SUBJECT FORMATION AND SELF-MAKING IN THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF STATELESS SHAN PEOPLE IN THE THAI-BURMESE BORDERLAND

Abstract

This thesis investigates the notion of subjectivity and the politics of emotion of stateless Shan people, who are shaped amid nation-state construction, violence, and suffering (known in the Shan language as Tukkha Khanjai). The primary focus of this thesis is on how the subjectivity of these individuals, who are constituted as vulnerable and powerless ‘non-citizens’ of the modern state, is constructed in relation to emotions. It is an ethnographic work, in which I immersed myself in stateless Shan people’s social lives in the setting of the Thai-Burmese borderland. From my ethnographic research, I suggest that the notion of subjectivity formation should not be understood through state power and state discourse alone, but that the actual conditions of being stateless and having a precarious life create inconsistencies in the subject formation of stateless Shan people. They do not only live within one particular social and power system, rather they exist within multiple social systems and embody a multitude of cultural meanings. For these stateless Shan, these meanings, discourses and principles are carried with them into the realm of their day-to-day lives. A complicated and paradoxical process of subject formation results in multiple contradictory subjectivities with various emotions that form a conflicted self, whereby individuals’ inner states (in particular their memories and emotions) are in disagreement with the dominant discourses that surround their lives. The complex and contradictory nature of their subject formation helps them to examine their multiple marginal subjectivities and navigate how to make their multiple subjectivities negotiable and liveable in their social and cultural environments.