The savage life of ruins: Resistant rhythms in a Bangkokian contact zone

Abstract

The present study analyzes the everyday rhythms of a ruin in Bangkok, where middle-class residents are in day-to-day contact with the disenfranchised—mostly migrants from northeast Thailand. I study the connections between ruined space, non-hegemonic mobility, the body, and everyday resistance. I do so by comparing and contrasting the bodily comportment of the disenfranchised with the middle class gaze over the ruin. The middle-class gaze is informed by Thai/global notions about what it means to be “civilized,” and it contains a primordial fear of “savagery”. The ruin is felt before it is thought. The fear of the ruin is a fear of ruination, in the sense of losing material wealth and sliding into the lower class. Natural, resistant rhythms emerge as a result of the body’s encounter with modernity.

Keywords

• bangkok
• (the) body
• civilization
• everyday resistance
• mobility
• modernity
• middle-class
• ruins
• rhythms
• working class