Food and Ritual: an invention of social memory among the Lue in Diaspora in Chiang Kham, Payao Province

Abstract

The cultural revivals in Thailand’s countryside have become the liberating processes of space formation for local identity in those places to be constructed, visible and recognized by the state and outsiders. These cultural revivals could be considered as part of the ways local communities narrate their stories and locate themselves in the contexts of nation states in the age of globalization. This article proposes the analysis of food culture and social memory among the Lue in Diaspora in Chiang Kham. In doing so, it will compares Lue food and eating in everyday life and Lue food that is served and represented through ‘the Khan Tok Dinner’ in the Lue Cultural Festival, annually held in Chiang Kham.  The article will show that these cultural processes are the ways the Lue insist to be ‘Tai Lue’, their Lue-ness, and display their cultural identity. The existence and appearance of Lue food in this annual cultural festival, which have become a theatre for these Lue in diaspora, are related and significant to them, in recalling and remembering their past in the present Chiang Kham. This article argues that ‘Lue food’ is metaphorically a transit place between their everyday life and the presentation of self in the public places of these displaced people in the contexts of transnationalism, which operate through cultural tourism and  regional development in the Mekong region.