The Participatory We-Self: Ethnicity and Music in Northern Thailand
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2017-08
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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The 20th century consolidation of Bangkok’s central rule over the northern Lanna kingdom and its outliers significantly impacted and retrospectively continues to shape regional identities, influencing not just khon mueang northerners but also ethnic highlanders including the Karen, Akha, Lahu, and others. Scholars highlight the importance and emergence of northern Thai “Lanna” identity and its fashioning via performance, specifically in relation to a modernizing and encroaching central Thai state, yet northern-focused studies tend to grant highland groups only cursory mention. Grounded in ethnographic field research on participatory musical application and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “flow”, this dissertation examines four case studies of musical engagements in the north as it specifically relates to ethnic, political, and autoethnographic positioning, narratives, and group formulation. In examining the inclusive and exclusive participatory nature of musical expression within various ethnic and local performances in the north, I show how identity construction and social synchrony, achieved via “flow,” sit at the heart of debates over authenticity, continuity, and ethnic destiny. This especially happens within and is complicated by the process of participatory musical traditions, where Thongchai Winichakul’s “we-self” is felt, synchronized, distinguished, and imagined as extending beyond the local performance in shared musical space across borders and through time—even as the “other” is present and necessary for the distinguishing act of ethnic formalization. Though wide-ranging differences persist among the many ethnic groups of the north, they share a common resistance to central “Thainess” and construct this via participatory musical engagement. Regional, local, indigenous, or ethnic identities here are thus formulated through sanuk, the enjoyment of participation, a process of “flow” that enables strong emotional bonds while also potentially exposing communities as fragile, ambiguous, and negotiable.
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Ethnicity in music--Community music--Music--Social aspects, Participatory music
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Northern Thailand
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