys and girls alike but particularly disadvantage girls when it comes to enforcing sexual morality. Embedded within implicitly understood definitions of tangjai rian is the maxim that commencing sexual activity indicates one’s failure to tangjai rian—the two states are mutually exclusive, at least for those still considered to be children.31 For Somjai, a dormitory girl in the

31 This is not to say that adults pursuing further education later in life cannot be described as tangjai rian because of being sexually active. The concept takes on additional moral constraints when used regarding children.

89 M3 class, doing well in school had always been difficult. Her grades were among the lowest in her class, indicating she lacked the ability (khwamkeng) of some of her classmates. Somjai’s enthusiastic participation in dormitory life and her positive attitude endeared her to some of the teachers, who recognised her goodness (khwamdi). Whether or not Somjai was someone who could tangjai rian was always up in the air while these aspects of her life as a student remained balanced. It was not categorically ruled out until the school was convinced that she was sexually active. Her shift into a student who absolutely does not tangjai rian had lasting consequences for her life. I initially came to know Somjai better than some of her classmates due to the fact that she was around at the school most weekends—more consistently than any of the other dormitory kids. While her younger siblings, Chatchaya and Tirayut, always left on Friday afternoons, Somjai chose to stay in the dormitories more often than not. A few others rarely visited home, but usually this was due to home being farther away than wherever any of the teachers happened to be driving. Somjai’s village was a relatively short drive from the school, on the way to the town of Mae La Noi. Some of the teachers speculated that it was because of her father that Somjai preferred to be at the dormitories. After Somjai had already been expelled, I spoke to her mother to learn what had been going on at home. For the early part of the year, Somjai’s mother had been away in Bangkok working in aged care. Some families engaged in seasonal labour migration like this in order to send money back home to support their families. It is not uncommon for children to be left with grandparents in the village, while both parents are away working for extended periods. Somjai’s mother had been sending most of her money home to her husband each month to support the children and save for future costs associated with their education. Somjai’s move to M4 at a larger school in town the following year was going to be expensive for the family. Unbeknownst to Somjai’s mother at the time, Somjai’s father was neglecting the children and spending all of this money on ya ba (ยาบ้า; ‘madness drug’), an addictive narcotic in pill form, containing a mixture of caffeine and methamphetamine (Cohen 2014; Lintner & Black 2009). Somjai’s elderly maternal grandparents lived in the household as well and were able to assist with looking after the children, but the father’s drug problem left the family without the financial resources they were depending on. As the eldest child, Somjai was aware of her father’s addiction and misuse of the family’s money and did not hide her disapproval. The two frequently had arguments as a result of this, leading to Somjai’s regular mistreatment at home by her father. ‘I heard that whenever Somjai was at home with her father, he wasn’t allowing her to eat and was telling her to leave the household’, Somjai’s mother told me. During this period, the school dormitories offered a safe environment for Somjai to spend her weekends surrounded by friends and with plenty of

90 food. It was also during this period that Somjai began spending some weekends in a different village, at the home of her boyfriend. Somjai reached out to her mother for help and told her everything that had been going on, imploring her to return home. ‘Once Somjai knew about the drugs, she called me and asked me to come home’, Somjai’s mother said. ‘I was so heartbroken when she told me, because I had been sending that money home every month and he’d just been wasting it all.’ Somjai’s mother was eventually able to return home and then kicked out her husband. Afterwards, Somjai’s father moved to the city in Chiang Mai and found a new wife. He did not send any money or express interest in maintaining contact with his children. The household became more stable from that point, but Somjai had already started down the path that would put a stop to her formal education. Somjai’s boyfriend at the time, Bunmi, was 27 years old and lived in a nearby Lawa village at his parents’ home. The two had met during Thai New Year celebrations earlier that year. ‘Some of us were having water fights by the road near our house when Bunmi and his friends were on their way home from celebrations in Mae La Noi’, Somjai told me. ‘After they saw us, they decided to stop and join in. Two days passed by, but we still didn’t really know each other. I didn’t know who he was because we weren’t friends on Facebook. I asked some Facebook friends from that village about him and they told me his name so I could find his profile and introduce myself.’ From that point, the relationship developed mostly online. Both speaking different languages at home, the pair mainly communicated using Thai. Somjai had been caught spending time alone with Bunmi on weekends a total of three times. On at least one occasion, she slept at his house, from which it was inferred that the pair had had sex. As in many places in Thailand, intimate physical contact of any kind, not necessarily sexual intercourse, is enough to constitute a pair as ‘lovers’ who are expected to be married (Lyttleton 1999: 35). How the school learned of Somjai’s actions was never made clear to me. Somjai said she was not sure. Any number of people could have seen her in Bunmi’s village and reported this to the director of Little Creek School. One of the current teachers at Little Creek School lived in Bunmi’s village, as did at least one former teacher. Many teachers had friends there or travelled there to purchase food from the local shops on the weekend. Bunmi’s home was near the village’s school, so it is also possible that local teachers noticed and informed on the pair’s actions. While one indiscretion was potentially tolerable, the second incident was more serious and raised the possibility of expulsion. Fortunately for Somjai, two of the teachers vouched for her in discussions with the director, and she was allowed to remain at the school provided the relationship with Bunmi ended. When Somjai was caught a third time, nothing more could be done from the perspective of the school. ‘Somjai has made her choice’, many teachers would say to me in the weeks following her departure.

91 It was never clear if Somjai’s family situation afforded her any leniency following the first couple of incidents, but the teachers certainly knew about what had been going on at home. After dropping Tirayut and Chatchaya off at home one day earlier in the year, Khru Yut had commented to me, in English, that theirs was a ‘broken home’. I did not yet know the details I have described above, and Khru Yut simply speculated, with resignation in his voice, that a divorce was likely in the near future. Another teacher revealed that she had shared her own life experiences with Somjai to caution her against early marriage. Khru Mot had herself dropped out of school partway through M5 to pursue love instead. She told Somjai that her own decision had made life unnecessarily difficult for her and advised against it. Despite being aware of the difficult circumstances surrounding Somjai, the staff attributed blame for wrongdoing to Somjai alone. Many people described it to me as having happened because Somjai did not tangjai rian. Most of the teachers were disappointed—some of them felt deeply betrayed and hurt—but they were not especially surprised. Somjai was after all, in their words, ‘a beautiful student’.

Figure 4.3 Somjai and Bunmi on their wedding day.

92 Although the matter became very public once Somjai was actually expelled, the meetings and decision-making leading up to the event were kept rather discreet. Following their initial indiscretions, Somjai and her classmate, Ratchanok, whom I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, were pulled out of class for a private meeting between the director, the two girls, their homeroom teacher, and Somjai’s mother.32 The school was satisfied that Ratchanok’s relationship would not continue, and she went on to successfully complete the school year.33 Somjai’s case became less clear with each breach of the rules. Even once she left, many of the teachers were uncertain of her fate. The M3 homeroom teacher initially told me that she was simply suspended for a week and would return. When she did not come to school the following week, the teachers still did not say that she had definitely left. ‘Not sure yet’; ‘We’ll have to wait and see’; ‘It’s up to the director’, were all responses to my queries about Somjai’s situation. Her siblings were as confused about her situation as I was, unable to give me any clearer information when I asked.34 After a couple of weeks, it became clear that Somjai would not return to school. At first, the teachers explained it simply as her having decided to drop out of school to get married. It was not until much later in the year, well after Somjai’s marriage to Bunmi, that I heard teachers openly referring to the situation as a student having been expelled (lai ok; ไล่ออก). Speaking to Somjai at the time, it was clear enough that she had very little choice in the matter. ‘I just want to go back to how things were’, she told me. She was upset about not being able to return to school, but the director expressly forbade it. She said that she did not feel ready to leave school, to get married, or to have children. She had wanted to continue studying so that she could get a better job in the future. But she also told me very clearly that she loved Bunmi. It went without saying that Somjai could not have both her studies and her relationship, but what upset her the most was that she no longer had any control over the decision. Even if she had wanted to leave Bunmi and return to school, ending the relationship would likely not be a simple matter given its role in coping with her difficult family situation. Now that the relationship had commenced publicly, there was also considerable pressure from family and her village community to marry. From that point onwards, Somjai’s standing among the teachers and in the local community was as somebody who did not tangjai rian and who had acted immorally. The

32 Ratchanok’s parents were also invited to the meeting but were unable to attend. 33 A teacher personally knew the family of Ratchanok’s boyfriend and went to speak with them in person himself to obtain assurances that the relationship had ended. 34 This situation very nearly affected Somjai’s younger sister’s education as well. Chatchaya, in P2, was pulled from school for a week at the same time that Somjai left. Their mother was concerned about her much younger daughter being at the dormitories without an older sister present. Chatchaya likely would have been re-enrolled at a smaller primary school closer to home where she had completed anuban and P1. It was decided that Chatchaya would be fine continuing at Little Creek School because she had a female cousin in the M2 class who came from the same village. This cousin would fill in for Somjai as an older sister figure for Chatchaya in the dormitories.

93 kindest way her behaviour was described was as ‘not right’ (mai thuk; ไม่ถูก). Others explicitly labelled her actions as ‘sin’ (bap; บาป). At times when Somjai came to pick up or drop off her siblings, she avoided coming in the gate herself or made sure the director was not present before coming in. When she spoke to teachers, several of them spoke rather curtly with her or avoided acknowledging her and engaging her in conversation. She had become socially isolated from the school for her transgression. Besides Somjai’s siblings, I was the only person from Little Creek School who took the day off to attend her wedding. In contrast, several teachers from Bunmi’s former school took time away from work to attend the event. After her marriage, Somjai felt quite isolated from her friends, especially after she moved to Chiang Mai with Bunmi where he had begun work as a security guard. Somjai’s work prospects were far more limited given that she had not completed M3—the minimum requirement for many of the more desirable service industry jobs in the city. Somjai told me she felt quite lonely during the day but then spoke excitedly about the maths and science applications she had downloaded on her phone to occupy herself. She had also enrolled at the ko so no (กศน.), or ‘informal education centre’ in Little Creek Village.35 Her progress was slow due to being based in Chiang Mai most of the time, but she planned to one day get her high school equivalency. As with my encounter with Samroeng described in the previous section, my own interactions with Somjai showed me that despite having consistently low grades, there were circumstances in which Somjai herself valued learning and studying. At school, Somjai valued the social bonds she felt each day, and even though her grades were low, she did enjoy studying certain subjects. She saw completion of schooling as a steppingstone to a happier and more certain future for her and her family. Although the school framed Somjai’s expulsion as her choice, she voiced that she was upset about her schooling being interrupted. She took steps to continue her education in the only way available to her. Nonetheless, according to the moral authority of the school, Somjai did not tangjai rian. This was indicated by her pursuit of an allegedly sexual relationship while still a student. This was flagged from the outset as a likely outcome due to her identification by teachers as beautiful. That this outcome was inevitable became indicated by her pursuit of an allegedly sexual relationship while still a student.

35 The Thai is an acronym derived from kansueksa nok rongrian (การศึกษานอกโรงเรียน), literally, ‘education outside of school’. In addition to high school certificates, the ko so no offers a range of vocational education.

94 ‘Beautiful’ Girls as Risk and At Risk

Well after the school year had concluded, I was reflecting on the events of Somjai’s expulsion in conversation with Nattaya, one of her close friends and a now former classmate. ‘I was really sad when she got expelled’, she said. ‘I remember wondering, why do the other teachers despise Somjai?’ Nattaya used the same word—rangkiat—that Khru Kwang had used to describe attitudes of lowland Thais to upland ‘hill tribe’ ethnic minorities. She felt it was not fair that Somjai was being treated as some despicable figure when in reality, from Nattaya’s perspective, Somjai had been acting in response to immense pressure from her boyfriend and parents. A few times when the topic of Somjai’s expulsion came up in conversation, I mentioned to some of the teachers that in my home country it is quite common for students to be sexually active. I said that I therefore did not quite understand exactly what the problem was. I asked what would happen if the director simply chose not to expel Somjai. The reason given by teachers to explain the harsh consequences imposed on Somjai was to make her an example; her case and punishment would deter other girls from following in her footsteps. My question then became what would happen if those girls also were not expelled? What was inherently wrong with having students at the school who are sexually active? The issue then became explicitly framed as a threat to the moral community of the school. Nobody in the surrounding area would want to send their children to a school with a reputation for allowing their students to have sex. Furthermore, once such relationships became public like Somjai’s had, there would be pressure from families to marry, which would often be followed by pregnancy. Even if the school allowed students to continue studying under such circumstances, teachers were not comfortable with seemingly supporting a rise in early marriage and teenage pregnancy in the community. The response, therefore, was to take a firm zero tolerance approach to any possibilities of illicit sexual behaviour.

It was commonly understood by teachers that ‘beautiful’ (suai; สวย) girls are prone to engaging in behaviour like Somjai’s in their early mathayom years. Teachers generally had a few specific girls from the mathayom classes in mind when saying this. When identified as ‘beautiful’ like this, girls are framed as a risk to other students and the moral fabric of the school. Teachers approach such girls as productive of risk and single them out to police any potentially illicit behaviour. Based on the attitude of teachers towards Somjai and her classmates, I argue that the school frames ‘beautiful’ girls as risk. Similar behaviour from girls and boys produced markedly different responses according to the moral authority of the school. Adolescent beauty and sexuality only attracted stricter policing when it was attached to girls. I argue that this framing by the teachers of girls as risk, contributes to the production of a risky geography for those very same girls. This risky

95 geography increases the chances that girls will have their education interrupted, whether as a result of expulsion or dropping out. The gendered difference in the policing of sexuality at Little Creek School is well summed up by a series of conversations I had with a teacher within the space of about half an hour one evening. We were staying in town at another school overnight for an academic event. Several teachers, several mathayom girls, two mathayom boys, and several prathom boys and girls came on the trip. It was an unusual circumstance in that teachers and students of all genders were sleeping in the same space due to limited accommodations. We all lay on the hard floor of a school auditorium.36 As we each prepared our own individual sleeping areas with blankets, Watsamon, one of the M2 girls, had been joking with male teachers about how she wanted a boyfriend. Afterwards, Khru Keng and I were discussing problems of motivation encountered with some of the girls. He complained that the mathayom dormitory girls were often lazy and slept in on weekends. He asserted that they were more interested in boys than school and should realign their priorities if they wanted more secure futures. He joked that sometimes he told them they were ugly in order to motivate them. By aiming to remove the girls’ own identification of themselves as beautiful, Keng hoped to remove the risk of them taking interest in romance. In a separate conversation shortly afterwards, I asked what the mathayom boys were up to as I had not seen them for a little while. Keng chuckled and gestured out the door towards the bathrooms where the two boys could be seen standing and looking at their phones, which all of the students had been permitted to use during the trip. ‘They’re probably looking for girls’, he said with a grin. Keng spoke nostalgically about how teenage years are a great time in life because you can be free to chase girls and have fun. Beautiful girls are framed as a moral risk for boys to navigate, but it is generally understood that the practical and moral consequences primarily fall on the girls involved. Even though sexuality was equally prohibited for the boys on paper, there was little fear of their future being on the line if they were to make the wrong choices. Ambivalence concerning female beauty has been observed by Keyes (1984) in his studies of modern rural Thai Buddhism. Physical beauty is identified as a threatening feature to moral order in a number of Buddhist texts, as it promotes passionate entanglements that defy various Buddhist precepts, pulling men away from virtue and causing suffering for all involved (ibid.: 231). This exists alongside cultural ideals of masculinity that unironically glorify men’s acquisition of the objects of their desires. They achieve positions of power and enjoy garnering reputations associated with gambling, hunting, and drinking alcohol—precept violations that women are disparaged for (ibid.: 234–5). Keyes notes that although young men

36 Boys were on one side of the room and girls on the other. There were separate bathrooms.

96 and women in villages express shared interest in sexual passion, the moral burden of the suffering following passionate acts is placed on beautiful women rather than men. This imbalance is explained by Kirsch (1985) through reference to the relative levels of worldly attachment associated with economic-entrepreneurial versus political-bureaucratic roles in society. Economic-entrepreneurial roles are more inherently tied to worldly attachments, while many explicitly religious roles require political-bureaucratic activities. Kirsch argues that the division of labour in Thailand has historically involved women specialising in economic-entrepreneurial roles (ibid.: 303). This, according to Kirsch, leaves them with more barriers to Buddhist salvation and therefore any potential infractions are treated as more morally debilitating. Women are also framed as more vulnerable to spiritual danger than men due to their supposedly fragile ‘soft souls’ (jitjai on; จิตใจอ่อน) and the polluting power of menstrual blood (Tanabe 1991: 189). The worldly attachments associated with women are also reflected in the everyday cultural practices associated with raising children in Thailand. Particularly in the north of Thailand, there has historically been an expectation that young men will ‘wander’ from their natal home, not being burdened with the same attachment as women (Cohen & Wijeyewardene 1984; Davis 1984). As boys grow into men, there is a traditionally sanctioned pattern of ‘going around’ (pai thiao; ไปเทยี ว), whereby young men would travel the country in pursuit of ‘work, adventure, excitement, fame, and fortune’ (Kirsch 1985: 313).37 Thus, in the above set of exchanges with Khru Keng, boys flirting with girls was framed as seizing the opportunities of youth, while girls flirting with boys was framed as a detrimental distraction from education. When girls pursued romance, this was attributed to the corrupting and threatening nature of their own beauty, whereas the pursuit of romance by boys was treated as an inherent and unproblematic feature of their masculinity, detached from any notions of their own physical beauty. Much like the rural Thai ideals of masculinity described by Keyes, there was no recognition of the apparent contradictions and irony in these moral evaluations that Khru Keng was making. The students discussed Somjai’s actions in a way that more readily acknowledged extraneous factors influencing the situation. A few of the other M3 girls I spoke to felt similarly to Nattaya, expressing sympathy for a friend they felt had been treated poorly by teachers. Some partially blamed Bunmi, suspecting that he had pressured Somjai to continue their relationship when Somjai had wanted to end it in favour of continuing her education. The students were mostly saddened by the situation but tended not to place blame on one

37 This word also has sexual connotations. Men who are routinely unfaithful to their wives or girlfriends may be described as thiao phuying (เทยี วผูห้ ญงิ ; visiting women).

97 particular aspect exclusively. Whether discussing Somjai specifically or dating in general, the students’ interpretations of risk extended beyond the confines of the school and the people within it. When I asked the mathayom girls why it was so common to date much older boys, their explanations were congruent with the gender dynamics that have been documented by the anthropologists cited above. The girls typically did not see any problem with pursuing a relationship with men up to the age of around 30. They would happily date a boy their age if it felt genuine, but they were wary of boys’ reputations for being fickle. ‘Boys our age aren’t usually serious enough’, Watsamon told me. ‘They’re likely to leave us for someone they think is prettier after a few weeks.’ Relationships with older boys, or even men in their 20s, were seen as more likely to be stable. This sentiment echoes Khru Keng’s nostalgic image of boyhood ‘wandering’, but Watsamon and her friends interpreted it in a more critical light. Despite seeking partners who would not wander from girl to girl, students did not necessarily want to get married as quickly as was expected in serious relationships. In some cases of early school leaving followed by early marriage, it was described by students explicitly as ‘forced marriage’ (don bangkhap hai taengngan; โดนบังคับให้แต่งงาน). Khanuengnit, a village student who had graduated from M3 a year prior, was recently married at the age of 16. She described this to me as a forced marriage. Her boyfriend was a few years older than her, and they had been dating for a while when they got married. She said she was happy with her married life but still missed school and had wanted to continue studying. The decision was out of her hands though, as her parents decided she had to get married, and she was not given the option of continuing her schooling instead. I asked the girls in the M3 class about this kind of situation, and they said it is fairly normal. Mawika and her friends said that a lot of parents expect their daughters to drop out after M3 and get married if they are not getting good grades at school. In some cases, girls may not see any point in continuing with school if they are not among the top of their class academically, thus opting to leave and get married of their own volition. ‘Not us though’, Mawika was quick to add. ‘We have happiness in our studies.’ Nattaya explained to me how she understood the causes of forced marriage. Beauty and tangjai rian were not mentioned as factors. She said that although some girls do make the decision to get married early on their own, in most cases it is actually the girl’s parents who make this decision. Nattaya outlined three typical scenarios resulting in a girl getting married early against her true wishes. The first scenario is that a girl reaches the end of her planned schooling (whether that be P6, M3, or M6, depending on the individual case), and so her parents will seek out a man for her to marry. Many girls are not happy about this kind of arrangement and will ‘not allow it’

98 (mai yom; ไม่ยอม), seeking ways to get out of the impending marriage. Although the parents’ motivations in such cases are to find somebody who can care for their daughter, Nattaya did not think of it as a good thing to do if a girl really does not want to get married. ‘If you ask me, I think girls might consider committing suicide’, Nattaya said. ‘If you don’t like the man that your mum and dad have you marry, then you won’t be happy. He won’t be your soulmate (nuea khu; เนือ ค).’ู่ In cases of forced marriage, suicide is seen as one of the only viable ways of taking back control of the situation. This is what Nattaya meant when saying many girls would ‘not allow’ the arrangement to go ahead.38 Finding her soulmate was important to Nattaya and something she wished to undertake on her own terms. The second scenario is that a girl has been dating somebody for some time, and the pair has been regularly seen together in public. The girl’s parents in this situation may force her to marry her boyfriend in order to protect their daughter from malicious gossip. Public inferences of premarital sexual activity between the couple will accelerate this scenario considerably. The case of Khanuengnit, described above, would be an example of this scenario. The third scenario is that a girl will intentionally seek out a partner and get married early because she sees her parents struggling and wishes to provide additional agricultural labour or financial support to the household.39 She may not really want to get married yet but will sacrifice other life plans and find somebody she can be happy with, for the sake of her parents. Nattaya’s own life plans were most in line with this third scenario. Although she was not going to rush into marriage, she did plan on dropping out of school after M3 to begin work so that she could help her parents financially. She knew her parents were having difficulty making ends meet and wanted to be a support also for her sister, who was in the P1 class. Patcharee, an M1 dormitory girl, took control of the situation by pre-emptively leaving before she was even in a relationship that could be policed. Over the holidays between the first and second term during the year of my fieldwork, she decided that school was more trouble than it was worth for her. Without informing the school, she simply never returned in the second term. Instead, she relocated to Chiang Mai, where she found work caring for the elderly. Early the following year, Patcharee married her 20-year-old boyfriend. I had difficulty learning more about Patcharee’s individual motivations and aspirations in taking this course of action. She

38 Suicide rates in the north of Thailand are considerably higher than elsewhere in the country, and in contrast to trends in Western countries, there is a peak in the number of suicides during early adulthood. The most common methods of death are hanging and ingestion of toxic pesticides which are readily available in farming communities (Manote 2005: 947). In earlier ethnographies of the Karen, suicide has been identified as relatively common among young people whose marriage decisions are not respected by their parents (Fink 2003: 106; Rajah 2008: 76–7). 39 Unlike many other groups in Thailand, marriage among the Karen does not include a bride price. Bride price is, however, customary among the Lawa, so it may factor into marriage considerations in cases of Karen-Lawa marriage, depending on the particular circumstances and families involved.

99 maintained contact with me over social media after cutting ties with all of the other teachers from Little Creek School, but she was never willing to speak candidly with me about her experiences. All she would reveal was that she had not been happy at school. The other teachers did not speak much about Patcharee after her departure, but it was generally agreed in hindsight that she did not tangjai rian. I had initially known Patcharee as a quiet and well- behaved student. After leaving the school, her online self-presentation shifted to consciously display her sexuality and rebelliousness. She grew her hair long, dyed it a different colour, began wearing makeup, and posed provocatively in pictures.

Figure 4.4 A photograph posted by Patcharee on the morning of her wedding, showing her middle finger to the camera. Her caption reads, ‘I’m ready’.

Although teenage romance is nominally described as a barrier to tangjai rian for all students, the actual policing of this ideal disproportionately impacts certain groups of girls. When rules relating to sexuality are transgressed, the cause is attributed to the ‘bad decisions’ of the girls rather than the actions of boys or men and without due regard for the reasons behind girls’ decisions. The hypervisibility of female adolescent sexuality places girls within a risky geography at Little Creek School, especially if identified as ‘beautiful’ and framed by

100 teachers as a potential risk not just to themselves but to other girls they may influence to follow them into patterns of illicit behaviour. The negative outcomes of such a risky geography can be seen in the cases described in this section. During the period of my fieldwork, two girls, Somjai and Patcharee, left Little Creek School before graduating and were subsequently married while still legally considered children. Even without knowing all of the details of Patcharee’s case, it is clear that the two cases are very different. Nonetheless, whether through expulsion or voluntarily dropping out, both girls were framed as ‘problems’ by the moral authority of the school due to their clashes with the ideals of tangjai rian.

Conclusion

The ideal student, the student who properly belongs in a classroom, is a student who can be described as tangjai rian. This chapter has provided an explanation of how this moral ideal is achieved, and how it can be undermined. At the most fundamental level, failure and success to tangjai rian have been demonstrated with the examples of P2 students, Samroeng and Narirat, respectively. Their present stories are not necessarily predictive of their futures. Samroeng’s behavioural issues may be turned around at his new school, or they may be replicated. Narirat may wind up in a similar predicament to Somjai in her mathayom years, or she may stay at the top of her class. It cannot be known at this stage what their futures hold, but the moral discourse surrounding tangjai rian treats these students as if they can and should be put into a particular box. Tangjai rian, as an ideological concept, is not just an ideal held by adults that kids either embrace or are indifferent to. For the most part, both successful and unsuccessful students are on board with striving for tangjai rian so long as they remain at school. By disciplining the heart, one can transform one’s sense of self to be focused on embodying the necessary goodness (khwamdi), ability (khwamkeng), persistence (wiriya), and insight (panya) to achieve educational success and happiness. Achieving ideals of tangjai rian is not singly about being smart, following the rules or being hard-working. It is a complete reorientation of the self to one’s studies, and while it can be aspired to, and students can be nudged towards it, it does nonetheless depend on factors beyond anybody’s control—a student’s aptitude, karma, or grace from God, as the case may be. So long as one remains a student, the key to happiness is described as balancing one’s goodness and skill in order to tangjai rian. If it becomes apparent that somebody cannot tangjai rian, then that person can still pursue happiness and fulfilment but not as a student. One means of signalling a failure to tangjai rian, in particular, has been focused on in the final section of this chapter, as it is central to my overall thesis. The incompatibility between female adolescent sexuality and tangjai rian was made very clear to me during my year at Little

101 Creek School. It was made especially clear to Somjai, an M3 student who was removed from her schooling against her wishes. Somjai’s expulsion from Little Creek School and subsequent marriage was the series of events that determined for me what my thesis was going to be about. Her expulsion was an event that brought to the surface many tensions that had been present but escaping my attention up until that point. After all was said and done, the gravity of this event continued to affect life at the school in profound ways. For the rest of the year, there was a sense of anxiety among the teachers about the possibility of Somjai’s case repeating itself with other girls. Those the teachers described as ‘beautiful’ were framed as being particularly at risk of engaging in similar behaviour. This made the school a ‘risky geography’ for these girls, who were framed as risk to the moral fabric of the school and therefore at risk of either dropping out or being expelled. Within the theoretical framework of figured worlds, a risky geography could be described as a space where a particular figured world has more power than others. Anybody positioned within that dominant figured world in a way that minimises their own power is therefore placed at risk of some kind of disenfranchisement. The teachers’ accounts of Somjai’s expulsion placed the blame squarely on Somjai as having acted immorally. If too much focus is placed on attributing blame, however, the broader situation is obscured. Somjai’s actions occurred while she was emplaced in a risky geography that attracted strict policing of her moral ideals by teachers. To highlight the diverse views of students, and how they jointly attribute meaning to this kind of situation, I have also drawn upon insights offered by Somjai’s classmates at Little Creek School. They explicitly drew attention to the multiple external forces that mathayom girls have on their mind when making decisions about love, sex, school, and marriage. Somjai was embroiled in a complex domestic situation at the time of her indiscretions, involving drug addiction within her immediate family. If blame is levelled at Bunmi, there is a risk of portraying Somjai as a passive victim without her own role to play. The love Somjai feels for her husband is complex and should be recognised as such, not simply dismissed as a girl unappreciative of the importance of school. Giving validity to the way that Somjai feels encourages an understanding of the ways that children actively participate in the authoring of figured worlds. This does not universally result in either positive or negative outcomes. While dropping out of school after completion of M3 was an issue for boys as well as girls, the process differed according to gender. Upper secondary schooling—years M4–M6— is the least accessible stage of schooling to disadvantaged rural students in Thailand due largely to transport and accommodation costs (OECD & UNESCO 2016: 74). Impoverished families are sometimes able to scrape together the resources to continue a child’s education— through some combination of loans, charity, and tight budgeting—but they will not do this for a child that they do not believe has the potential to benefit from schooling. Poor grades were

102 a common reason cited by boys planning to drop out of school. Sexuality and marriage were not prominent in boys’ reasons for leaving school early, however, as the pursuit of romance was not problematised in the same way for boys as it was for girls. Girls may often leave school—either voluntarily or due to expulsion—any time from M1–M6 and very quickly get married. Boys who leave school early tend to more commonly drop out after completion of M3 and transition immediately into work or vocational training, with marriage and fatherhood still on hold for several more years. Boys, like girls, are told that they should tangjai rian instead of looking for girlfriends. Public displays of physical affection between teenage boys and girls are not tolerated for either party. But the proactiveness and intensity of the policing of these moral ideals is far greater where girls are concerned. This leads to the production of an institutional space that places teenage girls at greater risk of having their education cut short due to sexual indiscretion. There still remains more to be said about the concept of tangjai rian before we can fully make sense of how students engage with it. In this chapter, I have deliberately focused on describing what this moral ideal is, and how it operates. I have not yet answered the question of why such importance is placed on tangjai rian, and, particularly, why it is so threatened by female adolescent sexuality. In the following chapter, I address those questions. Tangjai rian and physical expressions of sexuality are both tightly bound up with local understandings of love, and it is through the idiom of love that the mutual exclusivity of these two things is explained at school.

103 Chapter 5 – Love is Beautiful: Learning about Love at School

I was once discussing student relationships with Khru Keng during a car trip. Two of the M3 students, Mawika and Attachai, were dating at the time—a fact known by the teachers and a popular topic for lunchtime gossip in the staff kitchen. I asked Keng why some student relationships were secret and forbidden while others were openly tolerated. ‘If they just talk to each other, it’s okay’, he said. ‘The problem is when they want to sleep at the boy’s house or go and see them at night-time. Then they get pregnant and get married.’ Pichit, one of the M3 dormitory boys, was in the car with me and Keng that day and joined in our conversation. ‘Lots of the boys like Mawika, because she’s cute and has a lot of good qualities’, he explained. ‘She’s really smart, well behaved, good at everything she does. I was dating her for a while last year. I’d still like to date her, but we’re just friends now.’ When I asked, he would not tell me why they ultimately broke up. ‘She’s had a lot of boyfriends’, Khru Keng added with a laugh. He jokingly described

Mawika as laijai (หลายใจ), a word meaning someone of ‘many hearts’ and often used to describe people who are promiscuous or regularly cheat on their partner. Keng’s use of the label laijai in the car that day to refer to Mawika was fairly playful and friendly in tone. Her relationships did not typically run afoul of the rules, and she was a star pupil of the school, with grades among the top of her class. A few weeks earlier though, the word laijai was used several times during sexual health education to refer to people who have sex with multiple sexual partners. It was explicitly taught to the girls as something they should avoid.

Laijai, like tangjai rian (ตงั ใจเรยี น), is another example of a compound word that includes the Thai word, jai (ใจ)—heart. Although these two terms refer to very different matters, the thing that they have in common is the Thai concept of the self. Laijai is directly related to romantic and sexual relationships, while at first glance, tangjai rian is related to education. In this chapter, I argue that tangjai rian does nonetheless share the connection to love and affection that many other jai compound words rely upon for their significance. It is through the connection between love and tangjai rian that the incompatibility of tangjai rian and adolescent sexuality can be understood. In the previous chapter, I highlighted the ways that ideals of tangjai rian are policed at Little Creek School and experienced by a range of different students. I argued that the school environment functions as a ‘risky geography’ for mathayom girls in particular. The risk in this case is either expulsion or dropping out of school early. The sexuality of these students is highly visible and is perceived by the moral authority of teachers to act as a barrier to their ability to tangjai rian successfully. Even when rules are followed, the pressure to uphold moral ideals remains a source of stress when navigating romantic feelings and relationships. Boys

104 are nominally held to the same moral standards, but their misdeeds more easily go unnoticed or unpoliced. In this chapter, I ask why tangjai rian and sexuality, according to parents and teachers, are so strongly in opposition. I argue that love is the key factor to consider in answering this question. To tangjai rian is to demonstrate love and gratitude to one’s parents and teachers both. Sex is closely bound with love also, normatively restricted to partnerships of marriage. Premarital sex is not ideal but does occur quite commonly in the village community. Where premarital sex does occur, marriage is expected to follow. In order to show love through tangjai rian, one must remain a child. In order to show love for a romantic partner through sex, one must leave childhood behind and begin married life. To parents and teachers, a child’s romantic relationship is problematic because it suggests that the expected love through tangjai rian is not being expressed. To pursue both of these love relationships simultaneously does not make sense. The chapter is divided into three main sections. In the first section, I unpack the meaning of the word jai. Jai is a key morpheme within the term tangjai rian, and it is invoked in a number of other words that relate to romantic relationships and love. It is through understanding this terminology that we can begin to see the connections and incompatibilities between love, sexuality, and tangjai rian. In the second section, I analyse the sexual health education offered at Little Creek School during ‘life skills’ day—an annual workshop held for the mathayom students. I argue that this workshop focuses on the concept of love just as much as on sexual and reproductive health, if not more so. In the third section, I analyse the presence of love embedded in the act of tangjai rian, by considering how the teacher-student relationship is modelled after the parent-child relationship, and how students are taught that love is always a powerful, beautiful, and meritorious force.

Connections between Love and the Heart in Thai Language

The ‘heart’ metaphor within words like tangjai rian is prolific in Thai language and is used regarding both affective and cognitive matters, unlike the heart/brain distinction in most Western concepts of the self. A compilation of over 300 Thai ‘heart words’—those including the jai prefix/suffix—has been assembled by Moore (1992) along with their English translations. There are many more ‘heart words’ than those included in Moore’s book, and tangjai is one of them. An analysis of the morpheme, jai, assists in making sense of the tension between tangjai rian and sexuality that was outlined in the previous chapter. As I have noted already, jai can mean things described by many different words in English. It can mean some combination of mind, soul, or self. Jai is most commonly translated as heart but more so in the

105 symbolic sense than the literal, physical sense. When used in compound words like tangjai

(ตงั ใจ), it represents an example of what has been described as ‘psycho-collocation’. Matisoff defines psycho-collocation as,

…a polymorphemic expression referring as a whole to a mental process, quality or state, one of whose constituents is a psycho-noun, i.e. a noun with explicit psychological reference (translatable by English words like heart, mind, spirit, soul, temper, nature, disposition, mood). (Matisoff 1986: 9; emphasis in original)

Matisoff notes that in east and southeast Asia, both the heart and the liver are commonly used as ‘psycho-nouns’. As arguably the most common such psycho-noun in the Thai language, jai is used to describe a wide range of cognitive and emotional states and actions.40 Matisoff (ibid.: 10–11) divides these states and actions into three broad categories: intellection and attitudes toward experience; qualities of character and traits of personality; emotions, feelings, and moods. Tangjai rian, according to the definition I provided in the previous chapter could fit into either of the first two categories depending on how it is used. Jai is associated directly with the actual heart, but the word specifically for the bodily organ includes an extra prefix meaning ‘head’ (hua; หัว) before jai. The heart then may be closely connected to one’s jai, but it is not actually the jai itself. If the heart stops beating, then the jai will also cease functioning. The hua prefix is explained by Matisoff (1986: 52) as referring to ‘bulbous objects’, i.e. the shape of the vital organ. This, according to Matisoff, makes discussion of the organ a more physical reference than other uses of jai. In many words though, the hua prefix carries the meaning of authority or decision-making. If huajai (หัวใจ) is interpreted in this sense, then it both refers unambiguously to a physical object in the body, while still maintaining the more multifaceted meanings of jai. Commenting on the richness and ubiquity of the heart metaphor in Thai language, Cassaniti (2015: 44) notes,

The English language draws a similar attention to the heart as the place of feeling, but the set of compound jai words ranges in scope well beyond English notions of the heart and extends to realms considered in English to reference not only affective but also cognitive states, dispositions, attitudes, and even actions.

Jai means a lot more than simply ‘heart’ then. Exhaling is described in Thai as something leaving one’s jai—haijai (หายใจ)—but there is no confusion about differentiating the lungs and

40 There is a similar word, sav, used in Sgaw Karen to refer to the ‘mind-heart’, paired with other words to express a wide range of meanings just as jai is in Thai.

106 the heart at the physiological level.41 It also encompasses aspects of mind more likely to be associated with the brain in English. To ‘understand’, is to khaojai (เข้าใจ)—meaning that something has entered your jai, or you have perhaps entered the jai of another, thus understanding them. These translations are very literal, and I do not mean to suggest that Thai speakers are consciously reflecting on their jai when they use these everyday words. The metaphor is so prolific that the relationship of many words to one’s jai is typically taken for granted.

The Thai word for ‘love’—rak (รัก)—does not make use of jai as a prefix or suffix. Jai is often used, however, in the context of love, as it is with any kind of emotional discussion in

Thai. For example, to be unfaithful to one’s lover is described as nokjai (นอกใจ) in Thai. This word literally means, ‘outside of the heart’. The love connection is particularly important to my thesis because when it comes to both sexuality and education in my fieldsite, the ways jai relates to expressions of love become highly salient. There are two jai compound words that I discuss throughout this chapter alongside tangjai rian, which are closely tied to love and which play important roles in explaining the incompatibility between tangjai rian and adolescent sexuality: rujai (รู ้ใจ)—to know someone’s heart; pen kamlangjai (เป็นกําลังใจ)—to offer support. If tangjai rian is compared to these phrases, then it is far less obviously related to love. If thinking of romantic love, it in fact almost suggests a detachment from love. The heart is focused, disciplined, redirected away from other things and towards a path of scholarly learning. The literal meaning of tangjai rian could be described as beyond the confines of the English heart metaphor. To use Cassaniti’s words again, not affective but a cognitive state, a disposition, an action. Matisoff would likely classify this term as an ‘intellection’ according to his typology. Cassaniti’s point though is that these distinctions are not necessarily recognised in Thai speech that includes jai. If we want to apply categories like those proposed by Matisoff, we are doing so with an etic perspective, and the same word or phrase may fall on either side of the boundaries we demarcate from one context to another. The association with love that I am arguing for in this chapter is not always so central to the term, tangjai rian. It is an everyday term after all. You cannot discuss someone being studious without using this term. Adults who return to study or enrol in some sort of professional development, for example, could rightly be described as tangjai rian. Love may not be a factor in that case. Certainly not sexuality. When schoolchildren are implored by their elders to tangjai

41 Matisoff (1986: 15) speculates that this usage is indicative of an older meaning akin to ‘breath of life’, noting that certain Tai dialects spoken in parts of maintain the breath metaphor over the heart metaphor in speech that would be associated exclusively with the heart in Thai.

107 rian, however, love is paramount. The value of an ethnographic analysis of this term then, as opposed to a more abstract linguistic analysis, is that it allows us to go beyond the metaphor as always present in the word and look to specific situations where the metaphor becomes more salient to users of the language based on their particular cultural values. In the ethnographic sections that follow, I consider how the association between love and tangjai rian is taught at Little Creek School, and how that association guides local reactions to suspected sexual activity.

Sex Education at Little Creek School: A Warning against Illicit Love

The concept of love took centre stage during sexual health education at Little Creek School. The main setting for the delivery of sexual and reproductive health education was during ‘life skills’ training (thaksa chiwit; ทักษะชีวิต), a full day workshop run for the combined mathayom classes once a year and held in the meeting hall. Life skills is an approach to the teaching of various psychosocial skills among young people, potentially including general skills such as problem solving and critical thinking, or more specific topics such as sexual health, interpersonal relationships, and knowledge about the dangers of drugs and alcohol (Botvin & Griffin 2004; International HIV/AIDS Alliance 2008; UNFPA 2015; UNICEF 2012; Visser 2005). While material on contraception was provided—as required by changes to the national health curriculum in the year 2008 (Monrudee et al. 2008)—the workshop strongly promoted abstinence from sex as the best approach to safely navigating teenage relationships. Girls were consistently portrayed in teaching materials as the party responsible for upholding ideals of sexual morality, while undesirable behaviour from boys was normalised as something girls should expect and adapt to. Much like campaigns addressing HIV/AIDS in Thailand during the 1980s and 1990s, the issues being addressed were presented as indicative of a moral crisis, rather than a health crisis (Fordham 2001: 270–1). The teachers leading the workshop hoped that it would curb the amount of early marriage and teenage pregnancy in the community. The year of my fieldwork, life skills day fell shortly after the expulsion of Somjai. Her story was fresh on the minds of everybody in attendance that day, although she was not explicitly mentioned by any staff or students during the day’s activities. Following opening presentations from staff promoting qualities of perseverance and entrepreneurialism, the majority of the day revolved around sexual health education. The relative appropriateness of various forms of love were covered throughout the day. Love was flagged as an important topic for the day before anything related to sex was explicitly raised by teachers. After gathering all 57 mathayom students in the meeting hall, a single multiple-choice survey question was distributed. Students were told there were no right or wrong answers and that the question would be discussed as a group later on. The question

108 simply asked students to circle the statement that was most in line with their own views. The students chose from four statements, and their responses were as follows:

a. Love is beautiful. It’s okay to love somebody, b. Love is beautiful. It’s okay to show your love for but it should be expressed only in the appropriate somebody in sight of adults. [3.5%] manner, place, and time (Thai expression literally, ‘inside the frame’). [65%] c. Love is beautiful. It’s okay to go ahead and love d. Love is beautiful, but you shouldn’t concern freely. You needn’t pay any mind to what others yourself with love while studying. [19%] think. [3.5%] e. Love is not good. It’s best not to love anybody. [9%]

Table 5.1 ‘Love’ survey responses.

Figure 5.1 Survey question about ‘love’, distributed to students by teachers.

In this context, the word ‘love’ carried very specific connotations that went without saying. Due to the presence of familiar expressions emphasising appropriate versus inappropriate contexts such as, ‘inside the frame’ (yu nai krop; อยู่ในกรอบ) and ‘in sight of adults’ (yu nai saita phuyai; อยู่ในสายตาผู้ใหญ่), the students immediately knew that this question was asking for their views about teenage romantic relationships potentially involving illicit sexual contact. This question and these responses do not really tell us much about mathayom students’ views on sex, love, and relationships. If anything, this question simply asks students

109 what they believe the official rules to be. At the time, I felt the entire exercise was rather pointless. They would have been better off asking the resident anthropologist to survey the students about their views, I thought. Most students identified the ‘correct’ answer (statement ‘a’), which allowed for relationships that remain of an acceptable nature, i.e. no illicit activity involved. Given the fact that many students implicitly challenged this statement through their private actions throughout the school year, such a collective response could be framed as ‘everyday resistance’ through false compliance (Fordham 2001: 279–80; Scott 1985: 29). In hindsight, the most interesting part of this hastily administered survey of questionable validity, was the assumption inherent in the phrasing of all but one of the possible responses. All but one statement included the maxim, ‘love is beautiful’ (khwamrak suai ngam;

ความรักสวยงาม). Whether platonic, romantic, sexual, or within a family, love is framed as a thing of inherent beauty. The lesson here was not that love should be suppressed. On the contrary, love is something that one should ideally express at all times. But the mode of expression depends greatly on the context. In chapter three, I introduced the Thai concept of ru kalathesa (รู ้กาลเทศะ)—a knowledge of time and space that places great importance on surface appearances in Thai society. Knowledge of kalathesa is key to students understanding what is and is not ‘inside the frame’ in different contexts. Whether dating or not, I argue that children are expected by adults to express love by tangjai rian. The wording of the survey question posed to the students suggests that they are expected to see two distinct modes of expressing and experiencing love if this thing of inherent beauty must be restricted in some way. During discussion of the survey results, Khru Keng clarified why statement ‘d’ was not necessarily the best approach to teenage experiences of love. He emphasised that it is natural for teenagers to experience romantic attraction and sexual urges (wairun mi arom pen thammachat; วัยรุ่นมีอารมณ์เป็นธรรมชาติ). Forbidding the experience of love outright was not framed as a viable option. Instead, students were encouraged to build the foundations of long-lasting relationships through being there to support one another emotionally in a romantic relationship during school years (pen kamlangjai). Progressing to any kind of physical relationship at this stage of life, however, was framed as inappropriate and contradictory to one’s ability to tangjai rian successfully. Two of the M3 students present were held up as an example of this kind of ideal teenage relationship. ‘Attachai likes Mawika, right? That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that’, Khru Keng said. ‘They send each other messages and talk to one another, to be there for one another and get to know each other better. But Attachai understands that right now Mawika is focused on her studies.’ The other students found the teachers’ knowledge of and commentary on this relationship amusing, and the pair in question appeared embarrassed by the situation. Keng

110 assured the cohort that this kind of relationship was nothing to be embarrassed about and that it had the blessing of the teachers because the students involved remained ‘inside the frame’— school life was framed as their priority, and love was contained and managed in the appropriate manner, with physical expressions of love reserved for starting a family later in life. Appropriate engagement with jai—one’s own and that of others—was key to walking the line of dating in a morally acceptable manner. Khru Keng explained to students that the benefit of a boyfriend or girlfriend during school years is not sexual gratification but an emotional support. The phrase used in Thai for this is, pen kamlangjai. It means to be the strength, the supporting force behind a person’s jai. In order to pen kamlangjai most effectively, it is necessary to really know a person’s jai. This translates to the phrase, rujai, which is something expected of romantic partners. Anyone in your life who is kind can pen kamlangjai to some extent, but the emotional intimacy—not necessarily sexual intimacy—of rujai is something harder to come by and makes for much stronger support from loved ones. Phrases like these are imbued with particular meaning by the moral authority of the school. According to teachers, if you are dating somebody at school and rujai them, you will know that they tangjai rian. The way in which you support them—pen kamlangjai—should support the path of learning that they have set their jai upon. Anything outside of that is not pen kamlangjai. As the day continued, there were several different sessions led by a few different teachers (three men and one woman). Information about bodily changes during puberty was shown using an animation. Different forms of contraception were explained both by teachers and using videos. There were videos, songs, and stories portraying extreme examples of positive and negative outcomes of different kinds of relationship. Two live-action short films were shown presenting fictional narratives about teenage relationships. One focused on a teenage romance that quickly progressed to sex, pregnancy, life in a slum, alcoholism, domestic abuse, miscarriage, and abandonment. The second short film was similar in tone but specifically focused on the role of mobile phones in facilitating promiscuity. The girl fell pregnant not knowing who the father was, and none of her former lovers were interested in taking responsibility for the child. Written short stories were also provided for analysis. In one story, a girl was in a sexual relationship with her boyfriend. After falling pregnant, he pressured her into getting an abortion. She committed suicide out of shame, and her parents were left depressed. This was contrasted with a relationship that remained inside the frame in a second story. Both the boy and the girl did well at school and university, got good jobs, and were then happily married with the blessings of their parents who ‘opened their hearts’ (poetjai; เปิดใจ). Each story is provided below, accompanied by my translation into English.

111 ดาวเป็ นเด็กนักเรยี นชนั ม.๓ โรงเรียนแห่ง Dao pen dek nakrian chan mo Dao was a student in mathayom หนึง ดาวมแี ฟนคนหนึงเป็ นนักเรยี นชนั ม. sam rongrian haeng nueng. Dao three at school. Dao had a mi faen khon nueng pen nakrian boyfriend who was a student in ๓ โรงเรียนเดียวกัน ทงั สองคบกนั ตงั แต่ chan mo sam rongrian diaokan. mathayom three at the same ตอนปลายปี ม.๒ แรก ๆ ทงั สองคนก็เพยี ง Thang song khopkan tangtae ton school. The two of them had been แค่พูดคุยกันทางไลน์ และเฟส นานวันเข้า plai pi mo song. Raek raek thang dating since the end of mathayom มกี ารนัดเจอกนั โดยมพี ่อแม่ของทงั สอง song khon ko phiang khae phut two. At first the two of them just ฝ่ ายไม่รเู ้รอื งเลยจนกระทงั สองมอี ะไรกนั khuikan thang lai lae fet. Nan wan chatted to one another over Line วนั หนึงดาวก็รวู ้ า่ ประจาํ เดอื นของตนเองไม่ khao mi kannad joekan doi mi pho and Facebook. Time went by, and mae khong thang song fai mai ru one day they arranged to meet มา จงึ นําเรอื งมาคยุ กบั แฟน แฟนก็บอกให้ rueang loei jon krathang song mi without either of their parents ดาวทําแท้ง ดาวเสยี ใจมากทเี รอื งของทงั araikan. Wan nueng Dao ko ru wa knowing, and the couple had sex. สองตอ้ งลงเอยแบบนี ดาวจึงตัดสินใจบอก prajamduean khong ton eng mai One day, Dao realised that her พ่อแม่ พ่อแม่รู ้ก็เสียใจมากจึงแจ้งความ ma jueng nam rueang ma khui period did not come, so she went ดําเนินคดีกับแฟนของดาว สุดท้ายแฟน kap faen. Faen ko bok hai Dao to discuss it with her boyfriend. ถูกรับเข้าสถานพินิจ ดาวเสียใจ และอับ tham thaeng. Dao siajai mak thi Her boyfriend told Dao to get an อาย จากเรอื งทเี กดิ ขนึ จงึ ผูกคอตาย พ่อ rueang khong thang song tong abortion. Dao was very sad that longoei baep ni. Dao jueng the two of them had to end things แม่ของดาวทอี ยขู่ า้ งหลงั ก็ตรอมใจคิดถึง tatsinjai bok pho mae. Pho mae ru that way. Dao thus decided to tell ลกู ทตี ายไปจนไม่เป็ นอนั ทาํ อะไร ko siajai mak jueng jaeng her parents. Once her parents khwamdamnoenkhadi kap faen knew, they were very sad, so they khong Dao. Sutthai faen thuk rap reported her boyfriend to the khao sathanphinit. Dao siajai lae police, and in the end, he was ap ai jak rueang thi koet khuen sent to juvenile detention. Dao jueng phuk kho tai. Pho mae was sad and ashamed because of khong Dao thi yu khanglang ko what had happened, so she tromjai khitthueng luk thi taipai jon hanged herself. Dao’s parents mai pen an tham arai. who were left behind were heartbroken and missed their child who had died, to the point where they were unable to get up and do anything.

Figure 5.2 'Dao's Story', in Thai and English.

112 เดอื นเป็ นนักเรยี นชนั ม.๓ โรงเรียนแห่ง Duean pen nakrian chan mo sam Duean was a student in หนึง เดอื นมเี พอื นชายทเี รยี กวา่ แฟนคน rongrian haeng nueng. Duean mi mathayom three at school. Duean phueanchai thi riak wa faen khon was friends with a boy in her class หนึงอยชู่ นั ม.๓ ห้องเดียวกัน ทงั คเู่ รมิ คบ nueng yu chan mo sam hong whom she called her boyfriend. กนั จากการเป็ นเพอื นทคี อยดแู ลเอาใจใส่ diaokan. Thang khu roem Their relationship developed from กัน เดือนไม่เคยร ้องขออะไรจากแฟน และ khopkan jak kanpenphuean thi being friends who looked out for แฟนก็ไม่เคยเรียกร ้องอะไรจากเดือน ทงั khoi dulae aojaisaikan. Duean mai one another. Duean never สองคอยเอาใจใสซ่ งึ กนั และกนั ในเรอื งของ khoei rongkho arai jak faen lae requested anything from her การเรียน ปัญหาทุกอย่าง ทางบ้านของ faen ko mai khoei riakrong arai jak boyfriend, and her boyfriend never Duean.Thang song khoi demanded anything from her. เดือนฐานะดี แต่เดือนเรียนไม่ค่อยเก่ง ส่วน aojaisaikanlaekan nai rueang They both supported one another แฟนเป็นคนเรียนดี แต่ฐานะทางบ้าน khong kanrian panha thuk yang. in their studies or with whatever ยากจน ทงั สองก็เขา้ ใจกนั เสมอ แฟนคอย Thang ban khong Duean thana di problems they each had. Duean สอนการบ้าน งานต่าง ๆ ให้เดือนส่วน tae Duean rian mai khoi keng. came from a fairly well-off เดือนก็คอยให้กําลังใจแฟน จนทงั คู่ Suan faen pen khon rian di tae household, but Duean wasn’t very สามารถสอบเข้าเรียนสาย วิทย์-คณิต ที thana thang ban yakjon. Thang smart academically at school. Her ต้องการได้ ทงั คยู่ งั คงคบกนั ตอ่ ไปให้ song ko khaojaikan samoe. Faen boyfriend did very well at school, khoi son kanban ngan tang tang but he came from a poor กําลังใจกัน ไม่เคยนัดกันไปดูหนัง ฟังเพลง hai Duean. Suan Duean ko khoi household. The two always เทยี วเลน่ นอกเหนือจากพบกันโรงเรียน hai kamlangjai faen jon thueng understood each other. Duean’s เพราะแฟนต้องทํางาน เมอื จบ ม. ปลาย ทงั khu samat sop khao rian sai wit boyfriend regularly helped with คู่ก็เรียนต่ออุดมศึกษา และยังคบกันอยู่ khanit thi tongkan dai. Thang khu her homework and other work, โดยไม่มีอะไรเกินเลย yang khong khopkan topai hai and as for Duean, she provided เมอื เรยี นจบ ผูใ้ หญท่ แี อบดคู วามสมั พนั ธ ์ kamlangjaikan. Mai khoei natkan support and encouragement for pai du nang fang phleng thiaolen her boyfriend, to the point that ของทงั คกู่ ็เลยเปิดใจใหท้ งั คคู่ บกนั เมอื ทงั คู่ noknueajak phopkan rongrian both of them were able to pass มีงานทํา ทงั สองก็ไดแ้ ตง่ งานกนั ตามทหี วงั phro faen tong thamngan. Muea the exams for entry into the ไว้ jop mo plai thang khu ko rian to maths-science stream at school udomsueksa lae yang khopkan yu like they wanted. So, both of them doi mai mi arai koen loei. continued dating and supporting Muea rian jop phuyai thi aep du each other through the final years khwamsamphan khong thang khu of high school. They had never ko loei poetjai hai thang khu arranged to go and see a movie, khopkan muea thang khu mi ngan listen to music or hang out tham. Thang song ko dai together outside of seeing each taengngankan tam thi wangwai. other at school, because her boyfriend had to work. After finishing high school, both of them went on to study at university, and they were still seeing each other without it being anything more than that. When they had finished their studies, the adults who had been secretly paying attention to their relationship opened their hearts for the two of them to be a couple once they both had jobs. Both of them were then able to get married just as they had hoped to all along.

Figure 5.3 'Duean's Story', in Thai and English.

113 Students were split into four groups to prepare posters and give presentations listing negative outcomes and possible solutions relating to one of two topics. Two groups had the topic of ‘people with many lovers’ (khon laijai; คนหลายใจ). As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, this phrase means a person of ‘many hearts’ and is often used in a derogatory sense.

The other two groups had the topic of ‘love while studying’ (rak nai wai rian; รักในวัยเรียน). This word—wai rian—literally means ‘learning/studying age’ and reinforces the implication that the appropriate space for a teenager is within a school. Schooling is identified as a distinct life- stage, in many cases synonymous with adolescence. The following table contains a summary of the key points listed by the students in their presentations:

Cons Solutions

Shared Responses across • Loss of future • Do not be gullible Topics • Other people in society will • Know how to say no look down on you, despise • Focus on your studies you (tangjai rian) • Your family will be ashamed, • Think before you act sad, and disappointed • Do not have sex You will damage your family’s • • Think about your parents and your own reputation • Remain ‘inside the frame’ (yu • You could protract a sexually nai krop) transmitted infection • You will be stressed and unfocused at school

Love while Studying • It goes against tradition • Socialise with and date only • You will lose your good people virginity/innocence • Honour/respect each other • Your genitals may become • Know how to protect yourself sore (unclear if referring to • People will view you with contraception, self-defence, pessimism or protecting yourself from others taking advantage) • The stress could lead to suicide • If you act, be prepared to accept the consequences

People with Many Lovers • Boys will probably not accept • Use contraception if you responsibility for their actions decide to have sex (i.e. unplanned pregnancy) • You should have only one • You may do bad things such partner as get an abortion • Always keep your future in • People will gossip about you mind • You may have a hard life • Know restraint because you need to raise a • Do not go out late at night child by yourself • Do as your parents say

Table 5.2 Summary of student life skills presentations.

114 The responses focused largely on personal responsibility of girls, social consequences affecting one’s parents, and the inevitability of undesirable outcomes such as unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections (STI). Arunee, an M3 student, delivered the only response of the day that explicitly implored boys to act responsibly. In other presentations there was some giggling and some mumbling, but, for the most part, posters were presented in a very matter-of-fact way, reading listed points from the poster verbatim. During the beginning and end of her presentation, Arunee adhered to this pattern. Through visible shifts in body language and speaking style though, it became clear that one of the points in the middle of her presentation was imbued with a lot of meaning beyond just reciting what she had been told was the appropriate behaviour.

‘We have to honour/respect one another’, Arunee began (rao tong hai kiat kan; เราต้อง

ให้เกียรติกัน). She paused to compose her thoughts before speaking again rather than just continuing to read the words written on the poster. The pace of her speech quickened, as she shifted to face the audience and used hand gestures to add emphasis. ‘This has to apply to both boys and girls, okay?’ she continued. ‘It shouldn’t be that boys just get whatever they want from girls. It shouldn’t be that if the boy says they want something, the girl just has to give, give, give…’ Arunee quickly glanced to Mawika, who stood beside her holding the poster, and threw her a smile. Laughter ensued from all of the seated students. ‘We need to honour/respect each other’, she stated again. Arunee then returned to her more scripted presentation. The focus of the life skills workshop on girls taking personal responsibility is consistent with the findings of Patchanee (2012: 187–8), who interviewed several Thai high school students as part of a larger project about sexuality in rural Thailand. The health textbooks of the students interviewed by Patchanee included sections encouraging girls to remain ‘untouched’ by men and to avoid wearing sensual clothing. Patchanee found that most male students explained that it was the responsibility of girls to take precautions to avoid ending up in undesirable situations as a result of sexual activity. Girls were routinely blamed for the poor behaviour of boys. A study of sex education across several schools in Chiang Mai reflected similar views among students (Uraiwan et al. 2006). When presented by researchers with a fictional vignette much like the ones I have described above, Chiang Mai students tended to respond that the girl should have known better and refused sex; the boy was not implicated as having acted inappropriately (ibid.: 2073). While there is traditionally high value placed on female virginity in Thailand, this is contrasted with a generally high tolerance for male premarital sex (Chanpen et al. 1999; Knodel et al. 1999; Warunee 2002). In the study by Uraiwan et al. (2006: 2074), parents spoke of the sexual impulses of their teenage sons as a natural and inevitable feature of their

115 masculinity, while displaying less permissive attitudes towards the sexual impulses of their teenage daughters. Considering this inconsistency of attitudes towards different genders, Patchanee (2012: 187–8) argues that it is unrealistic to expect that abstinence-focused education programmes will be effective in such a context. In the US context, it has been argued that the essentialisation of personal responsibility central to abstinence-focused approaches to sex education obscures structural factors like class, gender, and ethnicity, and how they relate to complex social issues like teenage pregnancy or HIV/AIDS (Clark & Stitzlein 2018). Such structural factors are crucial to addressing these issues in the area of my fieldwork but were not raised in any discussions or activities during the life skills workshop. Arunee’s appeal for boys to treat their girlfriends with honour and respect was the closest anybody came to engaging directly with structural gender inequalities. Arunee’s group also included a point on their poster stating that ‘love while studying’ goes against tradition. A point of clarification that would perhaps have made for a productive group discussion would have been that it is the ‘while studying’ aspect of teenage romance that is against tradition in this community, not the ‘while a teenager’ aspect. Early marriage, a longstanding feature of life in the communities of all Little Creek School students, was not mentioned at all throughout the workshop. The hypothetical scenarios posed to students were very urban Thai oriented, rather than adapted for a rural Karen setting. The scenarios all took place in large urban schools and focused on worst-case- scenarios involving destitution, disease, and abandonment following sexual activity. Similar criticisms have been made regarding Thailand’s blanket approach to addressing HIV/AIDS. Fordham argues, ‘…the effect of reducing the problems presented by the HIV/AIDS epidemic to moral homilies has been a failure to adequately come to terms with the cultural practices followed by the members of the ethnically and socio-structurally diverse Thai population…’ (2001: 271). None of the material at Little Creek School was informative about possible difficulties associated with early marriage in an upland village. For instance, information about the risks of childbirth away from hospitals may have been useful to include given the remoteness of some students’ home villages. What students were told was that becoming sexually active while at school would upset their parents, and they should therefore show their love by not becoming sexually active while at school. Students were not, however, invited to reflect on the ambiguity many local parents feel regarding teenage romance once schooling is removed as a factor. In some cases, it is the wish of parents for their children to leave school and marry early. Following traditional patterns of household formation is balanced with possibilities of cultural capital on offer through schooling. The students’ Karen ethnicity and structural position on the margins of Thai society are therefore crucial. These matters are central to understanding the dynamics influencing perceptions of morality regarding teenage romance at

116 Little Creek School. Another key omission from life skills day was reflection on the important relationship of familial love between teachers and students. In the next section, I analyse how familial love relationships between children and adults are framed, with the above issues in mind. I outline how tangjai rian is an expression of such a love relationship, and how adolescent sexuality disrupts this through its own interactions with love.

Sacrifice and Gratitude: The ‘Beauty’ of Teacher-Student and Parent-Child Love

In this section, I look at interactions between students and teachers to examine the practice of tangjai rian and highlight how it is an expression of love. There is a strong familial love shared between teachers and their students—analogous in many ways to the parent-child relationship but differing in certain key aspects. Love is such an important theme in ‘life skills’ at Little Creek School because sexuality is disruptive of teacher-student love. Early marriage and teenage pregnancy are not problematised in the same way when they occur beyond the context of schooling. In fact, historically in this Karen community, girls have been expected to marry during their early teenage years. From the perspective of the parents then, there is nothing inherently wrong with teenagers pursuing sexual relationships, so long as marriage is the outcome. The opposition of parents to their children commencing sexual relationships is not a general moral objection to teenagers having sex but is specific to the threat it poses to continued education. Teenage sex is a threat to continued schooling because of the overlapping relationships between love, sex, gratitude, and education. The moral value of tangjai rian is emphasised at Little Creek School in ways that differ to the general moral value attached to this ideal for children in Thai society as a whole. I once overheard a female teacher saying about Somjai’s situation, ‘If she was at a school in the city, this probably wouldn’t even be an issue’. Not only because surveillance of students’ sexual morality becomes more difficult in a larger school but also acknowledging that upland schools tended to be more conservative regarding student relationships. In the upland setting, any possible threat to educational success was taken very seriously given the social mobility seen as possible through schooling. Life is not easy at the margins of Thai society, as a member of a ‘hill tribe’. The cultural capital on offer at school means a lot to Karen people in Thailand, as I have discussed in the preceding chapters. For girls and young women, the path of tangjai rian is particularly important as they are taught to expect poor treatment at the hands of men whom they pursue relationships with, taught that they must be the ones to adapt themselves if they choose to pursue romance. For those like Arunee, who are dissatisfied with being placed in that position,

117 further education also represents a means to more equitable romantic relationships in the future. The challenges of this issue particular to the Karen were once pointed out by Khru Tao, herself a Karen woman from the local area. She had the following to say one day at a morning assembly, holding back tears as she addressed the mathayom cohort (the entire school cohort, including anuban and prathom, were nonetheless present and listening). ‘I want to talk to you about next year’, she began. ‘Some of you will be graduating from M3 soon, and I know not all of you will continue to M4. You’re probably thinking about getting married. But please think carefully about this, and don’t rush into anything. Life is tough for us up here. We, all of us, have to endure so much. You can get through it and make a better life. But it’s not easy. It takes a long time and hard work, and it can disappear in an instant. Think very carefully about the kind of future you want before choosing to get married.’ Khru Tao was imploring students to tangjai rian. This appeal was primarily for the sake of the students themselves, but Tao made a point of publicly displaying how deeply she was personally affected by the way students engaged with this matter. Tao delivered this appeal as an expression of her loving concern for the students; thus, they were encouraged to reflect on their love for their teachers during this sort of exchange. The large number of Karen teachers working at the school made many of the teachers particularly relatable role models (consistently about half of the teachers were Sgaw Karen). In order to understand the love felt between teachers and students, it is necessary to first understand the way love between parents and their children is conceptualised. Both of these relationships have a lot in common. There are various Thai concepts that characterise the kind of love common to both teachers and parents. Two of these concepts are central to my argument in this chapter. These are khwamkatanyu (ความกตัญู)—a debt of gratitude— and sia sala (เสียสละ)—self-sacrifice. Although both concepts are present in each relationship type discussed here, I argue that the former is far more significant for parents and the latter for teachers. Khwamkatanyu is a feeling instilled by great generosity and self-sacrifice from another. It represents a constant awareness of one’s debt of gratitude that results in a moral duty to work towards repaying this unending debt. Another important concept related to both khwamkatanyu and self-sacrifice (sia sala) is bunkhun (บุญคุณ). Bunkhun is a quality of enduring goodness, generated by the meritorious acts of one individual towards another. The ‘extraordinary goodness’ of a benevolent parental figure acts as ‘the fountain-head from which moral obligation arises’ (Mulder 2000: 32). The bunkhun felt between parent and child causes the child to feel khwamkatanyu. These concepts are used most prominently in the context of

118 parent-child relationships, although they are also used in other situations, such as with elders in general, and with teachers or mentors. Expressions of khwamkatanyu and acts of self- sacrifice that generate bunkhun are both meritorious acts according to Buddhist values (Knodel, Chanpen & Werasit 1995: 84). Despite the Buddhist roots of these terms, they are widely held values in Thailand that cross religious divides. This is yet another way that Buddhism and ‘Thainess’ are closely intertwined, as I noted in chapter three. Khwamkatanyu is present throughout a person’s life but is particularly felt when one’s parents become too old or sick to care for themselves. It is due to the widespread cultural value of khwamkatanyu that most families across Thailand expect at least one child to permanently co-reside with their parents and take care of them after they are unable to work (Knodel et al. 2000; Walaiporn et al. 2010). This is seen as an important expression of khwamkatanyu because the child is finally able to return the favour in kind. The parents who once cared for the helpless child are now cared for in their old age by their adult children. Similar to many other cultural groups in Thailand, it has long been traditional in Karen families for the youngest daughter to remain living with her parents until they die, repaying them for the care and support they offered throughout her infancy and childhood. While learning Thai at school, such traditions are explained through the lens of khwamkatanyu (gratitude), bunkhun (goodness leading to obligation), and sia sala (self-sacrifice). There are no teachers who expect their students to care for them in their old age, but the teacher-student relationship is analogous to the parent-child relationship in other ways. Teachers and students regularly spoke of their bonds as like those between a parent and child, and the word khwamkatanyu is used when describing teacher-student relationships. Teachers took great pride in the fact that they are able to use a familial term of address with students.

The word luk (ลูก), meaning son or daughter, is primarily used by parents or other parental figures within a family, such as grandparents or aunts and uncles. Teachers often use this word in place of a student’s name, particularly when offering comfort. In the previous chapter, Khru Payom comforted Narirat in this way to ease her disappointment. Of course, in the Little Creek School student’s homes, their parents do not use this word—they speak Karen. But the significance of teachers using this term is clear to the community, and it is felt just as much by ethnic minority teachers as ethnically Thai teachers. Parent-like bonds were especially strong between girls and female teachers. Where particularly close bonds existed between certain individuals, the teacher would in certain contexts refer to herself using the word for mother, mae (แม่), and the student would use the same word as a term of address. This parental relationship was especially pronounced among the dormitory students who live alongside their teachers day and night, but it was by no means exclusive to them. For example, this term was used once by Khru Tuk while speaking to three

119 of the M3 village girls. It was the birthday of one of the girls, and Khru Tuk wished to celebrate with them. ‘How about you come and see your mother tonight?’ Tuk said, referring to herself as mother to all three girls. ‘We can eat suki in the library.’ After school, the three girls went home as usual and then returned to the school after dark to spend the evening with Tuk, another female teacher, and some other friends who were dormitory students. Afterwards, the girls walked back home together to Little Creek Village. While these three girls were especially close with Khru Tuk, there were other girls who had this sort of relationship with different teachers.

Both boys and girls openly cried during wai khru (ไหว้ครู) and similar ceremonies, where love and respect for teachers is ritually demonstrated through prostration. During wai khru, students approach the row of seated teachers on their knees and present floral arrangements the students have made. In return, the students receive blessings from their teachers, who implore them to be good children and to tangjai rian. Similar ceremonies are held on certain special occasions, though less formulaic and without the floral arrangements. At graduation ceremonies, the teachers tie string around students’ wrists to bless them, but most other aspects of the ritual remain the same. These exchanges move from prostration to embrace in many cases, with students hugging the teachers they feel close to in order to receive comfort and affection. Many of the teachers also cry in this setting. The gratitude expressed in this ritual is in recognition of the meritorious act of a teacher taking on the duties of a mother or father in guiding a child through socialisation and learning.

Figure 5.4 Students performing wai khru on Figure 5.5 Wrist-tying ceremony for graduation of 'Teacher's Day'. anuban 2, P6, and, M3 classes (photo supplied by Little Creek School).

There was a clear demonstration of these bonds even for boys in one instance I witnessed during my time as an English teacher at Little Creek School in 2013. On Mother’s Day each year, students’ mothers are all invited to the school to watch student performances,

120 share a meal, and participate in a wai mae ceremony (ไหว้แม่; paying respect to mothers), not unlike the wai khru ceremony (paying respect to teachers) described above.42 If a mother is unable to attend, it is common for a grandmother to come in her place, or possibly an older sister or aunt.43 For one M3 boy in this case, nobody from his family was able to attend. The obvious solution was for one of the senior female teachers, Khru Payom, to sit in place of his mother during the wai mae. After receiving Khru Payom’s blessing just as all the other mothers gave to their children, the pair embraced, and the boy cried harder than anyone else that day. I asked afterwards if something was wrong, and Payom explained that he was upset that his mother could not come. Payom explained that she loves her students as she loves her own children and that this boy was crying because he was immensely grateful that she was so willing to act as a surrogate during the ceremony. Due to the explicit analogy of parenthood drawn between parents and teachers, there is a similar sense of gratitude in many ways. Teachers generate bunkhun (goodness leading to obligation) towards their students, and while the parenthood analogy does elicit feelings of khwamkatanyu (gratitude), there is no formal expectation that children go to the same lengths as with their parents to show their gratitude. In practice, the relationship between teacher and student is usually relatively brief, despite the enduring and lifelong nature of bunkhun and khwamkatanyu. It is due to the relative absence of expressed khwamkatanyu in this relationship that sia sala—self-sacrifice—is even further emphasised. While parents endure hardship and sacrifice a lot for their children, it is with the anticipation that their children will one day care for them (Pranee et al. 2004: 592–3). Teachers, meanwhile, also make virtuous self-sacrifice for the sake of their students but with no hope of similar returns. The emotional labour of teaching is given a far higher merit value than reflected by the meagre salary teachers receive. It is a highly respected profession in Thailand because of the bunkhun of teachers. Many teachers are also parents, and part of how they self-sacrifice is to take time away from being with their own children and spouse. This is particularly emphasised in a relatively remote location such as Little Creek School, where the majority of teachers live at the school for most of the year, even during school holidays.44 Khru Pong, for example, had his first child born during my fieldwork. He told me that he could not describe the feeling of missing his newborn daughter throughout the week. ‘It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced’, he said. ‘You won’t know what it’s like until you have a child.’ It pained him whenever he was required

42 Before the wai mae ceremony for the mothers, there is a wai mae ceremony held for the female teachers as well, further demonstrating the explicit analogy of parenthood that is drawn. 43 On the Mother’s Day two years after completion of my fieldwork, the mother of Somjai, Tirayut and Chatchaya was once again working in Bangkok. Unlike the year of my fieldwork, their grandmother was unable to attend celebrations at Little Creek School for Tirayut and Chatchaya. Somjai fulfilled the role of mother on that occasion, formally participating in school events again for the first time since her expulsion, albeit as an adult member of the community. 44 School holidays are often spent in meetings and professional development training at the school.

121 at school on the weekend for some activity rather than getting to go home and spend what little spare time he had with his family. This sentiment is reflected in a song by Pongsit ‘Pu’ Kampee (2008) that the M3 class performed during National Children’s Day celebrations. Many villagers from the surrounding area gathered at the school for a day of games, food, and music. The song, ‘My School’

(rongrian khong nu; โรงเรียนของหนู), opens by describing a particular school as beautiful but isolated and with difficult living conditions. The song continues by proudly sharing the story of the school’s lone teacher, who self-sacrifices (sia sala) and endures being far away from comfort for the sake of her students.

Figure 5.6 The song, ‘My School’, performed by M3 students at Children's Day (Pongsit 2008).

The conditions described in Pongsit’s song are relatable to the inhabitants of Little Creek School, who experience both hot and cold weather extremes, occasional interruptions to electricity and water supply, and a feeling of being forgotten by many other parts of Thai society. Together with other ethnic minorities known as ‘hill tribes’ in Thailand, the Karen have long faced discrimination from the rest of Thailand (Morton & Baird 2019; Prasit, 2019). These

122 experiences are embedded in the song, which asks why people in different parts of Thai society must be seen as so different to one another (thai kap thai yai taektangkan; ไทยกับไทย

ใยแตกต่างกัน). This part of the song reflects the observations of Morton and Baird (2019: 10), who note that claims to indigenous recognition in Thailand differ to other contexts in that they rest upon simultaneously demonstrating both cultural distinctiveness and legitimate membership in the Thai nation. Those claiming special status based on their cultural background risk being labelled as migrants if they are seen as too distinct or distinct in the wrong ways. The intense emotion felt during rituals like wai khru (paying respect to teachers) is in recognition of the extent of the teachers’ self-sacrifice and the meritorious bunkhun (goodness leading to obligation) that the teachers have therefore amassed in relation to their students. In addition to tears of affection, these ceremonies are tinged with emotional pain and sadness in recognition of the brevity of the teachers’ and students’ direct involvement in one another’s lives despite the strong love they share for one another. The students will be unable to respond to the teachers’ bunkhun in the same way as they do for their parents, and so they must do all that they can to be the best students they can be, for the sake of their teachers. This determination to tangjai rian in order to acknowledge teachers’ bunkhun extends beyond a student’s time at a particular school. If they move onto further education somewhere else, then students will still feel a moral duty to continue working hard on behalf of the teachers who got them that far. Tangjai rian is thus an act of loving gratitude towards both parents and teachers. For the teacher-student relationship, being able to tangjai rian is the closest a student can come to addressing the bunkhun of their teachers, as they cannot show gratitude in the same way as with their parents. Tangjai rian as an expression of love for one’s parents is more complex due to the wider range of family circumstances involved. Writing about khwamkatanyu, Knodel, Chanpen, and Werasit (1995: 84) have described it as, ‘a continual obligation that starts when the children are old enough to provide meaningful help’. Many people in Thailand note that they truly begin to feel khwamkatanyu (gratitude) once they themselves become parents and experience the hardships of parenthood first-hand (Pranee et al. 2004: 593–4). But khwamkatanyu is nonetheless present long before this, even with simple jobs around the house like cooking and cleaning while one is still a child. A key method for children to express this gratitude before they are able to offer more significant financial or labour contributions to the household is to actively set themselves up to be in a better position to do so later in life. This is how tangjai rian is perceived as an act of loving gratitude towards one’s parents. Success in school could lead to future financial stability as well as the benefits of acquiring cultural capital and valued life skills that are taught at

123 school. Importantly though, to tangjai rian is not the only acceptable way of planning for the future, and herein lies the complexity compared to expressions of love for teachers. It is also valued for one to take pride in Karen cultural traditions, and so if a child decides to leave school and focus on life in the village—supporting their parents through agricultural labour and marrying early—this can similarly be recognised as an expression of gratitude on the part of the child. This may even be preferable for certain families based on their particular household composition and available resources for investing in further education. This contrast was demonstrated in the previous chapter through the cases of Somjai and Patcharee. Both students engaged in technically similar behaviour during the course of my fieldwork. They both commenced romantic relationships, presumed to involve sex, while still in their early teenage years. Patcharee’s situation was by no means viewed favourably by the teachers at Little Creek School, but it was not the public scandal that Somjai’s situation was. Patcharee opted to express gratitude for her parents through different means acceptable to her particular life situation. Somjai began down an alternate path while still publicly committed to the path of tangjai rian. Somjai’s mother was initially upset with how things played out, especially considering the extraneous circumstances I discussed in the previous chapter, but it was a relatively simple matter to carry on having a positive relationship with her daughter and her new son-in-law. It was the school that treated Somjai with resentment and disdain following her actions. Patcharee avoided the scorn of the school by leaving before commencing her relationship. In some cases, then, parents may prefer for their child to show their love by tangjai rian at school but not view this as the only option available. Expressing love for one’s teachers— also a moral expectation of children—is more dependent on tangjai rian than in the parent- child relationship. A failure to tangjai rian is a failure to love one’s teachers—its relation to loving one’s parents is potentially similar but also potentially more flexible. In any case, in order to tangjai rian, one’s heart must be focused primarily on schooling. Romantic love is potentially compatible with this goal but only if the heart is not diverted from its pre-existing moral project of tangjai rian. An adolescent student who has sex is acting outside of the agreed upon focus and attachment of their heart.

Conclusion

When students are told repeatedly that love is beautiful, there are a wide range of meanings conveyed that are not necessarily obvious to an outside observer but which are immediately apparent to the students based on their upbringing across both Little Creek School and the various Sgaw Karen villages that students come from. In this chapter, I have analysed this range of meanings as taught at the school, while also drawing attention to outside influences

124 such as from Buddhism or traditional Karen beliefs and practices. The outcome of this analysis has been an explanation for why such moral weight is attached to expectations for students to tangjai rian, and why sexuality and this moral ideal are mutually exclusive. My analysis of sex education at Little Creek School suggests that love is strongly tied to understandings of the moral obligations associated with tangjai rian as an ideological concept. Sexual activity was strongly identified by teachers and students as incompatible with ideals of tangjai rian, just as I outlined in the previous chapter. The only way that romance can work alongside studying, according to this model, is if it functions to support one’s education by rujai—knowing someone’s heart—and pen kamlangjai—offering emotional support and encouragement. The reasoning offered by the ‘life skills’ workshop for this incompatibility between sexuality and schooling suggests that the nature of parent-child relationships lies at the heart of the matter. My analysis of parent-child relationships extended to include teacher-student relationships after identifying the presence of similar dynamics of love. In both kinds of relationship, the adult party generates bunkhun (goodness leading to obligation) through meritorious acts of looking after the children in their care. Children feel deep gratitude in response to the bunkhun of the adults in their lives, be they parents or teachers. In the case of parents, this is reciprocated through expressions of khwamkatanyu (gratitude)—continual acts of gratitude for the rest of a parent’s life, culminating in caring for parents who become too old or sick to work. While still children, khwamkatanyu can be expressed by a child’s efforts to tangjai rian and set themselves up for a successful future. Alternatively, children and/or their families may opt out of schooling, particularly after graduating from M3, and pursue the means for children to express khwamkatanyu by expanding the household through early marriage and immediately contributing agricultural labour and financial resources to the family. Tangjai rian is also an act of love in acknowledgement of the bunkhun of teachers. The relationships between teachers and their students are explicitly described in the community as analogous in many ways to the parent-child relationship. The word khwamkatanyu is used in this context as well. However, students are unable to express gratitude for teachers to the same extent as for their parents. This is because their teachers are only directly involved in their lives for a relatively brief period; thus, ritual expressions of gratitude and respect are frequent. The acts of teachers are glorified as sia sala—self-sacrificing—suggesting they are virtuous individuals who treat others with kindness without the expectation of reward in their present life. Without the alternative path of early marriage available for children to express loving gratitude toward their teachers, tangjai rian is the only real option, resulting in enormous tension and scandal if the path of tangjai rian is seen to be rejected. This tension is ideally managed by students leaving school before re-affixing a new project of love to their heart. When students engage in sexual activity while still at school, they

125 demonstrate to teachers that learning is no longer ‘affixed to their heart’, as the intensity of a relationship involving sexual activity necessitates a realignment of one’s jai (mind-heart). It is here that the metaphorical subtext of the term tangjai rian most clearly comes into play. The reason that non-sexual romance is permissible is because it does not disrupt a person’s jai in the same way. This kind of romantic relationship is indeed encouraged, so long as teachers can be certain that nothing untoward will eventuate from the relationship down the line. An acceptable teenage romance actually facilitates tangjai rian through rujai (knowing the heart) and pen kamlangjai (being the strength of the heart). Assuming a student is morally upright to begin with (an assumption that is implicitly made by teachers), whoever enters into a romantic relationship with that student should be intimately familiar with their jai, i.e. rujai, thus they will be aware that that student has affixed learning to their heart. The way that the romantic partner can pen kamlangjai—be the strength or force behind the other person’s jai— is to do whatever they can to assist in this pre-existing project of love that takes precedence over their physical attraction to one another. When students act in ways that disrupt the heart’s appropriate orientation, it is felt by teachers as a betrayal. This chapter has served to thoroughly outline the cultural logic underlying rules, morals, and expectations put in place by the adults in the immediate environment of students at Little Creek School. I have nonetheless drawn on input from students themselves wherever possible. Arunee’s life skills presentation, for example, suggested that her own understanding of romantic relationships was critical of gender expectations that she understood to be normative and problematic. The teachers were focused on different matters, even if they did not necessarily disagree with Arunee’s assessment. The gender inequality at the forefront of the issue for Arunee was not salient to teachers. Instead, the potential moral impact of disrupting tangjai rian was the primary concern emphasised by teachers throughout the life skills workshop. From the student perspectives I have included in this chapter and the preceding one, it is clear that tangjai rian as a moral ideal is very important to most students. It is not just a rule imposed on them from above that they indicate a lack of care for when they cause trouble. The students, however, have their own understandings of their moral obligations and the role of tangjai rian. These understandings do not perfectly match the expectations of teachers. When students announce their adherence to the moral ideal of tangjai rian, it is not the case that they have internalised it exactly as presented to them. Nor are they simply pretending that they believe in its value just to please the teachers. In the next chapter, I turn to the topic of mathayom students’ engagement with social media, particularly as a tool for finding romantic partners. Thus, I begin to look closely at the ‘serious play’ that students engage in to author, reproduce, and transform the figured worlds that they occupy during their time at Little Creek School. Through such serious play, students give their own nuanced meaning to tangjai rian.

126 Chapter 6 – Close Facebook, Time to Study: Social Media in Teenage Courting and Relationships

‘Why don’t I have a boyfriend yet?’ Charotorn asked me rhetorically as she put on her best sad face. Charotorn and Watsamon, two of the M2 dormitory girls, were chatting to me about boys while we were on our way back to Little Creek School following an English Camp in town. A small group of M1 and M2 girls were sitting in the back tray of Khru Yut’s parked car while we waited for him to finish running errands nearby. The M4–M6 boys boarding at a church in town had been the highlight of our stops that afternoon. My expression of curiosity piqued the students’ curiosity about me. ‘Have you ever stayed in the same house as a girl? Have you kissed a girl? How many girls have you been with?’ Watsamon hit me with a barrage of questions that I tried to avoid or answer as vaguely as possible. I told them I was not going to fill them in on the details. The girls laughed at my awkwardness, and Watsamon asked to borrow my phone to take selfies with Charotorn. ‘Could you post these to Facebook and tag me in them please?’ Watsamon requested. Charotorn was watching me open up Facebook on my phone to show them my post. ‘You have hardly any friends!’ she exclaimed, shocked by my friend count of around 750. ‘You don’t even have 1,000 yet?’ The mathayom girls, by contrast, commonly had 3–4,000 friends connected to their Facebook accounts. I explained that I typically only became ‘friends’ with people whom I knew ‘in real life’. Watsamon began to browse my other photos. ‘Do you have many girls who want to be your girlfriend?’ she asked, searching for girls who had consistently clicked ‘like’ on photos I had posted of myself. Once again, I found myself trying to explain how I use Facebook differently to the girls. I explained that I had met my partner using a different app, Tinder. Watsamon was curious how the dating app works, and she grasped the concept fairly quickly when I explained. ‘Oh, that’s like Facebook’, she said. The students at Little Creek School used Facebook for a variety of reasons, but pursuing romance was certainly one of the main ones. Adults readily made this connection when complaining of their children’s use of technology, and like other aspects of students’ love lives, their engagement with social media was typically framed as inappropriate in a school setting. Almost every Sunday evening, Watsamon and others would routinely post a Facebook status update reading, ‘pit fet, tangjai rian’ (ปิ ดเฟส ตงั ใจเรยี น)—‘Close Facebook, time to study’. Some of the dormitory kids earnestly set aside their online social life until the weekend, but many surreptitiously carried on regularly accessing Facebook throughout the week despite their contradictory public announcement.

127

Figure 6.1 Mathayom students chatting in the back of a teacher's car.

This chapter is based on my ethnographic observation of and participation in students’ online social lives, aiming to shed light on how social media relates to issues faced in their offline lives. I argue that the social media platform of Facebook represents an important tool for the students of Little Creek School in asserting claims to private spaces and relationships typically denied to them by adults in their lives who act as authority figures. Besides aiding in romantic pursuits, Facebook represents a significant site of social activity and personal expression in the students’ lives, with most of the students maintaining an active account by the end of M1. The norms surrounding privacy and expression that the students both adhere to and subvert online are crucial to understanding how they relate to one another and to adults in general. The risks taken by students online and the strategies employed to manage those risks all serve to enable them to forge stronger platonic and romantic relationships while adhering to standards of tangjai rian as they understand this concept. The widespread use of social media among Thai-Karen adolescents, as a tool for both general socialising and pursuing romance, is a relatively recent phenomenon, and so there is little ethnographic data available in the literature for comparison regarding this specific subsection of the wider Thai community. Facebook in Thailand has been of interest to scholars

128 researching social movements advocating for things like animal protection or protesting large- scale development projects such as dams (Bhanubhatra 2011; McCarthy 2017). It has also been identified as an important site for certain business activities and a potential educational tool due to its large user base of Thai university students (Atchara & Mardjo 2013; Teo 2016). More recently, it has been identified as an important space for the expression and promotion of political views among young people, particularly in the lead-up to Thailand’s 2019 election (Ellis-Petersen 2019; McCargo & Alexander 2019: 95). General patterns of Facebook use among Thai youth nationally may or may not align with the ethnographic descriptions in this chapter, but even where certain practices appear similar on the surface, their implications may be different due to the cultural and socioeconomic background of the Karen and Lawa adolescents whose Facebook accounts I regularly engaged with. As such, this chapter serves as an important ethnographic record of this emerging realm of social action in the hills of Mae Hong Son. Social media’s emerging role in courting is particularly noteworthy for anthropologists studying youth in northern Thailand. In the past, courting among Karen teenagers took place at very specific places and times. Young men would routinely visit girls’ homes to build relationships and express their interest in marriage in a practice called, ‘to go and visit young women’ (laiz of s’kauv muf k’nauz) (Rajah 2008: 76). A girl’s parents would be present at these visits, which mostly involved conversation, harp playing, and the exchange of love poetry in the form of traditional Karen verses known as hta. Hta may be spoken or sung and are formed as couplets, used not only in courting but also at important ritual events or in tense social situations as a means of expressing that which cannot be stated explicitly (Mischung 2003). Due to limits on the mobility of adolescent girls, the main settings where they could actively seek out potential marriage partners to interact with were traditionally weddings, funerals, and during the exchange of agricultural labour in the fields. Teenagers, therefore, looked forward to these events as opportunities for flirting with members of the opposite sex (Fink 2003). Courting songs have traditionally played a large role in adolescent love lives among other cultural groups in northern and north-eastern Thailand as well, with Keyes (1984: 230) noting that young girls would go out of their way to attend temple fairs and other ritual occasions where they could deliberately attract the attention of potential suitors. The traditional practices described by Fink (2003) and Rajah (2008) were no longer the main forms of courting in my fieldsite. Several villagers and students explained this shift to me as having taken place following the proliferation of affordable mobile phones over the past decade. Initially, this would have consisted of sending text messages and calling one another. When I first visited Little Creek School in 2013, this seemed to be the case. Even that recently though, mobile phones would not have been able to become as ubiquitous in courting as they were at the time of my fieldwork. When I visited in 2013, there was very poor mobile phone

129 coverage on the mountain, and I regularly accompanied teachers on evening car trips a few kilometres down the main road to a place with strong enough signal to make social calls using mobile phones. There was extremely limited reception within the school or village. In the interceding years, two key things have happened: the mobile phone coverage around the village itself has drastically improved, and smartphones that enable portable use of social media have become common even among poorer communities in Thailand. This enables all community members to communicate with one another over distance at any time, whether at home in the village, at work in the fields, or staying in school dormitories. Although ritual events in the village were still very important social occasions for the mathayom students, most of their courting took place online. Somjai’s case, described in chapter four, serves as an example of how older and newer practices operate alongside one another. Somjai and Bunmi met as a part of ritual new year celebrations and initiated their courting at that event. But the rest of their courting took place online, solidifying their relationship away from parental supervision. Many of the interactions central to this online courting process, namely private one-on-one text and video messages, were not visible to me as a researcher. But there remains a wide range of online interaction among the mathayom students at Little Creek School that was more public in nature, giving at least partial insight into how this space operates as a figured world where students renegotiate the meaning and value of tangjai rian. The availability of online media as a new form of communication is akin to the effects of literacy on courting in other contexts. In Nepal, Ahearn (2001) has documented the rise of love letters as a new form of courting made possible by increases to female literacy in the area of her research. In that setting, literacy offered tools for young people to open up new spaces for communication that they had previously been unable to experience. This was followed by the development of complex new forms of interaction and standards of courting behaviour. I argue that Facebook use among the students of Little Creek School follows a similar trajectory. It is therefore important to record the particular cultural forms that emerge through this medium. The subversive aspects of students’ Facebook use can be described as a kind of serious play. As I outlined in chapter one, ‘serious play’ refers to social practice with the potential to foster social change of some kind through reproduction and transformation at the point of practice (Holland et al. 1998; Ortner 1996). It is through serious play that figured worlds are simultaneously authored, reproduced, and transformed. In their study with teenage girls, Eisenhart and Allaman (2018) framed texting as serious play within the serious game of schooling. They found that the playful discourse of texting provided a space that intensified both positive and negative stances toward schooling. The girls in their study came from a number of different schools, and while students of some schools found solidarity as ‘good students’ in their texting, those at other schools used the freedom of texting to create a space

130 to circulate complaints about life at school. In all cases, the girls demonstrated creativity and agency but in a way that responded to the existing social context of their particular school environment. By framing Facebook use at Little Creek School as serious play, it may be analysed as a tool that students use for self-expression and in their pursuit of romantic relationships. Facebook use is typically considered by teachers and parents as disruptive to one’s ability to tangjai rian, both because it is a distraction from school generally and also because of its direct connection to romantic relationships. It introduces obstacles that supposedly stand in the way of success at school unless properly managed. Most students balk at these obstacles and work to overcome them rather than avoid them altogether. When they are told that love is beautiful but should not be expressed in sight of adults, they take heed of such maxims but at the same time challenge them by seeking out new spaces to act in that are both public and private. This chapter will include two main sections. In the first section, I outline what Facebook is, how users at Little Creek School made use of some of its basic features, and how it is accessed by members of this community. In the second section, I offer an ethnographic description of how Facebook provides a space for serious play, where students are able to renegotiate the moral values associated with tangjai rian in their own figured world. This serious play leads to approaches to privacy and expression that facilitate the development of romantic relationships without blatantly defying the rules of appropriate conduct between boys and girls.

Accessing Social Media and Understanding the Facebook Interface

Facebook was the most popular social media platform for the students in my fieldsite. The students usually accessed Facebook using smartphones, via the primary Facebook application and its associated application, Facebook Messenger.45 Facebook Messenger allows users the ability to privately chat with one another through text, audio, or video. I use ‘Facebook’ to refer to both the main Facebook application and also Facebook Messenger, as they use shared contact lists and are typically used in conjunction. Facebook is a platform allowing account owners to create a personalised profile and then send and receive requests to connect with other users as ‘friends’. At that point they are able to view one another’s posts, which may include text, photo, or video. Posts can be made to one’s own or someone else’s ‘timeline’, where all previous posts can be browsed through unless manually deleted by the account owner. Upon opening Facebook, posts made by all

45 A smartphone here refers to any mobile phone that has a touch screen display, Wi-Fi connectivity, web browsing capabilities, and the ability to download and install various third-party applications.

131 friends are displayed in a user’s personalised ‘news feed’, ordered based on both chronology and relative level of interaction taking place within a post. Users receive notifications whenever anybody posts new comments or clicks ‘like’ on their content, or whenever their profile is ‘tagged’ within somebody else’s content. If tagged, a link to the tagged user’s profile is included in the post, and the post will also appear on the tagged user’s timeline alongside their own posts. The platform is appealing because it is free to use, widely popular, and does not necessarily require the use of a large amount of data, especially with certain phone plans featuring ‘social media packages’ that do not count Facebook use towards overall data allowances. There is also a stripped-down version of the application, called Facebook Lite, which is optimised for users with slower internet connections by removing certain features. Even students without mobile data available were able to access Facebook. Shortly after I began my fieldwork, a high-speed broadband connection was installed at the school, which both teachers and students could access wirelessly. Some parents were not pleased with this development, but it was highly valued by the teachers, who lived at the school most of the time and made use of the Wi-Fi for both personal and professional purposes.

Figure 6.2 Prathom students watching online videos on a smartphone (photo taken by P2 student).

Just like when mobile phones in general were first released, smartphones were initially quite expensive and inaccessible to poorer sections of society and in certain parts of the world (Doran & Jeffrey 2013). In recent years, however, mobile devices of all kinds have become much cheaper and have sparked various kinds of social change in areas where they have very quickly become prevalent. While popular high-end iPhone models are still too expensive for most people in my fieldsite, several other brands such as Samsung, Oppo, Huawei or HTC, to name a few, offer a wide range of cheaper models, commonly bought new in the range of 2–

132 3,000 Thai baht. This is still a considerable investment for some households, so mathayom students often inherit older devices when their elder siblings or other relatives purchase new ones. Very few people in the community own a personal computer, and so the students rarely have opportunities to use the desktop version of Facebook. Facebook could theoretically be accessed using the computers in the IT room, but this was rarely done in practice, as desktop computer use was easily monitored during class, and access to the IT room on weekends was limited. Although I would occasionally see Facebook posts by highly educated adults written entirely in the Karen language using the romanised script known as lix romei, Karen literacy was extremely limited among both children and adults in the community.46 The majority of discourse taking place online therefore was in Central or Northern Thai.47 Little Creek Village is located near several Lawa villages, and the level of Lawa language literacy in those communities was also low. This situation alleviates the potential language barrier between these different ethnic groups when interacting online. The use of Thai even between members of the same ethnic minority group facilitates the formation of relationships between Karen and Lawa individuals who may or may not otherwise come into contact in everyday life around their respective villages. A public post shared between two Karen Facebook users can readily be seen and interacted with by Lawa Facebook users, as all are posting in the same language. Romantic relationships between Karen and Lawa, often leading to marriage, are now common, and these relationships often begin on Facebook.48 Students’ ‘friend’ counts ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand, with larger numbers more common. Although Facebook regards all connected users as friends, the nature of these relationships in people’s lives varies greatly (Lambert 2013). Among the friend counts of the students were teachers, relatives, friends, strangers, and classmates. The vast majority of these ‘friends’ were people interacted with exclusively via Facebook and aged between 13 and 30.

46 The focus of the Karen language subject offered once a week at Little Creek School is the teaching of Karen literacy using lix romei. Advanced reading and writing instruction are hampered by the necessity to begin from the basics again at M1 to accommodate the influx of external students who have never studied it before. Very few students achieve functional literacy in Karen despite completing this subject. The main source of Karen literacy in the community remains church-related activities and study with the support of the Catholic Diocese of Chiang Mai. 47 All written using the Central Thai writing system. 48 Research on the Lawa of Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai, generally believed to be the earliest human settlers of the region, is scant compared to Karen studies, but Kunstadter (1966) has conducted research in a cluster of villages neighbouring Little Creek Village. One of these villages in particular happens to be where I met most of the I knew. Kunstadter notes that at the time of his research, the village practised generally endogamous marriage and expressed attitudes of confusion or disinterest towards their Karen neighbours (ibid.: 72).

133 Despite only interacting with many Facebook friends online, they are not necessarily completely unknown to the user offline. Most of the students had large numbers of mutual Facebook friends all from the same pool of local teenagers and young adults, and these Facebook friends could therefore be potentially discussed or gossiped about in ‘real-world’ social settings. Due to the geographic proximity of many of these Facebook friends, it was not uncommon for someone unknown to a person offline to have some kind of kinship relationship to at least one of that person’s classmates. Interacting with these people online therefore is not always necessarily akin to meeting total strangers. The Facebook interface assists in this accumulation of local contacts through its ‘suggested friends’ feature. While scrolling through Facebook, one is presented with the profiles of people that one may wish to become ‘friends’ with, based on various factors including number of mutual friends and proximity to one’s geographic location. It was through this mechanism that my own pool of research participants on Facebook grew considerably throughout fieldwork to include students from other schools in the district who I did not already know but who had decided to send me friend requests. Teenage girls, in particular, typically had a large number of pending friend requests at any given time. If overwhelming in number, the majority are left pending or removed, accepting requests from either people known in person or those vouched for by friends. Many young Facebook users in my fieldsite chose to use pseudonyms, song lyrics, or short sayings for their profile name rather than their real name or nickname.49 Thai phrases along the lines of, ‘finding true love is almost impossible’, ‘I’m just an ordinary person’, or ‘everything I do is to make you smile’ are indicative of the sorts of things commonly used as Facebook names.50 Phrases such as these are chosen in order to reflect something about the user’s personality or attitude or perhaps reference an inside joke. In this way, communication between users begins to take place even before people start posting or actively interacting with one another. Combinations of phrases and names are also common. When using an actual name, some people chose to write it in Thai while others chose to romanise it.

49 In Thailand, parents assign their children a legal ‘real name’ (chue jing; ชอื จรงิ ), which appears before their father’s surname on their birth certificate and other identity documents. They also assign a ‘nickname’ (chue len; ชอื เลน่ ) that they will be known by among family and friends. Real names are usually only used in formal situations and relationships such as in school, when filling out forms, or in certain work situations. In Little Creek Village, children also receive a traditional Karen name, which may double as their nickname or may be given in addition to a Thai nickname. The name used most frequently varies from person to person. Some of the students at Little Creek School adopted new nicknames of their own choosing as teenagers. 50 While writing out a complete sentence in place of a name is not usually possible for English-speaking Facebook users, Thai-speakers are able to get around the single-word ‘name’ text-fields in Facebook’s interface due to the fact that written Thai does not incorporate spaces between most words. The resultant Facebook names therefore do not look as obviously out of place as English phrases would when written as a single word without spaces.

134

Figure 6.4 Vouching for others. Comment reads, ‘You should go ahead and accept [name]. You Figure 6.3 Too many friend requests, at 757. can trust him.’ The second sentence is knowingly Caption reads, ‘#Too many? Only accepting spelled incorrectly, following common online people that I know. No offense.’ Post includes convention. One vowel is completely omitted screenshot of friend request page, which is while another is written using alternative usually only visible to the account owner. characters representing the same sound.

Using pseudonyms is explicitly not allowed according to Facebook’s user policies, which require every user to be identifiable by a name they identify with in ‘real life’. The reasoning behind this is that a platform with no completely anonymous users will theoretically create a safer environment where you know who you are dealing with, and where people can be held accountable for their actions. This policy has come under fire from various groups whose naming practices are more complicated than an English Christian name followed by English surname (Holpuch 2015a). In response to these complaints, Facebook has relaxed its requirement that names have a legal basis, accepting non-legal documents as evidence of the legitimacy of a name in cases where an account’s adherence to the policy is in dispute (Holpuch 2015b). The policy remains controversial, however, still difficult to navigate for transgender users (Levin 2017) and ruled as an illegal breach of privacy laws by a German court (Kastrenakes 2018). Facebook’s adjustments to the policy do nothing to help users with reason to use a profile name that is specifically not one they identify with offline. For profile pictures, many students used pictures of themselves, but some did not. Much like profile naming conventions, some people’s profile pictures consisted of a short phrase written in Thai, sometimes accompanied by small cartoon images. Those in a romantic relationship sometimes used a picture of their girlfriend or boyfriend as their profile picture. Profile pictures were often changed quite frequently, either to newly uploaded photos or back and forth between old favourites. One’s name and picture are the first things others see when

135 first encountering someone’s Facebook account. These two pieces of information are usually visible to strangers even when an account is predominantly set to ‘friends only’ using the default privacy settings. The most common form of Facebook post is the ‘status update’. Status updates are used for a variety of purposes, such as announcing one’s excitement for an upcoming event or inviting discussion on a particular topic. The post featured above in figures 6.3 and 6.4 is an example of a status update paired with an image. One prominent use of this feature by the students was as a way to vent their frustrations. Status updates allow students to share their feelings while maintaining control over information about the causes of those feelings. It was common to post deliberately vague statuses expressing heartache, stress, or despair of some kind. If a student was in the midst of a disagreement or argument with one of their classmates, then expressing frustration and seeking moral support could be achieved through such a post. If friends ask for more details in the comment section of the post, they will either be told not to worry or invited to begin a one-on-one conversation through private messages. Rarely were specific people publicly ‘called out’ in these kinds of statuses, but those within a group of close friends may be aware who a particular post is about. In one such post (pictured below in figure 6.5), an M2 girl attacked the character of some unnamed boy who had been bothering her:

I just can’t take it anymore with people like this. You’ve come up behind me again. I’ve lived here since I was born, and never have I met a guy with worse habits than you. This was the first weekend I’ve stayed here [this term], but you never go home! I feel like I don’t want to be here anymore. #Some people… Ugh.

I was fortunate to be walking from the village back to the dormitories with this student and some of her friends one evening not long after reading this post. I asked her what it was about, and she explained. One of the mathayom dormitory boys had made a habit of going out of his way to annoy her. Earlier that day while cooking lunch, she needed to use the cooking oil but discovered that he had taken it so she could not use it. She said she did not like being at the dormitories while he was around but did not feel there was anything that she could do to amend the situation besides seeking moral support from her friends on Facebook. By taking advantage of the possibilities afforded by Facebook, teenagers in my fieldsite were able to build large social networks across the local area that they would not otherwise have access to. If students ever need to engage with any particular school or village community in the surrounding area, they will have already cultivated the social ties to do so without necessarily needing to rely exclusively on networks of social ties established by their elders. Interschool academic or athletic events were opportunities to make friends who could later be searched for and added on Facebook and, additionally, opportunities to meet with one’s existing online friends. As Facebook does not distinguish profiles belonging to youth of different

136 ethnicities, Karen youth actively mixed with large numbers of Lawa youth on Facebook despite village schools rarely having ethnically diverse student cohorts. Many of the barriers that once existed between teenagers separated by geography, ethnicity, or religion are at least partially circumvented thanks to their shared use of Facebook.

Figure 6.5 An M2 girl's post expressing frustration with a particular boy who has been annoying her. The ‘mood’ at the top reads, ‘sick of people like this’. A classmate comments, ‘What's happened this time?’

Playing Facebook: Managing Those Who Meddle

‘Playing Facebook’ (len fet; เล่นเฟส) is an activity the teenage students of Little Creek School typically engaged in in the evenings or on weekends. Mobile phone use was technically banned in the dormitories during the week, but this did not stop most dormitory students from using them anyway. Playing Facebook requires access to a smartphone, not necessarily one’s own, and involves sharing pictures, posting status updates, viewing and commenting on others’ posts, video calling with friends, and instant messaging either in group or private chats. The primary motivation for many of the practices I have listed is to find a suitable long-term romantic partner. In doing so, students must balance the moral expectations and privacy concerns of their teachers and parents. Many of the students had their profile set entirely to ‘public’ view. This means that anybody with a Facebook account who clicks onto a public account can see all of that person’s posts, friends, photos, and whatever personal biographical and contact information is present

137 in their ‘about’ section.51 It also means strangers are able to post comments or leave ‘likes’ on a person’s content. Although some students set at least some of their posts to ‘friends only’, the sheer volume of friends they had meant that a significant number of people not known offline could still see what was being posted. This outcome was quite intentional on the part of the students. Teachers at Little Creek School expressed concerns on several occasions that the students were not taking enough care in how they present themselves online for all the world to see, but the students themselves for the most part did not share these concerns. When I would ask students about the risks associated with having their account set to public view, they would say they were not concerned about people they did not know accessing their personal information. They were aware that everything was set to public, but this was in order to make meeting new people easier. The potential benefit outweighed the risks. Most simply did not include sensitive information in their profile if they wished not to share anything. As noted already, many did not actually include their real name anywhere on their profile. Furthermore, it was relatively common for posts or photos to be manually deleted after a certain period of time rather than adjusting the privacy settings. The precautions one decides to take regarding privacy on social media are largely dependent on the ‘imagined audience’ one has in mind when posting something. The way we think about how others may view us plays a large role in conscious and subconscious decisions we make regarding our behaviour, our speech, and the way we dress (Goffman 1959). When the audience to our actions is not necessarily immediately visible or knowable, such as with many online activities, we craft a certain idea in our mind about both who may actually view our actions, and who we would like to view them (Litt 2012). This imagined audience has great influence over our actions and may or may not accurately reflect our actual audience. When posting things to social media, our imagined audience is often complicated by ‘context collapse’. Initially, the term context collapse related to the advent of broadcast media and the necessity for multiple different audiences to be addressed simultaneously (Davis & Jurgenson 2014). In the context of social media, context collapse is evident when people who are usually encountered in separate parts of our life are all present in the same online space. So, as an example pertinent to the students of Little Creek School, they may usually tailor their behaviour according to whether they are chatting to their friends, flirting with a boy or girl they like, discussing schoolwork with a teacher, or talking with their parents over dinner. Any individual student may have members of all these different groups among their friends on

51 Each individual piece of information typically has its own adjustable privacy setting. There is no actual blanket ‘public’ setting for an entire profile. I describe profiles as such due to the prevalence of users with every single section of their profile manually set to public.

138 Facebook. A post made referencing an inside joke among friends may also be seen by the student’s teachers and parents and be misunderstood or received poorly. Some people may attempt to censor themselves so as not to reveal the wrong presentation of self to the wrong audience, while others may post various things with a specific audience in mind and manage any confusions or repercussions on an ad-hoc basis. In her investigation of American teenagers’ attitudes towards privacy, boyd (2014: 54– 9) has found that her research participants did indeed post quite ‘publicly’ on social media from a technical perspective but that privacy was nevertheless highly valued. While online privacy debates in the media often focus on the ability of corporate and government actors to access our data, for many teenagers the more immediate concern is the adult authority figures in their everyday lives. To explain this coexistence of privacy concerns with public posts, boyd (2014) draws on Goffman (1971) and his concept of ‘civil inattention’. While conducting ourselves in public, there are social norms dictating that we ideally should not listen in on others’ audible conversations. Acting in privacy therefore is not always an individual act but ‘requires the participation of bystanders’ (Marwick & boyd 2010: 115). Similar such social norms exist among frequent users of public online spaces, rendering certain kinds of behaviour as rude, disrespectful, or invasive. The simplistic demarcation of posts as either ‘public’ or ‘private’ on various social media platforms does not necessarily correspond to the attitude and expectations toward privacy of any particular group of users. From the perspective of the owners of personal data, just because it is legally accessible, that does not make it morally acceptable to exploit that accessibility. To do so would be akin to reading over someone’s shoulder on the bus while they look at sensitive documents. The teenagers attending Little Creek School may not have been concerned about their online privacy in the same ways as some of the teachers, but privacy was still important to them despite the abundance of ‘public’ profiles. Privacy has been described by Lambert (2013: 29) as ‘fuzzy’, referring to the multitude of different meanings this term has taken up among different groups, including in different academic disciplines. Students often complained about people sticking their nose in other people’s business through gossip or unwanted attention.

The action of doing this is expressed in Thai using the word, yung (ยุ่ง), meaning ‘to meddle’. One M2 student once made a post (pictured below in figure 6.6) out of anger at somebody bothering her friend. It sums up well the way that many students felt about this issue:

Why must you be this kind of person? I don’t want to curse, okay? But this is my friend’s business, right? Yet sluts like you still come and stick your nose in it. You’re making such a big deal out of this. You’re not her close friend, so how about you stay out of it? Even considering how close I am with her, I’m still not on her back about this to the extent you are. Sorry to everybody else who reads this that on this occasion I’ve spoken rather impolitely. But this is just too much.

139 Some of the language used in this post is very derogatory, particularly the words dok (ดอก), shortened from dokthong (ดอกทอง; slut), and sueak (เสือก; impolite synonym of yung). Although the post was made in defence of her friend’s privacy, this is exactly the kind of post that the teachers reprimand students for publicly sharing online, as others will make character judgements about the students based on the kind of language they use. Swearing does not align with the image of mountain children quaintly embodying Thainess. Teenagers are likely reprimanded for swearing on social media in ethnic Thai communities as well, but the stakes are much higher for ethnic minorities whose language use is already highly scrutinised. At the end of this post there is an attempt to manage context collapse and hopefully mitigate at least some of this judgement.

Figure 6.6 Post berating someone for not minding their own business. The second profile tagged in the post belongs to the friend that the poster is defending.

Students were not typically concerned about people simply being able to view their words or image, but they did take precautions regarding the publication of certain kinds of information about themselves and others. A common question asked by strangers in comment sections was where a particular person is from. Although Facebook provides a field for entering this biographical information in a profile, most students simply listed themselves as living in a large city such as Chiang Mai or Bangkok, in order to identify as Thai but withhold further information about the exact location of their home. When answering specific enquiries via public comments, it was rare for a student to answer with the name of their village or even school. Instead, people would more commonly identify with being from a certain district.

140 Another indication of concern for privacy is regarding the protection of other people’s personal information. When making public posts to Facebook that provide commentary of some kind on an interaction that took place in a private message, screenshots of said conversation may be posted. When posting a screenshot from one’s private message inbox, however, etiquette dictates that the profile picture and profile name of the other person be censored. Part of the text may also be censored if it is deemed sensitive or unrelated to the point being made.

Figure 6.7 Post featuring screenshot from private message conversation. Censoring in red added by me, while censoring in white included by the student in original post. Caption from the student reads, ‘Hahaha #Don’t know what to say next. Not tagging you. You can see for yourself.’ The conversation shared is a boy explaining to a girl that he has not been chatting to her much lately due to an ongoing dispute with her best friend.

Posting ‘selfies’ (selfi; เซลฟี )—self-portraits—to Facebook was one of the most common public activities directly related to finding romantic partners, particularly by the girls. Often posted in sets of multiple photos, selfies invite immediate social interaction through compliments or playful teasing in comments. Many of these comments came from other girls as an expression of friendship, but there was also an abundance of comments from boys and young men expressing romantic or sexual interest. The comment sections of selfies were common places to meet new friends and potential love interests. Comments ranged from fairly simple one-word compliments such as, ‘suai’ (สวย; beautiful), ‘narak’ (น่าร ัก; cute), or ‘lauz aif’ (Karen transcribed as ลอแอะ; cute), to longer statements inviting response. Commenters

141 commonly asked questions such as, ‘are you single?’ (sot mai; โสดไหม), ‘where is this girl from?’ (sao thinai; สาวทไี หน), or ‘can I flirt with you?’ (jip dai mai; จีบได้ไหม). Girls commonly exploited Facebook’s tagging feature alongside their collectively public profiles to collaborate in their search for somebody to flirt with or date. By posting your own selfie but tagging one or more female friends in the post (who are not actually in the photo), the selfie will then appear on the timelines of anybody tagged, thus inviting extended networks of potential suitors to comment on the picture despite not yet being your friend on Facebook. Another strategy was to post a selfie with both yourself and a friend in the picture and thereby invite your network of Facebook friends to express interest in the second person. Such posts were often captioned along the lines of, ‘my friend is single’ (phuean sot na; เพอื นโสดนะ) or,

‘you can say hi to her’ (thak khao dai na; ทักเขาได้นะ). Once a potential love interest is your friend on Facebook, the next step after flirting in public comments is to regularly chat with one another through private messages, audio calls, or video calls.52 Great enjoyment is derived from this process of meeting new people and demonstrating one’s conversational ability, similar to how young Karen in the past took pride in their mastery of traditional Karen hta oral poetry to impress the opposite sex (Fink 1994: 124). Conversational ability here refers to clever use of wit and euphemism to communicate in a way that is fun for both participants. Before you are formally in a relationship, it is not uncommon to have a number of people regularly messaging you in this manner. Once somebody is considered your girlfriend or boyfriend (faen; แฟน), it is considered unfaithful to carry on regular chatting in this manner with others of the opposite sex. It is okay to maintain friendships with members of the opposite sex to an extent, but excessively friendly and playful teasing on a regular basis is cause for jealousy, be it in public comments or private messages. Once in a relationship with someone, it is common practice for boyfriend and girlfriend to exchange login passwords with one another (laek rahat; แลกรหัส). This was explained to me as an expression of trust, to show your partner that you have nothing to hide. Not just a token gesture, however, students and their partners regularly logged into each other’s accounts in order to check who is actively being chatted to and to ensure nobody is cheating. This practice sometimes leads to the creation of multiple Facebook accounts. If somebody

52 I witnessed students engaged in video calls on several occasions while I was in the room and also saw screenshots from video calls that students had posted to their Facebook timelines. In these instances, students were often lying down relaxing in the evening and chatting about their day. Private conversations via text, audio, and video were all possible within Facebook Messenger, but some students also made use of Line for private interactions of these kinds. Line is another popular social media application in Thailand. In Thailand, it is used primarily for messaging and calls, similar to other applications such as WeChat or WhatsApp.

142 wishes to maintain private conversations that are not visible to their partner, then a second account may be made and used alongside the main account, with a similar pool of friends being added for the new profile. If a couple breaks up after exchanging passwords, people can theoretically just change their password but may not wish to do so and will instead abandon their old account and create a new one to prevent their ex-partner from gaining access to their current messages. Creating an additional account after exchanging passwords would possibly be suspicious and provoke jealousy in and of itself, if not for the fact that ownership and use of multiple Facebook accounts is already a common practice for other reasons. Some people may wish to use multiple profiles as a way to manage context collapse. One profile may be for friends only and another for friends plus another group of acquaintances. Both profiles may even be set to public view in some cases. Perusal of the friend lists of students’ multiple profiles sometimes suggested to me that certain accounts had different audiences in mind, but it was uncommon for students to actively post to multiple profiles within the same time period. When multiple accounts were still in use, students tended to go through phases of using one or the other more frequently. It was also common for additional accounts to be abandoned or in disuse (but not deactivated). The students’ use of Facebook exclusively through the smartphone application was often the reason for losing access to an account. When creating a Facebook account, it can be associated with an email address, a mobile phone number, or both. The students did not typically have email accounts and therefore Facebook only had one point of contact for them. Although it is possible to reset forgotten passwords using only the mobile number linked to an account, this is less intuitive to do compared to using an associated email address. If a student changes to a different phone and also cannot remember their password, then they will be forced to create a new Facebook account as they are unable to receive SMS messages from Facebook on their new device with a new number. Another scenario is that a student will have access to multiple different smartphones and have the login details for different Facebook accounts saved to each device, meaning the account used at any given time depends on the device being used. Sometimes students will simply choose to abandon an account and start anew if they have had bad experiences with several people sending them inappropriate or annoying messages and comments. This is a risk that comes with adding thousands of people unknown to the user offline, but it is managed through readiness to maintain multiple profiles. Perhaps the most common reason for losing access to a Facebook account and creating a new one was that their old one had been ‘spammed’ (sapaem; สแปม). In English, the word ‘spam’ typically refers to unsolicited messages sent en masse that range from mundane advertisements to malicious software or intentional harassment (Whitworth &

143 Whitworth 2004). In general Thai usage, the English loanword has similar meaning, but in this particular context it refers to a different phenomenon. Occasionally when attempting to log into Facebook, one will be unable to do so. When this happens, it is described as having been spammed.53 In cases I have been able to document, the below error messages may appear after opening the application.

Figure 6.9 ‘You have not been able to confirm your identity. Sorry, we cannot confirm your identity with that information. You may try again later.’ Figure 6.8 ‘Your account has been temporarily locked. We have locked your account due to a recent login attempt from an unknown location. Please help us to confirm it was you who was trying to log in.’

A variety of issues with Facebook accounts were all referred to as spam in my fieldsite. Regularly logging in from multiple devices could conceivably cause account errors to occur or raise red flags in Facebook’s security systems, and the practice of sharing passwords between boyfriends and girlfriends makes deliberate sabotage a definite possibility. It is also possible that accounts are removed deliberately by Facebook through either manual or automated processes, as the students’ use of Facebook regularly violates the platform’s user policies. As I have mentioned, the typical naming practices for accounts are in violation of Facebook’s rules because they rarely correlated to people’s actual names and were often not even in the format of a name. Furthermore, Facebook technically only permits each user to have a single personal

53 On one occasion a different loanword, ‘spy’ (sapai; สปาย) was used in place of spam but with the same meaning. In English, one may say an account has been ‘hacked’ if suddenly unable to log in for suspicious reasons. I have heard the word ‘hack’ (haek; แฮ็ก) used in Thai, but surprisingly not in this context.

144 account active at any one time, so the practice of owning multiple accounts simultaneously is also technically in violation of the rules. Targeted use of Facebook’s reporting features is the most likely means for somebody to deliberately lock someone else out of their account, but more often than not, the errors associated with being spammed did not explicitly indicate anything of this nature had happened. The precise cause of being spammed is not as important as the way people thought and acted with regards to its occurrence. The culture of Facebook use in my fieldsite renders its users particularly vulnerable to frequently being locked out of their accounts. They have become accustomed to encountering this situation on a regular basis and have developed means of understanding it and coping with it. Getting spammed is not just some unfortunate thing that happens. It is understood as something that is actively done to you out of spite. In all cases of being spammed, users express frustration and anger but quickly move onto creating a new profile and starting from scratch rebuilding their online social network. Recovering from being spammed is aided by Facebook’s tagging tools. Patcharee, who dropped out of the M1 class, was prone to losing phones and being spammed. She had six different Facebook accounts by the end of my fieldwork, making regular use of only one or two of them. She retained access to her old social networks by tagging several of her own profiles whenever she posted new selfies, thus including all of her accumulated friends in the audience of her posts even if she was yet to reacquire a direct connection to them with her current account. There are no specific means of protecting oneself from being spammed, although sometimes a new account will be made and then set aside as a backup account to be switched over to in the event of one’s main account being lost. On the one hand, being a nice person that others will not harbour ill will towards would be one strategy of staying safe from spam. A more proactive measure is to present yourself as a person who will not put up with such mistreatment as being spammed and to sardonically appeal to the good character of those who could potentially spam you. On one of Patcharee’s more recent profiles, she writes in her bio, ‘If you’re thinking of spamming my Facebook, you should think first about how you would feel if your Facebook was spammed’. She was less polite on one occasion immediately after the incident occurred. She posted a status saying, ‘Whoever did this, I hope your father is in a car crash and breaks his leg, and your mother is bitten by a snake and dies. May the person who spammed my Facebook get really badly sick and suffer greatly’. Patcharee’s choice of words here is particularly colourful compared to many of the other students, but her general feelings and approach following being spammed are typical of this kind of situation. She was not the only student who became angry and started cursing after being spammed.

145

Figure 6.11 Patcharee cursing.

Figure 6.10 Patcharee being sardonically polite.

Conclusion

This chapter has offered a set of ethnographic descriptions that provide a look at how Facebook interaction works in the lives of Karen teenagers in Mae Hong Son Province. The practices covered here can be described as serious play. Facebook facilitates the collective authoring of a figured world where the same moral discourses exist as in offline spaces but where they may be experimented with in new ways. Students position their attitudes to education and sexual morality in this space by elaborating new ways of conceiving public and private spaces. When they are ready to tangjai rian after the weekend, students log out of Facebook and carry on being ‘good students’. Those who take issue with their online behaviour are reprimanded for ‘meddling’. In years to come, Facebook may be abandoned in favour of an alternative platform. At Little Creek School, teachers in their early 30s occasionally spoke nostalgically of hi5, a social media platform which was hugely popular in Thailand in the recent past but is now far less prominent. In 2008, it was estimated that approximately half the Thai population had a hi5 account, but it was no longer used by anyone I met during fieldwork (Vikanda & Nuchada 2010: 74). Given the dramatic change in social media use in just a few years, relatively recent research on hi5 usage already appears somewhat dated (Köhl & Götzenbrucker 2014; Vikanda & Nuchada 2013). The technical details of social media use change very quickly, and many of the practices described here have already begun to change since the completion of my fieldwork. For example, towards the end of my fieldwork, Facebook introduced a new feature alongside the ability to post conventional status updates. The ‘stories’ feature allows one to post a series of images or videos for one’s friends to see. Any ‘stories’ posted through this feature will only be available for 24 hours and then will disappear, unlike regular status updates which are archived to one’s Facebook timeline. Although the students did use this feature to share photos and videos along with various customised filters and captions, they just as often used this

146 feature in much the same way as regular status updates. The ‘photo’ shared in such stories was often just a plain coloured background, and the main focus of the content was the text added to the image. Since formally completing my fieldwork, I have observed this practice continuing among my research participants, although the stories being posted are increasingly incorporating audio-visual content. Despite the rapid changes to the exact kinds of content being posted, the form these practices took in this time and place teach us much about how young people on the fringes of Thai society relate to concepts of privacy and to one another. These ideas and patterns of relationships will endure in some form, just as the world of Facebook in the hills of Mae Hong Son bears resemblance to many aspects of the offline lives of Karen youths past and present. Ethnographic descriptions of how particular social media platforms were used in the past are also valuable as historical record. Facebook is a realm where definitions and expectations of privacy are fiercely contested. Many of the adults in the Little Creek village and school community share similar views to the managers and executives of Facebook; they urge students to use their real names so that it is readily apparent to outsiders who is who, and they suggest that online networks should mirror real life networks of social contacts, sharing only information with those who can be trusted not to exploit it. Within this carefully demarcated space, privacy is about keeping things hidden and creating a managed public space for interaction. Students are expected to conduct themselves as though they were out in the schoolyard or the marketplace, minding their language and presenting themselves in a manner befitting of good mountain children. This kind of Facebook experience is counterproductive to the functions it serves in young people’s lives in villages throughout Mae Hong Son. While students do use Facebook to keep in touch with their offline friends and family, one of its main functions is to facilitate the process of getting to know new people, especially in pursuit of a long-term romantic relationship. This necessitates a certain approach to privacy, in which certain kinds of personal information are candidly shared with as many people as possible while other personal information is completely withheld from everyone. Different audiences are expected to know who a post is for, or more importantly, who it is not for. ‘Public’ posts are not everybody’s business but would be less efficacious if restricted to a limited audience. This approach to privacy brings risks associated with context collapse, harassment, and people who yung, sueak, and otherwise ‘meddle’. Strategies have been adopted to manage these risks, such as the creation of multiple accounts. Through these methods, Facebook serves as a certain kind of private space where teenagers can freely express themselves, whether that be in ‘private’ messages or ‘public’ posts. The visibility of certain behaviour does not necessarily render it not private from the perspective of the students.

147 There was a certain ambivalence towards mobile phones among parents and teachers I spoke to. The main benefit parents get from providing their children with a mobile phone is the ability to contact them at any time, particularly if their children are staying away from home in school dormitories or if parents are living elsewhere for work. Another factor is that because most teenagers have a phone of their own, denying one to your child could affect the way they are viewed by their friends. Some teachers saw potential in the use of smartphones to facilitate the finding of information or communication between teachers and students regarding out-of- class projects. For the most part though, they were seen by teachers as a distraction that provides opportunities for inappropriate behaviour. It was common knowledge that Facebook is the primary means the students use to meet their boyfriends and girlfriends, usually people either attending other schools or who have already completed their schooling. The students themselves conceive of their actions on Facebook as consistent with ideals of tangjai rian. Whatever barriers online romance poses to focusing one’s love on a project of tangjai rian, students are confident those barriers can be overcome. Because behaviour that would normally be seen as inappropriate is contained to a nominally private space, students earnestly declare that their actions in that space do not impinge upon their morality at school. The students may consider their Facebook posts as private—despite often being technically visible to a public audience—but their access to private contexts is not sanctioned. As far as their teachers and parents are concerned, no space is legitimately private for those still considered children. Children should tangjai rian at all times, and by claiming private space to pursue other goals, they are threatening the distinctions between child and adult. Teacher and parent frustration with the inaccessibility of their children’s online sociality reflect this tension. The lively world of Facebook has provided new private spaces that are beyond the reach of adult intervention, with the visible surfaces just apparent enough to generate a sense of moral concern. In the following chapter, I look at how these different moral worlds come into contact with one another. I consider attempts at policing students’ online conduct alongside additional offline settings where alternative interpretations of the relationship between tangjai rian and teenage romance are brought into contact.

148 Chapter 7 – School is Spelled L-O-V-E: Balancing Figured Worlds

‘What do you think of these?’ Duangporn asked her friends, as she tried on a pair of novelty sunglasses. About five girls from the M2 and M3 classes were crowded inside the narrow aisles of a clothing stall at a small night market in the town of Mae Sariang. The woman working the stall sat in the back corner of the tent, watching the girls closely as they pulled item after item off the racks, seemingly without any intention of buying them. After a few selfies and laughing at each other’s poses in front of the mirror propped at the front of the stall, the mathayom girls all chipped in to purchase a pair of the glasses to share between them. Then they wandered off to see what else the market had to offer. Two mathayom boys and I walked in the other direction. A few teachers and a group of students from Little Creek School were staying overnight at a school in Mae Sariang, with students entering academic competitions over two days alongside other students from across the educational district. I was supervising some of the students at the market while other teachers ran errands after we all went out for dinner. The boys, in M1 and M3, seemed as disinterested in the market as I was, as we each tried to follow one another and ended up wandering aimlessly around the rather small market. There were only half a dozen different stalls selling clothes and various odds and ends. Jirasak, the M3 boy, spotted a group of boys he knew and said hello. They were older boys from a village near Jirasak’s, some of them in M5. After a brief chat, the other group of boys continued walking their own circuit around the marketplace. The Little Creek School boys and I made our way back towards the road to wait for the other teachers to return. Before long, two of the girls approached as well. Duangporn and Arunee were whispering to one another and giggling as they approached. They stopped by a tree a few feet away and Duangporn called out using Jirasak’s nickname. ‘Bert! Come here!’ Jirasak reluctantly made his way over to the girls and asked what they wanted. ‘Who are those guys you were talking to?’ Duangporn asked. ‘You should introduce them to us.’ Jirasak initially refused and began walking back over to where I was standing. Duangporn ran out in front of him to ask again, while Arunee waited by the tree. Duangporn grinned and pleaded until Jirasak relented. He walked Duangporn and Arunee over to where his friends were and made introductions. They all spoke very briefly and then separated again. The M5 boys were crowding around one boy’s phone looking at pictures, presumably on the Facebook profiles of the girls. The girls were doing the same when the other teachers returned, none the wiser to the flirting that had been going on between the girls and older boys. Encounters like the one described above are a perk for students who join in with extracurricular activities. Mathayom students attending events in town get the chance to socialise together in public spaces where they may encounter other teenagers who are outside

149 of their usual social circles. While socialising around the schoolyard, visible interactions between mathayom students of the opposite sex were quite limited. At school, public conversations even between students who were dating one another were relatively infrequent and relied largely on the passing of notes. Away from the closely monitored space of the schoolyard, however, mathayom students more readily mingled with potential love interests. Teachers and students thus developed quite different conceptions of what goes on when opposite sex adolescents spend time together.

This chapter argues that students’ interpretations of tangjai rian (ตงั ใจเรยี น) are more flexible than those of teachers. This is because they have greater confidence in their own decision-making and risk management capabilities than teachers do. This flexibility with regards to the meaning of tangjai rian gives students the moral latitude to navigate situations that are nominally forbidden—by teachers and parents—while still maintaining their own ideals of tangjai rian. In students’ minds, breaking certain rules does not need to stand in contradiction to the virtue of tangjai rian. The public flirting that occurred in the marketplace described above does not in any way, from the students’ perspectives, contradict their efforts to tangjai rian. Had that interaction been witnessed by teachers, however (non-anthropologist ones), they may have disapproved on moral grounds and reprimanded the girls involved for not tangjai rian. It is also possible that some teachers may not mind the students interacting in the way they did. All that happened in this case was some talking, after all. Nonetheless, students are aware of the potential for such interactions to be heavily policed and therefore take efforts to carry them out without the knowledge of teachers or parents. As with the Facebook activity described in the previous chapter, mathayom students preferred others not to ‘meddle’ (yung;

ยุ่ง) in their affairs. Through serious play with ideas like tangjai rian in their own figured worlds, mathayom students strive to be morally upright according to their own standards. While parents and teachers were not aware of every individual instance of borderline inappropriate behaviour during my fieldwork, they were aware of general settings and patterns for where and how such behaviour usually took place. This resulted in tension that occasionally surfaced when different figured worlds came into contact. I turn to these types of situation in this chapter, to consider how alternative figured worlds are balanced alongside one another at Little Creek School. This chapter is divided into three main sections. In the first section, I situate the moral panic around teenage dating at Little Creek School within broader moral panics in recent Thai history. I then outline the rules imposed by the school in efforts to limit serious breaches of sexual morality anticipated in association with the recent rise in smartphone usage by mathayom students. In the second section, I recount the events at the school that followed a failed attempt by Duangporn and her friend, Kotchakorn, to sneak out of the dormitories after

150 dark to visit boys. I contrast the strong emotional response by the teachers to this incident with the ways that both boys and girls described their own dating practices. This contrast demonstrates key differences in the ways that teachers and students assess moral risk. In the third section, I provide an example of students engaging in dialogue with teachers and parents regarding the issue of teenage sexuality and romance through dramatic performance. I analyse a comedic play that was written and performed by the M3 class as part of annual Mother’s Day celebrations at Little Creek School. The play sends a clear moral message that is consistent with adult expectations of how students should conduct themselves, but it also manages to portray some of the complexities of students’ own engagements with these moral ideals.

Managing Moral Panics

As discussed in earlier chapters, it is generally assumed in Thailand that sexual activity may have taken place if unrelated adolescent or adult people of the opposite sex spend time alone together. Young people know they are supposed to avoid these types of situations in order to avoid suspicion of wrongdoing, regardless of whether an encounter actually involves sexual activity. Through private messages on Facebook, boys and girls are able to, in a sense, ‘spend time alone’ together without directly violating norms of appropriate conduct with the opposite sex. Adults are aware of this and they worry about where these online encounters may lead. Knowledge of these and other dating practices—those that risk disrupting tangjai rian without necessarily being an immediate breach of the same magnitude as Somjai’s behaviour— resulted in a general feeling of moral anxiety among teachers and parents. I describe the preoccupation with teenage dating practices at Little Creek School as a moral panic. A moral panic is defined by Stanley Cohen as follows:

A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. (2011: 1)

Whether related to some novel phenomenon or something that has already been occurring for some time, Cohen notes that moral panics in Britain since the second world war have commonly been concerned with aspects of youth culture, especially that of working-class youth (ibid.: 1–2). Regarding recent moral panics in Thailand, Anjalee Cohen has argued that youth cultural practices routinely become a source of panic and anxiety due to their association with the future of the nation. She notes that Thai youth are seen as ‘the repository of national identity

151 and the means by which it is reproduced’ (Cohen 2020: 95). The Thai media has played a key role in propagating this idea of a nation in moral crisis (ibid.: 99; McCargo 2000). There has been a long history of moral panics surrounding both sexuality and youth in Thailand. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the HIV/AIDS crisis coincided with anxiety about rapid cultural change due to globalisation (Fordham 2001: 287). Fordham discusses how this led to a moral panic about commercial sex workers. He notes that this moral panic shared features with other social movements in Thailand’s history, ranging from witchcraft accusations throughout the 1880s–1920s (Anan 1984), to concerns about child prostitution in the 1990s (Montgomery 1996). The present moral panic in Thailand about the supposedly rife sexual immorality of teenagers can be traced to a political initiative in the early 2000s, during Thaksin Shinawatra’s time as Prime Minister. The ‘social order’ campaign (rabiap sangkhom; ระเบียบสังคม) was launched in 2001 by Interior Minister Purachai Piumsombun, aiming to combat Thailand’s global reputation as a centre of prostitution and drugs (Lewis 2006: 74–6). The Ministry of Culture was established the following year to promote a return to what were framed as traditional Thai values in opposition to consumerism and individualism (Pasuk & Baker 2004: 169). As the social order campaign pressed on, youth continued to be scrutinised for their behaviour. Marginalised Bangkok youth who enjoyed adorning themselves in ‘sexy’ (seksi;

เซก็ ซ)ี clothing, were framed as ‘sexually deviant’ by their elders (Mahony 2018: 97). The Thai New Year celebrations of 2003 were precipitated by the Ministry of Culture attempting to ban women from wearing spaghetti strap tank tops and hotpants while participating in the annual water festival. Other efforts to reform ‘deviant’ youth included banning several popular songs in 2003 because of sexual content, a 2004 Valentine’s Day campaign discouraging sex before marriage, and a range of curfews and closures affecting night-time entertainment venues such as bars and karaoke booths (Cohen 2020: 95). Little Creek School had clear rules that were designed to control student conduct for the sake of eliminating distractions and discouraging behaviour that parents held moral concerns about. Every Sunday evening as dormitory students returned to the school, motorbike keys and mobile phones were to be handed over to teachers for safe keeping until the following Friday afternoon. No student was normally allowed to use their phone during the school week, either during the day or in the evening. Dormitory students who stayed at the school over the weekend were allowed to use their phones freely at that time, and students could request use of their phone during the week exclusively for the purpose of calling their family. After such a call had taken place then the phone was to be returned to teachers.

152 There were two main consequences associated with illicit mobile phone use, assuming a student was physically caught with device in hand. Firstly, the device would be confiscated— maybe returned at the end of the week or maybe at the end of term, depending on the situation and the discretion of the teacher involved. Secondly, a monetary fine of 200 Thai baht would be issued to the offending student. When I was discussing this with one teacher, he commented that the school had already raised a few thousand baht through this relatively new rule. The rule had been decided upon through consultation with the students themselves, who were asked for suggestions about what would deter them from being tempted to break the rules. The money to pay these fines typically came from a student’s parents, ensuring students would be reprimanded at home as well if they were caught breaking the rules.

Figure 7.1 A group of M1–M3 students being reprimanded over mobile phones and other banned objects recently confiscated.

The students had various means of getting around these rules. If students wanted access to a motorcycle without having to get a teacher’s permission first, then they would simply park it at a friend’s house in the village to avoid being asked to hand in their keys. Sometimes teachers would be fooled by requests to call parents that were actually calls to

153 friends or love interests. Students never tried to get away with using phones in class, and I never knew of a student even having their phone on their person during the day if they were not supposed to. After school was a different story. Those that did hand in their phones willingly would often borrow phones that had been concealed by their friends so that they could all collectively get online using only a handful of devices. The surest way of teachers finding out who had a phone that they should not was by seeing evidence of somebody’s Facebook activity. It was rare for a student to actively post things after school while surreptitiously using a phone, but by using Facebook Messenger to chat with their friends and love interests, the application would list them as ‘online’ to anybody who is friends with their account. Many of the teachers added many of the students to their friend lists on Facebook and vice versa, so if teachers happened to be online at the same time then they could be tipped off to ongoing rule-breaking in real-time and go to investigate. Of course, any teacher actively and openly exploiting this capability would not be friends with an offending student on Facebook for very long; the student would delete the teacher from their friend list. I fell into this trap myself early on and overstepped boundaries I had not realised were in place. One Wednesday evening, I was checking Facebook in my room shortly after dinner and noticed that Duangporn was listed as online. I had only just learned about the rules surrounding mobile phone use at the school, and so I was curious to check if I had correct information. Duangporn had seemed open to talking to me around the school so I did not hesitate to message her and straightforwardly ask about the situation then and there. I asked how she was on Facebook if the dormitory kids were not allowed to have phones. At first, I got a brief response explaining that she was using a phone belonging to one of the village kids. I was not sure if she meant she had borrowed their phone, if she was somehow with one of the village kids at the time, or whether this response was even true. I made the mistake of asking follow-up questions, however, and this crossed a line for Duangporn. I fear my genuine curiosity and confusion was mistaken for me reprimanding her for breaking the rules. Instead of receiving further responses, I was immediately deleted as a friend and blocked from interacting with her Facebook profile. I later learned that Duangporn had been in trouble several times for using phones when she was not supposed to. Whenever the teachers checked on the dormitory students after school, they would specifically make sure that Duangporn was accounted for. She was regularly caught with a phone after spending a suspicious amount of time in the bathroom. In the following section, I analyse a serious incident Duangporn was involved in, whereby she and a friend were almost threatened with expulsion as Somjai had been the previous term. Duangporn’s indiscretion was not as serious as Somjai’s, and so it was dealt with in a more public manner, where the tension between student and teacher approaches to tangjai rian was brought into light.

154 When Girls Wander: Midnight Excursions and ‘Sniff Kisses’

Although the students were well aware of how seriously breaches of sexual morality were taken, this did not stop them from pursuing relationships they knew to be forbidden. The forms that courting practices sometimes took were particularly confronting to teachers and parents, as they involved girls engaging in mobility more conventionally associated with the ‘wandering’ of male Thai youth that I discussed in chapter four. Occasionally, students’ clandestine activities were discovered by teachers, allowing a glimpse into how such behaviours are usually carried out, and how everybody in the community responds to them. The majority of this section will consider the events that took place after two M3 girls, Kotchakorn and Duangporn, sneaked out of the dormitories one night to meet boys and were caught by a teacher. On the night in question, I was unaware of the unfolding events, but I was informed of what had happened the next morning. ‘Two of the girls want to be like Somjai’, Khru Pong told me after a morning assembly spent lecturing the cohort about why they should focus on school rather than pursuing love. The two girls had borrowed a friend’s phone to arrange the time and place to meet with two boys, both of whom were a few years older and no longer attending school. Khru Mot had heard the boys’ motorbikes heading out to nearby rice fields in the middle of the night and grew suspicious. She found the girls missing from the dormitories and learned their whereabouts from some of the other girls. Khru Mot promptly fetched the girls, presumably before anything untoward (i.e. sexual activity) had taken place. When the director of the school arrived at lunchtime, he called a special meeting over by the school café for all of the girls who live in the dormitories, including Kotchakorn and Duangporn. The two youngest dormitory girls, Chonticha and Chatchaya from the P2 class, were not included in the meeting, but the rest in attendance ranged in age from 11 to 15 years. Four female teachers were also present, seated in front of the girls. Students and teachers alike sat silently. Duangporn was the only girl smiling, looking around to her friends. I speculated that she either found the teachers’ reaction excessive or was simply smirking to hide her nerves and embarrassment—perhaps a bit of both. Everybody knew this meeting had been prompted by the actions of her and Kotchakorn. The director spoke gently and at first, vaguely. His words seemed mismatched to his physical demeanour—standing tall, close enough to the girls seated on the floor that he could lean over them at points of emphasis, wielding a long cane in his left hand. The cane was not used to hit anybody on this occasion, but it helped him to give off an intimidating presence throughout the meeting. The threat of physical violence was brought into the purview of students’ awareness but was not directly deployed against them. His lecture was an appeal to reason and character, and his voice sounded tired. His opening statements were to remind the

155 girls of their responsibilities and duties at the school, likening each student to a finger on a hand. Everybody needs to do their part so that the hand can be strong. Things such as cooking, cleaning, and showering were offered as examples. ‘You all know what happened and who it was, right?’ he confirmed as he transitioned to addressing the previous night’s events directly. ‘I’ve given you all lots of chances already’, he went on. The director reminded the girls how important it is that they be careful and listen to teachers’ advice. ‘Boys have different problems for us to worry about’, he said, explaining why the school is so strict about the girls dating but not the boys. If the girls got pregnant, there would be no getting away from the consequences of that for the rest of their life, so the director said they should make sure they have a job and the means to look after a child before thinking about having boyfriends. Kotchakorn was the first student to start sobbing as the director’s speech took a sorrowful turn. He spoke about how the most important thing to consider before any action, is how it will reflect on one’s parents. He asked the students to imagine the tears of their parents and reflect on how that image made them feel themselves. The anger and frustration in his voice began to show through as he expressed his confusion at the lack of gratitude this incident suggested. ‘Don’t we give you enough? Don’t we look after you well enough?’ the director asked. ‘Anything and everything you need, we provide for you’, he continued. ‘If you’re hungry, we give you food; if you’re cold, we give you clothes and blankets; when you need more facilities, we erect new buildings. All we ask is that you follow the rules. Why aren’t you satisfied with all that we give you?’ The director paused after this question and indicated he was waiting for somebody to speak up and give him an answer. Nobody did, but several more students had now started to quietly cry. Although the director did not directly refer to khwamkatanyu

(ความกตัญู; gratitude), it was understood that he was accusing students of failing to express this important virtue. He told everybody that sometimes it is necessary to expel people in order to protect the reputation of the school and of the teachers who work there. What would people think if this sort of thing was allowed to carry on? He then addressed Kotchakorn directly, asking her how long she had been a student at Little Creek School. She answered softly that she had been a student since P3. ‘What a shame it would be. To throw away seven years, so close to finishing’, the director said. He noted some of the students present had been at the school since anuban. Nobody was to be expelled that day, but everybody was clear about that option having been on the table. Two ethnically Thai teachers spoke in turn next, offering brief statements about how the girls should know better and should follow the rules. After that, Khru Mot spoke—a Karen teacher and the one who had discovered the girls were missing. Mot was one of several

156 teachers responsible for managing the girls’ dormitories. Another Karen teacher present, Khru Tuk, joked that it was time for the ‘dormitory director’ to speak. Mot took a slightly different approach to the director, trying at first to empathise with the girls and look at things from their perspective as she understood it. She suggested that perhaps the girls felt they were currently desirable but that once they got older it may become harder for them to find love. She assured the girls that there was no need to rush into settling down and beginning their adult life. Once they finished school, there would be plenty of guys out there happy to have them. Until this point, Mot’s tone had been calm and reassuring. Her empathy then turned to snide comparison to try and convince the girls to change their behaviour. ‘Think about Somjai’, she said. ‘She was in a hurry to find love and get married. What’s her life like now? I’m sure some of you are still in touch with her. Is she happy?’ Mot suggested that Somjai’s life was now much more demanding than it would have been had she corrected her behaviour and therefore been allowed to stay in school. The final speaker at the meeting was Khru Tuk. Tuk was crying the moment she began to speak. She expressed her immense disappointment and hoped her own children would not grow up to be so ungrateful. ‘How many times do we have to go through this?!’ she shouted. Most of the girls had begun crying as Tuk went on pleading with them all through her tears. ‘I know this isn’t just a one-off thing’, she said. ‘I know of lots of you who may do the same thing, and I’m so, so worried about you all. I love you like you’re my own children. Look at how upset this is making me!’ Her voice broke as she reprimanded the girls. ‘Imagine how your actual mothers must feel.’ Tuk felt personally betrayed by the girls’ actions, as if her love had been taken for granted by everyone present. ‘Does anybody have anything to say?’ Tuk locked eyes with several individual girls in turn. As before with the director, nobody answered, and the only sounds were sniffling and sobbing. Khru Tuk sat down without another word and looked away as she regained her composure. After a few moments of silence, the director took over again. He asked me if I would like to say anything. Throughout the meeting, I had been quietly standing off to the side of the girls taking notes. I politely declined the invitation to speak, and so the director brought the meeting to a close. Kotchakorn, Duangporn, and two other girls were asked to remain after everybody else went off to class. Khru Mot and the director both addressed the remaining girls, asking them to clarify where the phones came from that were used to arrange the girls’ outing. The two other girls confirmed that one of them secretly had a phone that the group had been using the night before. This mobile phone was to be confiscated, just as Duangporn’s already had been on a previous occasion. The director then wanted to know where the boys were from. He asked each of the girls in turn but was met with silence. He suspected the boys may have been alumni of the school. The two extra girls were dismissed, and then Duangporn’s mother arrived to join

157 the interrogation. Duangporn’s younger brother dropped her off on a motorbike, the two of them having come a long way from Duangporn’s village in the neighbouring province of Chiang Mai. Khru Yut also joined the group. Khru Yut seemed quite angry as he began his attempt to get information from the girls about exactly who the boys were and where they were from. Duangporn’s mother was not surprised by her daughter’s actions and did not seem nearly as upset as the teachers. ‘I don’t know’, was the only answer being given by the girls to any questions at first, if any answer was given at all. Duangporn deflected questions by chuckling under her breath and looking away smirking, acting amused by the situation. Kotchakorn was more visibly upset, silently looking down and with tears welling in her eyes. It was Kotchakorn who finally gave up some concrete information. She quietly told the adults present that she knew the boys from her own village. Yut mentioned that the last time Duangporn was in trouble it was involving a boy from a different village to that one—he had expected it would have been the same boy and was surprised to learn it was not. Duangporn’s mother chimed in to explain that Duangporn was always on her phone at home chatting to people every spare moment. She was at a loss as to how to deal with it. Khru Yut continued questioning Kotchakorn and managed to get the first names of the two boys. Yut theorised about who he suspected one of the boys to be—the older brother of one of the M1 girls—but Kotchakorn and Duangporn would neither confirm nor deny this. The director headed back to his office, satisfied that this was all the information the girls were going to provide. Yut shifted from Thai to Karen language at this point to discuss the incident further with Duangporn’s mother. As the adults spoke amongst themselves, Duangporn threw a quick smirk towards Kotchakorn. It was not reciprocated, with Kotchakorn still looking shocked and upset from everything that had transpired. Yut began to tease Duangporn playfully about going after lots of different guys. He spoke negatively about one of the boys he suspected of being involved the night before. The boy had recently broken his arm in a motorcycle accident that was caused by riding while drunk. He complained to Duangporn’s mother that the girls just look for a handsome face on Facebook but do not really know what people are truly like before dating them. He lamented that beautiful girls like Duangporn often find themselves in this situation and joked to her mother that Duangporn got her looks from her handsome father. Khru Yut walked back to class with Kotchakorn at this point, as Khru Mot took Duangporn and her mother over to the director’s office for a final, private meeting. On the way over, Mot asked Duangporn to clarify that there was no ongoing relationship to be worried about. She was not entirely convinced the same boy from a previous incident was not present again this time. Duangporn was much more open speaking just to Mot alone, and the rebellious smirk was finally gone from her face, replaced with a tired expression. ‘He wasn’t even my

158 boyfriend’, she plainly insisted. ‘The other time too. We were just talking.’ Despite what her actions suggested to the teachers, Duangporn was in no hurry to settle down and start a family. Mot accepted this response with a look of relief and words of comfort. ‘Okay. Be good for your mother, luk (ลูก; child).’ She left the mother and daughter with the director and returned to her classroom to teach. As might be expected considering the material from chapter five, the most emotive parts of the teachers’ outpourings in the meeting with all of the dormitory girls related to expressions of love and gratitude for teachers and parents. It would be possible to frame this whole incident as the exposure of a disconnect between students’ words and actions. According to such a view, the children feign adherence to a moral discourse that disapproves of romantic relationships while studying, all the while expressing their true moral leanings by secretly pursuing those very same relationships. This was the sort of conclusion reached by Uraiwan et al. (2006: 2072–3) in their study of Chiang Mai sex education. They described teenagers as holding a ‘dual value system’ and experiencing ‘role confusion’. When considering teenagers’ own perspectives, such an explanation does not hold up. Mahony (2018: 134–6) defers to the explanation of a teenage girl from Bangkok’s Khlong Toey slum to better convey how contrasting values are navigated with competence and agency that is not reflected in a simple label like ‘role confusion’. Naen, a 15-year-old girl, tells Mahony that she wants to learn how to succeed at being what she calls a ‘bitch’ (English loanword). In this context, bitch means a girl who is, in Naen’s words, ‘Like a street girl, but better… Someone who is street but can adjust it and still be a good kid’ (ibid.: 134). In this discussion about youth desires, there is a genuine yearning to fulfil one’s filial responsibilities, but also a recognition that the moral ideal as conveyed by elders is not congruent with the lived realities of adolescence in modern Thailand. As in the case I have described above, this agency is not necessarily emancipatory. Ultimately, the outcome of young slum dwellers embracing an identity as a ‘bitch’ is that ‘they further reinforced perceptions of themselves as immoral and embroiled themselves in other pejorative discourses’ (ibid.: 135). Even when caught out violating adults’ moral expectations, Little Creek School students consistently reemphasised their strong desire to tangjai rian and repay their debts of gratitude to their parents. Kotchakorn had once told me that her parents were rather ambivalent about sending her to live in the dormitories. They valued the opportunity for their daughter to study in a Karen village but worried a lot about her getting involved with boys away from their supervision. Kotchakorn wanted to do well at school so she could get a good job and support her parents. Still, a key part of her school experience was trying to find love. The way she went about this did not directly violate ideals of tangjai rian as Kotchakorn understood them, but her behaviour was seen as risky by adults, who had less faith in her ability to balance her search

159 for love with her focus on school. As one Thai language study of youth sexuality in Thailand uncritically put it: ‘The samples engaged in sexual risk-taking by courting their boyfriends/girlfriends’ (Sutthiluck et al., cited in Fordham 2001: 286; emphasis added in Fordham’s translation). A key point of contention for Duangporn in this situation was that although she was aware that her actions were breaking the rules, she did not feel they warranted a response as strong as that which took place. The teachers were convinced that if left to complete this misadventure, the girls would henceforth be involved in sexual relationships with the boys they had gone to see. This was not the outcome that the girls had anticipated. The planned outing was not two girls sneaking off to have sex but Kotchakorn introducing Duangporn to potential suitors who Kotchakorn already knew from her home village. The girls had travelled together to look out for one another. Duangporn struggled to convince the teachers that neither of the boys they met was actually her boyfriend. Not being in a relationship with either boy would by no means make the potential sexual indiscretion morally acceptable to teachers. The possibility of sexual activity is assumed regardless of whether a boy is a friend, a lover, or a potential suitor. Nonetheless, if Duangporn was not already involved in a relationship with either of the boys, then the teachers would be less concerned about the possibility of similar events happening again. Furthermore, from Duangporn’s perspective, the lack of a pre-existing relationship made this a less serious breach of the rules than if she had sneaked out to see her boyfriend. Duangporn seemed confident that she had been in control of the situation. The teachers saw this attitude as careless, and on more than one occasion they cited Duangporn to me as an example of the ‘beautiful girl’ trope I discussed in chapter four. Teachers did not approve of the girls’ behaviour, but they did expect it, at least of Duangporn. As Khru Tuk indicated while crying and reprimanding all of the dormitory girls as a group, the incident that had taken place the night before had not been a surprise to the teachers. It was upsetting to learn of because it induced worry about other ‘beautiful girls’ who may similarly fulfil the expectations of risk that had been associated with them. Khru Yut had complained that the problem was girls initiating potentially lifelong commitments with boys that they had only known online. Factoring in the girls’ stated intentions for this midnight excursion, it is likely that this incident was motivated precisely to address such concerns about online personas. The girls were able to communicate freely with these boys online but had wanted an opportunity to meet them in person and get to know them in an offline setting. Contrary to the teachers’ assumptions, these were not yet considered ‘boyfriends’ by the students involved. Teachers and students were interpreting the situation according to entirely different parameters.

160 As discussed in the previous chapter, courting in the past involved regular opportunities for supervised meetings between potential suitors and adolescent Karen girls. Because Duangporn and Kotchakorn were at the Little Creek School dormitories most of the time, they had very few such opportunities, and so students in their situation must break the rules to initiate romantic relationships that are not solely mediated by a screen. Rather than facilitate such meetings, the school’s preference was that girls pursue relationships with boys who they already knew at school. Relationships within the school cohort were preferable for the teachers as these are theoretically more easily monitored, and the teachers believed such relationships to hold as a priority the moral foundation of supporting one another to tangjai rian. Even where students dated other Little Creek School students though, there was still ‘risky’ behaviour taking place. After the school year had finished, I asked Attachai, an M3 dormitory boy, about his experiences flouting the rules in the dormitories. Having already graduated, he was more comfortable discussing this subject with me than while I was a teacher at his school. For example, he confided that he had made a habit of drinking alcohol with some of his friends some evenings to help alleviate the stress of school. He was never caught engaging in such behaviour, but the teachers had suspicions based on empty bottles near the boys’ dormitories. Attachai had dated a few different girls from Little Creek School during his time there. None of his relationships had worked out because he was planning on moving to Chiang Mai for work the following year, whereas the girls he had dated were planning on studying further in Mae La Noi or Mae Sariang. ‘Everybody has their own destination’, he said (tang khon tang pai;

ต่างคนต่างไป). I asked Attachai if he had ever engaged in illicit behaviour with girls without the teachers’ knowledge. He maintained that sneaking out at night to visit girls was never something that he or his friends had done (although he confessed that he may have been tempted to if he was dating a dormitory girl—he had only ever dated village girls). When I continued asking for details about how he conducted his relationships, however, he readily conceded to breaching the rules in other ways. It was common for the boys in the dormitories to share video calls with their girlfriends in the evening. This was of course something that had to be done without the knowledge of teachers, as the students were not supposed to have access to their phones during the week. Attachai emphasised that these video calls did not actually involve anything sexual. ‘It wasn’t anything like going off “doing stuff” together’, he said. ‘We really just talked.’ Students who were dating valued video calls as an opportunity to verbalise their love for one another and discuss things more openly than they felt able to appropriately do in the schoolyard during the day.

161 Another practice that Attachai sometimes engaged in with girls he was dating was to sneak moments during the day to hom kaem (หอมแก้ม; ‘sniff kiss’). Hom kaem is a show of affection shared between lovers or between parents and their children. Lips are not actually involved in this ‘kiss’, but it does require faces to make physical contact, as one person’s nose is pressed against the cheek of the other person.54 In Thailand, to hom kaem in public with somebody who is not a relative may provoke embarrassment or discomfort if witnessed by the wrong people in the wrong setting (Ferguson & Arratee 2019: 336). Here, the concept of ru kalathesa (รู ้กาลเทศะ; knowledge of time and place) again becomes relevant—the same behaviour may be either appropriate or inappropriate depending on the particular conjunction of space and time in which it occurs (Van Esterik 2000: 36). One must have knowledge of kalathesa to know when it is okay to hom kaem. Attachai attributed his bold displays of physical affection as reflecting his wish to ‘stand out’ (tham tua den; ทําตัวเด่น) while at school. He was aware of kalathesa but deliberately pushed the boundaries to generate a particular image of his character among his peers. As our conversation continued, Attachai told me about one weekend when he actually did visit his girlfriend in Little Creek Village while he was supposed to be at the dormitories. He volunteered this information when I specifically asked about his relationship with Mawika. It had not occurred to him earlier when I was asking for behaviour comparable to that of Duangporn and Kotchakorn. There were some key differences that made this less of a serious breach of the rules—the excursion was before dark, there were more people present, and the meeting did not take place in a rice field. Nonetheless, the visit was planned in secret and could potentially have got the students involved into trouble. Mawika’s parents were not home for part of the day, so she and Attachai arranged a convenient time to meet at her house. Attachai invited another M3 dormitory boy along and bought a birthday cake to bring to Mawika. Some of Mawika’s friends were also present. The purpose of this visit was just to see each other and spend time together to celebrate Mawika’s birthday. The students were not doing anything that they felt could jeopardise their ability to tangjai rian, and as with Duangporn and Kotchakorn’s excursion, there were more than two people present to avoid the couple being alone together. Still, it had been necessary to arrange the meeting in secrecy, as both Mawika’s parents and the teachers at the school would not have approved. Although the boys’ excursion away from the dormitories required secrecy, the stakes were not as high as for the girls. The strong public reaction from the school after catching Duangporn and Kotchakorn was purportedly provoked by the potential gravity of

54 Kisses involving the nose rather than the mouth are quite common in many non-Western contexts (Schapper 2019).

162 consequences the girls might face if they had engaged in sexual activity while away from the school in the middle of the night. When the director said that boys have other problems that take priority, he was referring to issues such as drinking, smoking, and reckless motorcycle riding. These were the issues that potentially had immediate consequences to the health and safety of male students. Girls could be faced with pregnancy and marriage if not wary of appropriate boundaries with boys. As a result of this situation, the possible sexual activity of male students was not as actively policed as that of female students. The more relaxed attitude toward possibilities of male sexual activity is consistent with the traditional expectations of ‘wandering’ associated with boys and young men in Thailand. When boys went exploring on their motorbikes on the weekend there were concerns about physical safety, but little anxiety about any possible moral implications of their activities. Girls who left the dormitories on their own for any purpose represented an inversion of the conventional Buddhist gender roles observed by earlier anthropologists of northern Thailand (Cohen & Wijeyewardene 1984; Davis 1984; Kirsch 1985). This kind of antagonism is an example of what Tanabe (1991: 183) describes as, ‘the quite diverse and often contradictory representations of gender observable in reality’, as opposed to the neat fulfilment of roles in Buddhist texts analysed by Keyes (1984) and others. When girls wander, they provoke moral panic from their parents and teachers. But, in doing so, they are rarely engaging in behaviour that is without precedent. Within the figured worlds of mathayom students at Little Creek School, gender relations are not as simple as girls waiting at home for a husband and boys wandering the countryside. The illicit behaviour described in this section, whether engaged in by boys or girls, suggests that students are willing and able to push the boundaries of what is considered appropriate behaviour. In planning activities deemed illicit by the school, the students still adhere to their own moral standards. They set boundaries that allow them to maintain adherence to their own ideals of tangjai rian, in order to maintain their ability to do well in school and repay their parents’ sacrifices. Even when surreptitious behaviour was not immediately sexual in nature, teachers and parents often disapproved for fear of where it may lead. This bears similarities to the view of marijuana as a ‘gateway drug’ for teenagers that may lead to more dangerous drug use in the future—teenagers may have their own motivations for and narratives about drug use that do not relate to those concerns (Cohen 2020; Moffat, Johnson & Shoveller 2009). Likewise, mathayom students at Little Creek School have their own narratives about romantic interactions that may or may not lead to sexual activity in the future. The next section uses a dramatic performance to demonstrate critical reflection by the M3 students upon what tangjai rian means to them and how it may be threatened. In doing so, they reproduce the moral lessons taught to them at school but do so playfully, in a way that allows for additional nuance.

163 Parodying School Romance: A School Play about a Beautiful Girl

During school celebrations for National Mother’s Day, each year level had the opportunity to prepare a dramatic performance for their teachers, peers, and mothers. Most year levels performed songs or traditional dances, drawing on either Thai or Karen culture and featuring various traditional outfits and makeup. Much like Thai school performances that have been observed by Mills (2001: 29), these were typically rehearsed under direct instruction from teachers but in some cases gave the students opportunities take on creative control themselves. The M2 and M3 classes both chose to prepare a short play each, with stories that highlighted the importance of good mothers in society and the perils of teenage promiscuity. While the M2 performance was a reproduction of a television program, the M3 class wrote theirs specifically for this event.55 It was therefore much more tailored to the local context and presented scenarios that were more relatable for the audience. As such, it is the main focus of analysis in this section. Several M3 students worked together to come up with ideas that they thought would be funny and keep everyone entertained, while sticking to the theme of Mother’s Day. The intended moral of the story was that no matter how bad we are as children, our mother will always love, support, and forgive us.

Figure 7.2 Teachers, mothers, and students watch Mother's Day performances from each year level.

55 The M2 class prepared an abridged version of an episode of ‘fa mi ta’ (ฟ้ า ม ตี า ; ‘The Sky has Eyes’) entitled ‘mae khue khrai, khrai khue mae’ (แม่คือใคร ใครคือแม่; ‘Who is Truly the Mother?’). It dealt with themes of promiscuity, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and gratitude.

164 The way the students chose to portray a stereotypically bad child was to portray a young girl as vain, narcissistic, and falling pregnant after becoming sexually active. The main character of the play, Wa, is introduced receiving compliments from her two best friends about her looks before school. As the students take their seats and teachers (two M3 boys) stand at the front of the ‘class’, one of the students slowly, clearly, and in her best proper Thai accent, invites the students to greet their teachers. ‘All students, pay respect (nakrian thangmot tham khwamkhaorop; นักเรยี นทงั หมดทาํ ความเคารพ).’ The students all perform a wai (ไหว้; respectful Thai greeting) as they greet the teachers, just as students do at the beginning of each period in Thai schools across the country. Once the maths lesson begins, students begin chatting to one another in Karen. One student throws a ball of paper across the room. Wa begins flirting with a boy in her class, named Dee. ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ one of the teachers asks Wa. ‘Nothing, most handsome teacher’, Wa responds, reverting to Thai. There is an uproar of laughter and whistling from the audience. The teacher does not believe Wa’s response, and Wa carries on chatting to her friends in Karen as the lesson continues. Another student pokes fun at one of the teachers, possibly an improvisation based on the prop that was chosen at the last minute to differentiate teachers from students. ‘Sir, why are you wearing sunglasses inside?’ she asks. ‘…I don’t know…’ he nervously answers. Once the laughter from the audience quiets, the lesson is brought to a close, and the students are once again called to perform their wai.

Figure 7.3 A classroom scene from the M3 Mother's Day performance.

165 After school, Dee invites Wa to go out on a date with him the following day. Wa is initially unsure how to respond but is encouraged by her friends to accept the invitation. Dee says he will pick her up the next day and then leaves with a friend. Wa blows him a kiss as he leaves. After returning home from school, we are shown Wa’s tumultuous relationship with her mother. Her mother asks why she is late returning home. Wa lies and says she was studying, concealing her interaction with Dee. ‘Are you hungry?’ Wa’s mother asks. ‘Today I made “burned omelette” for you’, she says. The audience begins to laugh as Wa expresses shock and disgust at this entirely unappetising meal she has been offered. ‘It’s really good!’ her mother insists. ‘People these days, they can’t make it like this anymore.’ The culinary disaster is passed off as a traditional recipe. The actors begin laughing and take a moment to compose themselves before continuing the scene. Wa is unappreciative of her mother’s hard work. She complains that her mother has very little money to give her when she asks for some to go and buy different food. ‘Mum, what the hell am I going to be able to buy with just two satang?’ (two hundredths of a Thai baht). ‘I have to use the money I make from working to pay for the electricity and water’, her mother explains. ‘Why do you have to pay?’ Wa sarcastically retorts. ‘Would you be able to survive if I didn’t pay the bills?’ her mother asks. ‘Of course! I’m beautiful’, Wa says. ‘Beauty won’t help anything, child.’ ‘That’s enough talk, old hag!’ Wa pushes her mother aside and storms out of the room. The next morning, Wa leaves in a hurry, rudely refusing her mother’s offer of breakfast. Dee and his friend from the day before both arrive on motorbikes to pick up Wa and her two friends. Wa rushes to climb onto the back of Dee’s motorbike and firmly grabs hold of his hips, leaving her friends to ride with Dee’s friend. The two motorbikes are separated, and Wa’s friends scold Dee’s friend for letting the pair go off alone. ‘Hey! Where did your friend take my friend? Well?!’ ‘How should I know?!’ replies Dee’s friend. ‘They’re surely off doing bad things!’ says Wa’s friend. Dee and Wa are sitting in a restaurant or café flirting with one another. ‘Wa, there’s something I need to tell you’, Dee says. ‘What is it?’ Wa says, as she clings to his arm and nuzzles her head against his shoulder while smiling. ‘I’m worried you’re going to cheat on me’, says Dee. ‘There’s no way I could ever cheat on you’, replies Wa. ‘You don’t believe me?’ Dee begins to try and convince Wa to have sex with him. ‘Do you love me?’ he asks.

166 ‘Yes, I love you’, Wa says. ‘So you’ll be mine then?’ he adds—‘being mine’ referring to entering into a sexual relationship. ‘I can’t’, Wa insists, as she pulls away from Dee looking worried. ‘I suppose that means you don’t love me then’, Dee replies. This argument convinces Wa to relent, and she is heard laughing loudly as a blanket is pulled in front of the couple by stagehands—the implication being that the couple proceeded to have sex. Once again, the audience bursts into laughter at the boldness of this scene. Back at school in the following scene, Wa is her usual self, flirting with her teachers in Thai and disrupting class by talking among her friends in Karen. Dee, however, is sitting close to a different girl. This time, the class being taught is an English lesson. This announcement alone prompts laughter from the audience, who know that the actor playing the English teacher is actually not very good at English compared to his classmates. ‘How do you spell “school”?’ he asks the class. ‘Oh, I know!’ Wa enthusiastically announces. ‘It’s spelled “l-o-v-e”, sir.’ The teacher accepts this as the correct answer. Dee’s new love interest objects and offers the actual correct spelling. She is told by the teacher that she is wrong. He next asks how to spell ‘love’. ‘I know’, says Wa once again. Instead of spelling out the word, Wa offers the name of her teacher as her response. ‘It’s spelled Sompong, sir.’ Once more, Dee’s new girlfriend offers the correct answer and is told by the teacher that she is wrong. Wa and her friends begin to wonder why Dee is sitting so close to this girl. Wa flicks her head away in contempt. After class, Wa and her friends confront the newcomer and an argument ensues. ‘Get out of my way. I need to go home’, says Dee’s new girlfriend. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ intercedes one of Wa’s friends. ‘Why are you messing around with my friend’s boyfriend?’ Wa and her love rival launch a flurry of insults at one another, and the confrontation begins to become physical. Dee arrives to break up the fight between the girls. ‘Don’t you love me anymore?’ Wa pleads. ‘No way! You’re ugly!’ he responds in Karen. Wa begins to cry, as the pair continue to argue in Karen. Dee hits Wa across the face, and she falls to the ground. She begins to vomit, signalling to the audience that she is pregnant.56 Dee and his new girlfriend leave to go on a date. Wa is consoled by her friends

56 This is a common trope in many Thai soap operas, whereby a woman dramatically vomiting usually indicates pregnancy. This same trope was also used during the M2 performance when a character was revealed to be pregnant.

167 who take her home. Despite the serious subject matter of this scene, the audience continues to laugh throughout at the exaggerated performances of the actors.

Figure 7.4 The breakup scene from the M3 Mother's Day performance.

In the final scene, Wa confesses to her mother that she is pregnant. Wa’s mother is initially in disbelief and repeatedly asks for clarification of the situation in a humorous exchange that takes place using Karen language. ‘What’s wrong?’ asks Wa’s mother when Wa comes home crying. ‘I’m pregnant.’ ‘What?! You’re pregnant?! Are you sure you’re not just sick?’ ‘I’m pregnant.’ ‘You’re pregnant?!’ Wa’s mother exclaims again. ‘Maybe you just need to eat something.’ ‘I’m pregnant.’ ‘You’re pregnant?’ ‘I’m pregnant.’ ‘You’re pregnant?’ ‘I’m pregnant.’ ‘Really?’ Once Wa’s mother comes to grips with the reality of the situation, the pair have an extended conversation in Karen, where Wa explains the situation with Dee. Wa’s mother ascertains that the child’s father is not interested in taking responsibility for his actions and

168 promises to be there for Wa in his stead. Wa begs her mother for forgiveness and they each express their love for one another and embrace. The success of this performance depended on both demonstrating the students’ awareness of moral expectations but also their knowledge of how these moral expectations are commonly subverted. The portrayal of illicit behaviour made the play relatable and enjoyable to all watching and suggests broad awareness of the kinds of subversive activities that the students sometimes engaged in. Performances may be described as a type of ‘restored behaviour’—a performance is effective because it reproduces ideas that already have a pre-existing model, script, or organised sequence of events (Schechner 1985: 35). The nature of a performance, however, makes these restored behaviours symbolic and reflexive. The strips of behaviour making up a performance can be manipulated, improvised upon, and altered in subtle ways. The symbolic and reflexive nature of restored behaviour within the context of performance can be described using Bakhtin’s theory of carnival. According to Bakhtin (1984a: 122–3), a carnivalistic setting is one in which many features of social life are inverted. The carnival is a playful setting where hierarchical distances may be eliminated or reduced, and profane parodies are socially permissible in ways that they usually would not be. This ‘opening out of thought’ is what Holland et al. (1998: 236–7) see as necessary to allow ‘the emergence of new figured worlds, of refigured worlds that come eventually to reshape selves and lives in all seriousness’. Through such serious play, social actors are able to recombine elements from the various worlds that they are acquainted with—this is how Holland et al. (ibid.) describe Bakhtin’s carnivalization as taking place. Just as serious play is not confined to literal games, carnivalization is not restricted to dramatic performances like the one I have recounted above. In fact, Bakhtin specifically notes the lack of a division between performers and spectators in his definition of carnival (Bakhtin 1984a: 122). He says that carnival is neither contemplated nor performed but lived (ibid.). Although in my ethnographic example there are of course performers and spectators that can be identified, the performers themselves are actively involved in the interpretation and resignification of figured worlds that is going on upon the stage. The dialogue generated by the performance, along with a sense of carnival, carries on among the audience once the performance ends, and the day’s events continue. Everyday social life thus takes place in the context of several figured worlds coming into contact through what Bakhtin describes as ‘dialogism’ (Holland et al. 1998: 238). The comedic nature of this performance demanded that the grittier details of the narrative be omitted, quickly skimmed over, or merely implied. The audience of course was familiar with the trope of the rebellious, beautiful young girl, and knew all too well that this story was a warning of what could happen if Wa had not had the wisdom to make amends with her

169 mother. It did not need to be stated that a life of ruin and misery would be expected to follow from Wa’s decisions were it not for her mother’s forgiveness and support. The happy ending then was simply making the best of an inevitably bad situation. A mother’s unconditional love was presented as an extraordinary gift we should all appreciate, but one that has no power over the mismatch between teenage pregnancy and tangjai rian. It was implicitly understood that Wa’s schooling would be over following the events in the performance. The narratives about morality on display in this performance follow similar patterns to those presented to the students by their teachers in class. The black and white presentation of good versus bad is particularly reminiscent of the life skills curriculum analysed in chapter five. According to the narrative presented here, sexual relationships while studying are categorically bad, and if one engages in them then one should expect to be left heartbroken and pregnant. The novel feature in this particular setting was the inclusion of a forgiving and loving mother to save the child from a disastrous future. The endings of stories presented during life skills day were far bleaker. In his analysis of Thai social studies curricula from the 1990s, Mulder (1997) has made similar observations about the way moral extremes have typically been presented to Thai students. Commenting on lessons about being a good citizen, he says, ‘By stressing the good while rejecting the undesirable, the moral model offered in school does not deal with society in any real sense, but depicts a utopian community’ (ibid.: 53). In Mulder’s view, Thai students leave school unequipped to make sense of the structural inequalities in their society, not having been taught about the moral and sociological complexities of real life. In this performance, the students did nevertheless make the story about more than just the black and white morality of adolescent sexuality. They were able to play with these ideas in ways that connected to hypothetical situations they had come up with according to their own reasoning. The ‘structural inequalities’ and ‘sociological complexities’ spoken of by Mulder implicitly make their way into the narrative as it is constructed through reflection on the actors’ own life situations. Through serious play, a figured world is authored by the M3 students that is influenced, but not determined, by such external factors. In addition to teenage relationships, the play also drew attention to the dynamics between students and teachers, and children and parents. In the classroom, the main character is made even more ‘bad’ by the way she flirts with her male teachers. At the same time, the teachers are presented as dim-witted and exploitable. The way the mother is portrayed highlights the financial pressures in students’ family lives, while also poking fun at the way mothers get nostalgic about old recipes that their children do not like. Wa refers to her mother with the impolite term ikae (อีแก่; old hag), thereby disrespecting her mother and calling her old (and by implication, not beautiful like Wa herself is). The celebrated portrayal of these

170 inappropriate behaviours adds to the carnivalesque nature of the performance (Bakhtin 1984b: 10). The performance made extensive use of language to convey meaning and humour. Language boundaries that exist in the students’ real lives were reproduced, with Karen being used in the classroom to gossip without the teacher being able to follow the conversation. The Thai greeting used to begin and end classes was exaggerated for dramatic effect. This call to pay respect to the teacher is usually mumbled very quickly and monotonously by students at Little Creek School. The overly formal enunciation played with in the performance effectively mocks the school environment’s preoccupation with correcting the students’ ‘lazy’ Thai pronunciation—that is to say, their Karen accents. Most of the dialogue was in Thai, even beyond the classroom scenes, but Karen language was sometimes used to add emotional impact. This took place in the scene when the girls were arguing and when mother and daughter were making amends. Even this small amount of Karen language being used in the context of a school performance was unusual. By contrast, the M2 performance was delivered entirely in Thai, abridged and adapted from the original Thai script. Karenness was introduced into the M2 performance visually rather than through language. Traditional Karen clothing was used for most of the M2 costumes. Women’s married (black and red) and unmarried (white and red) blouses were used to signal the difference between adult and teenage characters. Furthermore, the immoral characters in the M2 performance (both adult and child) were wearing casual clothes rather than Karen outfits. Besides the traditional outfits being utilised to signal the moral and marital status of the characters, there was no other trace of Karenness present in the M2 performance. Even though several characters were portrayed as Karen through costumes, Karen language was not incorporated at all throughout the performance. Much like the real students and their families, these characters were clearly portrayed as Karen subjects of the Thai state.

Figure 7.5 A scene from the M2 Mother's Day performance, showing the range of costumes used.

171 The subtle humour deployed in the M3 performance suggests some level of cultural critique embedded within the reproduction of lessons about sexual morality. The pairing of love and school as a motif is a reflection of children’s realities that is in stark contrast to the ideal pairing of school and tangjai rian that students are taught to embody. The ‘love and school’ narratives presented to the students during life skills day expressed similar themes but were held up as images of immoral behaviour to be avoided at all costs. In this performance, the ‘love and school’ narrative was still presented as potentially immoral, but it was made light of and used as an example of common student behaviour rather than being purely hypothetical. While maintaining that sex inevitably disrupts tangjai rian, this performance acknowledged that romantic love is nonetheless a necessary feature of teenage life that must be navigated away from adult supervision. Rather than romance being a barrier to tangjai rian that must be carefully managed, romance comes to be seen as a primary feature of the school experience. It is pursued alongside ideals of tangjai rian. It is not necessarily used as a support for tangjai rian as Khru Keng had once described Attachai and Mawika’s relationship as being. As the character of Wa said, school is spelled ‘l-o-v-e’. The gravity of Wa’s sexual involvement with Dee was not lost on her friends. Even though they giddily encouraged the pair to begin dating, it was these same friends who reacted with shock and anger at the moral implications of Dee having absconded with Wa alone. They had intended to chaperone their friend, just as with Duangporn and Kotchakorn’s secret outing. Although Wa was presented throughout most of the narrative as an example of what not to do, this story differed from the stories taught at school in that it placed greater emphasis on the actions of the boyfriend as also contributing to the negative outcomes of the situation. Wa and her friends, excited as they were about finding love, had no intention of breaching the rules in such a grievous manner. Dee was clearly portrayed as having emotionally manipulated Wa into consenting to sex. The side characters of Wa’s friends were thus central to conveying the alternative figured world through which mathayom students assess the morality of their actions. Dee and Wa were examples of immoral characters according to the ideal of teachers and parents. Wa’s mother was expecting her daughter to be focused entirely on school, unaware she was being deceived until the very end when tragedy had already struck. Wa’s friends, meanwhile, were following an alternative morality. Their figured world celebrated chances for pursuing love at school, all the while objecting to the exploitative behaviour of Dee that led to their friend becoming pregnant. They stood by their friend and defended her against the insults of Dee’s new girlfriend. I would argue that Wa’s friends were the most relatable characters in the story for the mathayom students watching and participating in the performance. Blatant breaches of the rules, whereby a student actually sneaks away to have sex, were quite exceptional and not a portrayal of common student behaviour. As was seen in the events described in the previous

172 section, the initial intention that was endorsed by Wa’s friends was not to directly violate standards of sexual morality. The intention was to experience physical intimacy that was milder, be it a motorbike ride with a boy or a ‘sniff kiss’ away from prying eyes. Nonetheless, this behaviour had to be conducted surreptitiously to escape the attention of parents and teachers.

Conclusion

The mathayom students at Little Creek School generally placed great importance on their ability to tangjai rian. The way they approached this, however, was not always in line with the expectations of parents and teachers. Through serious play in their own figured worlds, students tested the limits of what kinds of behaviour they were comfortable engaging in. Regardless of the nature of their behaviour, there was a general preference for adults not to ‘meddle’ in their affairs. Students were not always in control of the visibility of their actions and decisions, however. Girls in particular were subject to a lot more scrutiny when it came to matters involving potential sexual activity. For girls identified as ‘beautiful’, the school represents a ‘risky geography’. The different moral standards for tangjai rian held by adults and teenagers operate within alternative figured worlds. The students’ figured worlds are able to differ through acts of serious play—secret interactions, patterns of Facebook use, dramatic performance, or even modifications to gendered clothing during a game of elastics. A key feature of the theory of figured worlds though is that they are never operating in isolation or in the abstract. A figured world must always be situated in practice and in a particular social encounter (Holland et al. 1998: 41). It is through the tensions of different figured worlds coming into contact that social practice is constantly given new meaning. In this chapter, I have focused on settings where adult and mathayom figured worlds have brushed up against one another and brought students’ positional moralities and identities into question. I analysed examples of both actual and hypothetical events involving illicit behaviour. Two dormitory girls were caught sneaking out under cover of darkness to meet with boys. A dormitory boy spoke about sneaking kisses in the schoolyard. The M3 class jointly reflected on their interpretations of sexual morality and presented this reflection to peers, parents, and teachers in the form of a comedic performance. In all of these instances, there was a common focus on keeping all romantic activity secret from the moral authority of teachers and parents. This was due to a stark difference in the ways that adults and teenagers assessed one’s efforts to tangjai rian. While both adults and teenagers shared the same understanding that sexual relationships are directly threatening to one’s ability to tangjai rian, adults seemed to frame a wider range of situations

173 as too risky to engage in. The mathayom students regularly pursued experiences that, while not outright violating the norms they were taught at school, did have potential outcomes that would be more direct violations. The students, however, allowed for their own intentionality in a potentially risky situation to alleviate the level of perceived risk. Because of an awareness of this difference in moral risk assessment, even behaviour that was relatively innocent by adult standards was regularly concealed by students. On many occasions during my fieldwork, for example, I was told by students that they did not have a girlfriend or boyfriend. This was the default answer when other teachers asked them as well. I knew for a fact in many of these cases, based on Facebook posts and conversations with other students or teachers, that this answer was not true. As Khru Keng explained during the life skills curriculum, the teachers did not automatically take issue with the students having a girlfriend or boyfriend. They were willing to be supportive of relationships that did not involve sexual activity. As far as I know, most of the students’ relationships fit this description, yet they were still actively concealed. It was not always readily apparent therefore if a concealed action or relationship was something that was likely to be considered ‘inside the frame’, something more overtly risky like the midnight excursion of Duangporn and Kotchakorn, or something that actually involved sex. Even in more serious cases like that of Duangporn and Kotchakorn, or perhaps Attachai’s physical expressions of affection, students often felt that teachers were overreacting. On the one hand, Kotchakorn appeared deeply moved and remorseful following the meeting about her actions. Duangporn, on the other hand, was bemused by the assumptions of teachers that she was off trying to have sex with her long-term boyfriend. She had just wanted to go talk to a guy that she maybe had a crush on. Attachai repeatedly dismissed my fishing for information about overtly illicit behaviour with girls. He assured me that all the secret stuff he and his friends got up to was actually pretty innocent compared to what the teachers were afraid of. But it had to be kept secret, nonetheless. Teachers’ fears were of course sometimes realised. Throughout this thesis, the cases of Somjai, Patcharee, and Ratchanok attest to that. Ratchanok’s trip to visit her boyfriend lasted overnight, and she only avoided more serious consequences by immediately breaking off the relationship. Patcharee was not comfortable in school for reasons that she chose to keep to herself—she left and married on her own terms before completing M1. Somjai’s expulsion was necessitated by her repeated defiance of the rules—unlike Ratchanok, she remained in a relationship where sex was inferred by the community. These cases were exceptional and do not necessarily reflect the common behaviour of most students. As I discussed in chapter four, Somjai had her own engagements with the idea of tangjai rian that likely differ again from those I have focused on in this chapter. The Mother’s Day performance prepared by the M3 class offers a clear portrayal of these different student experiences. I argue

174 that the more common scenario is for students to conduct themselves in a similar fashion to how Wa’s friends did in the fictional performance. Nonetheless, more serious and exceptional cases are important to analyse, as they demonstrate very clearly how the associated risks are formulated and discussed in the community. During the life skills workshop discussed in chapter five, the appropriate management of romantic relationships during school was clearly outlined to students. While at school, children should tangjai rian. To tangjai rian in this context is an act of loving gratitude to one’s parents and teachers and therefore requires a full reorientation of the self. Romance can be experienced in this setting, but it should only be accommodated if it operates in support of a student’s primary project of love. By suggesting that ‘school is spelled l-o-v-e’ in their Mother’s Day performance—a statement explicitly paired with romantic love in the narrative—the M3 class were reflecting on the realities of their actual school experiences, as opposed to the moral ideal put forth by teachers. In students’ actual school experiences, tangjai rian remains highly important. It is a salient concept and one that is made a priority in many students’ lives. But romance was also a fundamental part of their school experience. Rather than just being tolerated to the extent that it supports projects of tangjai rian, both romance and tangjai rian are featured alongside one another as defining features of one’s time at school. Both are important in their own right within the figured worlds of mathayom students.

175 Chapter 8 – Conclusion: Lighting Candles in the Rain

This thesis has taken a Thai concept that is taken for granted in Thai educational settings— tangjai rian (ตงั ใจเรยี น)—and interrogated its locally situated nuances in an upland ethnic minority context. I have engaged with this topic from the perspectives of not only the disciplinary authorities of teachers and parents but also the differing perspectives of students. This project began in an effort to contribute to the anthropology of the Karen in Thailand in a way that focuses on the perspectives and experiences of children. In doing so, I also sought to contribute to recent shifts in the way that anthropology engages with children through ethnography. I aimed to show how children could be given voice in anthropological research and be understood on their own terms as complete human beings rather than simply ‘adults in progress’, as older anthropological and sociological literature has typically framed them. As I outlined in chapter two, where I detailed my methodology, this was done by living alongside students and teachers at an upland Thai government school for a full academic year. My initial focus was quite broad as I sought to identify the issues that really mattered to Karen schoolchildren in my fieldsite. Over time, I encountered various instances of moral complexity and contention. I observed that students spoke and behaved very differently in the different contexts I accompanied them to—in class with a teacher, in class unsupervised, around the dormitories, during recess, online. Topics that kept emerging as salient in all of these varied contexts were teenage love and the disciplinary structures attempting to police it. This led me to reframe my project as specifically exploring these different moral worlds that appeared to be coexisting within the school. Key among the events that took place during my fieldwork was the expulsion of Somjai from the M3 class due to her sexual indiscretion. Following this event, my attention became focused on discussions around ideal student behaviour and judgements of morality. Teachers cautioning students against violating sexual ideals was something that increasingly took place for the rest of the school year, as teachers attempted to prevent what they anticipated as a possible stream of other girls following in Somjai’s footsteps. This drew my attention to the concept of tangjai rian and its local nuances. Prior to the events that led to Somjai’s expulsion, I was already familiar with this term. I had until then understood tangjai rian simply to mean to focus on schoolwork. It was an everyday word that I often heard used by teachers either praising or admonishing students in class. Parents used it to describe their children. When teachers gave their blessings to students during ritual settings such as a wai khru (ไหว้ครู; paying respect to teachers) ceremony, they would entreat students to be good children for their parents and tangjai rian. The stark opposition between tangjai rian and expressions of adolescent sexuality—especially female adolescent sexuality—was revealed to me later on.

176 As I began to observe the local nuances of this term, my research questions began to develop more clearly. While it made sense to me that teachers would want the children in their care to be ‘good students’, I needed to investigate exactly what the descriptor ‘good student’ meant in this particular context. I first asked what is required for a student at Little Creek School to be described as tangjai rian. Chapters three and four addressed this question by mapping the institutional space of the school. One of my key findings was that, in addition to performing well academically, students must adhere to particular standards of sexual morality, with the national institution of the school being the enforcing authority. I also asked what the consequences are for those moral standards being violated. This question connects to my main extended case study, the expulsion and early marriage of Somjai. I also noted, however, that Somjai’s story was not the only way that violations of the moral ideal could play out. Some kinds of indiscretion were treated less seriously, and student behaviour was able to be amended to enable continued schooling. Another of my questions asked why tangjai rian is so threatened by sexuality at Little Creek School. I answered this question in chapter five by analysing the way that tangjai rian is locally framed as an important expression of love by students for their parents and teachers. This interpretation of tangjai rian was conveyed to students through ‘life skills’ education and through both ritual and everyday activities at the school. Commencing sexual activity was also interpreted as embarking on a project of love, one that inevitably pulls one’s heart away from being able to tangjai rian. This relates to another of my research questions, asking how tangjai rian relates to gender and ethnicity. The gravity attached to student failures to tangjai rian is based on the enormous cultural capital that Karen parents see as a possibility through schooling. Doing well at school, including upholding the necessary sexual morality, is seen as a means to push back against the disadvantaged position in society that the Karen people occupy. This point is especially pronounced for girls at Little Creek School, whose sexuality is more visible to the moral authority of the school, and who are readily blamed for a lack of personal responsibility if sexual encounters lead to pregnancy or early marriage— consequences that boys do not have to contend with. Because sexual morality is so tightly bound to one’s potential to tangjai rian in this context, this adds a gendered aspect to the attainment of educational ideals. My most significant research question asked how children themselves navigate both tangjai rian and romantic love upon reaching adolescence. Children’s own perspectives have been featured and celebrated throughout the thesis but were especially drawn upon to answer this final research question. The ways that mathayom students successfully balance both love and school were directly addressed in chapters six and seven, where I included ethnographic data about the courting behaviour of mathayom students in both online and offline settings. I framed my answer to this question using social practice theory to analyse the balancing of

177 multiple moralities using the terminology of serious play and figured worlds (Holland et al. 1998). By authoring their own figured worlds of social practice alongside the figured world of the school, students acted morally according to their own interpretations of tangjai rian. Students earnestly strived to tangjai rian while simultaneously engaging in surreptitious behaviour that from the perspective of adults could indicate a potential failure to tangjai rian. At school, teachers defined acceptable teenage romantic relationships as existing primarily to support tangjai rian; but the lived realities of teenage life presented both tangjai rian and romance as existing alongside one another as necessary and defining features of one’s time at school. In answering all of the above questions, this thesis makes an original contribution to understandings of Karen youth in Thailand by ethnographically documenting the situated meaning of tangjai rian in upland Mae Hong Son Province. The analysis of tangjai rian throughout this thesis adds to existing scholarship on the role of gratitude in parent-child and teacher-student relationships in Thailand. Although the significance of these relationships has been previously documented—for example, in the context of wai khru ceremonies (paying respect to teachers) or caregiving arrangements for the elderly—the role of tangjai rian in these relationships has not yet been explicitly researched as an ideological concept. Documenting the changing practices of teenage courting and romance in upland Karen communities within the ethnographic record is also an important contribution of this thesis. While I have shown that many older beliefs and practices persist, the proliferation of affordable smartphones in upland Thailand has resulted in recent changes to how romance is practised. I use the remainder of my conclusion to integrate my findings from throughout the thesis and to reflect on the insights gained and further questions raised by my research.

We Have to Endure: Being a Thai-Karen Student in Upland Mae Hong Son

The significance of many of the findings from my research is closely tied to the specific cultural and socioeconomic circumstances in which my research participants live. While students everywhere in Thailand are expected to tangjai rian, this expectation is expressed differently based on the values and experiences of particular communities. Due to my primary fieldsite being a school, my research participants were drawn from a number of different Karen villages, including some with ties also to Lawa villages. My pool of research participants included Buddhist, Catholic, and Protestant individuals who were all members of a shared community. The diversity of the Little Creek School cohort is something that I have factored into my analysis of the varying viewpoints that people expressed to me during the course of my research. What these people do have in common is their position at the margins of Thai society.

178 I opened this thesis with a conversation I once shared with a P2 dormitory student,

Chonticha, who told me that she and the others at her school had to otthon (อดทน; endure/persevere/be patient). Sometimes this kind of statement meant something relatively trivial, like being a bit colder at night because you have extra chores to do before curling up in a blanket. Other times, otthon was in response to life experiences widely shared in the local community—an expectation of discrimination in lowland Thailand or a life of poverty brought about through educational inequalities. Although there are success stories of people from Little Creek Village and the surrounding area doing well in life—opening a successful business in the city, marrying out of poverty, passing the exams to study medicine at university—these are exceptions to the more usually expected outcomes. People in this community do not treat systemic societal inequality as a situation that can be realistically resolved. Being born into a Karen village in the uplands of Mae Hong Son Province brings with it a host of difficulties that will be encountered across a lifespan. For most people, those difficulties are accepted and managed through otthon. Even if one is able to find their way out of poverty, there will be a lot of sacrifice and endurance along the way. The specific ways that children relate to the structural position of the Karen in Thai society are not well documented in the existing literature. A key contribution of my research is adding the voices of Karen children to those acknowledging this cultural expectation that they must inevitably face hardship and otthon (endure). Childhood awareness of complex issues often framed as ‘adult’ in nature has been widely documented by anthropologists in a range of different settings, and I add to this body of literature with this thesis. In the area of my fieldwork, and in Thailand generally, this is at odds with the way that childhood is often described and reflected upon by adults. Nostalgia about childhood in Thailand often frames it as a time free of worries. In chapter four, Khru Keng used nostalgia about his own childhood to speak positively about boys pursuing romance with girls. In other conversations with Keng, he told me about how stressed he often was in his adult life and that he longed for the carefree times of his youth. In chapter five, Khru Tao saw the M3 girls as on the verge of leaving this carefree period behind. She implored them to begin thinking carefully about their adult futures and to cease acting carelessly for the sake of fun, which was devalued as a non-serious concern in the grand scheme of things. By focusing my methodology on getting to know children within their own social settings, I was able to assess to what degree the students at Little Creek School actually were carefree. As it turns out, students were not unaware of nor unaffected by the issues that their parents and teachers were often stressed about. Students did value the free time that was afforded to them as children, but the years of enjoyment available to them were not taken for

179 granted. They were not ignorant of the hardship both surrounding them and directly affecting them. I learned this by spending time with students while teachers were all in meetings, by listening to their explanations of online posting behaviour, and by observing the reasons why children became upset. In chapter three, I introduced Somjai’s younger sister, Chatchaya, to demonstrate that even very young students are intimately familiar with the harsh realities of their position in society. My descriptions of Chatchaya’s play behaviour can be fit easily into a portrayal of children as carefree and with fun as the main focus of their spare time. She was known by teachers as a student who is always mucking around and joking, not taking her schoolwork very seriously. My more reflective conversations with Chatchaya away from contexts of play revealed the nuances of what ‘fun’ actually meant to her. Chatchaya was very self-aware that her family was quite poor, even compared to some of her peers at Little Creek School. She expressed a reluctance to optimism about her future, brushing off possibilities of being able to leave her village and pursue dreams elsewhere. Following such moments of reflection, Chatchaya would promptly engage in play that she found fun. This sort of fun was neither an expression of innocence nor a statement about her attitude to education. Rather, it was the way that she chose to engage with the difficulties she was experiencing in her life. I also introduced Chatchaya’s classmate, Narirat, in chapter three, whose story I continued in chapter four. The pressures Narirat had to contend with daily were not domestic problems like Chatchaya’s but pressures associated with representing her ethnic group as a role model of educational success. Narirat was encouraged to do well specifically to disprove lowland Thai preconceptions about the academic potential of all Karen in Thailand. When representing Little Creek School in lowland urban centres, Karen students are seen as

‘mountain children’ (dek doi; เด็กดอย) and members of a ‘hill tribe’ (chao khao; ชาวเขา). In mainstream Thai society, labels like these variously suggest dirtiness, quaint politeness, stupidity, and exotic intrigue. Prathom students like Narirat are not unaware of the prejudice their people face in Thailand, and as students grow older and move onto M4 at lowland schools these labels are encountered on an everyday basis. In the latter half of chapter four, I moved onto mathayom girls’ difficulties at school associated with alleged sexual activity. Once again, this investigation revealed children’s engagement with complex societal issues that they encounter in their daily lives. Somjai’s tale of expulsion and early marriage took place in the context of her father’s drug addiction exacerbating her family’s struggle with poverty. While teachers framed the opposition between school and sexuality as a simple matter of making the right choices, Somjai’s classmates were quicker to point out the extraneous factors involved. Mawika drew attention to the financial barriers to education interacting with traditional marriage practices in the village to exclude

180 many girls from further education. Nattaya drew attention to suicide as a reality for many Karen girls who feel they have no other way of taking control of their lives. When teachers reflect nostalgically on their youth, they omit or downplay the above types of narrative. And despite speaking positively about the freedom of youth, they actively work to curtail that freedom among their students in efforts to protect them from harm and facilitate their successful entry into Thai society. One of the main concepts used to discuss such efforts is tangjai rian, which I turn to in the next section.

Disciplining the Heart

As I have noted above, the simplest definition of tangjai rian is ‘to focus on learning and studying’. Throughout this thesis, I have argued for a more nuanced understanding of this term. In chapter four, I provided clear examples of how this term was used in everyday speech at Little Creek School. I identified tangjai rian as both something people are encouraged to actively do and also an enduring character trait that may be associated with certain people. The discipline required to ‘affix learning and studying to the heart’ or ‘set the heart towards learning and studying’ is treated as the ideal orientation of the self for students in Thailand. I initially learned of the ubiquity of tangjai rian as an ideological concept through my presence in classrooms at Little Creek School. In the first half of chapter four, I focused on the experiences of two students in the P2 classroom to highlight this. Whether successful or unsuccessful academically, the concept of tangjai rian was habitually used by teachers to assess these students’ behaviour. In the second half of chapter four, I used the case study of Somjai’s expulsion and early marriage to highlight the opposition between tangjai rian and adolescent sexuality. Despite the additional life circumstances involved in Somjai’s decision making, teachers invariably interpreted Somjai’s actions as indicating a failure to tangjai rian and thus a rejection of this ideal. Due to this tension between tangjai rian and adolescent sexuality, I described Little Creek School as a ‘risky geography’ for girls who are likely to be suspected of illicit behaviour—girls identified by teachers as ‘beautiful’ are more likely to have their schooling interrupted due to either being expelled or voluntarily dropping out. The majority of chapter five was used to explore how the appropriate navigation of love was taught at Little Creek School. My findings suggest that love is closely connected not only to sexual activity but also to tangjai rian. This connection was made quite explicit within the ‘life skills’ curriculum offered at Little Creek School. The sexual health education included in an annual life skills workshop focused heavily on promoting abstinence from sex as necessary on mostly moral grounds. Students were taught that one means of avoiding sex is to tangjai rian—one counteracts the other. If one engages in sex and therefore does not tangjai rian, the consequences do not only affect one’s sexual health. Students were taught that the social

181 consequences will also greatly impact their parents and families. I explained this connection through reference to the ways that tangjai rian functions to fulfil debts of gratitude that are powerfully felt between children and their parents, and also their teachers. To tangjai rian is thus a project of love that in this context requires a full reorientation of the self, precluding alternative projects of love such as sexual relationships. My data also revealed, however, that mathayom students regularly pursued romantic relationships that teachers would prefer they steered well clear of for the sake of tangjai rian. This was in spite of the fact that most mathayom students did highly value tangjai rian as an ideal they earnestly aspired to. Students like Somjai, who very clearly violated expectations of appropriate sexual conduct, represent exceptional cases. But even nonsexual romantic relationships were only tolerated by teachers if they functioned to support a student’s efforts to tangjai rian. In chapter five, the relationship between Mawika and Attachai was held up by Khru Keng as an example of such a relationship. In chapter seven, however, I reflected on Attachai revealing to me that his relationship with Mawika had in fact involved surreptitious activity that, while not as serious as Somjai’s misconduct, was nonetheless in violation of the rules. In the next section, I elaborate on students’ own interpretations of tangjai rian and the role that this plays in their navigation of romantic relationships alongside educational success.

Succeeding at Love while Studying: Serious Play in Figured Worlds

Students shared with me a Thai saying that highlights the difficulty they experienced navigating romance alongside education: ‘finding love while studying is like lighting a candle in the rain’

(rak nai wai rian muean jut thian klangsai fon; รักในวัยเรียนเหมือนจุดเทียนกลางสายฝน). A typical retort to this among mathayom students is that they will be fine because they have an umbrella. Although tangjai rian remained an important value to students themselves, and they acknowledged the barriers to balancing education and sexuality, they nonetheless recognised the ubiquity of romance as a defining feature of their teenage years that they were not willing to surrender. My first step towards learning about how mathayom students ‘light candles in the rain’ was to closely follow cases where the idiom held true and the opposition between sexuality and education was publicly reinforced. This material was a point of focus in the latter half of chapter four. The most prominent case I considered was Somjai’s. After repeatedly being caught sleeping at her boyfriend’s home on weekends, Somjai was expelled from school during her first term in M3. A few months later, she was married. Despite Somjai’s desire to continue her schooling, school authorities would not allow her to do so while continuing her relationship. She maintained her own approach to tangjai rian by finding time where she could to gradually work towards her high school equivalency at the informal education centre (ko so no; กศน.).

182 This did not change her public status as a student who failed to tangjai rian. Somjai’s classmate, Ratchanok, had a similar beginning to her story—she left the dormitories to sleep at the home of her boyfriend and was caught by teachers. Ratchanok was able to maintain her potential to tangjai rian and thus remain in school only by immediately ending the illicit relationship. I also offered the example of an M1 student, Patcharee, who outright rejected the merits of tangjai rian. Patcharee dropped out of school before ever engaging in any morally risky behaviour, then proceeded to openly seek romance online, presenting herself in ways that would have been deemed inappropriate were she still a student at Little Creek School. Once I was aware of the moral weight attached to students’ romantic pursuits, I began searching for evidence of cases where students were successful at balancing school with their love lives. The possibility of this scenario was mentioned in chapter five, as Khru Keng publicly discussed the relationship between Mawika, an M3 village girl, and Attachai, an M3 dormitory boy. Following student reactions to this discussion during the life skills workshop, however, I began to suspect there was more to learn about this particular relationship. Mawika and Attachai’s story was revisited in chapter seven. Ultimately, the couple had broken up before the end of the school year. I learned from Attachai, however, that while the relationship was ongoing and had the approval of the school, the pair had been regularly engaging in illicit behaviour undetected. The illicit behaviour here was not of the same magnitude as that of Somjai or Ratchanok, but it was actively concealed all the same. There were several other ongoing relationships at Little Creek School during the year of my fieldwork. I knew of a handful that were between students within the local cohort. I knew of several students who had a boyfriend or girlfriend attending a different school. In almost all cases, students were not willing to reveal any further information to me about the nature of these relationships. This was a limitation of my positionality as a teacher-researcher at Little Creek School. My lack of specific data in the majority of cases, combined with my knowledge that the relationships did exist, suggests that students were well-practised at evading the moral authority of the school in conducting these relationships. Where I was able to catch glimpses of these ongoing relationships was on Facebook. In chapter six, I provided ethnographic description of the ways that mathayom students made use of Facebook as their primary means of meeting new love interests. Despite the technically public visibility of much of the students’ behaviour on this platform, it was framed as a space where outsiders should not enter with the intention to ‘meddle’ (yung; ยุ่ง). The surface visibility of morally risky behaviour made Facebook a topic of concern for parents and teachers. Even while surreptitiously using the platform throughout the week in the dormitories, students made a show of posting that they were logging out on Sunday afternoons in order to tangjai rian. By pursuing romance in the semi-private space of Facebook, mathayom students occupied an

183 alternative ‘figured world’ where they were able to engage in ‘serious play’ to renegotiate their moral ideals amongst themselves. Throughout this thesis, I have used the theoretical concepts of serious play and figured worlds to describe situations where students’ agency interacts with the institutional structures they are in the midst of. This theoretical approach, originally developed by Holland et al. (1998) as an extension of practice theory, is particularly well suited to a child-focused project such as mine. The presence of literal games and play in my fieldsite allowed me to deploy this metaphor to other realms of life in a way that could be ethnographically checked against its inspiration. In chapter three, where I first used this theoretical framework to analyse ethnographic data, I did so using the games of P2 students. This allowed me to avoid framing childhood games and play as merely analogous to serious play. Even within seemingly innocent early childhood games, there is the potential for serious play. I drew attention to the ways that serious play in the figured worlds of early childhood games allowed ‘fun’ to take on varied meanings among the P2 cohort that had ramifications for how students engaged with gender norms and approaches to coping with hardship. This kind of serious play with a taken-for-granted concept like ‘fun’ resulted in the joint authoring of new figured worlds occupied by the P2 students. Within my overall thesis, this detour into literal games established the process by which mathayom students play with the concept of tangjai rian. The mathayom students’ typical approaches to tangjai rian initially struck me as self- contradictory. They publicly voiced a desire to tangjai rian and insisted they were doing so, all the while blatantly acting in ways that could be described as not tangjai rian. This observation makes more sense once the alternative nuances of tangjai rian within the various figured worlds of mathayom students is taken into consideration. Romantic pursuits on Facebook or secret encounters around the school and village are behaviours that adults identify as risky and likely to lead to behaviour that will negate any possibility of tangjai rian. Students’ own senses of tangjai rian are not necessarily shaken by such preliminary dating behaviour because it was constructed within their own figured worlds that did not frame it as risk. In most cases, students acknowledged that if they actually began having sex, then that would mean that they did not tangjai rian. But they also had greater confidence in their own ability to manage the risks in a situation to avoid this eventuality. The dominant figured world of the school, by contrast, framed tangjai rian in a way that called for avoidance of such situations altogether. In chapter seven, I analysed various examples of this reasoning among the mathayom cohort. The story of Attachai and Mawika, recounted above, was among these. I also included an incident where two M3 dormitory girls, Kotchakorn and Duangporn, were caught sneaking out to see boys from another village late at night. This was a far more severe violation of the rules than those described by Attachai. Nonetheless, a similar logic can be seen in Duangporn’s reactions to the school’s response. She found it bemusing that the teachers made

184 various assumptions about her intentions and the supposed inevitability of certain outcomes had Khru Mot not intervened and stopped the girls. Duangporn had been sure that she could manage the unfolding situation in a way that would ensure her continued ability to tangjai rian. I also pointed to a Mother’s Day performance by the M3 class as another example of serious play. The main character of the play became sexually active, fell pregnant and was abandoned by her partner for another girl. The overt moral lessons conveyed in the performance were largely in line with the school’s framing of tangjai rian. I argued, however, that closer analysis of the side characters in the performance could be telling of how the mathayom students approached tangjai rian slightly differently to teachers and parents. The side characters in the performance excitedly encouraged their friend to pursue a relationship while at school, but they still expressed concern when the boy in question began to act in ways that directly endangered their friend’s ability to tangjai rian. The performance argued that ‘school is spelled l-o-v-e’, suggesting that even though romantic love may sometimes be challenging to educational success and vice versa, the two are inseparable experiences in the lives of mathayom students. The value of describing this kind of rule-breaking behaviour using the theory of serious play in figured worlds is that it can account for the diversity in student behaviour and reasoning within the cohort. This terminology can be used to describe the actions of both Somjai and Mawika, despite the very different extent of their actions. There can be more than two figured worlds operating in the same physical space. The figured world of the school framed Somjai as absolutely not able to tangjai rian. The figured world of Mawika and her friends may also frame Somjai as somebody who did not tangjai rian, but I have shown in chapter four that they nonetheless were more open to expressing sympathy for Somjai in light of the additional circumstances affecting her decision-making. Even after expulsion and marriage, I described how Somjai continued to hold ambitions for educational success. She entered yet another figured world, where tangjai rian was no longer bound to ideals of children in the institutional setting of a school.

Saying Goodbye: Implications and Further Questions

‘I’m really happy today’, Siwaporn declared, followed by a long sigh. ‘And I’m sad too.’ I stood by the P2 classroom with Siwaporn, Narirat, and Wipa after the M3 graduation ceremony had come to a close. Dormitory students had already begun leaving for the holidays. ‘I’m going to really miss my elder classmates (phi phi; พๆี ), but I’m glad they all did well and get to graduate’,

Siwaporn explained.

185 Well, not all of them, I thought, as my mind turned to Somjai’s absence. ‘Yeah, I’m a bit sad as well’, I said to the P2 girls. ‘You know, I’m leaving soon too, right? I won’t be here next year.’ Narirat’s eyes widened and then dropped for a moment as a frown spread across her face. ‘Really?’ she asked. ‘Yeah. I’ll still be around for a few more days though. And I’ll come to visit when I can.’ I thanked the girls for their insights and friendship throughout the year and promised I would not forget them as I went home to write about my time at Little Creek School. Siwaporn took my hand and led the four of us into the P2 classroom to play hide and seek together one last time. Our game came to a close as Khru Nong walked into the classroom to get her things. She laughed as she spotted me crouched on the floor underneath her desk. She must think I’m such a bizarre teacher, I thought. One outcome of being emplaced as a teacher-researcher at Little Creek School was that my project was almost always framed by my research participants as relating to education specifically. As I noted in chapter two, I was often asked for advice about aspects of teaching and learning that were beyond the scope of my research objectives, such as what my data could tell the staff about how to better engage students in the classroom or improve comprehension of lesson content. Put simply, teachers, parents, and the director of the school wanted to know how my research could generate new methods for encouraging students to tangjai rian more than they currently were. These encounters were one way that I learned about aspects of tangjai rian contained within the classroom and not directly related to gendered sexual morality. Following requests for advice about pedagogical matters, I did my best to give informed suggestions based on my classroom observations but with repeated caveats that this was not my area of expertise as an anthropologist. Nonetheless, the extended engagement with the concept of tangjai rian that I have presented in this thesis should be of use to those looking to intervene in the quality of education in Thailand, whether nationally or specifically in upland ethnic minority areas. Any engagement with students in Thai classrooms looking to improve academic outcomes needs to incorporate a situated understanding of what schooling means to the students in that location. Approaching tangjai rian as I have done in this thesis is a key part of that process. As I noted in the introduction to the thesis, the theoretical framework of figured worlds that I have used has also been of use to many scholars of education. A further project using a similar theoretical framework could thus be designed to focus more specifically on the pedagogical issues that teachers raised as important to them during the course of my research. Such a project among the Karen of Mae Hong Son Province would of course benefit greatly

186 from the work I have already done mapping the significance of tangjai rian beyond the classroom. Regardless of a child’s academic success or failure in the classroom, my ethnography has demonstrated all of the children at Little Creek School to be active cultural producers and adept learners of the figured worlds that they pass through and claim ownership of. Failure is an institutionalised event that tends to disregard the ‘intentions, desires, and actions’ of students (McDermott 1987: 363). Blaming minority students for their institutionalised shortcomings at school obscures the figured worlds that they thrive in and obstructs interventions that aim to improve their position in both the academy and society. This has been summed up well by McDermott (ibid.):

By making believe that failure is something that kids do, as different from how it is something that is done to them, and then by explaining their failure in terms of other things they do, we likely contribute to the maintenance of school failure.

This statement captures the source of the anger and frustration that I felt when I first learned about the circumstances surrounding Somjai’s expulsion from the M3 class at Little Creek School. While everybody around me was talking about how she did not tangjai rian, I was feeling that the school had failed her. I felt compelled to help—to prove, in my role as a Little Creek School teacher, that the school had not given up on her. I attended Somjai’s wedding as the sole representative of the school. I told her that I bore no ill judgement towards her. I offered to volunteer my time and tutor her if she needed help with her studies at the informal education centre. Somjai and her family were grateful for these gestures from a very bizarre foreign teacher, but there was nothing I could do to change the immediate situation. Chatchaya missed her older sister and once asked me to bring Somjai back with me when I was about to visit Chiang Mai. I could not. So, I carried on with my research. I gave Chatchaya and her brother, Tirayut, a hug before I left for Canberra. And then I left. My thesis has told the stories of a number of individual children. There are still other stories that remain waiting in my fieldnotes. Within the photographs I have taken and the stories I have written, these children are frozen in time. The characters I said goodbye to at the beginning of this section will forever be eight years old in these pages, celebrating their last day as P2 students. This is the reality of any finished ethnography, but it is particularly striking to me given the focus on children here. I often read about an ethnographer’s lifelong involvement in the ongoing life course of their informants in the acknowledgements and forewords of ethnographies published many years after the completion of initial fieldwork. But even before completing this thesis, the lives of my research participants have drastically changed. Two to three years is not always necessarily a long time in adult worlds, but the difference between P2 and commencing P5 is an enormous one for someone like Chatchaya.

187 The last time that I saw her, that is where she was at, not going home after P2 graduation. It would be dishonest of me to pretend that that is not the case as I write this, and so I write this here in my conclusion—within the thesis—not in my acknowledgements or in the foreword of a book I may or may not publish within the next decade. Throughout the thesis, I have done my best to indicate roughly the moment in time when key pieces of data were collected. I have avoided the ethnographic present tense to continuously emphasise the passage of time. Notwithstanding the passage of three years since I first commenced fieldwork for this project, the issues I have engaged with in this thesis are yet to be resolved. So, what then does the future hold for Little Creek School and the children who pass through this institution? Will these students always be second-class citizens? Will ‘beautiful girls’ in upland village schools always be navigating a risky geography that may lead to expulsion and early marriage? I cannot answer these questions in relation to specific individual characters from the thesis. None of the data I collected suggests that either the socioeconomic situation in this community or the moral framework promoted by the authority of the school is likely to change any time soon. The cultural capital on offer through schooling is not a sure thing. Even if it is obtained, it is not a guarantee of social and economic success for Karen high school graduates in Mae Hong Son Province. What is certain, is that Karen graduates now and into the future will leave school knowing the benchmarks for Thainess. Schooling in Thailand is not just a means of conveying knowledge and information. It is a project of ethnonational belonging that frames marginal groups such as the Karen as internal others. It inflicts failure upon them and then tells them that it is their own fault. In order to compensate for their disadvantage, students are told by parents and teachers to adhere to strict moral standards. To tangjai rian in this context purportedly requires a single-minded focus on school that is threatened by romantic love and any hint of sexuality. Students take this advice seriously. They love their parents and teachers, and many earnestly strive to tangjai rian in order to honour them. At the same time, however, they incorporate these ideas into their own figured worlds. Through serious play, new value is added to schooling for the students at Little Creek School. Rather than eternally striving for an unattainable ideal of Thainess, these children reject a mode of experiencing school that has only a single goal in mind. Education and the associated cultural capital may or may not benefit individual students, but experiences of romantic love are beyond the control of the institution and add value to students’ passage through it. This is an aspect of schooling that students themselves bring to the table and remain in control of. By pursuing their own priorities, future generations of students at Little Creek School—and other schools that I visited throughout my fieldwork—will continue to broker their own figured worlds through serious play.

188 People often say that children are the future, and they are of course correct. But children are not just the future of adult society. The children of today are the future of tomorrow’s children. There are vibrant cultural worlds among children, with complex practices, ideas, and morals being shared, passed down, and altered within social worlds that operate away from the prying eyes of adult supervision. This is the most generalisable lesson that has emerged from my investigation of what tangjai rian means to this Karen community in the highlands of northern Thailand. Any future change that comes to the moral ideals holding power at Little Creek School will be intimately bound to the serious play of the children who reproduce those ideals as they are taught to them. As new generations of students enter the institution, they too will learn what it means to be both Karen and Thai. But older children will be there alongside them, teaching them that there is more to schooling than what is mandated by the institution. They will explore institutional space in unanticipated ways, according to their own priorities. They will learn how to pursue romantic love in conjunction with ideals of tangjai rian. They will decide for themselves if doing so is a meaningful goal in their own lives. And after reaching adulthood, they will continue to play—seriously and otherwise—and to thereby shape the figured worlds that they move through in Thai society.

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