:::::: OVOP APEC 2008 ::::::

The Experiences of Thai Woodcarvers and Furniture Artisans

Frederick F. Wherry, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Southeast Asian Studies
University of Michigan, USA

When we anticipate an encounter, we make a guess about what is likely to happen and prepare ourselves for the encounter with these expectations in mind. Those of us who are economic sociologists and behavioral economists talk about framing and mental accounting to describe the importance of expectations on outcomes in the marketplace. How a buyer anticipates her encounter with small enterprises in the Thai woodcarving sector affects the economic outcome of the encounter. In other words, buyers primed to believe in the authenticity of local cultural industries will be willing to pay a higher price and/or to offer more favorable terms of trade for local cultural industries compared with buyers who receive no independent indications of the authenticity of these local craft traditions and no feel for the sincerity of the artisans.
This might suggest that the authenticity of these local cultural industries might be manufactured by government entities building marketplaces with stages for the demonstration of local craft traditions and through supporting local craft festivals and museum exhibits on local knowledge. However, I will show that these interventions cannot proceed in any way that the well-meaning government agents please. The mental accounts that buyers have about products and producers in the cultural sector preclude the overt mechanization of meaning. When the charisma of small enterprises becomes routinized, the comparative advantage of these local cultural industries is lost.
Methods and Data
I will demonstrate the importance of these anticipated and of unanticipated outcomes by drawing on my work in northern Thailand, where I conducted field work for five months in 2002. While in Thailand, I attended meetings of the Northern Organization for Handicraft Manufacturers and Exporters (NOHMEX) and translated profiles of twenty-one of its members. These profiles were graciously provided to me by Professor Luechai Chulasai at Chiang Mai University. I also shadowed local artisans in village workshops (employing roughly 5 artisans) and in small factories (employing fewer than 50 workers)
I interviewed fifty-two artisans in their village workshops, and spoke with other key informants in the government. The respondents were 62 percent female and were either the head of the workshop or the spouse of the head. Most of the workshops export their products abroad (79%); and most are micro- enterprises, employing five or fewer workers (58%), with a few employing up to nine workers. Nearly three-quarters of the workshops in Thawai report their monthly sales as exceeding US$1,250 in the high season. To protect the identities of the small handicraft factories outside the village, employing more than 10 but fewer than 50 full-time workers, I do not report their summary statistics here. Although I speak, read and write central Thai, four advanced undergraduate students from Chiang Mai University, two of whom speak the northern dialect, accompanied me in the field at least once a week over a four month period. Most of the interviews were not tape recorded because the small-scale artisans were concerned with privacy and economic vulnerability.
I chose the village of Thawai and its district, Hang Dong, because they are emblematic of communities whose livelihoods depend on ethnic and tourist crafts. The village hosts an annual woodcarving festival advertised by the Thai Tourism Authority and most of its inhabitants either produce or sell handicrafts for a living.
Small enterprises in the woodcarving sector contribute to a thriving world export market. To give you some perspective on the value of world exports, I present this bulls'-eye (See Figure 1). The World Trade Organization and the United Nations Trade and Development jointly maintain a database of cultural commodity export flows for 98 countries. We are looking at wooden furniture made by artisans that totals 14.6 billion current US dollars in 2003. In the center of the bull's-eye are countries accounting for 10 percent or more of the total world exports of wooden furniture made by artisans. There we find China and Italy, which together account for nearly a quarter of the total. In the fourth ring we have countries accounting for 2 to 3.9 percent of the total. There we find Thailand with a recorded 377 million US dollars in furniture exports.
Mental Accounting
Now that we have taken into account some indications of the size of the woodcarving sector, we will take into account how economic value gets created in the market for local cultural industries. I will begin with an advertisement from the world wide web before turning to testimony from one of my informants about how sacred traditions get priced in the marketplace.
Take the example of the Thai spirit house. Buyers differentiate between real ones and fake ones in such a way as to create dramatic pricing advantages for the sellers. In the sacred domain, the spirit house shelters ghosts and spirits displaced from the land by the arrival of humans who chop down the trees that host the spirits. As a person worked to clear land to build a house, a multitude of homes for the spirits would be removed. In return for the displacement, the human occupants of the land would build a miniature house, the size of a Western bird cage, ranging from about one by one by one and a half feet to a much larger structure that could be three feet in height or more. The size of the spirit house depends on the ages and the types of trees removed. As the age of the displaced tree increased, so too did the attention given to the spirit house honoring the tree's removal. It is believed that older trees host more formidable spirits.
Each day a representative of the household would pay homage to the displaced spirits in return for the peace and tranquility that come with having one's displaced spirits appeased. At both homes and business establishments, the human occupants of the land set out offerings to the spirits and whisper prayers while holding lit joss sticks. The offering consists of fermented rice wrapped in a banana leaf, a garland of flowers, lit candles, and red joss sticks. The supplicant recognizes the power of the spirits to grant peace and tranquility (Anuman Rajadhon,1988). In the supplicant's personal life, the prayer recognizes that life is uncertain and that accidents happen. In the supplicant's professional life, the prayer suggests that market forces create instability and great dangers to survival. With so much change wrought by life's natural cycle and by the global market's incursion into all corners of the world, the supplicant seeks protection wherever and however it may be found. Those selling the spirit houses in the West extract this sacred narrative of peace, protection and spiritual balance, and transfer it from its sacred context to a profane market context. Instead of advertising the merits of spirituality, some Western marketers have used the form of the spirit house as a gimmick for ornate bird cages.
Consider the Thai response to this violation of the sacred. In the market transaction for spirit houses, the Thai producers and sellers have had to think about the distinction between the sacred and the profane. One informant constantly used the English phrase ‘the real one' (khong ching) to discern the spirit house from the bird cage as he discussed the dilemma that he faced. According to the informant, everyone in Thailand knows about the sacred significance of the spirit house. Its Thai name translates as ‘the house in which the spirits are invited'. For the spirits to feel welcomed in the house, the human occupant of the land invites the Buddhist monks to the property to hold a special ceremony welcoming the spirits to their new home. As the spirit house ages, the human occupant becomes concerned about where the spirits will reside because the spirits do not exit the dilapidated house without a proper ceremony that invites them into their new home. The old spirit houses, in fact, have to rest beneath the old banyan tree, which holds sacred significance as the place where the Buddha was enlightened. For this reason, one will see lots of old, broken spirit houses discarded beneath these gnarled trees.
Because the Western buyer proposed that he had customers willing to pay up to US$1,000 for very old teak spirit houses, the informant agreed to furnish these items under a set of specific conditions. If the buyer wanted an antique spirit house for artistic purposes, the Thai seller would provide it, but it would take some time to have the monks come and decommission it properly. However, if the buyer only wanted a bird cage that looked like a spirit house, the Thai seller would instruct the artisans to build a new spirit house and to set the object out of doors during the rainy season to make it look old. For inauthentic uses of the object, the Thai would use inauthentic processes. The informant stressed, ‘We can't treat a real spirit house as if it's just any old kind of thing.' Explaining what the object is not makes more salient what the object is; moreover, the seller's sincerity can be verified by the everyday acts apparent all over Thailand. Because the offerings to the spirit house are a public ritual, the claims to authenticity that the sellers make can be verified by the buyers' casual observation. Public rituals reduce the risk that buyers will be duped into believing that a profane practice is sacred for the sake of the seller's gain. The seller can believe what s/he can see without being told to see it. Hence, public rituals undertaken by everyday people are important for the creation and maintenance of value in this product.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that making public other rituals and processes might have the same outcome on the value of local cultural commodities. Let's take as an example the importance that buyers have in seeing how and what the artisans carve. After I left the field site, one of my informants told me about a government-supported project to construct storefronts with staging spaces where the artisans are expected to display themselves at work. In other words, the artisans are expected by the designers of these storefronts to make what usually happens backstage as a visible part of what buyers see in the front stage. The artisans did not refuse these storefronts, yet many of the storefronts go unused. The artisans prefer having the option of closing the backstage to some but not other buyers. The artisans understand intuitively that barriers to outsiders are important elements of authenticity. The observer has to be let “in” for a tour backstage or for a viewing of works-in-progress to confirm the agency and kindness of the artisan and to validate the experience of authenticity as exclusive. The options that artisans have about who sees what enable these artisans to segregate their buyers into appropriate categories for different types of sales and different trading dynamics. The standardization imperative of government agencies would seem to dictate the routinization of the artisan's charisma, but my field investigations reveal that local control over the display of artisanal processes and over the granting of access to the artisan's backstage gives these products their value.
Indeed, one of the important barriers to entry in local cultural industries for buyers is the reluctance of real artisans to engage in commercial encounters. The experience of master craftsman Nopphadol exemplifies how reluctance serves as a source of authenticity. To hear him tell it, the last thing he ever wanted to do was to enter the global market. Perched on a small pillow, with his chisels aligned by his feet, and a large piece of teakwood resting between his thighs, he would carve with no thought of sending his work into the global market. He had already made the 300 mile journey to Bangkok, found a retail shop willing to sell his wares, and established a subcontracting relationship. Markets beyond Bangkok were beyond his ken, until his 1993 encounter with a German buying agent. The German businessman offered Nopphadol the chance to make it big in the global market. Politely, Nopphadol declined the generous offer.
The German businessman was not accustomed to artisans refusing generous terms of trade. The German regularly traveled throughout Asia identifying and purchasing high quality, authentic handicrafts to sell in Germany. En route to Bali, he stopped in Chiang Mai, a region well known for the craft villages scattered across its territory. Like many others before him, the agent searched for those villages where authentic crafts were being made. Once he had found villages, he proceeded to identify and contact the most talented artisans. He offered to act as their middleman in exporting the goods to Germany. He also hoped to find craft artisans who would come to Germany for a major crafts exhibit and who would become regular partners for producing and distributing their hand-made crafts in Europe. The opportunity he offered any aspiring artisan, he thought, was mutually beneficial and likely to be seized by those artisans wanting to profit by going global. By initially refusing to go global, Nopphadol made his successful entry into the global market more likely.
Conclusion
To conclude, in the market for local cultural industries, things are not what they seem. Sincere reluctance to enter the commercial sector increases the likelihood of one's desirability for buyers. Moreover, traditional restrictions on production processes and on the uses to which objects may spur commercial innovations. Where public policy plays an important role is in the support of festivals and other public rituals. This support independently verifies what middlemen buyers suspect: the symbols that these products present and the local lore that may be packaged into the product's narrative are unique, scarce, and valuable. Too much attention to creating a mass market for local cultural industries will undo the very mechanism that gives this sector its value and will place countries and localities back into the price-cutting race to the bottom. More comparative works needs to be done to identify different dynamics among buyers and sellers at trade fairs and in different environments of sale. With these comparative findings we will be able to understand both the improvised strategies of individuals and the policy environments that make the anticipated encounters yield more accurately anticipated outcomes. Thank you.

References
Anuman Rajadhon, Phya. 1988. Essays on Thai Folklore. Bangkok, Thailand: Thai Inter-Religious Commission for Development and Santhirakoses Nagapradipa Foundation.
Luechai Chulasai and Siroros Nataworn. 2002. “Networks and Clusters Development in Northern Thailand,” SMEs Institute of Chiang Mai University Working Paper. Chiang Mai, Thailand: University of Chiang Mai.
Luechai Chulasai and Frederick F. Wherry. 2003. SME Competitive Strategy: Lessons Learned in Northern Thailand. Bangkok: Chulalonghorn University Press.
Peleggi, Maurizio. 2002. The Politics of Ruins and the Business of Nostalgia. Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press.
Wherry, Frederick F. 2006. “The Social Sources of Authenticity in Global Handicraft Markets: Evidence from northern Thailand,” Journal of Consumer Culture 6 (1): 5-32