WEAVING THROUGH BANGKOK WEAVING THROUGH LIFE
A pillion ride with the mosaiwin explores Thai society and politics
The owners of the map are the motorcycle taxi drivers, now found at every street corner of Bangkok. Claudio Sopranzetti came to Bangkok from southern Italy via Harvard University in 2008 in search of a topic for a dissertation in urban anthropology. He chose the motorcycle drivers as an example of the essential mobility of a modern city, but also as an entry point into understanding Thailand’s fractured society. For three to four years, he loitered on their street corners, followed them jinking through back-alleys, got drunk with them in low-end bars and karaoke parlours, and accompanied them on train rides back to see their families in rural Isan. When the drivers got swept into Red Shirt politics, Sopranzetti went along for the ride.
He has produced a fabulous book — an anthropology of warm bodies, readable prose and burning commitment. In style, subject and substance, the book is a counterblast to the postmodern trend.
The motorcycle drivers were not always here. They first appeared in the early 1980s, and became ubiquitous around the millennium. Sopranzetti traces the conditions which created them: the unplanned and greedy development of a street-starved metropolis; the forces and policies pushing young rural men into the city; and the 1997 crisis which slowed growth in the formal economy and tipped more migrants into informal work.
Most drivers are young men from the villages of the Northeast. On arrival, many first worked in the factories built with the inflow of Japanese yen. In the 1997 crash, they lost their jobs and fell into more precarious work, eventually settling on driving. They like the itsaraphap, the freedom of not having a boss telling them what to do, the freedom to travel back to their village and family when they want. This freedom comes at a high cost. Driving around Bangkok is unhealthy and dangerous. Their earnings are not high, and they often end up working far harder than they would in a factory. Still, they celebrate this freedom, though it may seem like a trap.
They do a lot more than move bodies from the soi to the BTS station. They deliver packages, fetch takeaway food, wait for children to finish school, and act as guides to those in their neighbourhoods. Their relationships with clients, built over many years, can become very tight.
One driver who worked for a gangsterish businessman was trusted to deliver bags containing millions of baht all over Bangkok. Another was so appreciated that a client put his daughter through university. The drivers are essential to the mesh of the city. It is now impossible to imagine Bangkok without them.
Living in the city and near the bottom of its social pile, their outlook on life changes. They desire the things they see that other people have. They want to catch up. Like migrants everywhere, they exploit themselves and invest their hopes in their children. On visits back to the village, they contribute their savings to upgrading the family house from old-fashioned wood to modern concrete, and filling it with the devices and symbols of a modern lifestyle, including sofas that nobody sits on. Sopranzetti notes that these projects of upgrading are “never finished”. They never catch up. Their desires are never properly fulfilled.
Their legal status as providers of a public service has always been a mess, leaving them vulnerable to “men of influence” who take a cut of their earnings in return for some dubious protection. In the early 2000s, some activist drivers began to organise themselves into an unofficial trade union. When they approached then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra for help, he saw them as a prime example of the “free entrepreneurs” he aspired to create at all levels of society. Thaksin helped to target the “dark influences” preying on the drivers, and regulated the profession with registration of drivers and official vests.
When the politics turned against Thaksin, the motorcycle drivers felt they owed him a debt of gratitude. They became a core segment of the Red Shirts. Their mobility skills helped to knit the Red Shirt movement together. When the big demonstrations began in March 2010, cavalcades of motorcyclists circumvented the city like a beast marking its territory. After the barricades went up, the motorcyclists ferried people in and out, evading the encircling soldiers through their map-like knowledge of the city. When the fighting started, they worked like guerrilla bands, materialising out of nowhere at a flashpoint and melting back into the urban landscape. Where once they had helped the city to move, they now helped to freeze it up, shut it down.
After the protests ended, the army set about separating the motorcycle taxi drivers from the Red Shirts. Like Thaksin earlier, they promised to get rid of the “men of influence” (who had returned since Thaksin’s fall), but only if the drivers would forsake Thaksin and join the military’s “pineapple eyes” surveillance programme. The drivers split. Some felt that their duty to their fellow drivers and their families meant they had to take the military’s offer. Others could not stomach working for people who had shot their comrades and destroyed their dreams. Many of the latter either quite driving or were pushed out, leaving them with some sadness and resentment.
Sopranzetti’s theme is mobility, and he writes with the same motif. He constructs his social analysis and his political narrative by telling the stories of individual drivers with a lot of warm detail. The drivers weave through Bangkok’s catastrophic traffic, and weave through Thailand’s constricted society and convoluted politics. This approach makes for wonderful reading. You can smell the exhaust fumes in the ink.
Sopranzetti supplies three endings. The first comes with the destruction of CentralWorld in 2010 and the end of what he calls “the largest social movement in Thai history”. The second comes when he returns to find Thailand sliding backwards under bleak military rule when the aspirations of the Red Shirt era seem a faint and even foolish memory. But then he rallies his spirits, reminds himself and his readers that all coup governments collapse in the end, and issues a call for a more committed social conscience.
This is a brilliant and extraordinary book, combining an original way to understand the modern Asian city, an intimate view of a pivotal political moment, and a challenge to the practice of anthropology.
A fabulous book — an anthropology of warm bodies, readable prose and burning commitment