Rituals of Care by Felicity Aulino

Author:Felicity Aulino [Aulino, Felicity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501739736
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Governance, Stigma, Patronage, and Power

The Volunteer Spirit Network has three major sponsors. One is the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (or Saw Saw Saw, สสส), the major health-funding arm of the Thai government, which is financed by a major tobacco and alcohol tax settlement. (Saw Saw Saw’s involvement is not surprising, as it plays a major role in all the organizations I discuss in this chapter.) Another is the TRRM, the Thailand Rural Reconstruction Movement. Although one of the earliest and most revered NGOs in Thailand (founded by Puey Ungphakorn), the TRRM has been criticized by more radical elements of society for its increasingly conservative agenda. Many see its current status, “under royal patronage,” as most telling of its activities. Finally, the Thai “Moral Center” (Sūn Khuntham, ศูนย์คุณธรรม)—also known as the Office for the Service and Development of Knowledge Organizations (samnakngān bǫrihān læ phatnā`ong khwāmrū (`ongkānmahāchon), สำนักงานบริหารและพัฒนาองค์ความรู้ (องค์การมหาชน))—is a public agency established by royal decree in 2004 with the mission to promote morality and development in the Thai population. On its board are such prominent people as the award-winning CEO of the Siam Commercial Bank, along with other leading public figures. The patronage of the Volunteer Spirit Network can thus be understood as primarily royalist, with a strong mandate for maintaining the status quo, despite its rhetoric for social change.

The social engineering involved does evoke biopolitics, as witnessed globally. One can read biopower in the Thai state’s aging-population policy agenda: therein, aging bodies are increasingly defined by and put under the auspices of the state, which seeks to foist an internalization of self-help and community care onto the populace so that its rule is supported by the people “caring for themselves” in the name of good citizenry. Appeals for aid must be made in a way that casts one’s body outside the typical purview of caring Thai neighbors. State recognition of someone as a helpful actor relies on a presentation of heartfelt motivation. But such a theoretical rubric, while very helpful for seeing rhetorical drives at the policy and programming level, is too blunt a tool for assessing the sectarian rifts and other particularities of the Thai situation. Ontological politics are at play here, and competing phenomenological protocols at stake.

The present structure and maneuvering of the Volunteer Spirit Network is a function of over fifty years of NGO operations in Thailand. NGOs are of course a potentially powerful force in any society, a force that governments have a keen interest in monitoring and controlling. That the network is officially recognized and sanctioned as such is, in part, a function of the National Cultural Act of 1942, which ordered organizations to register with the government “to ensure state control over a growing and potentially threatening sector” (Yamamoto 1995, 245–246). Again, in 1985, the government of Prime Minister Prem (1980–1988) initiated the NGO coordinating Committee on Rural Development, or NGO-CORD, “to bring NGO efforts into range of the government’s radar” (Simpkins 2003, 258).24

In broad strokes, the establishment of the Culture Ministry under the

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