Sterilization: Demographic Statistics, Fertility and the Making of Thailand’s National Body

During this fellowship I am working on a book project investigating how Thailand’s state and non-state actors, government as well as transnational organizations directed their attention onto individual bodies to control individuals and groups, produce and enact knowledge regimes (specifically bureaucratic and medical ones), and to govern conducts. In this context, bodies are a form of political space and become the sites where individuals can also manifest political participation and resistance. I examine how the historical trajectory of specific processes of identity, political, and biomedical practices can be read as strategies of nation building and governance that were carried out through the making and unmaking
of national, regional and individual identities. While my attention is devoted to Thailand,
the primary question I investigate, the body as political space, is relevant to wider debates in political anthropology and political science, focusing on state making and political participation.

In this talk at SCAS I will focus on two of the five historical defining moments that I analyse in the book: I will first introduce Thailand’s post-war period when demographic mapping via statistics and development of the nationalcensusesrepresented the nation in visual forms that are bureaucratically constituting subjects; then, I will describe the implementation of public health and family planning policies during the 1970s, with a special attention to campaigns of sterilization as medico-political rituals, integrated as part of larger development programmes of modernization.