In Intimate Economies Ara Wilson charts the complexities and nuances of contemporary Thai citizens’ encounters with capitalist modernity. Specifically, Wilson offers an original and timely analysis of the class, gendered, and sexualized dynamics that both shape and are themselves transformed through commodity exchange and capitalist market forms in urban Thai society. By examining the links between everyday arenas of market exchange and consumption and the ongoing constitution of gender and sexual as well as ethnic and class identities, Wilson presents a compelling ethnography of global capitalism and a nuanced portrait of modern urban citizenship in Thailand.

Based on multisited field research in the 1990s, Intimate Economies highlights five distinct “capitalist venues” that characterize the modern (some would say “hypermodern”) landscape of Bangkok, Thailand’s primate capital city. Each one of the five main chapters takes up a different location: a department store, go-go bars, a shopping mall, a high-tech corporate media workplace, and direct sales networks. Framed by a nicely synthetic introduction and a brief conclusion, the five ethnographic case studies examine both how capitalist modernity has entered into “the intimate realms of daily life” (p. 8) in Thailand and how “intimate identities and relationships, specifically gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, have been and continue to be centrally involved in the operations of modernizing markets” (p. 9). In other words, the globalizing and transnational processes of capitalist modernity—rather than the homogenizing and culturally depleting forces of much popular imagination—are demonstrated to be both productive of and reliant on diverse (gendered, ethnic, and class) local identities and existing social relationships.

The first chapter traces the history of the powerful Sino-Thai merchant family whose members established the first Thai department store in the 1950s, a company (now much expanded) that remains an icon of middle-class consumer style and progress. The focus here is the interplay between one family’s entrepreneurial successes, rooted in specific class and ethnicized notions of masculinity and patriarchal heterosexuality, and emerging models of middle-class consumption and commodified norms of urbanized femininity (norms that frame both the clientele and service-sector labor force of the department store). Ch. 2 moves to the marginalized world of sex workers in Bangkok’s go-go bars catering to a predominantly foreign, Western clientele. Here Wilson examines how capitalist modes of production and consumption inform the lives, desires, and strategies of rural-born women who are themselves objects of commodified exchange. Next, a chapter on the shopping mall explores how this emblematic space of commodity consumption provides a unique stage for urban individuals to perform and experiment with new notions modern selfhood, “underwrit[ing] the construction of a variety of personae, … through the democracy of consumption” (p. 132). Most dramatically, the mall stages the enactment of novel patterns of heterosexual romance and nonnormative genders and sexualities (e.g., transgendered kathoey, tom and dee. The remaining ethnographic chapters shift the reader’s attention toward new arenas of globalized entrepreneurship. In ch. 4, Wilson examines self-consciously cosmopolitan “knowledge workers” in the promotional offices of Bangkok’s premier cable TV corporation. Skilled in English and global technologies, these professionals exemplify some of Thailand’s most privileged modern subjects. Hailing from varied middle-class and elite backgrounds, corporate men and women formulate messages to sell transnational images of modernity to Thai audiences, even as they negotiate what these images and ideals mean in their own lives. Finally, the fifth case addresses the explosive growth of globalized direct sales in Thailand (through companies like Avon, Amway, and their locally grown counterparts). Wilson explores the complex and contradictory ways in which participants rely on and reformulate conventional gendered, class, and ethnic identities in their pursuit of new entrepreneurial dreams.

This is an ambitious book. Related studies tend to focus on one particular group or community or on one particular space of consumption or exchange. Wilson’s innovation is important: combining in a single analysis both multiple spaces of exchange and multiple identities. Not all the case studies succeed to the same degree—in particular, the two chapters focusing on individual corporate venues (the department store and the cable TV company) are somewhat thin ethnographically. I also am slightly dissatisfied with Wilson’s use of terms such as folk, kin, and moral economies when describing the interpenetration of capitalist modes of economic behavior with noncapitalist arenas of value and exchange (e.g., those based in kinship and community ties). Such terminology risks essentializing nonmarket relationships as timeless products of a uniform or unchanging tradition, counter to Wilson’s own clear intentions. Nevertheless, the overall direction of Wilson’s argument is clear and persuasive: “Markets stage more and more of Thais’ work, leisure, and self-expression. The realization of intimate lives through capitalist venues both reproduces and transforms aspects of identity, social relationships, and cultural meanings” (p. 193).

Wilson raises questions and offers directions of analysis in this book that will engage ethnographers of globalization, consumption, gender, sexuality, and popular media, among other topics around the world. Moreover, Wilson writes clearly and accessibly, which makes Intimate Economies not only a refreshingly readable but also a readily teachable text.