L'ambiente come spettacolo. Etnicità, sviluppo rurale e visioni politiche del paesaggio nel Nord della Tailandia (provincia di Nan)

Abstract

The thesis consists in a discussion of ethnographic sources gathered during fieldwork in Nan Province- Northern Thailand- in 2008 and 2009. The analysis operates at least on three interplaying levels.
 Firstly, drawing from theoretical suggestions coming from E.Goffman, G.Debord, C.Geertz, J.Scott and other authors, I emphasize the usefulness of the theatre-spectacle metaphor for the study of developmental and environmental social dynamics, as it allows to describe the institutionalization of a moral and aesthetic discourse of social responsibility and helps to explain frictions and contradictions happening in the backstage of the environmental spectacle at local, national and international scale. Secondly, I show how the articulation of environmental and landscape imaginaries, narratives and projections encourages forms of territorialization and counter-territorialization which are not reducible to a simplistic opposition between hegemonic and subaltern subjects and which need to be explored looking for cases that contradict this theoretical dichotomy through the description of situational subjective agencies. Thirdly, I enlighten a path along which the ideas of subalternity and hegemony are crucial not for the fact that they enclose specific and stable subjectivities, but for the reason that competition within and combination of hegemonic and subaltern social capitals in the environmental arena are sources of institutional stabilization in a country that is often in political trouble. The selective and discrete analysis of different stakeholders involved in this arena,reflected in the titling and succession of five chapters leads to understand how, similarly to what happens in the Luigi Pirandello’s drama I sei personaggi in cerca di autore (Engl.trans. Six characters looking for an author) I found out that subaltern subjects, and especially non T’ai and non-Buddhist ethnic minorities that used to be part of the communist guerrilla (1965-1983), in recent years tend to act like characters looking for an author who is capable of legitimizing their presence on the environmental stage; in this scenario, egemonic authors themselves (environmental institutional agencies) may behave as actors looking for other, superior sources of authority (Buddhist religion, the King, the media, the UN agencies...). Only if 'masked' as Khon M'uang they become able to act in the environmental spectacle as authorized subjects. Environmental populism works as a territorializing force and enact symbolic dispositives that indirectly tend to rewrite (and sometimes to cancel) upland environmental culture by the means of correcting its landscape.