Same same but different: Eine romantische Dekonstruktion des paradoxografischen Trends in den gegenwärtigen Thai Studien.

Why is the paradox such a common trope in scholarly texts discussing Thailand's contemporary socio-cultural configuration? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand's lower Northeast, this article presents philosophical reflections on this omnipresence of the paradox and sets out to document a paradoxographical trend in contemporary Thai studies. As becomes clear in the debate on "Anthropology and the study of contradictions" initiated by David Berliner, anthropological fieldwork is a special laboratory for observing contradictions. I started my ethnographic fieldwork with the goal of documenting how the ethnic identity of Thailand's Khmer-speakers is reproduced through popular religious rituals. The assumption that there is an ethnic group to be studied became the source of various apparently paradoxical observations that moved the question for the place of the paradox in contemporary Thai Studies into the center of my theoretical reflections. Based at the intersections of anthropology, philosophy and sociology this interdisciplinary texts seeks out to deconstruct the paradoxographical trend that haunts contemporary Thai studies by mapping the ideological function of the paradox in naturalistic language games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]