AbstractThis essay describes and analyzes a historical situation of loss in Thailand's far south since the annexation of the Sultanate of Patani by Siam and its recurring conflict since the late 1940s. What was felt to be lost for my Malay Muslim interlocutors was a history of protracted struggles against a Thai Buddhist kingdom—the implications of which varied widely and were experienced unevenly. For some elites, the present violence reflected the loss of a past glorious kingdom. For ordinary civilians facing a reality of unending violence, what was lost was quotidian liveliness, embodiment, and emplacement. For others, the history of their struggles and its attendant losses had become constitutive of the present. Over the course of the essay, the relationship between loss and history (in its multiple temporalities) is ethnographically shown to be unstable, given the uneven effects on a population that was never homogenous in the first place.
