Spirits in a Material World

This epilogue considers acquittal through the absolution of the apparition—where supernatural beings help to dictate the actions and fates of the living. It is only in the latter world that it makes sense for one to undertake kan-tham khwan, the action of making amends for a lost life through a compensatory payment made to the spirit of the deceased. The chapter illustrates that, insofar as kan-tham khwan masquerades as a payment made to placate the spirit of the deceased, it conforms to the logic and spirit of traditional forms of remediation for lost life. It is a testament to the survival of customary modes of action in an age of ostensibly normalized and homogeneous forms of law and order. At the same time, however, it is a form of action that imparts indemnification or legal protection for the injurer or culpable party. In this respect, kan-tham khwan participates in the long-standing logic of noblesse oblige, whereby social superiors are entitled to make amends for potentially wrongful actions that cost the lives of their subordinates. Within this backdrop, the chapter draws some inferences on the state of social and economic inequality in contemporary Thailand.

Incisions and Inscriptions

This chapter follows the dead body as it moved out of the public spaces of vernacular forensics and into the sequestered space of medicolegal science, the morgue. It attends to the efforts of the Siamese state to implement medicolegal science in the form of autopsies (incisions) capable of producing forms of documentary evidence (inscriptions) that foreign consular courts would recognize in the prosecution of foreign residents accused of having harmed Siamese subjects. Engaging with science studies scholarship on the work of mediation, the chapter focuses on the collaborative work of Dr. P. A. Nightingale, a British physician in the employ of the Siamese state, and Mo (Dr.) Meng Yim, his Sino-Thai assistant and translator. It discovers in the documentary fruits of their collaborative labor, the death certificate, a “boundary object” capable of entertaining discordant forms of knowledge. It became a testament to the emergence of a new form of necropolitics in Siam.