3 - Tribal People on the Southern Thai Border: Internal Colonialism, Minorities, and the State

Summary

… in this part of the world, the word “aborigines” is applied only to the Orang Asli of Malaya and to the aboriginal population of Australia. In both cases we find a situation where the “aborigines” do not only form a very small proportion of the total population, but they are also economically and socially backward when compared to other races. (Carey 1976, p. 5.)

The “aborigines” of Southeast Asia generally, and those of the Malay Peninsula in particular, have been subject to varying forms of scholarly scrutiny and state intervention since the colonial period. However, substantial attempts are now being made to grasp their ethnological, historical, and social positions from a comparative perspective. Early evolutionist paradigms postulated a “Negrito” population in much of the region, displaced through varying proto-historical movements by more “advanced” peoples. As these modes of analysis lost legitimacy, and particularly under the influence of ethnographic studies within “national” regional definitions, the effort to understand the origins and dispositions of the many “tribal”, “aboriginal”, or “indigenous” groups in Southeast Asia gave way to much more defined scholarly aims, focusing on specific groups in defined ethno-ecological areas. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, an emerging concern with indigenous or tribal peoples in the face of global development has called for a renewed interest in ethnological, social, and political comparison. The postcolonial1 era has seen increasing pressure on the habitats, lifeways and continued social reproduction of minority groups, particularly in those parts of the world where the impacts of industrialization, tourism, and population growth have occurred with explosive results. The role of the respective national governments and states in maintaining, controlling or ignoring these impacts calls for urgent and specific comparative analysis.

The situation of the so-called Sakais in southern Thailand is an excellent exemplar of the historical, cultural, social and political relations between dominant (hegemonic) nation-states and the small, vulnerable populations encircled by them. The former are committed to various versions of national identity and nation-state power, but the latter find themselves stranded (more or less) within these alien life-worlds. Very small groups of Sakais are now scattered in three isolated regions of Thailand, living close to or within shrinking jungle tracts across five southern Thai provinces.