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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 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]