Anthropology of Art and Nonhuman/Queer Narratives at the Southern Border
Anthropology of Art and Nonhuman/Queer Narratives at the Southern Border
In early 2017, I started to work in visual ethnography for my new border study in Pattani, on a project about being ‘queer Muslim’. Since I wrote a reflexive article “Pondan under the Pondok” (Samak 2017a) about my childhood memories of homosexual practice in the Islamic school where I did religious studies for six years, those experiences still keep me questioning, how did this happen at a place that seems to be so strongly anti-homosexuality?
In that same year, there was a big argument among scholars and activists both inside and outside of Thailand’s three “Deep South” provinces debating on how to open up homosexuality to public discussion, and how to make queer people and identity visible in the community (see Anticha 2017). At that time talking about being queer in Islam became a very sensitive topic. Then, one day my former student from Islamic college asked if I ever saw stray sheep in Pattani? I wondered why I never noticed these sheep that lived among us. Suddenly that question came to me again; why there were so many sheep here, and how did they look so dirty, wandering around like stray dogs.
