Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok

ทวิพากษ์ #2

by Claudio Sopranzetti

On May 19, 2010, the Royal Thai Army deployed tanks, snipers, and war weapons to disperse the thousands of Red Shirts protesters who had taken over the commercial center of Bangkok to demand democratic elections and an end to inequality. Key to this mobilization were motorcycle taxi drivers, who slowed down, filtered, and severed mobility in the area, claiming a prominent role in national politics and ownership over the city and challenging state hegemony. Four years later, on May 20, 2014, the same army general who directed the dispersal staged a coup, unopposed by protesters. How could state power have been so fragile and open to challenge in 2010 and yet so seemingly sturdy only four years later? How could protesters who had once fearlessly resisted military attacks now remain silent?  Owners of the Map provides answers to these questions—central to contemporary political mobilizations around the globe—through an ethnographic study of motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok. Claudio Sopranzetti advances an analysis of power that focuses not on the sturdiness of hegemony or the ubiquity of everyday resistance but on its potential fragility and the work needed for its maintenance.

329 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 10, 2017

About the author

Claudio was born in a small town in Central Italy. He received his BA from University of Rome in 2005 in Anthropology and Linguistics. After working for NGOs in Kenya and traveling around West Africa and Southeast Asia, he begun a PhD in Social Anthropology at Harvard University writing and researching about urban development, social movements, and history in Thailand, Cambodia, and Venezuela. In 2012 he published his first book, Red Journey: Inside the Thai Red-Shirt Movement with Silkworm Book and Washington University Press. In 2013, Claudio received his PhD in 2013. Currently he is based in Oxford University where he is a fellow of All Souls College, a research associate at the Future of Cities Center, and lectures at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Reviews

[Jesper Döpping · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thisted book does matter Out side of Thailand

In The end of this book try to answer the question if an ethnographic book can ever matter for people outside of the specific context of its production. His answer is a yes, arguing from a modern, and maybe late Marxist perspective, that the experiences can be used as learning from others practices.

Yet, as an ethnography from the bottom it raises so many academic questions on concepts of class, power, infrastructures, peoples trajectories, concrete politics, differences in neoliberalism and the entrepreneurial dream and it’s demands al of which can keep academic discussion going for a while! Only later when the book is hopefully picked up by many, and hopefully the brighter kids of the very motorcycle taxi drivers around the world can think and reflects on the changes to concepts of inclusion, and the better life life will it have the political impact the author is hoping for.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well researched and personal exploration of Thai politics and society since the mid 1990s. At times best suited for a political science graduate student (theories abound, a la doctoral thesis), the text also provides unique insights into the perspectives of the motorsai drivers and the upheavals in recent Bangkok history. There were times where I believe the author's personal perspectives clouded his narrative (and he probably did not need to repetitively remind us that the drivers had an advantage because they knew the city), but these problems are very few in an otherwise amazing book. Further, those flaws were more than balanced by the two post script chapters in which the author puts some of his younger, more visceral assertions in perspective. The moment to moment experiences of the 2010 uprising were fascinating, and putting them so well into context made this a fascinating read, especially those trying to make sense of Thai political history.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Urban Ethnography of Asia class

[Dhamma K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth every word. A fascinating look at political movements. A stellar mix of methodology.

[FluffyNyctea]

Comparison, a flagship method of anthropology since the late nineteenth century, has been used to drastically different, and sometimes harmful ends. But it can also allow anthropologists to attend to inequitably distributed connections. At its best, comparison guides anthropologists to remember and reimagine, to make better relations, live better practices, in fieldwork, writing, teaching, organising…. But anthropology does not own comparison. Sopranzetti offers an ethnography of ‘the work needed to knit the city together and keep it connected, the people and infrastructures that perform it, and their roles in making and remaking the urban scale’ (pp. 6). The city of Bangkok becomes scalarly conceivable because of the work of comparison, where the scales being connected and the connecting of scales are all too material, corporeal, infrastructural. Thinking with work and labour, comparison is performed by different people in different ways; the making a better otherwise can be such a tangy admixture of agency and coercion, capacitation and debilitation, hope and despair.

[hanita]

read for class