TY - JOUR
T1 - Beyond vernacular and metropolitan concepts Good governance, translation and word coinage in Thailand
AU - Sopranzetti, Claudio
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022/12/1
Y1 - 2022/12/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Thailand
KW - good governance
KW - history
KW - political thought
KW - word coinage
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85160025877&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1086/722611
DO - 10.1086/722611
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85160025877
SN - 2575-1433
VL - 12
SP - 717
EP - 731
JO - HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
JF - HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
IS - 3
ER -