From the responses of interviewees such as Saengkam, Banchaa, and Buajan herself, it appears that "injustice" implies not just a violation of legal rights but, more broadly, a perturbation or imbalance in the cosmic order. For that reason, the examples of injustice that they offer go beyond legal violations and refer to life experiences in which Thailand's economic crisis causes rice farmers' costs and profits to fall out of alignment or in which rich people flaunt their wealth and power by driving arrogantly and forcing poor people off the road. "Justice," then, does not imply narrow legal victories but, more broadly, a restoration of balance and harmony (compare Nader 1990). This is not an outcome that most Thai people associate with litigation.

Justice in this broader sense cannot, according to these interviewees, be achieved through the limited and often unreliable institutions of the legal system. The courts and the criminal justice system are in the hands of government officials, who have great power but cannot always be trusted to provide justice to ordinary people. Daaw, for example, who was subjected unwillingly to the authority of police investigators, refers to government officials as khon mii sii, literally "people with colors," referring to their official uniforms. Daaw was injured by an ambulance whose driver wore a uniform, and she was later interviewed by police, prosecutors, and other government officials in uniforms. She feels they were rude to her and threatened to make her the wrongdoer rather than the victim. Daaw concludes that "people with colors" stick together, and consequently, the legal system is more likely to produce injustice than justice:
People with colors have . . . more of an advantage than we do. They think they work at the same place. They know each other. Something like that. We go to them, and we want them to help, but they don't help us. We don't get anything from them. Instead, they turn around and ask us angry questions. They should give us justice. But at that time, I didn't have anyone who would help me. I was there alone. I thought, what can I do? I wanted them to give me justice, but they didn't give me any justice at all.

Many other interviewees agreed that "people with colors," including the civil servants who run the court system, are part of the problem and not part of the solution. As Somsak, a laborer, put it, the law is not there for people like himself in the "outer circle" [roop nook ] of society, but only for wealthy people or government officials. Somsak was not alone in asserting that people like himself have no way to obtain justice. Both law and justice are, Somsak states, strictly for others and completely irrelevant to his life. Several interviewees expressed the opinion that justice could be obtained through the media. Both Pongsak and Jaemjai gave examples of unfair or corrupt behavior that they addressed by notifying newspapers and television reporters. They assumed that the media, rather than the legal system, offer a few individuals the possibility of achieving justice.

In injury cases, the loss of locality-based remediation systems has left individuals with a perception that human institutions are now less capable of providing compensation than in years past but that Buddhism provides an effective response that will ultimately reduce future harm and suffering. In the post-globalization era, liberal legalism does not feature more prominently in the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens. Interviewees express disapproval of the behavior of injurers and even of the officials who could hold wrongdoers accountable, but they do not couch their disapproval in legal terms. They may be familiar with the concept of rights (in Thai, sit or sitthi), but it is not a term they offer spontaneously, nor do they view the narrow thrust of law as capable of correcting injustice as they understand it.

8. CONCLUSION

This article has explored the legal consciousness of ordinary people as they talk about their childhood experiences; the changes they have witnessed in the world around them; the transformations of their own beliefs, practices, and sense of self; the injuries they have suffered; and the complex interpretations they attach to their misfortunes. As the narrators speak of injury, causation, remedy, responsibility, law, and justice, they also observe the transformation of these concepts over time. Such transformations are, to an extent, predicted by the theorists of "globalization" who suggest that the consciousness of ordinary people must inevitably be affected not only by globalized economic activity but also by the increased transnational flow of people, media, technology, and ideologies (Appadurai 1996). Yet the changes in legal consciousness associated with globalization in Thailand are quite different from those we might expect, since they emphasize general religious precepts rather than legal rights and institutions.

The effects of globalization are evident throughout the injury narratives of Buajan and others. Had globalization not had an impact on northern Thailand, we might imagine that Buajan, instead of moving to the city of Chiangmai, would have remained in the farming village where she was born. With fewer motor vehicles on the road, her chances of being struck by a car would have been sharply reduced; and with a less-extensive highway system, she might never have traveled to the butcher stand where she was injured. Had she suffered an injury in her own village, Buajan's case would have been of intense interest to the entire community. Since her injurer would most likely have been a fellow villager, the injury would have been seen as a matter of concern to the local spirits, and the injurer would have been required to pay damages. Buddhist precepts, spirit worship, and the intervention of community leaders would in all likelihood have produced an agreement that conformed to Buajan's sense of justice--and probably that of her injurer as well. If the injurer did not agree to pay compensation, however, and if he was somehow beyond the reach of local systems of social control, Buajan might have been among the small number of individuals who chose to pursue a traditional remedy (in this case, khaa tham khwan) in the Chiangmai Provincial Court. There, formal legal procedures would probably have compelled the very same injury payment that community pressures alone could not produce.

Because of globalization, however, Buajan's life changed, and so did the type of legal consciousness evident in the injury narrative that she recounts. As a result of globalization, her life was marked by mobility, separation from her birth community, economic uncertainty, frequent interactions with strangers in unfamiliar locales, elevated levels of risk, and increased disparities of wealth and power. With these changes came others that affected the conceptualization of her injury and the range of options she could imagine in response. Media reports and popular discourse increasingly emphasized rights and the rule of law, but at the same time "mediascapes" and "ideoscapes" disseminated new forms of religious thought. They presented Buajan and others with familiar religious ideas in new packaging--Buddhist beliefs and practices that are no longer embedded in particular localities and connected to the animist practices associated with those localities. Buddhism has assumed a more universal form, located as much in the mass media and in translocal and transnational networks as in the village temple or in local connections between Buddhism and animism. Religion divorced from geography has great appeal to individuals who have become separated from the villages and communities where they grew up. Belief in spirits and ghosts remains strong, but the attachment to village-level remedial systems has weakened, and the close linkages between Buddhism and locality spirits have become attenuated. These developments have important implications for the role of law in the lives of ordinary people.

Injury narratives such as Buajan's reveal a complex form of legal consciousness marked by ambiguity and a degree of uncertainty. Buajan clearly considered herself an aggrieved party and a victim of unfair treatment. She thought that the elderly driver who ran into her should have offered considerably more money than he did, but she found no interpretive frame that could express her claim in terms that he would understand and accept. References to payment for the khwan soul--a traditional form of compensation that she might once have obtained without difficulty--proved useless, since the two of them now disagreed about the essential meaning and purpose of such payments. For "uncle," khaa tham khwan encompassed all aspects of the harm Buajan had suffered, including lost wages and pain and suffering, but for Buajan, such a payment simply covered the intangible or noncorporeal aspects of her injury. References to spirits or shared community interests were no longer possible, since she and "uncle" lived in different worlds subject to different social and supernatural forces. Locality-based remediation systems were no longer available to resolve their differences and facilitate an agreement. References to the intervention of an authority figure who might produce a settlement were also ineffective, since the social distance separating the two parties was so great that only the police might conceivably act as mediators. For Buajan, the police were part of the problem of power and wealth that put her at a disadvantage. She did not view them--or the legal system as a whole-- as part of the solution.

In the past, when local remediation systems broke down, a small but consistent number of injured persons pursued traditional remedies in the courts. But the option of litigation, even as a hypothetical possibility, is now conspicuous by its absence from the injury narratives. It no longer represents an alternative means to enforce village-level practices ensuring injury payments, since such practices have become unfamiliar to most local residents. The risks and costs of litigation are seen as comparable to the risks and costs of police mediation, and a further disadvantage is the loss of control over one's own claim once it is in the hands of a judge. Yet these risks and costs were also present 25 years ago, when litigation rates per injury were higher than they are today. It appears that injury victims in Chiangmai now tend to view their belief in Buddhism as inconsistent with an aggressive insistence on a remedy. As the close linkage between Buddhism and village customary laws has been broken, the abstract norms of Buddhism are no longer connected to any remedy system and, instead, seem to counsel against the pursuit of a claim for compensation. Karma caused the injury, and karma will determine its consequences. The cycle of injury and suffering can be brought to an end only by forgiveness and not by the "selfish" pursuit of money damages.

But what about the effects of globalization on legal consciousness? Why has the "compression of the world" (Robertson 1992, 8) not made individuals more familiar with liberal legalism and the language of rights? Why has the transnational dissemination of rule-of-law ideology--evident in the Thai "People's Constitution" of 1997, in the activities of numerous international agencies and NGOs that operate in Thailand, and in ubiquitous news reports and commentaries on national and international events--not made people like Buajan more inclined to conceptualize their injuries in legal terms and more ready to turn to the law for redress?

Perhaps Western observers are prone to exaggerate the influence of their own ideologies on people in other parts of the world. In modern Thai society, it is true that public discourse frequently refers to rights, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. Significant political mobilization around these concepts has indeed altered the course of Thai history over the past several decades. Yet references to rights and liberal legalism, like other symbols of "globalization," must be interpreted with some restraint. Although such references indicate important developments in Thai society at the national level or in Bangkok, and although the English-language media may emphasize this type of discourse when offering accounts of contemporary Thailand, that does not necessarily mean that a broad-based transformation of Thai legal consciousness has occurred in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens throughout the country.