ABSTRACT
Precolonial Southeast Asian social formations are frequently described as ‘cosmic’ or ‘galactic’ polities, a scholarly classification emphasizing a parallelism of macrocosm and microcosm characterizing conceptions of state and kingship in the region. There is an ongoing debate in Southeast Asian studies as to whether the Tai mueang, with its emphasis of hierarchical encompassment as organizational logic, is merely a ruling ideology and whether it was shared by those collectives that the ruling center imagined as peripheral. This chapter draws on this debate to propose an alternative reading of the mueang. Reading the mueang as a social ontology, the chapter attempts to utilize the conceptual framework outlined in the second and third chapters of this volume for an epistemic decolonization of the debate in Southeast Asian studies through an emphasis of the role non-humans have for an understanding of Tai conceptualizations of collectivity. The chapter introduces animist collectivity as the essential form of social being in the language game of the mueang, and traces its practical meaningfulness throughout Thai history, up to the present.
