Presented online only - Zoom details below

What might the precarious persistence of the naga in Bangkok’s critical zones illuminate about entangled relations of capitalist urbanization, migration, environmental degradation, and speculative world-renewal? Drawing on ethnographic encounters with naga shrines, urban infrastructures, and Isan migrants in the city, I investigate how the naga, once deeply rooted in the water cosmologies of Thailand’s rural regions, has become an occupant of diverse critical zones within the city—temple grounds, sites of speculative capitalism, and of labor precarity. Rather than as a remnant of the past or a mere symbol of animist belief, the talk will engage the naga as a more-than-mythic cosmopolitical figure that mediates multiple ontologies. Its spectral presence diffracts struggles of marginalized urban dwellers and the ongoing negotiation of more-than-human coexistence in the face of environmental degradation in Bangkok and the hinterlands. By attending to the naga’s shifting positionality—from riverine protector to an urban diplomat entangled in precarious worldings—the talk will contribute to evolving discussions concerning the role of more-than-human entities in shaping the urban futures of Thailand and Southeast Asia.

Speaker:

Jakkrit Sangkhamanee is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. His research explores the intersections of ecology, ontological politics, and science and technology studies (STS) in Southeast Asia. Engaging with themes of environmental infrastructures, more-than-human ecologies, and speculative world-making, his work examines how materialities, cosmologies, and infrastructures shape socio-political life. His recent projects investigate the cosmopolitics of water, amphibious urbanism, and the role of nonhuman entities as mediators of environmental and urban transformations in contemporary Thailand. He is also interested in the anthropology of futures, particularly in how Thai society imagines and negotiates its place in uncertain ecological and political landscapes. His scholarship contributes to wider discussions in anthropology, STS, and critical environmental studies.

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/84128620477?pwd=fRLFaoWlZw7kKJzZZWlCIavoO2pHOX.1