Globalization and the Decline of Legal Consciousness: Torts, Ghosts, and Karma in Thailand, David M. Engel

In this study, Engel compares the legal consciousness of injury victims in Northern Thailand before and after a series of dramatic socioeconomic changes associated with globalization.

In the years that followed Engel's first study, Chiangmai's economy was transformed by global investments and industrial development. New ideas and images became familiar to the people of Chiangmai, along with new political, cultural, and religious ideologies. Increased tourism led to contact with visitors from around the world, and local residents also traveled far beyond the borders of their villages. The question this article explores, then, is how these global transformations had, by the turn of the twenty-first century, affected the forms of legal consciousness that had been apparent in 1975. Did globalization produce an increased tendency to adopt rule-of-law concepts, as many scholars would predict? Engel argues that, at least with respect to practices involving physical injuries, the answer is no. Even as traditional remedial systems began to atrophy, injury victims did not replace them with remedies afforded by state law nor with concepts associated with liberal legalism. Tort litigation was, if anything, less frequent than before, references to legal rights were all but nonexistent, and injury victims were left without any remedy whatsoever.

The article centers around the injury narrative of a middle-aged woman, “Buajan” (a pseudonym), whose leg was seriously injured in an accident.

Buajan lists multiple causes for her misfortune, including karma, fate, spirits, ghosts, the old man's negligence, and her own negligence - by which she meant that she must have lacked the Buddhist quality of mindfulness (sati), and if she had been more alert she would not have been hurt. She was especially conscious of the workings of karma, because she had beaten a dog that entered her house and broken its leg. It was no coincidence that her own leg was broken when Uncle ran her over. Moreover, she believed that, in a previous life, she had injured Uncle, and her karma caught up with her in this lifetime.

After the injury, Buajan pursued various measures to remedy her situation and make herself whole. She performed a traditional khwan ceremony to restore the vital essence that had fled from her body as a result of the trauma. She offered food to the Buddhist monks to make merit and rectify her karmic imbalance. And she attempted in various ways to negotiate a settlement with Uncle. These negotiations proved highly unsatisfactory, resulting in a minimal compensatory payment that barely covered her medical costs and totally failed to address her lost wages and pain and suffering. Buajan suspected that intermediaries in the negotiation process - the subdistrict officer (kamnan) and the police - had been bribed by Uncle, leaving her with no viable options.

Buajan sees herself as the victim of a gross injustice, and does not view the law as offering any hope for ordinary people like her:

Whenever I've used the law, I’ve gotten nothing. The police, for example. Law and the police. The law is loose and leaky. That’s how it is here.

The article concludes with some general observations about the impact of globalization on legal consciousness in northern Thailand from 1975 to the end of the twentieth century. According to the author, injury victims do not exhibit a greater attachment to liberal legalism than they had before. In fact, the reverse appears to be the case. Law in all of its forms - official and customary - has receded in importance and left injury victims like Buajan with the sense that they now have no recourse of any kind.

The effects of globalization are evident throughout the injury narratives of Buajan and others. Had globalization not had an impact on northern Thailand, we might imagine that Buajan, instead of moving to the city of Chiangmai, would have remained in the farming village where she was born. With fewer motor vehicles on the road, her chances of being struck by a car would have been sharply reduced; and with a less-extensive highway system, she might never have traveled to the butcher stand where she was injured. Had she suffered an injury in her own village, Buajan’s case would have been of intense interest to the entire community. Since her injurer would most likely have been a fellow villager, the injury would have been seen as a matter of concern to the local spirits, and the injurer would have been required to pay damages. Buddhist precepts, spirit worship, and the intervention of commu­nity leaders would in all likelihood have produced an agreement that con­formed to Buajan’s sense of justice - and probably that of her injurer as well. If the injurer did not agree to pay compensation, however, and if he was somehow beyond the reach of local systems of social control, Buajan might have been among the small number of individuals who chose to pursue a traditional remedy (in this case, khaa tham khwan) in the Chiangmai Provincial Court.

Because of globalization, however, Buajan's life changed, and so did the type of legal consciousness evident in the injury narrative that she recounts. As a result of globalization, her life was marked by mobility, separation from her birth community, economic uncertainty, frequent interactions with strangers in unfamiliar locales, elevated levels of risk, and increased disparities of wealth and power. With these changes came others that affected the conceptualiza­tion of her injury and the range of options she could imagine in response. Media reports and popular discourse increasingly emphasized rights and the rule of law, but at the same time “mediascapes” and “ideoscapes” dissemin­ated new forms of religious thought. They presented Buajan and others with familiar religious ideas in new packaging - Buddhist beliefs and practices that are no longer embedded in particular localities and connected to the animist practices associated with those localities. Buddhism has assumed a more universal form, located as much in the mass media and in translocal and transnational networks as in the village temple or in local connections between Buddhism and animism. Religion divorced from geography has great appeal to individuals who have become separated from the villages and communities where they grew up. Belief in spirits and ghosts remains strong, but the attachment to village-level remedial systems has weakened, and the close linkages between Buddhism and locality spirits have become attenuated. These developments have important implications for the role of law in the lives of ordinary people.

Injury narratives such as Buajan's reveal a complex form of legal conscious­ness marked by ambiguity and a degree of uncertainty. Buajan clearly con­sidered herself an aggrieved party and a victim of unfair treatment.

In the past, when local remediation systems broke down, a small but consistent number of injured persons pursued traditional remedies in the courts. But the option of litigation, even as a hypothetical possibility, is now conspicuous by its absence from the injury narratives. It no longer represents an alternative means to enforce village-level practices ensuring injury pay­ments, since such practices have become unfamiliar to most local residents. The risks and costs of litigation are seen as comparable to the risks and costs of police mediation, and a further disadvantage is the loss of control over one's own claim once it is in the hands of a judge. Yet these risks and costs were also present 25 years ago, when litigation rates per injury were higher than they are today. It appears that injury victims in Chiangmai now tend to view their belief in Buddhism as inconsistent with an aggressive insistence on a remedy.

But what about the effects of globalization on legal consciousness? Why has the “compression of the world”^[CI] not made individuals more familiar with liberal legalism and the language of rights? Why has the transnational dissemination of rule-of-law ideology - evident in the Thai “People's Constitution” of 1997, in the activities of numerous international agencies and NGOs that operate in Thailand, and in ubiquitous news reports and commentaries on national and international events - not made people like Buajan more inclined to conceptu­alize their injuries in legal terms and more ready to turn to the law for redress?

Perhaps Western observers are prone to exaggerate the influence of their own ideologies on people in other parts of the world. In modem Thai society, it is true that public discourse frequently refers to rights, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. Significant political mobilization around these concepts has indeed altered the course of Thai history over the past several decades. Yet references to rights and liberal legalism, like other symbols of “globalization,” must be interpreted with some restraint. Although such references indicate important developments in Thai society at the national level or in Bangkok, and although the English-language media may emphasize this type of discourse when offering accounts of contemporary Thailand, that does not necessarily mean that a broad-based transformation of Thai legal consciousness has occurred in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens throughout the country.

In other regions of the world, we have seen a resurgence of the great religious traditions, in part as a response to the effects of globalization in its many forms. This study of a particular locality in Thailand may illustrate how and why such dynamics can develop, as global influences change local circumstances for ordinary people. Buddhism is as fundamental to Thai culture today as it has been for centuries, yet it appears that its essential qualities have changed in some respects. If the injury narratives provide a reliable indication, the effects of globalization have contributed to a separation of Buddhism from locality-based beliefs and practices. Buddhism in Thailand is increasingly a universal religion whose norms can influence belief and action without regard to the location of the believer. Separated from the local systems of social control to which it was formerly linked, which had routinely compelled injurers to pay damages, Buddhism's general precepts now guide injury victims away from the pursuit of compensation and toward a quest for selflessness, nonaggression, and forgiveness.

Injury victims no longer view the legal system as a viable alternative through which to pursue culturally acceptable goals by a different means, nor do community pressures encourage the aggressive pursuit of a remedy. Rather, the legal system increasingly represents the antithesis of deeply held religious and cultural beliefs about injuries and appropriate responses. Although injured persons may in some overtly political contexts have considerable respect for the language of rights, they do not view their mishap in terms of a potential rights claim. The language of rights is nowhere to be found in the injury narratives, and in any event, it is not evident to the narrators how their own rights can be safely and effectively vindicated. At the same time, ordinary Thai citizens appear to view law as existing in tension with their religious convictions, and they perceive the Buddha's teachings as morally superior to the ideology of liberal legalism. Although globalization may indeed have transformed legal conscious­ness in Thailand, the accounts provided by injury victims suggest that the end result - somewhat unexpectedly - has been an atrophy of locality-based reme­diation systems, a further diminution of the role of law in everyday life, and a heightened sense that justice for the ordinary person is more likely to be achieved through self-abnegation than through the pursuit of rights.