Plants, people and narratives in Southeast Asia: reading Kampoon Boontawee’s A Child of the Northeast as literary ethnobotany

Abstract

This paper examines Thai author Kampoon Boontawee’s novel A Child of the Northeast, originally published in Thai as Luk Isan (1976) and translated to English by Susan Fulop Kepner in 1988. The semi-autobiographical novel details the uncertainties of village life in the Isan region of north-east Thailand in the 1930s. Boontawee presents the immediacies of drought, food, trade, and intercultural tensions between Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai villagers from the perspective of an eight-year-old boy, Koon, whose parents remain unnamed throughout the novel. Previous studies of Luk Isan have focused on cultural self-sufficiency in relation to the harsh yet seasonally bountiful environment depicted throughout the work. Critics have described the novel as an account of Isan life and ecological practices that have since shifted due to socio-cultural and land use changes in the region. This paper suggests that A Child of the Northeast can also be understood as “literary ethnobotany”-a work of literature that documents traditional uses of plants. Through textual analysis of the novel, involving a survey of its ethnobotanical references, a model of literary ethnobotany that traverses literature, social science, and botany is posited, theorized, and applied. In an era of habitat loss and destructive human impacts on environments-in Thailand and around the world-literary ethnobotany contributes to the documentation of vanishing environmental practices, specifically those related to plants as foods, medicines, fibers, and spiritual objects.