Engel and Engel begin Tort, Custom, and Karma: Globalization and Legal Consciousness in Thailand by asking, “What happens to law in the lives of ordinary people when a society undergoes rapid change, economic development, and integration into global markets?” (3). Based on in-depth interviews with 35 people from Chiangmai who had been injured as a result of the conduct of another person, the authors trace the transformation of legal culture and consciousness in contemporary Thailand as a result of globalization. These “injury narratives” are augmented by an analysis of litigation rates in the Chiangmai Provincial Court during two periods, 1965 to 1974 and 1992 to 1997. Both data sources depict a situation in which both state and customary law are an increasingly irrelevant and, in the case of state law, illegitimate way of ordering social relations.
Engel and Engel frame their research by reviewing competing claims about the effect of globalization on legal consciousness. One view holds that globalization enhances consciousness of the rule of law and increases the willingness to use formal legal remedies. According to this view, the universalism that liberal legal systems promise roots out and displaces customary law. Alternatively, others argue that the processes associated with globalization are as likely to provoke a backlash against its market logics and to nourish traditional and oppositional discourses, particularly religious fundamentalism, resulting in a reactivation of customary legal ordering. Rather than adjudicating between these alternative scenarios, Engel and Engel reframe the debate, by conceiving of legal culture and consciousness as multidimensional, and seek to examine the impact of globalization on each of five key aspects of consciousness: spatial and temporal frameworks; concepts of self, community, social networks, and relationships; justice norms and procedures; and cosmology and religious beliefs. Using these concepts to interpret the injury narratives, Engel and Engel discover that the correct answer to the question about the effect of globalization on legal consciousness is “none of the above.” Instead of uncovering a zero-sum relationship between state and customary law, Engel and Engel find that by the late twentieth century both systems had atrophied, having been replaced by an individuated and abstracted Buddhism that, among other things, counsels people to absorb their injuries by assuming responsibility, forfeiting compensation, and abandoning the pursuit of justice.
By the 1930s, Thailand had adopted a legal system that conformed to the model of the liberal legal state. Recognizing individual subjects, valuing neutrality in judging, and adopting written laws and opinions, this state law operated evenly across delimited spatial and temporal boundaries. Thailand also had a customary legality that was, by contrast, defined by the idea of sacred centers—located in the heart of family, village, and community—whose authority diminished as it radiated outward. This customary legality was animated by ideas of karma, spirits, fate, and collective harm, and the definitions of fault and remedy were defined were based on these concepts. Despite their differences, state and customary legality were mutually reinforcing. Operating as a court of last resort to enforce decisions made at the local level, state law institutionalized, and thus reinforced, customary remedies. At the same time, state law derived its own legitimacy from its connections to customary legal forms.
This interlegality thus sustained multiple legal orders. At the same time, as Engel and Engel's research demonstrates, such interlegality also exposed both legal orderings to a shared vulnerability. Due to rapid social changes in the late twentieth century, Thai people now work and travel far from their villages and thus from sacred centers and customary authority. Injuries are no long interpreted within the discourse of malevolent spirits posing risks of collective harm and thus warranting collectively enforced remedies. Instead, injuries are considered karmic in origin and are thus the responsibility, at least in part, of the injured person. Moreover, within this cosmology, the pursuit of legal compensation through state law is thought to be a delusion and a form of attachment that will only lead to further suffering. Thus the displacements of globalization have led to the individuation of injuries and the withering of both state and customary law—and, with them, the possibility of obtaining justice through legal means.
This is a gem of a book. Concise but rich, it offers both a deft cultural portrait of Thai legal culture and two fully rendered injury narratives that open and close the authors' analysis. It is theoretically sophisticated and methodologically satisfying. Most impressively, Engel and Engel have enlarged the research on legal consciousness by examining how it intersects with broader social and economic trajectories. This is surely a book about Thailand and about globalization, but it is more than that as well. It is a masterful study of law, culture, and social change that reinvigorates sociolegal research on legal consciousness.
