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Claudio Sopranzetti, Red Journeys: Inside the Thai Red-Shirt Movement. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2012. 137 pp.
Claudio Sopranzetti's Red Journeys: Inside the Thai Red-Shirt Movement is an up-close, vivid, and fast-paced ethnographic account of one and a half frenetic months circulating amongst, conversing with, and feverishly documenting the actions of red-shirt protestors in Bangkok from April 10 to May 20, 2010. While media reports often reductively depict the Red Shirts as a singular rural mass of discontented "Thaksin supporters," Sopranzetti's account documents the movement through encounters with heterogeneous characters with multiple, distinct motives and beliefs. A Ph.D. student in anthropology, Sopranzetti originally traveled to Bangkok to conduct dissertation research on motorcycle taxi drivers. However, the Red Shirts occupied Bangkok in mid-April, placing both Sopranzetti and the drivers he was studying at the center of a national event that began making global headlines. As Sopranzetti puts it, "this side interest took my thesis hostage" (xii), and he shifted his attention to the spectacular story his network of motorbike taxi friends inserted him into. The book documents the view from behind the barricades in raw ethnographic detail, reproducing the blog posts Sopranzetti meticulously recorded during the unfolding protests, and bringing readers into close daily contact with the Red Shirts. It is an innovative ethnography that reproduces the way his field-notes and blogs emerged, and the book is styled to read as if events were playing out in real time. In response to such innovation, we have written this review as a collectively authored wiki which we hope will capture the multifarious reactions of a faculty member, a graduate student, and 11 undergraduate students-two of them from Thailand-who read and discussed the book together in a course on Southeast Asia. The advantage of this approach is that it manages to bring out in one text very different individual readings of the book. For example, some readers noted that the book ignored analyzing top-down power dynamics, while others celebrated the way it carefully avoided forcing a simplifying explanatory narrative onto these events. This collectively written document offers space for both readings, without suppressing either.
The immediacy of Sopranzetti's account complicates simplified renderings of the protests as a unified drama with a straightforward plot. This might frustrate readers searching...