Karen cultural capital and the political economy of symbolic power

For the Karen of northern Thailand, constructing the image of Karen as forest guardians and conservationists has produced an instrument of struggle against the official hegemonic discourse. This image construction is the accumulation of cultural capital and its transformation into symbolic power. The Karen cultural producers promote this strategy by investing their local knowledge and cultural resources into political action and alliances that reinforce their identification as ‘children of the forest’, in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Through image construction, the largely negative identities embodied in ‘Karen’ and their communities—as denigrated ‘hill‐tribes’, forest‐destroyers and illiterate peasants—are transformed into a single social and political category defined as the ‘indigenous’ forest managers.