Quiet Refusal: Somatic Resistance and the Politics of Belonging in Phuket Baba Foodspaces
Keywords:
Quiet refusal, Somatic infrapolitics, Embodied identity, Phuket Baba, Foodspaces, Heritage tourismAbstract
How do bodies resist identity labels that do not fit—and what can ethnographic attention to somatic responses reveal about the limits of heritage branding? This paper examines what happens in the pause: the somatic moment when the body registers a misfit between an externally applied identity label and an internally held sense of belonging. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Phuket Province from March to August 2024, it traces how working‑class Phuket Baba food practitioners navigate the increasing application of “Peranakan”—a regional heritage label strongly associated with the Straits Chinese world and now broadly circulated across Southeast Asia—to their local foodways, rituals, and cultural practices. The paper introduces “quiet refusal” as a form of somatic infrapolitics: bodily micro‑resistances that operate beneath overt confrontation. Building on Scott’s concept of infrapolitics (1990), Ahmed’s work on affective economies (2014), and Csordas’s somatic modes of attention (1993), the analysis demonstrates that identity resistance in Phuket does not rely primarily on argumentation, but on embodied knowledge inscribed through generations of somatic memory, ecological attunement, and cooking practice. Three ethnographic vignettes anchor the analysis: an uneasy pause in a coffee‑shop conversation; pepper as a bodily archive of mining‑era labour; and a popiah maker whose hands slowed before his words corrected. The paper finds that quiet refusal operates through two field‑derived somatic mechanisms—sadung (“สะดุ้ง”, the startle) and chaa‑ngak (“ชะงัก”, the bodily hitch)—which register identity misfit before conscious articulation. These scenes reveal that belonging, for Phuket Baba practitioners, is not only a category to be claimed but a practice to be inhabited, known first in the body and defended there.
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