Human Rights in Thailand. Don F. Selby

about how one takes human rights as an anthropological object involves this work in ongoing but quite recent discussions within anthropology that have freed themselves of the previous straightjacket of cultural relativism. As I mentioned at the outset, a focus on the social life of human rights⁵ provides the broad parameters into which this study fits. What human rights advocates in Thailand impressed upon me, though, is that it is less what human rights do to actors in a given situation that allows for a clear picture of human rights’ social force than what social actors do with human rights as ways of working out relations among themselves. That is to say, human rights in Thailand are a mode of relating to one another but a novel, emergent mode that attaches in unforeseeable and unexpected ways to long-established social practices and conventions. This book describes Thai social actors’ preliminary efforts to make sense of and judge the dimensions and implications of this emergent form of relating and attends to the mutually transfiguring force that human rights and the modes of sociality with which they entangle exert on one another.

       Chapter 1

      Experimenting with Fate

      In this chapter, I make the case that human rights emerged in Thailand significantly in relation to experiments with Buddhist morality. These experiments employed everyday ethics turned in specific ways by certain readings and practices of Buddhism that are at once recognizable within the Thai ethos and yet at odds with principles that many Thai take to be intrinsic to Buddhism (especially around questions of kamma, nibbana,¹ meditation practices, or merit in relation to social stratification). I examine here how Buddhism, which in principle eschews participation in worldly affairs like politics, becomes a resource for human rights and how, in turn, human rights invite a renewed consideration of debates over Buddhist morality. This is evident in the ways that key figures in the NHRC formulate human rights as available, if latent, in Buddhism and in the way Thai lawyers advocating for Burmese migrants’ rights enact consonant egalitarian principles. In this way, human rights politics and Buddhist politics configure or transfigure one another within a history of Thai Buddhisms that manifest progressive and reactionary faces, engaging sometimes with one another and sometimes with political events of the moment.

      This chapter argues that in this contingent nexus of historical, moral, and political forces in Thailand at the dawn of the millennium, human rights emerge as an event that reduces neither to the force of the official human rights discourses and practices of international organizations (like the United Nations [UN], in which the NHRC nonetheless participates) nor to indigenous forces (despite the claims of NHRC commissioners who find human rights in Buddhism but must still account for why they emerge at this time). I argue that human rights appeared as if overheard, involving a construction of understanding around a fragment, with the resources one has at hand rather than a process of vernacularization. Ultimately, such overhearing provides an opportunity, through engaging human rights, to renew stakes in an egalitarian Buddhist morality that provides for an articulation of human rights.

       The Event of Human Rights

      While Thai did not widely employ the language of human rights in their struggles, I contend that human rights were themselves an emergent event² in Thai political and moral life, as distinct from a critical event that introduces a break with the everyday.³ To say that human rights are in this way ordinary in Thailand does not mean that they are normal. The way that particular social actors articulate human rights with or through Buddhist ethics is not a normalization of human rights but a turning back to alternatives within Buddhist moral thinking on the occasion of human rights’ emergence.⁴

      In this sense, human rights offered an opportunity to resist dictation or conformity on moral issues, with conformity effectively crushing ordinary efforts to think and act morally or ethically.⁵ I take suppression of the ordinary to be the suppression of voice through dictation, with the implication that the recovery or discovery of voice may be possible only within the everyday, hence the need not to transcend but to turn again to the everyday. The aversion of conformity, or normalization, is a task that involves declining available discourses where one cannot find one’s voice with them (see Cavell 2003, 192–214). This is not an inability to speak—scripts are available, thrust upon us—as much as it is an inability to have one’s say. Cavell captures this perspicuously when he says that the aversion of conformity is “to turn around, or turn back (Wittgenstein says lead back), the words of ordinary life … that now repel thought, disgust it” (Cavell 2003, 193). Finding or recovering one’s ethical voice takes a turning back, again or anew, to alternatives that have remained suffocated—in the present work, stifled in Thailand’s particular religious, political, and social ethos. Below, I argue that the emergence of voice with or through human rights involved opposing hegemonic Buddhism not through escape but by a turn to specific Buddhist alternatives. In this way, transfiguration, rather than transcendence or rupture, connects the event to the eventual in the everyday.

      This is not an inevitable product of human rights, so we must attend to the specificities of human rights as an emergent event in Thailand to see how their articulation with and through Buddhist morality provided resources for the transfiguration of that very morality.

       Human Rights and Worldly Buddhism

      On 25 September 2005, the NHRC hosted a memorial service for Phra Supoj, a monk assassinated while promoting conservation in Chiang Mai province. It was 100 days after his murder, and the banner announcing the memorial at the NHRC’s original Phyathai Road location⁶ counted him among human rights defenders. In the lobby, outside the hall where the memorial would take place, were tables with coffee and food, as well as CDs and books for sale recounting Phra Supoj’s work and life. A little after 10:20 a.m., a dozen monks and around fifty laypersons entered the hall, which held a small shrine with a statue of the Buddha, lotuses, candles, burning incense, the Thai flag, a photo of the king, and a photo of Phra Supoj. The monks sat shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the seated attendees, and just before 10:30 a.m. began chanting. Forty minutes later, the religious ceremony concluded with individuals offering alms to the monks. They then extended a string from the Buddha statue around the monks and the photo of Phra Supoj, along which merit would travel to the deceased.

      Following the religious ceremony and a break for lunch, there were sessions by NHRC commissioners, monks, human rights activists, and government officials on topics ranging from the security of human rights defenders, the stagnation of Phra Supoj’s case, and the problem of “influential persons” in areas where threats to human rights defenders arise. The ostensive reason for convening this event was to sustain attention on the case. What interests me in particular, though, is how this effort—and, indeed, the work of Phra Supoj and his colleagues—brings together religious and secular activity, each bleeding into the other.

      The head monk, Phra Kittisak Kittisophon, who chaired the proceedings, was a controversial figure, in part for his previous campaigning for the Democrat Party in the South and in part because he had remained openly and publicly critical of Prime Minister Thaksin (of the rival Thai Rak Thai party). Of interest to me here is both that these monks participated, as monks, in this-worldly activity, and that the NHRC hosted the religious ceremony for Phra Supoj. I take the crossing of human rights and Buddhism not to be coincidental but to reflect positions within political and religious debates.

      Both monks were active in the Buddhadasa Study Group, which follows the teaching of the late monk Buddhadasa. Although Phra Kittisak has been criticized for the attention he has drawn to his own voice as a critic of Prime Minister Thaksin, Phra Supoj has won accolades for his work through the group, especially for the project in Chiang Mai province to extend Buddhadasa’s work by founding the Metthadhamma Forest Dhamma Center. The Thai news outlet Prachathai covered Phra Supoj’s murder extensively, describing increasingly violent efforts by local business interests to usurp land from the center in order to plant an orange orchard.⁷ The center’s land was around 600 acres (240 ha)—too much to monitor—and so, when developers started to clear, plow, and plant it, Phra Kittisak sought police assistance. Once the police