ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the possibilities and limitations of resilience. Resilience itself is heritage; community resilience affects its public standing and thus the outcome of its struggles. Initial success renders a previously despised community more visible as a target for bureaucratic hostility, in which materialization of its unique identity becomes mere obduracy. Where dominant cultural discourses effectively infantilize local communities, local claims meet condescension or worse. At Pom Mahakan (Bangkok), eviction of the entire population and the destruction of fine Thai vernacular architecture demonstrated that the agency of karmically based hierarchical class structures constrains cultural independence and even survival. An exportable example of self-governance was thus suppressed, illustrating what makes cultural resilience insufficient to overcome the constraints inhibiting sociopolitical resilience.
