Sensitizing Thai Studies: (Multi)sensory Approaches to Thai History and Culture
摘要
Since the final decades of the twentieth century and increasingly in recent years, Thai academia has witnessed a significant surge of attention to the senses in various disciplines, from anthropology and sociology to history, archaeology, and literary criticism. This sensory turn has only begun to be systematically integrated across disciplinary boundaries and resonate with an extramural interest in sensory experience among the Thai general public. This chapter is aimed at sensitizing the wider field of Thai studies to the sensory dimensions of Thai history and culture, calling attention to the sensorium as both an object and a method of interdisciplinary inquiry. It provides an overview of existing sense-based scholarship in Thai studies and suggests potential areas and directions for further research. Drawing upon theoretical and methodological perspectives from the burgeoning field of sensory studies, it proposes five interrelated lines of investigation into Thai historical processes and cultural phenomena: (1) the historicity and sociocultural construction of the senses, (2) multimodality, intersensoriality, and synaesthesia in experience and discourse, (3) sensory and aesthetic politics, (4) sensory extension and modification through media and technology, and (5) interspecies or more-than-human sensory entanglement. This chapter also argues that the sensory turn opens up decolonial possibilities for Thai studies insofar as it allows for subjugated or alternative modes of knowledge production other than those dominated by Western ocularcentrism or disembodied abstraction.