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Belittled Citizens - The Cultural Politics of Childhood on Bangkok's Margins (Hardcover)
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Belittled Citizens - The Cultural Politics of Childhood on Bangkok's Margins (Hardcover)
Series: NIAS Monographs, 155
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What does childhood mean in contemporary Thailand? What constitutes
childhood in a slum? How does childhood figure in the construction
of national citizenships? Rich in ethnographic detail, this
fascinating, engaging and illuminating study explores the daily
lives, constraints, and social worlds of children born in the slums
of Bangkok, and their ways of defining themselves in relation to a
range of governing technologies, state and non-state actors, and
broad cultural politics. It does so by interrogating the layered
meanings of "childhood" in slums, schools, Buddhist temples,
Christian NGOs, state and international aid organisations, as well
as social media. Giuseppe Bolotta's analysis employs "childhood" as
a prism to make sense of broader socio-political, religious, and
economic transformations in Thai society. By examining the
competition between different Thai and foreign actors to define and
control the world-view formed by these children, he demonstrates
how Bangkok slums are political arenas within which local, national
and global social forces and interests converge and clash. At the
same time, this analysis highlights the roles played by Bangkok's
poor children in processes of social change, considering how young
people's efforts to make sense of themselves in an era of
authoritarian rule reflect the broader tensions facing the urban
poor in this complex moment of Thai history. The book shows how
"marginal childhoods" and the "cultural technologies of childhood"
- schools, religious agencies, NGOs - reflect both endemic
inequalities in Thailand's larger socio-political structure and
global transformations in transnational childhood governance.
Marginalized young people's increasingly plural cultural references
create space for both existential fragmentation and creative
self-reformulation, which provide socially disadvantaged citizens
with unexpected religious, economic, and political resources to
challenge Thai society's generational structures of power. Through
these arguments, Belittled Citizens demonstrates that "childhood"
is best understood in Thailand as a political category that has
been fundamental to the military state's rule and, potentially, its
undoing. It also shows more broadly how attention to children,
typically excluded from national politics and therefore invisible
in most political analyses, has important potential for producing
startling insights into contemporary Southeast Asian societies
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