Beyond vernacular and metropolitan concepts Good governance, translation and word coinage in Thailand

Claudio Sopranzetti*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

This article explores the emergence and transformation of the concept of good governance in contemporary Thailand after the 1997 economic crisis to reveal how it morphed from a technocratic category to a moral one, central to conservative and anti-democratic discourses in the country. By reconstructing historical and contemporary debates over word coinage and translation in Thailand, this article questions the easy distinctions between “metropolitan” and “vernacular” concepts. In so doing, I propose to carve a new space for an ethnographically grounded political anthropology that neither assumes a flattened and universal conception of political categories—such as state, power, or government—nor seeks refuge into pristine “vernacular concepts” but rather explores the pro-cesses through which specific people, organizations, and institutions are constantly reworking and diffusing concepts on multiple scales while aligning, challenging, or creating “global hierarchies of value,” in the plural, along which those concepts are positioned.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)717-731
Number of pages15
JournalHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Volume12
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2022

Keywords

  • Thailand
  • good governance
  • history
  • political thought
  • word coinage

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