Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Based on fieldwork conducted over the past fifteen years, Siege of the Spirits is an in-depth ethnography of a tiny community, Pom Mahakan, which dwells at the historic heart of a major metropolis, Bangkok. Pom Mahakan has been targeted for beautification and urban renewal by the city and national governments. The typically poor residents have organized in particular and often paradoxical ways to resist eviction on a large scale. Their protests are couched in the familiar symbolic idiom of the larger movement for the rights of the poor.and#160; But much of that idiom reflects middle-class values and practices. On the one hand, they sought to identify their community with the entire nation and its Buddhist heritage, so that any assault on their integrity could also be represented as an act of treason or sacrilege. Thus claiming the mantle of national history, they invert a scale of legitimacy in which the authorities have tried to place them on the lowest rung. On the other hand, their identification with the official narrative of a state they accuse of ignoring them, and especially with the discourse of reverence for an increasingly controversial and beleaguered establishment, carried serious risks for their future.and#160; Under siege is both their spirit of resilience but also their defense of the spirit shrines threatened with destruction through urban renewal. Herzfeld shows how the residentsandrsquo; claims to represent a microcosm of Thai Buddhist society influence political policy and public opinion. His attempt to arrive at an at least partial understanding of these apparent contradictions leads to the core of Thai ideas about power and into the arenas in which political practices translate those ideas into policies and actions.
Synopsis
What happens when three hundred alleged squatters go head-to-head with an enormous city government looking to develop the place where they live? As anthropologist Michael Herzfeld shows in this book, the answer can be surprising. He tells the story of Pom Mahakan, a tiny enclave in the heart of old Bangkok whose residents have resisted authorities demands to vacate their homes for a quarter of a century. It s a story of community versus government, of old versus new, and of political will versus the law.
Herzfeld argues that even though the residents of Pom Mahakan have lost every legal battle the city government has dragged them into, they have won every public relations contest, highlighting their struggle as one against bureaucrats who do not respect the age-old values of Thai/Siamese social and cultural order. Such values include compassion for the poor and an understanding of urban space as deeply embedded in social and ritual relations. In a gripping account of their standoff, Herzfeld who simultaneously argues for the importance of activism in scholarship traces the agile political tactics and styles of the community s leadership, using their struggle to illuminate the larger difficulties, tensions, and unresolved debates that continue to roil Thai society to this day.
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