ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Bangkok and on the rift between the formal understanding of the city and an undermining, informal reality. Thanon Sukhumvit is the west-to-east armature along which Bangkok expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Bangkok's most famous slum, Khlong Toei has engendered a whole subculture of reformers and activists along with an industry of slum improvement and welfare-focused slum tourism. The chapter examines Warner's concern with metamorphoses, of which she suggests four modes mutating, hatching, splitting and doubling. Bangkok's Sukhumvit is a constant display of Siam/Thailand's impregnation from its own erstwhile colonies, now its invaders, and from the neo-colonizing hordes of global tourists and mass media. Modern Thailand can be viewed as uneasily wedged between rival polities: a persisting memory of royal absolutism and relict feudalism, the constant threat of military dictatorship and Western-style popular democracy.
