Day One: New Perspectives
Hello from Chiang Mai! Yesterday we got to eat out in one of the local restaurants. The food took a long time to arrive but it was good. For some reason though, my stomach felt a little queasy afterwards. I didn’t feel sick, just a bit uncomfortable. It just goes to show how something as seemingly trivial as food can differ significantly enough between countries to cause problems – an early indication and newsflash to me that I’m in an entirely different world now and have to be open-minded and prepared for challenges.
We began our Chiang Mai study trip with a trip to Chiang Mai University (CMU), where Dr Vithi Panichapan gave us a fantastic lecture on Chiang Mai’s history. He told us about many interesting phenomenons in Chiang Mai’s culture and history, such as how the Thai Ler people used to dress according to their own unique definition and understanding of modesty. Women had to wear a long skirt covering everything from their waist to their ankles, yet their top half could be completely bare and exposed! This was somewhat opposite for men – males were required to cover their upper body, but they were encouraged to expose as much of their legs as possible. In fact, it was common for men to wear just a tiny loincloth in front and expose their buttocks, thighs and basically their entire legs, thus showing off their elaborate traditional tattoos which covered this entire area. Women would evaluate these tattoos as they searched for a partner – as the professor put it in his casual, humorous manner of delivery for his lecture, “if you have white ass, you don’t get wife.”
Learning about this was truly an eye-opening experience. So often in our own ways of thinking, our own little bubbles, we have fixed ideas about what certain concepts entail, how we understand them to be. Modesty, for one thing, in the outward appearance sense, surely must mean covering up bare skin. Yet Chiang Mai’s history shows us how nothing is universal, and there are no particular ways of thinking which are correct or wrong. They are all different, but who are we to say one culture’s beliefs are superior to another’s?
After the lecture my group was a bit at a loss. Like our ideas of what “modesty” means, we had arrived in Chiang Mai with our own ideas about what their heritage and culture meant to them. We were probably being ignorant here in assuming and overgeneralizing that their culture comprised temples, their food, their stories and such. Following the eye-opening lecture we were no longer so sure – was culture just those things we had listed? It seemed to mean a whole lot more, a much richer set of entities and traditions than we had thought. For example, we never knew about the dress code in olden Chiang Mai and the full-leg tattoos as an attractive feature. We never knew that even something as simple as sticky rice was something that linked not just the locals together with other Thais, but even the Thais in general with the Laos and Burmese people (collectively known as the “sticky rice people”, as humorously suggested by the professor). The prevalence of sticky rice as a staple in Thai cuisine and culture became even more apparent to me and better embedded in my understanding of Thai culture later when I visited a 7-Eleven store. I noticed that even their microwave meals were chicken/fish with sticky rice and not just normal rice. I felt I better understood the importance of their food and how deeply it is a part in their lifestyle simply by noticing such a subtle detail – perhaps it is by observing the small, everyday things that we can get a truly well-rounded understanding of Thai culture.
Following the lecture, my group went about the interviews we had planned to execute with more caution and allowing ourselves more free rein regarding the questions we were asking, giving room for more spontaneous responses based on what our respondents said. Halfway through the day’s interviews, we realized that to define Chiang Mai’s culture in such simple terms, in a laundry list of meaningful items, would be an injustice to it. Our interviewees were all unable to pick the top things which contributed to their culture, and all agreed that their culture could not be simplified in this manner. It is encompassed by all the entities we had listed – food, music, religion, architecture, stories, art, etc – and then synthesised into a cohesive, indivisible whole. It is the coming together of all of these vital features, the mishmash of these characteristics, that is their heritage.
Discovering this, while a good eye-opening experience for us, led us to a problem for our research: we had initially planned for one sub-group to cover intangible aspects and the other tangible aspects of culture, but it had become clear to us that the distinction between the two was far too blurred for us to do so. For example, how are we to talk about the architecture of temples, which is tangible, without simultaneously talking about religion, which is not? We realized to so clearly delineate each feature for research and discussion would be like trying to talk about the various places of religious worship in Singapore without mentioning our multi-ethnic society. They go hand in hand.
We had a long meeting at night with our seniors, Soak and Joash, about the altered direction our research had to take. It seemed to go around in circles for a good hour at least, but I am grateful for the seniors’ guidance and advice based on their past experience doing research. I also really appreciated how my group members were all willing to voice their opinions and suggestions. With all this input we finally arrived at a solution: one sub-group will cover the perspectives of the locals, and the other the tourists and foreigners. Both sub-groups will touch on both the intangible and tangible aspects, but each will take a different angle. The gap between the viewpoints of the different groups of people would be interesting to analyze and draw conclusions from regarding the meaning of Chiang Mai’s culture from the locals’ perspective and the tourists’. A large gap would suggest a watered down or even significantly altered cultural understanding, a potential problem for Chiang Mai in the area of heritage preservation for years to come. With these new angles in mind, and after more clearly defining our individuals roles during the video interviewing process for a smoother procedure, I hope tomorrow will be a more fruitful day with less of the initial confusion we had today!