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Across Northern Thailand, het thop mushrooms (Astraeus) are foraged and sold into an increasingly commodified marketplace. A species of wild fungi that only appears for a short time each year, it is widely enjoyed across the diverse range of communities living in the region and increasingly positioned as part of the Lanna food and cultural aesthetic. Through a rapid rise in price over recent decades and the subsequent forging of supply chains linking rural communities to urban and online markets, foraging practices now provide significant seasonal incomes and form an essential part of annual livelihoods. However, as this paper contends – working closely with the analytical framing of "precarity" put forth by Tsing (2015) in a similar fungal context – there are forms of precariousness and uncertainty that are inherent in wild products, from the indeterminant ecologies from which it emerges, to the unreliable livelihoods that arise from it, and the fickle market for such products. The purpose is not to dismiss this market as frivolous or problematic, but rather to suggest that in a disturbed and distorted environmental and economic context such as Northern Thailand, this is indicative of a wider shift toward a "salvage economy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnographer's reconstruction of his experience in Thailand with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the flux of opposing biases he was subject to as a black African on one hand and a farang development expert on the other. The paper discusses how racial thinking affected dynamics in the UN office and in the field, and how and why those dynamics played out differently over the course of the project. It describes racial hierarchies and meanings situated in this particular country and era as a contribution to an unfinished anthropological inquiry: how blackness and whiteness are intimately woven into the everyday practices of development bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the emerging transnational mobility of Japanese young men as lifestyle migrants in Southeast Asia, mainly targeting those in their twenties and thirties moving to Thailand for a change of life. Japanese lifestyle migrants are considered to be socio-cultural “refugees” who escape the stresses of Japanese society and seek a better quality of life elsewhere. This paper explores how and to what extent mobility liberates Japanese men from the male-centered corporate culture orsalarymanmasculinity. It also analyzes the role that travel writings have had in the social labelling and facilitation of the lifestyle mobility of Japanese young men sojourning in Southeast Asia in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the construction of minorities in Thailand, questioning its naturalness, both theoretically and practically. Investigating the plight of Malay Muslim minorities in Thailand's far south can show how minorities are central to the construction of state power in Thailand. This article argues that Siam's annexation of the Sultanate of Patani requires a revision that brings its Malay Muslim subjects centrally and integrally into the history of modern Thailand. Indeed, given the Kingdom's propensity to use the trope of fragility to manufacture unity and patriotism, the Malay Muslims are in fact not at the margins but one of the key problematics for Thai nationalism, one that provides a pretext for the continuing exercise of state power and violence in Thailand's far south. The Malay Muslims in Thailand's far south are led to ask themselves whether they can be Thai enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gruesome murder of two British tourists in September 2014 on “paradisiac” Koh Tao, a world-renowned diving site in Thailand, attracted widespread international attention. The authorities therefore urged the police to swiftly resolve a case threatening foreign tourism arrivals and the country’s image. Using Innes’ concept of police “investigation narratives” in homicide cases, this report contrasts the narrative of the murders constructed by the police under pressure from the authorities, with a widespread counter-narrative, which criticized the police for scapegoating weak, illegal foreign labor migrants as the murderers, while allegedly covering for the real culprits. The article shows how a rigid adherence to the police’s narrative, due to extraneous considerations, backfired on the police and the authorities and embroiled them in a widening national and international dispute, with high stakes for the prestige of the Prime Minister, the reputation of the police and the image of the country. Under the circumstances, the prosecution and eventually the lower instance court accepted the police’s narrative, leading to a death sentence for the accused, which aroused wide indignation and protest, and is currently under appeal. In conclusion it is argued that Innes’ concept of investigation narratives has a political dimension, since such narratives can be strategically deployed by the police and used by the authorities for their own political ends, with deleterious implications for the dispensation of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For decades people from Myanmar have fled or migrated to Thailand. Civil conflicts, political repression, poverty and a lack of work opportunities are just some of the reasons why people have left Myanmar. Through these movements and the way they have been governed, a borderland has been constituted. In recent decades especially, the border itself has been strategically manipulated by state authorities to preserve a border area used as an industrial node for export-oriented industries dependent on cheap (i.e. migrant) labor. This article discusses the processes establishing the systemic categories of “refugee” and “labor migrant.” On the basis of fieldwork conducted from 2012 on, the article also analyzes the influence on the borderland of recent political and economic changes in Thailand and Myanmar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In late 2010, about 2000 human fetuses were discovered in the mortuary of a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. This article examines the subsequent affair from two perspectives: the magico-religious and the socio-political. The first deals with the fetuses as a symbol: it examines the beliefs regarding fetuses in Buddhism and Thai folk religion, and the manner with which the irruption of the fetuses into the Buddhist temple was dealt with. The second deals with the fetuses as an exposure of a widespread social problem with complex legal and social policy implications, and the way the authorities treated it. The two perspectives are related through Buddhism, which helped to resolve the magico-religious issue of dispatching the fetuses' spirits, while constituting a barrier to the resolution of the socio-political issue of change in the Thai abortion law. This created an irresolvable conundrum: the issue of abortion cannot be resolved in a sustainable way without affecting some of the fundamental premises on which Thailand's abortion law and its "regime of images" is based. The authorities preferred to uphold the law and sustain the image, rather than to resolve the basic underlying problem of which the discovered fetuses were just the most blatant symptom. This problem is the discrepancy between the restrictive abortion law and current sexual practices, which have engendered a growing demand for abortions by the younger generation of Thai urbanites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]