Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Daena Funahashi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, who will discuss constitutional change and political legitimacy in Thailand.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In 2017 Thailand launched yet another constitution – its twentieth in less than a century. Contra a common perspective among political scientists that the cycle of coups followed by constitution writing in Thailand points to a “failure” of democracy, I examine this cycle as one that successfully renders political legitimacy visible as the vanishing point of politics. As I see it, what the century of Thai political conflict teaches us is that the problem of legitimacy is one that cannot and should not be laid to rest. Based on ethnographic and archival work I began in 2011, I argue in this talk that legitimacy is a question most animated at moments when old notions are toppled, and the new codifications of legitimacy are yet to emerge. Here, I put forth an idea of legitimacy as that which emerges through being toppled, rather than on being constituted.

About the Speaker

Daena Funahashi is a political and economic anthropologist interested in examining the interstice between speech and speechlessness, between what is possible to make legible and what resists articulation. She has written on issues of scientific authority, political legitimacy, and democracy in Thailand. Beyond Southeast Asia, she is the author of Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland (Cornell University Press, 2023). In it, Funahashi brings classic anthropological scholarship on exchange and sacrifice to bear on contemporary concerns with labor, labor’s attritional force such as burnout, and the future of state welfare. She is a member of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS) and The Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.