3. THE STUDY
Because of the profound economic, political, and cultural influences it has experienced over the past 25 years, Chiangmai is an ideal setting in which to explore the connections between global influences and legal consciousness. The subject of "legal consciousness" has attracted considerable attention from sociolegal scholars, who have used a variety of methodologies to explore it. This study builds on research that explores the ways in which individuals tell stories about their lives, their experiences, their social relationships and interactions, and their sense of self. [FN8] Such narratives are used primarily to understand the subjectivity of the narrators--how they interpret events, how they explain their own behavior and that of others, and how they view themselves in relation to the world around them and in relation to legal norms, procedures, and institutions.

In this study, as in a previous coauthored study of Americans with disabilities (Engel and Munger 2003), I encouraged interviewees to provide an extended narrative covering a broad sweep of time, in which the narrators described their lives from childhood to present and the changes that had occurred in their social environment over a period of many years. Within the broader narrative of their personal history they located the specific incident that had caused them to seek treatment in a hospital for physical injury. The primary value of such research is that it can demonstrate how individuals perceive themselves and their experiences in relation to broader systems of belief or social control. Although the "facts" recounted in these narratives may be of great importance to the narrator, this type of research does not necessarily seek external confirmation that they occurred as described, nor does it compare rival interpretations of events. The subjectivity of the narrator--in this case the interpretation offered by the injured person--is the object of study.

In order to record the injury narratives of ordinary people in Chiangmai, I identified a large hospital that treated patients from the entire province of Chiangmai and thus drew cases from a "jurisdiction" comparable to that of the provincial court. With the help of hospital staff, I obtained the names of 93 current or very recently discharged patients who were willing to participate in interviews. All had suffered physical injuries involving the conduct of another party. I selected 35 of these individuals for extensive, in-depth interviews, which I conducted, in Thai, at the hospital or at the interviewee's home or place of work. [FN9] Participants were selected to provide a range of perspectives, based primarily on rural versus urban background, gender, circumstances of the injury, and age. [FN10] Although this group of individuals was chosen because they offered differing accounts and different kinds of life experiences and interpretations, this type of research does not rely on statistically representative samples but on the following of leads and the exploration of promising themes. The 35 interviewees were not selected to make quantitative predictions about a broader universe, but they do illustrate in considerable depth some of the ways in which "globalization" has affected the legal consciousness of differently situated individuals in Chiangmai.

The subjectivity of ordinary people who suffer injuries represents a key component of the base of an "injury pyramid," a concept that is familiar to law and society scholars (see, e.g., Trubek et al. 1983). The broad base of the pyramid is said to contain a large number of harms that might potentially be perceived as wrongful and, in some cases, as having legal significance; its middle layers involve unilateral or bilateral claims and negotiations, intervention by "unofficial" third-party intermediaries or lawyers, and other extrajudicial settlement procedures; and its narrow upper regions and tip involve tort cases that are actually litigated, adjudicated, and--even more rarely--appealed. Saks (1992) represents perhaps the most extensive application of the pyramid model to existing literature on the American tort litigation system. One of Saks's most important insights is that the characteristics of the pyramid's base must be understood before meaningful inferences can be drawn about any other aspect of the handling of tort cases in society. Analysis of "lumping," negotiation, settlement, or the decision to litigate should be framed in terms of information about the pyramid's base: the kinds of injuries that occur in society and the ways in which individuals interpret them--the raw materials from which claims, disputes, or lawsuits might be fashioned (see generally Engel and Steele 1979; Mather and Yngvesson 1980-81; Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 1980-81).

Thus, although this study focuses on the subjective and interpretive processes that occur in the pyramid's base, the findings have implications for each succeeding level of the pyramid, including the use of courts and lawyers. While a systematic study of the entire injury pyramid in Thailand was beyond the scope of this study, and unfortunately there are few other studies of the injury pyramid in Thailand, I sought to shed additional light on the injury narratives by also exploring the tip of the pyramid--the Chiangmai Provincial Court--where I had focused my research 25 years earlier. To this end, I surveyed the docket of the Chiangmai Provincial Court from 1992 to 1997. Using the court registers, I identified every injury case litigated by a private party. Most took the form of civil actions, but some were litigated as private criminal cases. [FN11] I retrieved and photocopied the entire case file of each of these civil and criminal cases, analyzed their contents, and compared them to the 10 years of cases I had studied in the 1970s. The finding that tort litigation rates at the tip of the injury pyramid had actually decreased over the past quarter century was consistent with the alienation from law I discovered at the base of the injury pyramid. These parallel developments at different levels of the pyramid invite more general theorizing about the relationships among globalization, legal consciousness, and tort law in Thailand.

Therefore, while focusing primarily on the injury narratives, I analyze them with one eye on the diminished rate of litigation in the formal legal system. I suggest that both the base and the tip of the pyramid reflect the influence of the social transformations Chiangmai has experienced during the past 25 years. This article begins, in the following section, with a detailed example of one of the injury narratives. The format of the presentation is designed to allow "Buajan" to speak more or less directly to the reader, although my intervention as translator (and editor) must be acknowledged. Buajan is a middle-aged woman who, with her husband, struggles to survive economically in the city of Chiangmai. She has worked at a succession of low wage jobs, most recently in the kitchen of a local hotel. Buajan comes from a rural background and has a strong attachment to the customs and practices she learned as a child. In addition, like many Thais, she is a devout Buddhist. In her story, she describes an accident in which her leg was broken by a big car driven by an elderly man, and she explains how she came to interpret and respond to this injury.

After presenting Buajan's injury narrative, the article addresses some of its central themes: causation, remedy, law, and justice. This discussion incorporates insights from a number of other interviewees (including Daaw, who is quoted at the beginning of the article) and from the litigated cases at the tip of the injury pyramid. In particular, the article examines the transformations in legal consciousness and social practices that have emerged during a time of profound socioeconomic and cultural change. I will suggest that globalization in Thailand, when viewed through the lens of personal injuries, is connected to a diminished role of law. Rather than documenting the growth of liberal legalism, the findings of this study point to a heightened role of Buddhist doctrine, which encourages injured persons to absorb the harm they have suffered and abandon the quest for compensation from the other party.

4. INJURY NARRATIVE: THE STORY OF BUAJAN
A bird chitters in the tree at the end of the lane. It is late afternoon, and mosquitoes begin to venture out of the shrubs. We sit in Buajan's front yard, which abuts a tall fence with a locked gate. Just beyond the gate we can see the wooded area of a park, formerly the graveyard of a now nonexistent temple. Spirits from the graveyard may be listening and could be offended by the things we say, and this causes Buajan to speak in a whisper during particularly sensitive portions of the interview. But she feels that she must speak honestly with us about her beliefs and experiences: "I wouldn't dare to lie about these things. I'm afraid. I fear sacred things the most."

Although Buajan lives and works in the city of Chiangmai, she was born in a farming village in the neighboring province of Lamphun. She attended primary school in her village and moved to Chiangmai after completing the fifth grade. There she continued her studies through the tenth grade, and there she remained to work as a sales clerk, a cleaner, a launderer, and a cook. She married a native of Chiangmai, a handyman at a university, and they have two children. Now 39 years old and employed on the kitchen staff at a hotel, Buajan struggles to survive Thailand's economic crisis. She earns only 3,000 baht (about $75) per month. Buajan describes a recent past filled with setbacks and crises. Of these, the most vivid is the accident that broke her leg and almost took her life.

The Accident. I had just taken my children to school. I drove past Wat Lampoeng, where there's a roadside stand that sells pork. I decided to stop and buy some pork. After I paid for it . . . I was just waiting. . . . This old man, this "uncle," had . . . parked his car right there, and he began to back up, back, back, back. When he got to the end of the path, he didn't go straight ahead. Instead, he lurched toward me. There was a small child [in a stroller] in his way, and the car was backing into the child, and I went to save him. . . . Just then the father pulled him away by his arm, but I couldn't get out of the way in time. It was a really big car. I was right here. The car ran into the stroller and went on to smash into a longan tree just behind me and then it bounced off it again. He ran into me. One of my legs was bent and the other was sticking out like this. The car ran right over me and came to a stop, and then it ran over me again.

[FN8]. Engel and Munger (1996, 2003) provide examples of earlier efforts by this author to employ such research methodologies. Recent examples of similar research by other sociolegal scholars include Yngvesson (1997), Ewick and Silbey (1998), Gilliom(2001), and Nielsen (2004).

[FN9]. I conducted each interview with one or more members of a "research team" consisting of Jaruwan Engel and two local research assistants--Sutthira Foocom and Rotjarek Intachote (who were also nurses). Interviews explored the personal background, life history, and belief systems of the interviewee, as well as the sequence of events connected to his or her injury and general experiences with and impressions of governmental agencies, officials, lawyers, and courts. Interviews concluded with a general discussion of "justice" in contemporary Thai society. All interviews were taped and transcribed in Thai. The translations into English are my own, in consultation with Jaruwan Engel.

[FN10]. In order to explore the effects of globalization on the legal consciousness of individuals who lived in rural versus urban settings, I divided the original pool of 93 injured persons into two groups based on their current place of residence. In this group, 37 resided in urban locations and 56 in rural locations. Of these, I selected 19 persons in urban locations and 16 in rural locations to participate in my interviews. My slightly disproportionate emphasis on urban residents reflected my discovery that this group in fact consisted of two categories of individuals: lifelong city dwellers and those who had moved to urban areas from the countryside, often as a result of factors associated with globalization. I wished to understand the experiences of both of these "urban" groups as well as those who chose to remain in rural settings, and I therefore selected a greater number for interviews than their proportionate representation in the original pool of 93 injured persons might have suggested. In addition to the urban-rural breakdown, I considered several other factors in selecting interviewees. The gender distributions of the 35 interviewees (12 women and 23 men) reflected that of the original pool (29 women and 64 men). I attempted to include a range of ages, since I was interested in the narratives offered by persons at different life stages who might have been affected by globalization in different ways (9 interviewees ranged from 20-30 years of age, 16 interviewees ranged from 31-40 years of age, 6 interviewees ranged from 41-50 years of age, and 4 interviewees were over 50 years old). My selection of interviewees also took into account the circumstances of their injuries. In the original pool of 93 injured persons, 70 were injured in traffic accidents and 23 in nontraffic accidents. Because the nontraffic accidents were more varied in their circumstances--and in the interpretations offered by the injured persons--I selected 16 of them, as compared to 19 traffic-related accident cases. Besides applying these selection criteria, my choice of individual interviewees from the original pool of 93 injury victims was otherwise random, based on anonymous summaries obtained during their hospital treatment.

[FN11]. The Thai Criminal Procedure Code gives the injured person the right to prosecute a criminal case either by himself or herself or in association with the public prosecutor. If the injured person is a child, is otherwise incompetent, or is deceased, the right to prosecute passes to a designated family member or legal representative. See generally, The Criminal Procedure Code, xx 28-30. I identified and studied each injury case brought as a criminal prosecution by a private person.