ธรรมชาติ/thammachat

ธรรมชาติ/Thammachat, meaning ‘nature’ in Thai, was a term coined as part of a larger language policy spanning the late-19th and 20th centuries, involving the expansion of the Thai vocabulary to encompass newly-introduced Western terms and concepts. Although ‘thammachat’ was the term constructed to describe the Western term, ‘nature’, it is imbued with locally specific meaning. Chusak (2008, p. 112), for example, notes that thammachat encompasses both the “wilderness discourse of the West” alongside a more Buddhist approach to nature. 

This is visible in its etymology: ‘thamma’/ธรรม, coming from the Pali dhamma and Sanskrit धर्म (dhárma), refers to the teachings of Buddha. When combined with ‘chat’/ชาติ, from the Pali jāti and Sanskrit जाति, meaning ‘birth’, ‘thammachat’ can be viewed as meaning: ‘born of the dharma’ (Darlington, 1997; Lohmann, 1999); effectively attaching Buddhist teachings to the Thai construction of nature through language. 

‘Thammachat’ ultimately represents a combination of Thai and Eurocentric perceptions of nature. As Pinkaew (2000, p. 19) writes, thammachat is “used to accommodate the western term, ‘nature’” while also including Thai-based understandings of “natural law, native (abilities), [and] naturalistic (religion)”. 

Nature in this Thai conception is also distinctive in that it does not offer a neat separation of nature and culture. As Forsyth and Walker (2008, p. 28) observe, ‘thammachat’, unlike its predecessor of ‘pa’/ป่า (which describes the ‘wild’), is an ordered landscape, involving a degree of human control and modification. The introduction of ‘thammachat’ also followed the inclusion of the Western extractivist/capitalist view of the environment as a resource, seen, for example, through the use of terms like sappayakon thammachat (natural resources). Importantly, however, this new way of thinking about nature was also exclusionary, as it established those who were able to take advantage of this nature and benefit from its resources. ‘Thammachat’ transformed nature into something for the middle class, to satisfy their “aesthetic, educational, and recreational needs” (Ribó, 2018, p. 42). Accordingly, ‘thammachat’ became, from its very concept, an “elite Thai word” (Rigg and Stott, 1998, p. 91). 

Rather than replacing ‘pa’, ‘thammachat’ sat alongside it, entailing a separation of nature along social boundaries. As Alisa (2025, p. 58) notes, “[t]his process of civilising and adopting the country’s natural/wild spaces and resources did not extend to the “wild people”—the chao pa [ชาวป่า]—who remain removed from society and continue to be seen and named as part of the pa, rather than the more acceptable thammachat. Therefore, while the Thai urban upper and middle classes expanded their realms to include the forests, they did so to the exclusion of the people occupying these spaces.”

The above is adapted from Indigenous Heritage and Identity of the Last Elephant Catchers in Northeast Thailand by Alisa Santikarn (2025, pp. 56–58).