#thai studies

[siathawisit]

Baby Ghosts: Child Spirits and Contemporary Conceptions of Childhood in Thailand | TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast

Baby Ghosts: Child Spirits and Contemporary Conceptions of Childhood in Thailand - Volume 2 Issue 2

This is an EXCELLENT (open access and clearly written) article on an interesting phenomenon in Thailand... And it reminded me of one of my pet peeves re: some of the discourse around Thai media that I see here on Tumblr. While not universal beliefs by any means, stuff like ghosts, magic, reincarnation, supernatural creatures, etc aren't necessarily fantasy "worldbuilding" elements. This IS real life. In fact, Thailand is one of the famous case studies for how modernity, capitalism, science or what have you do NOT necessarily lead to the disenchantment of the world -- just to a whole new set of possibilities for human and non-human/more-than-human interactions.

[xagan]

Please allow me to share the best acknowledgements I've ever seen in an article

[raccoonstudiez]

Day 22/100

2019.08.13

I recently started getting into Photography again and my father gave me this really old Polaroid camera and bought me some film for it, needless to say, I love taking pictures with it! 

I also managed to finally clean up my desk and I have to say, it feels amazing being able to work freely and not having to worry about a cluttered desk!

Further, then that, I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of studying I got done today! 

Maths ~ 1hr 20min

I started with Chapter 1 of my Senior book and I have been working my way through the first topic. So far it’s going fairly well, but I know it won’t last.

Latin ~ 1hr 30min

Reviewed lots of Vocab and did some light Grammar! 

Spanish ~ 3hr 20 min

I got a lot of Spanish done today! Besides finishing a chapter of my school book, I also did a lot of Duolingo and reviewed some Flashcards. 

In addition to that, I also had a long talk with a Native speaker, where we talked in both German and Spanish! I really enjoyed that, since I barely get to talk Spanish.

Thai ~ 1hr

I have finally found some good resources to study Thai and hopefully, from now on I will be able to actually make some progress learning Thai!

Today I learned the following words:

สวัสดี – ค่ะ - Hello

สบายดีไหม – ครับ / ค่ะ - How are you?

สบายดี – ค่ะ - Fine, thank you

ขอบคุณ  – ค่ะ - Thank you

ใช่ – ค่ะ - Yes

ไม่ –  ค่ะ - No

อาจจะ – ค่ะ - Maybe

ไม่เป็นไร – ค่ะ - Never mind/it’s okay

ผมฉันพูดภาษาไทยไม่ได้ – ค่ะ - I can’t speak Thai

กรุณาพูดช้าช้า – ค่ะ - Please speak slowly

Korean ~ 2hr 40min

I worked in all of my four Korean books, did some additional Flashcards and FINALLY after a long long time some Duolingo lessons! I am very pleased with how my Korean is progressing, but I still could work a lot harder! I only did 5 words today, because I reviewed a lot of words.

As always here are the words I learned for my LAPTOP1000 challenge:

지나다 - to pass, elapse, go on

많이 - a lot (adverb)

시간 - time, hour(s)

인간 - a human being, a person

사실 - the truth, a fact

Words from the Vocab lists in ITALIC are words I already knew

[siathawisit]

There's not a huge amount of research on Thai GL, so I was very happy to see this pop up on a FB page that promotes humanities and social science work in Thai journals and dissertation repositories.

One thing I particularly appreciated was that they acknowledge that It's Complicated rather than just celebrating it as subversive or condemning it as assimilationist. (That's not uncommon in queer studies, and I find it irritating. But it's not my field so whatever.)

Anyway, give it a read!

[siathawisit]

(PDF) Eastern Orientations: Thai Middle-Class Gay Desire for ‘White Asians’

PDF | Romantic partnerships affect local ways of thinking about and experiencing the self amid rapid economic, social and political change.

Article of the day. Extremely useful for anyone interested in the politics of race/ethnicity and beauty and what exactly "whiteness" signifies in Thailand. Worth noting that the BL aesthetic is HIGHLY associated with this "Asian whiteness" (ie prestigious and wealthy East Asian countries like Korea and Japan).

Abstract:

[siathawisit]

I'm captioning old photos for an upcoming event at work and I came across a new-to-me one that might be of interest to Memoir of Rati fans.

The figure in the back of the carriage is the king ruling during the show's time period (still wearing a black armband because it was taken a few months after his father's death) and the hatless fellow looking rather knowingly at the camera is his right hand man and life partner.

The author of the MoR novel says she intentionally modeled the style of speech (in Thai) on the king's literary works, and a lot of the names look like references to the king and those close to him. It's a poignant homage for the centenary of his death (as I suspect Interminable will be as well).

[siathawisit]

I made a response post with this but I'm going to make an original post as well so it shows up in the MoR tag.

Re: the historical legal status of homosexuality in Siam/Thailand

The whole article by Peter Jackson, who specializes in Thai queer history, is very much worth a read:

Ejournal examining issues of Gender, History & Culture in the Asian Context

[siathawisit]

I haven't finished the Memoir of Rati ep yet but I was watching the "I am a slave" part while waiting for my carpool and then I got asked a question about slavery in the relevant time period at work (I'm a docent at a historic site associated with the MoR king, Rama VI).

Long story short, it was illegal at that time... But the process of phasing it out (by Rama V) had taken some decades. There's a lot of different opinions on the king's real motives for it -- the standard narrative is that he was inspired by the American example as well as the fear that the British or French might use it as a pretext to "civilize" (ie colonize) Siam; there's also a convincing argument by revisionist historians that it was part of the Chakri Reformation that centralized power in the royal government's hands. Interestingly, the name of that family (in the novel at least) refers to the last royal to be killed the traditional way (sewn up in a velvet bag and beaten with a sandalwood club). The charge they finally got him on (because 'ur gay' didn't work) was having so many prisoners of war (who were therefore slaves) in his personal possession that it looked like he was planning to topple Rama III. (The reformation put an end to those kind of private armies.) This guy, incidentally, was the great grandfather of Rama VI's life partners and the original namesake of what is now the Thai equivalent of the White House.

The word that is used in Thai is ขี้ข้า (khi kha) which actually has a wider semantic range than the legal term ทาส (that) and absolutely could be applied (cruelly) to people like Rati's mother in the WWI era. The Longdo dictionary's movie subtitle corpus gives some sense of its contemporary meanings: