Land territorialisation, contestation and informal place-laws of Indigenous peoples in Phuket and Phang Nga, Thailand

摘要: BACKGROUNDIn this chapter, we acknowledge that researching and writing about the collective Indigeneity of groups and communities is both challenging and risky because often individual dissonances and differences between and within communities are lost in the neat presentation of an overall message about the identity of that group (see Tuhiwai Smith 1999). In this vein, Jackson and Warren (2005, p. 549) have noted that ‘self-representational strategies [are]… numerous and dynamic, identities [are] themselves multiple, fluid, and abundantly positional’. Indeed, the fluidity and multiplicity of identity interpretations continue to present challenges for field research like our own, as well as explication in ethnographic writing. Such challenges are also place specific;‘Indigeneity’has held an uneasy ambiguity within state discourses in Thailand and many parts of Asia (see Li 2000). The alternative descriptors of ‘tribal’and ‘minority’groups were more common until campaigns by local non-governmental organisations (NGOs)(McKinnon 2011) to pay more attention to the diversity of and within communities like the Moken, Moklen and Urak Lawoi.