Studies of law in everyday life tend to view law either as instrumental in shaping specific decisions and practices or as constitutive of the cultural categories through which humans apprehend their world and perceive law as relevant to a greater or lesser extent. This article, however, suggests that circumstances may arise in which law's role in relation to everyday life is neither instrumental nor constitutive but instead becomes one of radical dissociation.
Based on a case study of injuries over time in northern Thailand, it explains how law can become uprooted from everyday life and viewed as alien to the experiences and values of ordinary people. Two transformational episodes in the recent history of Thai society contributed to this situation. The first was the creation of the modem Thai state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the extension of centralized legal and political control over the northern region and other outlying areas. During this process, the organic connection between customary and written law in northern Thailand was disrupted, and customary practices were relegated to a shadowy existence outside the framework of formal law.
The second episode was the period of dramatic social and economic change that occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century and brought with it a weakening of customary village relationships and practices. Traditional remedial practices were no longer tenable even outside the official legal system. New forms of Buddhism prompted injury victims to reject state law as an alternative, since they viewed it as inefficacious and contrary to justice as they now understood it. Consequently, law came to play neither an instrumental nor a constitutive role in the everyday lives of injury victims. After a century of state building and globalization, the dissociation of injury law from everyday life appears to be all but complete.
目次
Abstract 343 Introduction 344 I. The First Transformational Episode: Creation of a Modem Nation-State 347 A. State Building under King Rama V 347 B. Impact of State Building on Law in Everyday Life in Lanna 350 II. The Second Transformational Episode: Late Twentieth Century G lobalization 357 Conclusion 363
