Disciplining the Heart: Love, School, and Growing Up Karen in Mae Hong Son

Abstract

The heart (jai) is a powerful metaphor in Thai language. To succeed at school, students in Thailand must tangjai rian. This means they must possess the right discipline, attitude, and ability to set their hearts toward learning and studying. This thesis documents the situated nuances of this everyday Thai concept as it is deployed in the context of a government school, within an upland Sgaw Karen community. Educational success is highly valued as cultural capital at the margins of Thai society, even while the institution of the school actively subjectifies upland groups as internal others, referred to in Thai as chao khao (hill tribes). As tangjai rian is presented as a potential path out of poverty, Karen teachers and parents are highly invested in policing students' adherence to it as a moral ideal.

This ethnography of a Thai government school analyses how Karen students engage with adult expectations of childhood to renegotiate the limits of tangjai rian and the meaning attached to one's time at school. As Karen students reach adolescence and begin to pursue romance, their status as children who can tangjai rian is threatened. Inference of sexual activity signals a failure to tangjai rian, as focusing on schoolwork is framed by adults as impossible alongside a sexual relationship. This represents a moral failure, as tangjai rian is framed as an expression of love and gratitude towards teachers and parents both. At the heart of the thesis lies the extended case study of a female student who was expelled due to her alleged sexual activity. This exceptional event is used as an entry point to the broader moral discourse about love and school that took place during the Thai school year of 2017.

Drawing on social practice theory, this thesis considers how adolescent students reconcile their romantic and educational pursuits through 'serious play' in 'figured worlds'. Students jointly author their own moral worlds where they can playfully enact their own understandings of ideas like tangjai rian according to new rules. The dominant figured world of the school frames teenage romance as only acceptable if it serves to directly support a student's efforts to tangjai rian. The key difference in the figured worlds of adolescent students is that romance and tangjai rian are both framed as integral features of the school experience alongside one another. Schooling in Thailand is an institutional project of ethnonational belonging in which Karen students are set up to fail. At the same time as they learn what Thainess looks like, Karen students are reminded that its embodiment is unattainable for those readily identifiable as belonging to a 'hill tribe'. By complementing their endeavours to tangjai rian with the pursuit of love, the secondary students at this school add value to their experience of an institution that, realistically, will deliver its promised outcomes to a very small number of those who pass through it. Successfully pursuing love and education simultaneously is made possible by the cultural innovations of children's serious play. Show more