A close reading of the case files from 1965 to 1974 revealed that litigation typically occurred when locality-based remedial systems and mediation by status superiors broke down. Such breakdowns were evident, for example, when the parties lived in different villages and were so distant socially or geographically that they could find no common third-party intermediary other than the court itself. Sometimes, litigated injury cases arose when the expected mediator was a party to the dispute and for that reason was unable to arrange an informal settlement. In all such cases, the court acted as a substitute mediator to bridge the gap and provide the remedy that would be expected in nonjudicial contexts. [FN16] Thus, in many instances the ultimate goal of the litigation was to obtain a resolution consistent with locality-based remedy systems, such as a mediated settlement (in which the judge served as mediator) providing for payment of khaa tham khwan or khaa tham sop. Although litigation represented a step outside village-level processes and institutions, it also reinforced themby providing a payment calibrated to traditional remedies and by reminding the wrongdoer that compensation was absolutely required to preserve social order.

Of course, Buddhism was also a key consideration for injured persons in Chiangmai 25 years ago. Villagers did not perceive sharp distinctions between their Buddhist beliefs and remediation systems based on village-based practices, spirit worship, and mediation. Locality spirits were part of village cosmologies that also included Buddhist shrines, temples, monks, and saints. Mediation by secular authority figures also incorporated Buddhist norms of moderation, selflessness, and forgiveness. Buddhism may have tempered the quest for a remedy by discouraging selfish or overly aggressive responses, but it was not understood to prohibit entirely the demand for compensation. Since compensation reflected the interests of the entire village, not just the interests of the injured party, it could be pursued without violating Buddhist precepts.

The injury narratives I obtained in the more recent research project, however, suggest that substantial changes have occurred over the past quarter century. Many of the interviewees referred to the impact of globalization related transformations on the communities of humans and spirits that had formerly existed in Chiangmai. Anchalee, for example, a clerk at a technical college, still lives in her rural home with her mother. In her narrative, Anchalee describes how her fellow villagers sold their farmland to developers who started but never completed their ambitious construction plans. The village community that she remembers from her childhood has been largely destroyed, and with it, the norms and practices that governed behavior in many situations, including the remediation of personal injuries. When Anchalee's leg was seriously injured in a traffic accident, she was forced to accept a meager settlement offer of 5,000 baht (for khaa tham khwan, according to the other party) plus a wheelchair. She would certainly have obtained a better outcome under traditional village-based procedures in the past. Significantly, perhaps, Anchalee attributes causation for her injury primarily to the other driver's fault and secondarily to her own karma and to spirits.

Even urban residents tell a similar story in which locality-based remediation procedures are conspicuous by their absence. For example, Jira, a fruit seller and longtime resident of the city of Chiangmai, remembers urban neighborhoods during her childhood with many empty lots and fields where trees grew and ghosts could be found. As Chiangmai boomed economically, most of these empty spaces became building sites, and the urban ghosts were displaced. When Jira's leg was broken in a traffic accident caused by a teenaged boy, she was forced to accept an injury payment of only 5,000 baht, although she thought she was entitled to 30,000. Jira attributes her injury primarily to her own karma and secondarily to the other driver's negligence. She does not believe that ghosts caused her injury, and they play no part in her injury narrative. Jira never refers to any obligation on the part of the injurer to propitiate guardian spirits or locality-based supernatural beings, nor is payment for the khwan associated in any way with the welfare of the community as a whole. It appears that such community-based remediation practices have become all but irrelevant to urban residents of Chiangmai. The transformation of Chiangmai's urban landscape has literally squeezed ghosts out of the picture.

Buajan's account is also instructive in this regard. Notably absent from her story is any reference to village guardian spirits or to other locality-based remedy systems. This is not surprising, although the explanation in her case is quite different from Jira's. Buajan had joined the exodus from her rural home, and in the process she left behind the locale in which such remediation systems exerted their authority. Furthermore, the old man who injured her was not a fellow villager, and he would probably not have submitted to the rules of Buajan's village even if she had never left home. Nevertheless, ghosts and spirits remain part of the story she tells. She attributes some of the blame for the accident to a ghost in the mango tree where the old man's car struck her. The tree was located in an area unfamiliar to Buajan and the old man. In an earlier era, perhaps, the two of them would not have roamed so far from home and might have known more about the dangers associated with each locale. Buajan herself observes that she was on unfamiliar ground and was therefore unable to protect herself against the malevolent ghost who was, at least in one interpretive frame, the cause of her injury.

In the absence of locality-based remediation systems that would compel the old man's cooperation, Buajan turns instead to direct negotiations and to third-party mediation by the police. In the course of the negotiations, it appears that Buajan and the old man misunderstand each other, because of confusion over the use of a traditional term: khaa tham khwan. The old man originally paid Buajan 20,000 baht and called it khaa tham khwan, a term suggesting to her that the money was intended to compensate her for the fright and suffering she had experienced. In her mind, khaa tham khwan was connected to traditional ceremonies to reintegrate the khwan soul with the damaged self. This form of payment focused on the self's intangible essence and, in earlier days, on the welfare of the entire village community.

Because she interpreted khaa tham khwan in this way, Buajan thought that the 20,000 baht payment for the khwan was entirely separate from the old man's promise to "clear" all her expenses. That is, she expected him to pay 20,000 plus her expenses. Apparently the old man had a different view of the injured self. For him, khaa tham khwan was merely a figure of speech that nowadays refers to the entire amount of compensation an injurer pays to an injury victim. He assumed that the expression--and the payment of 20,000 baht-- included not only the intangible and noncorporeal khwan-related aspects of Buajan's injury but also themore mundane andmaterialistic aspects, namely her medical expenses and lost wages. He thought the payment of 20,000 baht in total should be enough. In the end, to settle the disagreement arising out of their different interpretations of khaa tham khwan, the old man paid Buajan an additional 10,000 baht, which she considered insufficient.

Outside the traditional village context, concepts and procedures such as khaa tham khwan become uncertain, and their original meanings are overlaid with different meanings derived from alternative conceptions of self, injury, and remedy. Disagreements could be resolved through the intervention of third-party mediators, but it is much more difficult nowadays to identify persons with sufficient status and authority to command the respect of unrelated and socially distant individuals such as Buajan and the old man who injured her. The difficulty in finding a mediator is pervasive in modern Chiangmai, where people live in different geographical locations and in unrelated social networks. By default, the void is often filled by the police, since serious traffic injuries typically fall under their jurisdiction. The police usually try to promote a settlement between the parties rather than filing criminal charges against one or the other.

Buajan's description of police mediation is not unusual. She suspected that the old man had used his wealth to make the police side with him. Not only did she feel that the police were unwilling to help her obtain a more substantial settlement, but she also feared that they might turn the tables on her and make her out to be the lawbreaker if she persisted in her claim against the old man. Other interviewees expressed a similar apprehension and avoided police mediation whenever possible.

To summarize, in the preglobalization era of the 1970s, compensation for injuries was considered highly important for maintaining the integrity of social institutions and practices, including pervasive patron-client hierarchies and locality-based belief systems. The emphasis was on remedies, but not on the rights of the injured person. Nowadays, at the turn of the twenty-first century, patron-client hierarchies and locality-based belief systems no longer function as effectively to provide a remedy, and the terms and concepts associated with them have become uncertain. Although individual rights are more often discussed in Thai society, particularly in the context of recent constitutional and legislative reforms, the discourse of rights is nowhere to be found in the injury narratives that are the subject of this study. Rather, strong evidence suggests that the legal consciousness of those who suffer injuries embraces neither rights nor remedies, and injured persons are less likely than before to receive compensation. The next section explores this apparent paradox.

7. LITIGATION

For Buajan, as for other interviewees like Anchalee and Jira, the injury narrative portrays a breakdown in the remediation systems that operated more extensively 25 years earlier. Injured persons now tend to lack recourse to the compulsion of village-level compensation mechanisms, because injuries less often take place in such settings or because the parties no longer live there. These factors have also made mediation more problematic as a means for obtaining compensation. In the past, a small but significant number of injury victims filed lawsuits when their access to locality-based remedies was blocked. Do injured persons now turn more frequently to the courts in order to seek remedies they can no longer obtain through other means? Has the discourse of rights among Thai elites been accompanied by a heightened rights consciousness and a turn toward law among ordinary Thai citizens who suffer injuries? An increase in the litigation rates of personal injury cases would be consistent with long-standing theories of the sociology of law [FN17] as well as with current assumptions that globalization tends to promote "Western" legal and political concepts at the expense of customary and traditional practices.

It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to probe the upper levels of the tort law pyramid in Chiangmai and discover that the tort litigation rates in the 1990s, measured in relation to population, have not changed significantly from the period of 1965-74. During four years in that earlier period, the mean rate of tort litigation per thousand population was .071, increasing only slightly to .088 from 1992 to 1997. The figures from 1992 to 1997, moreover, show that the number of tort cases involving personal injury is surprisingly small (see table 1). [FN18]

[FN16]. Personal injury cases sometimes involved potentially transformational challenges to powerful figures or entrenched systems of dominance and authority (e.g., a village woman suing a government official for sexual harassment, or a village youth suing the village chief or a police officer for abusive treatment) (see Engel 1978, 186-204).

[FN17]. E.g., Black 1976, Friedman and Percival 1976, and Toharia 1976. These theories of litigation and social change are surveyed and critiqued in Munger 1990.

[FN18]. In the later period, 1992-97, it is interesting to note a small but steady increase in the tort litigation rate every year except 1996. This increase, however, is not apparent in tort cases involving personal injuries, which are the central focus of this study. This upward trend appears only in property damage tort cases--a curious development but one that lies outside the scope of this article. It is possible that Thailand's new mandatory automobile insurance law, enacted in 1992, has caused this increase in property damage cases (see the discussion of insurance, p. 031). If so, it is all the more significant that this same law has not also increased the rate of personal injury tort cases. The differing patterns for property damage and personal injury torts underscore a central question of this study: Why does the law play such a small role in injury cases?