The lyrics of laborious life: popular music and the reassertion of migrant manhood in Northeastern Thailand

Abstract

The focal subject under investigation in this paper is the gendered identities of overseas male migrant workers as presented in the contemporary popular song lyrics from Northeastern Thailand. My reading of such lyrics is informed by my ethnographic fieldwork of Thai migrant workers in Singapore. I intend to uncover some complex, cultural junctures of transnational labor migration, in which men, mobility, and music have come across and formed a social force to reshape cultural imagination of migrant manhood. I argue that popular music celebrates male heroism of overseas migrant workers. Instead of challenging existing structures of hegemonic masculinity in the region, popular song texts poetically reaffirm and reassert the traditional dominant gender ideology and cultural practice. Overseas workmen are usually depicted as hard‐working, self‐sacrificial heroes in their attempts to rescue their families as well as romantic, caring lovers and morally responsible fathers.     

Magic monks and spirit mediums in the politics of Thai popular religion

In this article, I read the politics of popular religion in Thailand through the case studies of magic monks and spirit mediums, which have been traditional key actors in the popular religious domain and have maintained their lasting popularity in the country in the 1990s and 2000s. Positioning my argument in the context of the much‐criticized commercialization of Buddhism, I accentuate that magic monkhood and spirit mediumship have exhibited themselves as culturally defined channels of, and strategies for, individuals' religious self‐empowerment. In the politics of negotiating and contesting for their religious identities and selfhood, the continued popularity of magic monk and spirit medium has exposed the conventional practices and ideologies of class and gender relations, which apparently favour men over women and, thus, countered attempts by ordinary disciples and followers to move out of their socially marginalized positions in both religious and socioeconomic worlds. In other words, the politics of Thai popular religion point to the affirmation or negotiation of existing religious and socioeconomic structures, but never the resistance against them. The consensus voice in this terrain of everyday life's religious practices emphasizes strong desire and a quest for material wealth and mundane success more than anything else.