"Ban Thung-Khen" : The Contemporary Mon Ethnic Community of Suphanburi

Abstract

This paper presents the Contemporary Mon Cultural Community of Thung-Khen whose complexities and various forms of ethnic Identity exist in a global context. In an age where social media connects the world together, people are able to access government policy information and are able to get an overall view of the world situation. At the same time, government agencies have followed the trend of international organizations’ cultural policies treating the diversity of local cultures as cultural and social capital for the purposes of tourism. Therefore, the villagers are no longer the only owners of the community’s culture. Moreover, the villagers “choose” to show different identities in different contexts even though the power of choosing has stemmed from the reciprocal relation (two-way relation) between the government’s cultural policy measures and their own negotiating mechanism, not solely from them. As a result, the villagers’ choosing strategy is powerful, complex, dynamic and significant. Furthermore, the old traditions such as paying respect to senior community members and ancestor spirit worship by the villagers are being challenged by the knowledge and information which has come along with globalization. Despite this, community conflicts in the Mon cultural context are solved via the old customs, especially the ritual of paying respect to the ancestor spirits of the Thung-Khen village which is still powerful and performs the important role of stopping conflicts and reinforces the bonds of the villagers to a certain extent.