ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Feral territories: The suburbanisation of nature in late 20th century Bangkok

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 1

English Abstract

This paper offers an account of changing human-non-human animal relations in Bangkok through a historical study of suburbanization at the eastern periphery of Bangkok in the late 20th century. The eastern suburbs were built in the 1960s, during what Benedict Anderson has called the American era in Thai history. To contain communism in Southeast Asia, the US government sent financial and technical assistance to Thailand. The aid and influence triggered an intense, uncontrolled transformation of the city’s periphery. In the process, a new type of environment, feral territories whose form was only loosely governed by the state, emerged. Into these territories, humans with enough money moved to escape the congestion and poverty of the old city. So did other creatures, from snakes and lizards to rats and elephants, in search of food and shelter. Thinking through city planning documents and foreign technical assistance reports in the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority collection at the National Archives of Thailand, this paper examines the emergent forms of life these territories gave rise to. In so doing, it shows how changes to the physical environment coincided with a reconfiguration of the way Bangkokians distinguished between culture and nature through the vocabulary of the market that underpinned the city’s rapid expansion.

Author

• Samson Lim, Monash University