“As a first step in this project I draw on studies of the contextuality of religion, gender and language use in Thailand, and expand my (2004) account of the surface nature of power in the Thai regime of images. I argue that this mode of power in contemporary Thailand, which contrasts with Foucault’s panoptic model of modern power as intrusive, emerges in part from a deep history of negotiating multiplicity and represents one response to the challenge of constructing social and cultural order in a setting characterised by multiple incommensurable cultural logics.”