Discursive Competence and the Micropolitics of Empowerment in Rural Thailand

Abstract

This paper examines the production of empowerment in a local community action project in Northeastern Thailand, in which local villagers undertake their own ecological and ethnographic research as a way to resist intrusive state practices. Empowerment in this con text consists primarily in access to, and production of, literate, formalized forms of discourse that authenticate local villagers' experiences and knowledge, and produce written research reports-a process which involves 'translating' between everyday discourse and formalized discourses of science and bureaucracy. Access to such forms of language depends on project advisors-academics, NGO workers, activists, and research assistants-who not only have the linguistic skills to generate the discourse, but also have the social status necessary to legitimately embody it. The overarching aim of such Thai Baan projects is political decentralization and local empowerment-a change from top-down models of power to more grassroots, bottom-up forms of power. But examining typical interactions between advisors and villagers-i.e. through finegrained micro politics-we see how difficult it is to escape the top-down nature of political power.