Argus Panoptes: How the Thai State See Citizens’ Health

Illan Nam, Colgate University

How does the state’s ability to see its citizens shape its capacity? Why is it able to see certain aspects of its citizens more clearly than others? Ever since Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) introduced the concept of legibility, a growing body of scholarship has advanced our understanding of the consequences that the state’s ability to see produced upon its capacity. While most works to date predominantly focused on the relationship between legibility and fiscal capacity, this article focuses on how the state’s ability to see citizens’ health enhanced its capacity to deliver public health goods. Drawing upon the case of Thailand, the article demonstrates that while the Thai state had poor vision in seeing “its population’s incomes, its accuracy and reach in gathering data on citizens’ health status enabled it to enroll virtually every Thai into its universal health care scheme, deliver sanitation services to every household, and monitor and track COVID infections such that, during the pandemic, far fewer people died in Thailand than in neighboring Malaysia. I argue that the state’s ability to “see” – to identify households that lacked toilets or track citizens who might be at risk of infection – was important to effective public health goods delivery. This study examines two initiatives – latrine installation and combatting NCDs – and finds that the state employed two mechanisms of information gathering that powerfully enlarged its information infrastructure: societal networks of traditional leaders deeply embedded in local communities and innovative health system design that incentivized providers to routinize data collection. These tools enabled the state to overcome impediments to citizen legibility: first, asymmetry of information between state and society in which society often withheld its knowledge; and second, citizens’ episodic contact with the state that limited the state’s reach into its population.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 8. Surveillance, Health, and Settler Administration