Human rights include the right to practice and preserve one’s culture as well as the right to appropriate cultural resources. However, these rights are undermined when they are considered to be an emblem of rupture in homogenous societies or a hindrance to national progress. Rights to Culture presents several cases in which the cultural rights of marginalized groups in Thailand perish at the hands of the Thai state. These people are encouraged, or even forced, to surrender their cultural practices and resources in the name of the nation and its patriotic discourse. Residents living in the vicinity of Phanom Rung Historical Park, for example, have seen how their small-scale, communal ritual at the Phanom Rung sanctuary has been transformed into a grand touristic event. The original meaning of the ritual diminishes in the face of the discourse that glorifies the Thai state as the benevolent patron of ancient Khmer heritage. The cultural practices of minorities are exploited and also discriminated against. In the case of the Khmer-speaking villagers in the lower part of northeastern Thailand, prejudice against their language reveals how the cultural rights of minorities are violated. Speaking Khmer becomes grounds for discrimination, since it ties speakers to the Khmers in Cambodia while putting their Thai identity in question. Because it is deemed a hindrance to assimilation into Thai culture, many Khmer speakers in Thailand decide not to pass this legacy on to their children. These two cases from Rights to Culture show how the cultural rights of minority groups in Thailand are sacrificed for a nation in which homogeneity is taken as the crucial basis for stability.
The major virtue of Rights to Culture lies in its encompassing scope wherein different issues—ranging from linguistic ideology to the problem of citizenship among ethnic minorities in Thailand—are examined in depth. Nevertheless, this wide scope entails two problems: the obscure definition of the term “rights to culture” and the incoherence resulting from the fact that there seems to be no connection between the different chapters. The right to observe a religious ritual or to speak a certain language, as problematized in the second and sixth chapters, are self-evident as “rights to culture,” and further explanation may not be needed. However, the right to gain access to and to appropriate natural resources, featured in chapter 4 about the community forest movement in Thailand, may need elaboration on how this can be counted as a “right to culture.” In this chapter, the author argues that communities that locate in the national forest territory claim their right to manage the forest by drawing upon their traditions. Belief in forest spirits is the folk mechanism that restrains believers from exhausting the forest. With this belief, the community manages its natural resources effectively without the surveillance of the state. This case study seems to be more about the strategy employed by the community to gain control over its natural resources than about its cultural rights. This is quite similar to chapter 3, about the heritage district in Bangkok, that focuses on the difficulties faced by communities when their areas are declared to be heritage districts. These difficulties include the loss of financial and occupational opportunities that seem to have little to do with cultural rights. If the term “rights to culture” is left obscure, it follows that any right can be taken to be a cultural right. The unclear definition of the term results in each chapter focusing on assorted issues, as well as the lack of coherence among them.
These drawbacks of the book, nonetheless, do not outweigh its virtues. Rights to Culture sheds light on the complex landscape of human rights and culture in Thailand. It delineates how the decision to embrace or forsake a cultural practice involves far more than the individual and his or her community.
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[Review length: 634 words • Review posted on April 2, 2014]