Thai pubs, or discotheques (well, that name is misleading too), are very unique to Thailand. This is a subject I was more engaged with when living in Chiang Rai, the northern most province in Thailand and biggest city therein. Nearly every weekend my esteemed colleague and I would venture into one pub or another under the moral aegis of engaging in participatory observation research for the nobler telos of potentially submitting an academic article to one of several well-known anthropology journals (working title: Houses of The Holy: The Thai-Style Pub as Locus of the Projection, Appropriation, and Reconstruction of Western-Liberal Notions of Gender, Sexual and Other Bodily Practices Within Traditional Thai Discursive Formations of the Same). As alcohol and hip-hop/house mash-ups are wont to do, however, our nobler aims for expanding academia's ken of social-scientific truths oft deteriorated into something that approximates what in some dialects of English could be described as a "shit-show." So, here I present to you my musings on the Thai pub, merely a glimpse, peering down into the mine-shaft of an academic treasure house, inexhaustible in its riches, only so that you, the reader, may take away with you a handful of (intellectual) booty.
Although there are--in Bangkok, for example--some pubs that both betray the archetype I am about to describe and approximate what Westerners commonly refer to as clubs, I'd venture to say 99.7 percent of all pubs in Thailand do not. As such, I will refer to the quintessential, ideal-type Thai-style pub as a "Thai pub" and will qualify the word appropriately should I need to employ the same word(s) to illustrate contrast or anomaly.
Thai pubs are host to one or many well-rehearsed cover bands of Thai (and occasionally, English) pop-punk, pop-ska, ska-hip-hop, and pop songs. The songs are super lame, undemanding, and repetitive, yet everybody goes fucking ape shit for them. The bands look deceivingly cool, mimicking the latest fashion and hairstyles from Japan. Up until the moment they, the band members, start to play and the singer reveals to the audience he's been thoroughly neutered of his masculinity, the band manages to deceive just about everybody in the audience into thinking their comportment and countenance suggests originality or at least passably Cool. This instance, like several others, is but one of several crystallizations of cognitive dissonance I and any perceptive westerner may experience in Thai pubs. That said, these disappointments, discomforts, confusions chain together in a surprising manner, giving way to something like a fractal that never resolves itself, a thing of ineffable complexity, and either because of or in spite of that, expresses a unique beauty.
These bands usually entertain/irritate their audience for an hour and then retire for the evening, giving way to other bands, more or less cut from the same alluvium. The intervals punctuated by these bands are the occasions in which my colleague and I tend to break from our repugnance, disdain, or whatever it is that separates us from sharing the ebullience evinced by the majority of the pub's clientele, and start to break it down real good. For the simple reason that these time intervals, some stretching to lengths of 85 minutes, are the occasion for mostly-American-but-sometimes-British-hip-hop-and-house remix sets, we boogie. For better or worse, it is also at this time that the rest of the pub's patrons experience acute symptoms of cold-feet, bodily insecurity, and, though more difficult to perceive, cultural dissociation (To what degree the latter symptom is manifested is the subject of healthy debate and contestation, one to which I invite the reader to pay comment.)
In addition to music, Thai pubs also share a common layout. Where a Westerner might expect there to be empty space reserved for cutting rug, there is a multitude of small, circular chest-high tables (waist-high for me) for supporting the bottles of whiskey, soda, and coca-cola that everybody drinks in plenty. Where in Western-style pubs, it typically occurs that one's dancing justifies one's existence on the pub's dance floor. At that of the Thai variety, it is the claim to a table that does this very crucial work of establishing a solid social footing in relation to the pub's clientele; if you can set a drink on a table, then you also have the right to dance (or stand) around it.
It is much less common to order a beer at a Thai pub than it is to share a bottle of whiskey, a bucket of ice, and some mixers with who you hope are your friends. Usually, if you and your companions don't finish the bottle, the pub will protect the bottle until the next time you or anybody with your opened-bottle-redeeming card returns to drink your booze. If I don't finish the bottle, I like to fool-heartedly dash out with it before the fleet of roaming, bottle-smuggling-patron watchers have any clue what hit them. Suckers.
Dancing, as mentioned, is always confined to an imaginary yet palpable perimeter that runs concentrically around the tables. I find this to be the most bothersome fact of Thai pubs because I, if you don't already know, need space, elbow and head room--a high ceiling to comfortably get down. The tables are unavoidable and often arranged in a way to make both the pub seem more crowded than it really is (though they do tend to get really freaking packed) and the patrons relax into the healthy, rhythmic chicken-twitching a less dispassionate scholar might confuse as dancing. Chicken-twitching at the Thai pub becomes incidental and secondary to getting drunk for men, while ladies still seem more inclined and apt to chicken-twitch. As you can see, having a table is a must. Without a table, you are a stray dog in Singapore. Second in importance to laying claim to real estate is being member to a party of friends.
Essentially, there are several self-contained parties occurring in a shared space where the event of meeting new people is legitimized and facilitated by the conjoining of these highly mobile tables; when a member of one party stumbles upon the welcoming gaze and consequent smiling and raising of glasses of a member to another party, it tacitly grants the permission to approach, introduce, and unite respective clans.
The polygonal shape of the table, usually hexagonal or pentagonal, is key to facilitating inter-group socialization. The tables are hoisted by the brethren of one clan and interlocked with the tables of a receiving clan, atoms bonding to form molecular chains of nascent, well-lubricated friendships. In this sense, we can imagine the socialscape of the Thai pub as something like a shipwreck: hundreds of disoriented passengers clinging to a limited number of life preservers, skeptical yet yearning for a sense of humanity, collective effervescence, or comprehension of love before the sea swallows them whole. One's peers, in this view, could be seen by others as essential supplies, wrapped in waterproof, buoyant containers, promising life after the cold, black night passes and they, the others and your peers, are rescued, brought aboard a rescue boat, and delivered to a place in the world of high social standing and, by consequence, material well being because you look cool when you're hanging out with a lot of people; peers, as a rule, improve one's attractiveness, so the more people in your group, the better your chances are of eliciting approving or inviting glances from the other passengers wading amidst the flotsam. The other night a girl told me I was "soooo lucky" to be friends with the people she and I recognize as my friends. What a bitch.
The merging of tables represents an elision of communal identities, and so though you may have been away at the bathroom, absentmindedly bouncing your head against the the wall to the bass emanating from the floor below, forgetting that you live in another country, that you have feet and that they dance--are dancing--there has been a complete rearrangement of the social-geography in the club, and when you return you have a new group of strangers to call friends of your own and to learn what you can of them, ask for phone numbers of people with pretty faces, and cut rug, perhaps shocking/offending those recently united. And so tenuous friendships fortify or dissolve over the next hour or however long it is before the lights turn on and you start to wonder which women you met could be biologically classified as women or socioeconomically labeled as sex workers and whether if you never found out that they were or were not these things, would it really matter? That said, you still want to ask, not even towards the ends of scoring or whatever, but strictly to see if you called it or whatever, and for the sake of advancing science. The problem is that there is no good way to ask, so out of fear and self-doubt, you steal away and rest in the comfort that you will probably never see that individual again and that that Lynchian web of disorienting siginfiers from which you just emerged is ubiquitous in Thailand and reproduced everywhere.
This might seem to suggest there are a lot of women whose genders and/or means to sustenance of which no observer could be completely certain. In fact, there are, particularly in Thai pubs. There are a lot of pubs in Thailand, everywhere, urban or otherwise, whose patrons, for the most part, comprise a similar social scape in which a significant number of women--relative to western-style or other non-Thai-style Thai pubs--are only performing as such, which is to say they were born with penises. This is a stereotype about Thailand, that there are a lot of men performing as women, which exists because it's sort of true. Fact: Thailand carries out the most sexual reassignment surgeries in the world next to Iran. Transsexuality has a long history in Thailand, one which I'm not really well-read on. It suffices simply to say that it is not a thing of the West. More interestingly is how little homosexuality is accepted, in- and outside the pub, if it does not go hand in hand with performing as the opposite, socially appropriate sex.
I pause here to catch my breath, collect my thoughts, and do the work I've been putting off all day before I write the next, more substantive part of this post. Perhaps it will be tomorrow that I venture back into the field for more research.
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