Reflections on the 'disappearing Sakai': a tribal minority in Southern Thailand.

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, June, 2006 by Hamilton, Annette

'They will all run away from you and disappear into the forest' (1)

My title is deliberately ambiguous: the minority tribal groups generally known in Thai as 'Sakai' have long been declared to be 'disappearing' demographically; and at the same time, the inability to 'know' them at first hand, to obtain control over them by successive interested parties (the colonial explorer, the naturalist, the government official) has been attributed to their ability to disappear into the jungle, seemingly without a trace. This article does not attempt to provide a comprehensive ethnography or discussion of the tribal groups in the Southern Thai border zones. (2) Rather, it traces the way the 'Sakai' have faded in and out of ethnology and Thai public consciousness, due in...

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