Cultural Festival in Thailand
Thailand's festivals are plentiful, but perhaps one of the most widely celebrated is the Loy Krathong Festival. The basis of this project is to learn the reasons behind this celebration, how it has changed over the years, and why. Although I have lived in Thailand for almost 9 years, a Western environment always surrounded me; therefore I had a lack of chance to satisfy my curiosities of the many Thai celebrations. I joined a visiting Thai friend in his celebration of Loy Krathong with his relatives and friends, where we dressed up in national Thai costume and floated the krathongs we made in Lake Mendota. The ceremony took place on October 31st, also known to the Thais as the full moon night of the twelfth lunar month. The people I celebrated with varied in age, gender, and experience. Some of these people live in Thailand but happened to come to Madison for vacation during Loy Krathong holidays. Some of them was born in the States and have never been back to Thailand before, whilst others were born in Thailand but are currently residing in the States. In order to maximize my understanding of this festival, I believed that it was important, despite how strange I felt, that I performed the same ritual tasks as is traditionally
As with many anthropologists, I didn't perform this fieldwork without encountering any difficulties. These problems mainly revolve around the cautiousness of the elderly, which challenged - and even changed - my fieldwork ideas. An elderly who prefers to remain anonymous states "It's not that we don't trust you, it's just that you're different, and you won't ever fully understand our Thai traditions." Due to my respect for their wishes to not become involved in my fieldwork, I decided to leave the elderly out of my interviews, and instead, focused on the younger generations. Keeping this in mind, due to circumstances out of my control, my fieldwork is not a completely accurate interpretation of the changes and views on the Loy Krathong Festival. The interviews (attached to this write-up) were performed upon four people, all of different ages and backgrounds. Separately, they provided me with information about Loy Krathong. Together, they provided me with patterns in changes and views of the festival with regard to both age and background. The interviews contained differently worded questions, but probed around the same ideas. For example, the idea of the changes in the celebration of the festival. Anchalee Kongviwatanakul "only started to celebrate it last year", which didn't really give her the opportunity to input any opinions on the change. However, it can be seen that immigrants from Thailand find that much of their culture is left back in Thailand, and younger generations often fail to learn much of their own culture. Ratanapon Amornpatsophon, an 18-year-old, expresses his opinion that changes have occurred between generations, and has resulted in "teena
Some common words found in the essay are:
Loy Krathong, Krathong Thais, Krathong Festival, Thanida Amornpatsophon, Lake Mendota, Secondly Celebrations, Anchalee Kongviwatanakul, Ratanapon Amornpatsophon, Pacharin Tantiparimongkol, loy krathong, Pavinee Ngamachariyakul, loy krathong festival, krathong festival, prefers remain anonymous, prefers remain, remain anonymous, born thailand, thailand celebrations, understanding festival, changes views, live thailand, changes celebration,
Approximate Word count = 1127
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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