Chiangmai has for centuries reflected diverse influences from many cultures-- Burmese, lowland and highland northern Thai, central Thai, Laotian, English, Chinese, Japanese, American, and others. Its long history of transnational interactions complicates any attempt to study Thai legal consciousness "before and after" globalization. [FN6] Yet there can be little doubt concerning the extent of social transformation that has occurred in Chiangmai since 1975, when I conducted my earlier sociolegal research there. In 1975, Chiangmai was one of the more cosmopolitan of Thailand's upcountry cities, exposed to a variety of national and international influences, but any observer of Chiangmai today would be struck by the deep and extensive changes that have occurred as a result of expanded global interactions and socioeconomic transformations over the past quarter century.

Thailand's rapid economic growth during the 1980s and early 1990s has been widely noted, as has the disastrous financial crisis of 1997. In the late 1970s, Thai policymakers planned a shift to an export-oriented economy based on increased industrial development. The policy succeeded dramatically in achieving its goals. With the devaluation of the baht in relation to the dollar and the yen in 1985, Thai exports surged ahead. In 1985, manufactured exports totaled $2,800 million, but by 1994 they had risen to $36,618 million (Dixon 1999, 114). Foreign direct investment in Thailand by Japan, the United States, and other countries in Asia and elsewhere rose to a peak of 62 billion baht [approximately $2,422 million] in 1990 (Phongpaichit and Baker 1998, 39), and joint ventures proliferated. New foreign investment was primarily in industry (see Dixon 1999, 132; Hussey 1993, 17), most of which was located in the Bangkok area. Indeed, despite the impressive industrial growth that occurred during this period, primarily around Bangkok, agriculture has remained the predominant occupation of two-thirds of Thailand's population. In 1999, the six provinces in the Bangkok region, [FN7] with their heavy concentration of industry, had only 15% of Thailand's population yet produced 86% of the nation's GDP. By contrast, Chiangmai's northern region had 19% of the population but produced only 9% of the GDP (UNDP 2003,126-27).

Although Chiangmai has not experienced the dramatic industrial growth that has occurred in the Bangkok area, its economy and society have been radically affected by changes emanating from the Thai capital. Many new luxury hotels have sprung up to accommodate a flood of business travelers and tourists. Huge shopping malls built around large Bangkok-and Japanese owned department stores have become social centers for the Chiangmai middle class and for teenagers as well as tourists. Airbus flights filled to capacity with Thai and foreign travelers now arrive every hour or two from Bangkok. Traffic jams, previously unheard of, clog the narrow city streets throughout the day. The city has expanded into the outlying countryside, and new "superhighways" have been constructed to link Chiangmai to central Thailand, to other northern cities, and soon, perhaps, to Laos and China. Developers have bought up farmland and converted it to condominiums and shopping centers.

Thailand's boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s came to a halt with the financial crisis of 1997. A rapid depreciation of the baht "was accompanied by the virtual collapse of the property and stock markets" (Dixon 1999, 239). The International Monetary Fund, another agent of globalization, agreed to help bail Thailand out of its crisis but demanded draconian spending cuts and other fiscal reforms. The media soon began to run stories about the "formerly rich," who were selling off their houses and cars and, in some cases, were reduced to street peddlers. For many Thais who had been drawn to Bangkok and other urban centers during the boom years, the crash of 1997 meant a return to the villages--if they were fortunate enough not to have lost their rural homes in the rush to sell land to developers and industrialists--but less than a decade later, a recovery was under way. Needless to say, all these economic swings had their effects in Chiangmai, as they did throughout Thailand.

Globalization theorists remind us that the effects they seek to study cannot be measured solely in terms of transnational business relations or economic development. In Robertson's much-quoted definition, globalization "refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" (1992, 8). Giddens contends that it is a "mistake" to view globalization only in economic terms: "Globalization is political, technological and cultural, as well as economic. It has been influenced above all by developments in systems of communication, dating back only to the late 1960s" (2003, 10).

Appadurai agrees that issues of communication, culture, and consciousness are just as significant as economic issues for understanding the process of globalization. He suggests that the "global cultural flows" that constitute globalization can be examined through five dimensions: (1) ethnoscapes: "the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals"; (2) mediascapes: "the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information . . . [and] the images of the world created by these media"; (3) technoscapes: "the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and the fact that technology . . . now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries"; (4) financescapes: "the disposition of global capital . . . as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed"; and (5) ideoscapes: "concatenations of images . . . [that] are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it" (1996, 33-35).

These broader views of globalization provide a framework for understanding the transformations that have confronted residents of Chiangmai over the past quarter century. Besides the obvious economic influences, other types of "cultural flows" have connected Chiangmai more closely to the nation and the world. Systems of communication, which Giddens cites as particularly important to the process of globalization, have profoundly challenged preexisting worldviews and social practices. The media have brought ideas and images instantaneously from around the world: Residents of Chiangmai watched the O. J. Simpson trial, the two Gulf Wars, and Tiger Woods (a Thai favorite son) on TV along with millions of viewers worldwide. Popular culture, particularly in the form of films and music, links Chiangmai residents to a global audience. Political developments from around the world become daily topics of conversation. The internet and the mobile phone have transformed communication and access to the world for many Chiangmai residents.

Demographic changes, or "ethnoscapes" in Appadurai's terms, are also striking, not only in connection with international tourism but as a result of internal migration and an influx of non-Thai immigrants, both documented and undocumented. Increasingly, on the streets of Chiangmai, one encounters individuals who come from other regions of Thailand or the world. The distinctive Northern Thai dialect is heard a little less often in the city of Chiangmai, and many local traditions and practices have either faded in significance or have been repackaged for display and sale to visitors.

What Appadurai terms "ideoscapes" are of particular relevance to this study. He suggests that they "are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy." Yet the "diaspora" of such concepts throughout the world "has loosened the internal coherence that held them together in a Euro-American master narrative and provided instead a loosely structured synopticon of politics" (1996, 36). Appadurai's reference to a reconfigured version of Euro-American legal and political discourse provides at least a starting point for understanding legal consciousness in contemporary Chiangmai.

Globalized ideologies and practices associated with international rights movements, constitutionalism, and democracy have clearly made their appearance in Chiangmai, yet local actors have expressed these ideologies in a vocabulary that draws on Buddhism and village-level traditions as much as liberal legalism. For example, when developers announced plans to construct an electric cable car that would have disfigured the sacred mountain crest of Doi Suthep overlooking the city of Chiangmai, opponents defeated their efforts by forming an unusual alliance of NGOs, Buddhist clergy, academics, and villagers (Swearer et al. 2004, 33-35). When the government proposed to expand the Chiangmai-Lamphun highway by cutting down the stately rows of rubber trees lining the route, a similar alliance was formed. The trees were ultimately preserved when opponents of the government performed a Buddhist ordination ceremony and wrapped all the trees in saffron-colored cloths, thereby preserving them from destruction. Both examples suggest that rights movements in Chiangmai are not simple expressions of Euro-American legal ideologies, but should be understood in terms of a legal consciousness in which Buddhism and other village-based belief systems play a central role. Later sections of this article will show that this form of legal-religious consciousness, rather than more familiar forms of liberal legalism, emerges with considerable clarity in the injury narratives.

Activities that aremost consonant with whatAppadurai terms the "Euro-American master narrative" tend to catch the eye of Western observers, who have little opportunity to assess the legal consciousness of ordinary Thai citizens. This fact may lead outsiders to draw exaggerated conclusions about the impact of European and American legal ideologies on Thai society or, for that matter, on societies throughout the world. In fact, we still lack an understanding of the influence of "ideoscapes" or, indeed, of globalization in all its cultural and political manifestations on the everyday lives of the vast majority of Thai citizens. We do not know, for example, to what extent the "internal coherence" of the ideology of rights and liberal legalism has been preserved or "loosened" as the cultural flows of globalization have washed across Chiangmai's social landscape. The present study, which explores the words, thoughts, and experiences of ordinary people who have suffered injuries at the hands of others, may provide at least a preliminary insight.

[FN7]. The six provinces are Bangkok, Nakhon Pathon, Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, Samut Prakan, and Samut Sakan.