5. THE INTERPRETATION OF INJURY

Injury narratives reflect the efforts of individuals to explain why harm has befallen them, to identify causes, and in some cases to attribute blame. These explanations and attributions reveal the interpretive frameworks available to the narrators at the time of the injury and after. They provide, therefore, a window into the social and cultural context in which the injury occurs and a view of the beliefs and practices that are familiar to the injured person and others with whom she discusses her situation. They are sensitive indicators of the conceptual transformations that might accompany "globalization."

Injury narratives serve a second function: They help us to understand the internal thought processes of individuals who may or may not take steps to move from the base of the injury pyramid to other levels where their experience may become a "claim" or even a "case." The movement or lack of movement from the base of the pyramid reveals the role that law plays or fails to play in the thoughts of injury victims as they choose whether to invoke legal norms or practices as a response to the harm they have suffered. The legal consciousness of ordinary Thai citizens following a period of significant "globalization" is a central concern of this study.

Buajan's injury narrative portrays a woman whose life experiences followed a familiar pattern during the boom and bust years of the late twentieth century in northern Thailand. Although her parents were not themselves rice farmers, they lived in a farming village and participated in many of the customary practices and belief systems of rural villagers in Chiangmai and neighboring provinces. Buajan describes these practices and beliefs as "deeply planted" in her consciousness during childhood, and they continue to affect her adult views. As was true for many villagers in northern Thailand, these practices and beliefs during Buajan's childhood involved a seamless mixture of Buddhism and animism in which the two somewhat distinct religious systems were generally experienced as one coherent whole (compare Tambiah 1970, 41; Keyes 1977, 115).

After attending primary school, Buajan participated in the mass migration from village to urban center, where she continued her studies and eventually found work in a series of low-paying jobs. Although she perceives her beliefs-- both animist and Buddhist--as basically unchanged since childhood, Buajan now lives at a distance from the household and locality spirits that she worshipped with her parents in her childhood home in Lamphun. Buajan no longer participates in a locality-based system to address injuries and enforce remedies, although such a system was available in the village where she grew up.

Buajan's injury narrative shifts continually from one interpretive frame to another. This is particularly evident in her discussion of causation. At different points in the interview, she attributes her injury to at least six causes: (1) an ancestral spirit offended by the sexual impropriety of a young female relative; (2) negligence of the elderly driver; (3) Buajan's contributory negligence; (4) malevolent ghosts near the mango tree where the accident occurred; (5) Buajan's weak stars or bad luck; and (6) Buajan's karma resulting from her own bad deeds in a previous life or earlier in her present life. The multiplicity of causes suggests a multiplicity of perspectives that simultaneously organize the ways in which Chiangmai residents like Buajan interpret reality. Although these multiple interpretive frames may appear inconsistent with one another to the Western observer, Buajan and other Chiangmai residents do not see them that way. In her injury narrative, Buajan shifts unself-consciously from one explanatory device to another. Each appears to be equally legitimate; none undercuts or negates the others. Nor is this narrative pattern unique to Buajan. Consider the multiple causal explanations offered by three other interviewees who suffered serious injuries as a result of the misdeeds of others:

Kitthiya worked on the entertainment staff of a Chiangmai hotel. She suffered facial injuries when her motorcycle was struck by another motorcycle driven by a teenage boy. She mentions five causes: the boy's negligent driving; fate or karma; her age--that is, odd-numbered years are bad luck for women, and she was 39; ghosts from previous fatal accidents waiting at that spot to harm others; and the fact that she ignored a warning from her elderly neighbor to take her car, not her motorcycle, when she went out (the same neighbor sometimes warns Kitthiya not to wear particular clothing because it may bring bad luck).

Phongsak is a trucker. Despite his strong belief in the role of spirits and the injuries they can cause, he maintains that his motorcycle accident was not caused by spirits. He has a "strong khwan," which usually protects him from their influence. Before his accident, however, he had a premonition of harm. He believes this forewarning proves that his injury was caused primarily by his own fate or karma, which no one can escape when the time comes. Secondarily, he asserts that his injury was caused by the other driver's negligence.

Jaemjai works for a Chiangmai newspaper. She was injured when her motorcycle was struck by a car, which fled the scene but was later located because its license plate fell off during the accident. Jaemjai attributes causation primarily to the other driver's lack of compassion [nam jai], evidenced by the fact that he sped away after hitting her. To a lesser extent, perhaps 15% in Jaemjai's estimation, the cause was Jaemjai's own bad fortune or bad stars. She also draws a causal connection to ghosts associated with the tall rubber trees lining the Chiangmai-Lamphun highway, where numerous fatalities have occurred. Her injury on that highway could have been caused by their depredations. An urbane young college graduate, Jaemjai says that she believes 50-50 in ghosts.

Each of the 35 interviewees told a similar story, with multiple causal explanations reflecting the multiple interpretive frameworks available to Chiangmai residents. Northern Thais have long been accustomed to living in a world in which multiple, seemingly inconsistent, perspectives give order to their experience. Their region, as we have seen, has experienced the clash and layering of numerous Asian and Western cultural influences throughout its history. The accelerated processes of globalization in the 1980s and 1990s did not create the multiplicity of interpretations evident in the injury narratives, but it did affect their salience and their interconnections.

Interpretation of the injury is the first and most important step in determining whether law or, indeed, any remedy system will play a role. As is apparent in Buajan's injury narrative, each causal explanation suggests a different approach to remediation, to making the injured person "whole." If the injury was caused by bad luck or bad stars, the appropriate response may be a ritual [sado khro ] to "unlock" and dispel one's misfortune. If the injury was caused by an ancestor spirit who was offended by a young relative's sexual impropriety, the injured person may perform a ritual of apology to the ancestor spirit at a family shrine. If the injury was caused by one's own karma, it may be most appropriate to perform a Buddhist ceremony to make merit or even to become ordained as a nun or a monk, accompanied by an effort to forgive the other party so that the pattern of injury and response will not repeat itself in future reincarnations. If the injury was caused by the other party's negligence, the injured person might consider a formal legal claim.

Each interpretation of an injury implies a different approach to remediation, but the relationships among these various interpretations appear to have undergone substantial change in Thailand during recent years. The implications of these changes for current perceptions of injury and remedy--and of the role of law in Thai society--will be examined in the sections that follow.

6. THE WANING OF LOCALITY-BASED REMEDIES FOR INJURY
During my research in Chiangmai in 1975, before the dramatic socioeconomic transformations associated with globalization, I found that those who had suffered injuries tended to respond in any of three ways. [FN15] Each type of response revealed the social importance of obtaining a remedy in "preglobalization" Thailand, yet none suggested that the individual rights of the injured person were central to the remediation process. Rather, obtaining compensation was understood to be important for maintaining community institutions and practices. From a Euro-American perspective, one might say that these responses paradoxically emphasized remedies without (legal) rights.

In the first type of response, injured persons sought the benefits of a pervasive system of third-party mediation. Ubiquitous Thai patron-client hierarchies located in rural and urban settings offered many opportunities for intervention by persons with higher social status. Indeed, such intervention was understood to be a fundamental obligation of status superiors such as village leaders, workplace supervisors, and government officials. Third-party mediation offered opportunities for indirect negotiation and adjustment rather than explicit, face-to-face confrontation, which was regarded as particularly problematic for many Thais in most social situations (Bilmes 1976; Engel 1978). This remediation process not only depended on Thai patronclient hierarchies but helped to constitute them, since settling disputes reinforced the charismatic authority of the status superior who could harmonize discord among those who sought his or her help.

Second, injured persons often had recourse to village-level normative systems and locality spirits. Villagers lived in a community of humans and spirits, whose interests must be considered when injuries occurred. Injurious behavior required adjustment for the good of the community, since the entire village could be put at risk by malevolent spirits if the appropriate rituals were not performed. One such ritual was tham khwan or riak khwan, intended to recall the khwan spirit to the body of the injured person (Hanks 1963; Tambiah 1970; Engel 1978, 2001; Heinze 1982). Buajan describes a related ceremony, known as soon khwan or suut thoon, in which an officiant scoops up and retrieves the khwan soul from the place where it fell, in order to restore it to the body of the injured person. The understanding that injurers must pay the cost of these khwan-related rituals was so pervasive that, even among lawyers and judges, the payment of damages for personal injury was sometimes called khaa tham khwan, or "payment for the khwan ceremony." For injuries resulting in death, the equivalent payment would be khaa tham sop, or "payment of funeral expenses," reflecting the importance of Buddhist-based beliefs and ceremonies to make merit for the deceased. Similar payments to propitiate village guardian spirits were often required of the individual who caused injury, since the injury offended not only the person who suffered the harm but the guardian spirits themselves. Their displeasure could jeopardize the well-being of all villagers, and thus the entire village had a stake in seeing that proper remedial steps were taken.

Third, some injured persons brought civil or private criminal actions in the Chiangmai Provincial Court. Such cases, however,were relatively rare, and when they occurred, the goal of the plaintiff was usually not the vindication of rights but the pursuit of traditional remedies by other means. From 1965 to 1974, the rate of civil litigation in Chiangmai province ranged from 0.64 to 0.87 cases per thousand population; and of these, only 8-12% were tort cases. Thais often quoted tome the aphorism, "It is better to eat dog shit than to go to court." Yet litigation did occur, subjecting the litigants to a wholly different set of norms and procedures from those otherwise used when injuries occurred.

[FN15]. Although some elements of the two studies--including the docket analysis--were closely comparable, the earlier study did not involve a set of interviews with hospital patients who had suffered accidental injuries. Instead, I conducted a smaller number of interviews with villagers, village leaders, police, lawyers, and judges in order to gain an understanding of how injury cases were handled outside the formal legal system.