In Thailand, healing has never simply meant wellness. Rosalia Namsai Engchuan maps the passage from cosmotechnic healing to commodifified care. Tracing the distance between yu fai – a postpartum fifire ritual rooted in cosmotechnics – and the sleek interiors of global spas, she asks what it means to situate a body once again within the cosmos, and to keep relationality and ritual alive.
Image worlds and wounds within a larger scream
Growing up in Germany, my access to Thai culture was fragmented and distorted through the lens of stereotype. In the absence of real Thai women around me, I came to know myself through images I did not create: the submissive masseuse, the greedy prostitute or the mail-order bride. I remember the momentary freeze in my body when someone would smile and ask, again, if I could give them a Thai massage. I felt the need to distance myself from whatever that was. My therapist once suggested that my decision to do a PhD might have been mostly about disproving this image. She is probably right.
Later, I began to trace where that image came from. I found its outlines in the histories of the American War in Vietnam, the sex tourism boom that followed, and the migration of rural Thai women whose lives were upended by state-led development projects. Many were funnelled into the growing tourism economies of Pattaya and other beach destinations, or into transnational marriages forged through economic precarity. She – the figure of the Thai Woman – did not simply emerge from cultural misrepresentation. She was assembled at the juncture of global militarism, capitalist desire, and uneven development.
She appears in early Thai Airways advertisements, smiling with an orchid in her hands, promising the fantasy of exotic servitude. She reappears as the punchline of a tasteless joke in The Hangover II, when Stu – a white, heterosexual American man – discovers he has slept with a Thai transgender woman in a Bangkok strip club. In Sex and the City, Samantha’s encounter with Sum, the Thai servant of her real-estate developer lover, maps the racial limits of white liberal feminism. Sum is obedient only to her master in a trope that casts Thai femininity as both submissive and scheming. These are not just isolated lapses into bad taste, nor simply instances of racism and homophobia; they form part of a broader cinematic and geopolitical pattern in which Thai femininity is constructed as inherently sexual, compliant, and transactional. On mainstream screens, the Thai woman is always available, always smiling, never complex.
This essay locates a wound within a larger scream: the scripting of Thai women into eroticised stereotypes and the simultaneous commodification of Thai massage into a globally consumable service. Both move in parallel as paired projections that flatten complexity into extractive fantasy. In anticipation of other worlds beyond the inherited fictions, these stories follow Thai massage not only back in time, but back to its ontological ground.
What are we healing from? Epistemic violence, state simplification, and the erasure of cosmotechnics in Siam
The history of healing since the encounter with White Man in Siam is a tragic case study in how epistemic violence and state simplification put to shambles the worlds of so many.1 In early nineteenth-century Siam, epistemic violence unfolded when midwives, gender-fluid shamans, and healers were stripped of their authority and their cosmotechnical practices were reclassified as cruel superstition. Through missionary encounters, anatomical images, royal codifications, and modern laws, they were turned into shadows of their former power. The result was not only a new medical order but a profound reconfiguration of knowledge, gender, and cosmology. What became celebrated as ‘modernisation’ was also, simultaneously, a gendered purge of cosmological world-making practices.
This erasure was not a single rupture but an unfolding sequence of translations. It began with American missionary doctors like Dan Beach Bradley expelling the midwife from the birthing chamber, one particular account still lingers with me:
On the evening of December 28, 1835, Bradley was called to assist at a birth within the royal palace. He later recalled the scene in his diary: ‘The chamber was surrounded by a multitude of old women who affected wondrous wisdom in the treatment of their patient. . . . in the company of a number of midwives and female attendants. Surely the tender mercies of the heathen are cruelty.’ 2
What he describes was yu fai, a resting-by-the-fire ritual held for the new mother and her child. Bradley’s phrasing reveals a lot about his lack of respect and understanding of what he was looking at. Yet, ‘he was adamant that he would not provide medical care to Pin Klao’s wife unless the midwives and other attendants would cease their traditional practices and her care was charged to him alone.’3
In that room, two worlds collided and could not coexist. One figure walked out as the embodiment of progress – the enlightened medicine man. The other slipped out the back door, disappearing from official records. Bradley’s demand was not only medical but epistemological. He displaced the authority of midwives and elders in order to install himself as the sole arbiter of truth. On a mission no-one asked for, Bradley imagined himself as a saviour of Thai women from the cruelties of native midwifery. Once again ‘white men saving brown women’ in this instantiation, from their female elders.4 Such encounters installed racial and gendered hierarchies of wisdom, elevating the clinical and foreign over the local and relational.
Bradley’s dismissal of the midwife was followed by new visual regimes that further entrenched the logic of the medical gaze.5 He commissioned local artists to produce anatomical drawings of isolated organs, printed on a press he himself imported from Singapore. Here, organs appear suspended in a blank void of nothingness. Detached from the body and rhythms of blood, breath, and season. In scientific publications all over the world, these images did more than illustrate Western medicine; they reconfigured how people related to their own bodies, to cycles of time, and to nature itself. They laid the visual and ideological foundations for what would later solidify into the medical-industrial complex.
Confronted with the looming danger of being colonised under the accusation of ‘underdevelopment’, Siamese rulers turned to what Michael Herzfeld later called crypto-colonialism.6 As a reactive manoeuvre and calculated counterpoint to the spread of modern anatomical images in Siam, King Rama III transformed the temple grounds of Wat Pho into a state-sanctioned site of medical authority reimagined as a public university. In the temple gardens, statues of forest hermits (reusi dat ton) were arranged in stretching poses. On the walls of salas (pavilions), bodies and sen lines (the subtle currents that connect human form to elements, seasons, and unseen forces) were carved into stone. This insistence on multidimensional bodies was a cosmological intervention into Western-dominated modernisation processes. Cosmotechnical practices were protected from vanishing, even as they were disciplined into forms the state could monitor, teach, and claim. A shield against colonial accusations of backwardness and at the same time a trap that later on made Thai healing legible to bureaucratic control.
More absurd still, this codification and universalisation moved directly against the nature of Thai healing itself. It had never been a single bounded system but a shifting constellation – responsive to the times, porous to Indian, Chinese, Khmer, Tibetan, Indigenous Tai, and later Western influences. Its vitality lay in responsiveness. As part of my research into Thai healing, I keep on speaking to Tarini, a traditional midwife, who describes herself as ‘a guardian of the entrances and exits to the cycles and also to the universe.’ She reminds us: ‘The minute it becomes static or objectified knowledge, by default we disconnect from the cycle . . . and then it ceases to be alive.’
The impulse to standardise and fix knowledge arose under the shadow of colonial scrutiny, where fluid practices had to be made legible as 'tradition' in order to count as modern. This is the colonial hangover: the craving for authenticity imposed from without, which continues to distort how healing is remembered, displayed, and regulated today. Not only indigenous worldviews but also relational philosophy knows that the very act of turning ‘tradition’ into a bounded object is a category mistake.7 There are no objects, as Anna Tsing reminds us, only precarious, generative constellations, assemblages as ‘open-ended gatherings’ among different beings.8
By the early twentieth century, the tides had turned towards a full embrace of biomedicine. Siriraj Hospital, once home to both Western and traditional medicine, closed its traditional wing in 1915. By 1936, the Act for the Control of the Practice of the Art of Healing outlawed spiritual, magical, and orally transmitted forms of care. The state simplification project reached its conclusion. Midwives, shamans, forest hermits, and plant healers – once central to communal life – were displaced by state-certified professionals.
The womb that mothers the mother, the world that mothers us all
The world of yu fai
When Dr. Bradley stepped into the birthing chamber, he entered not just a room but a world of yu fai. For generations, this practice was based on the wisdom that birth is not a single event but the beginning of a transformational cycle. Over the course of weeks, the mother is cocooned in warmth and herbs. On the other side of this passage, she is mentally, spiritually, energetically, and physically elevated. Yu fai is, in essence, the womb that mothers the mother. It is one of many Thai botanical–elemental–spiritual assemblages that safeguard cycles of transformation by intentionally connecting to all the dimensions of the cosmos.
Two weeks after my daughter was born, a yu fai practitioner came to our home and set up a tent in our shower. Inside, she placed a rice cooker filled with boiling herbs. Inhaling the steam stirred something deep – it was almost unbearable at first. She encouraged me to slowly increase the duration of each session, starting with twenty minutes. By the fifth day, I was sitting for forty. It had become more bearable, even comforting. Each morning began with her adapted version of Thai massage, followed by herbal compresses and hot bricks warmed on a grill in our bedroom. After the steam, she poured hot herbal water over my sarong-covered body. Never in my life had I felt so tenderly held. My yu fai lingered with me. I wanted to understand what had moved me so deeply.
Tarini listened carefully as I recounted my experience, which she recognised as ‘not the real thing’ but ‘wellness’. The herbs should be fresh, she told me, and the ritual should begin immediately after birth and last longer. Her quiet insistence stayed with me, and our conversations continue to shift my entire world.
‘ What we do not talk about much in the whole birthing realm is the subtle sense. It is the one that guides us to our expansive consciousness. And steam and smoke are its closest allies. All these herbs – this is a development of the subtle sense. It is not just staying by the fire – you are actually being introduced to these plants.’
I interrupted her: ‘It is the learning of a language.’ We both had tears in our eyes.
She continued:
‘Which is why there are also prayers, there is also music. We are infusing the steam with sound. It is believed that each molecule of steam is carrying the essence of these plants and intentions to kickstart the system of the baby from its first breath but also to heal the system of the mother. This practice is based on a seven-dimensional consciousness as a baseline. The outer space – connecting, the cosmic ocean realms, the world of energy, spirits, elemental earth, the phenomenal world, the womb space and the inner space, the cellular cosmos that reflects the outer cosmos. From what I understand, yu fai is calibrated for you to be aware of this. Even the mixture of herbs is aligned to creating that expansive consciousness in relation to you and the environment. This practice is not just what is happening in this dimension. It is a duty to connect to the whole seven-dimensional consciousness as a foundation.’
To see yu fai as a seven-dimensional practice is to glimpse a multidimensional and relational world-making. Here plants are chosen not only for their physiological effect but for their energetic vibrations. As active ritual participants they already know what to do.9 Yu fai is a practice of relation. It enacts a body not only embodied, but embedded – woven into rhythms, elements, and dimensions that exceed the material. It extends Annemarie Mol’s notion of the body multiple toward a cosmological multiplicity, where healing is not repair of an isolated organism but alignment with a more-than-human system of relations.10 Following Yuk Hui’s imperative to conceive of multiple cosmotechnics ‘which are different from each other not simply functionally and aesthetically, but also ontologically and cosmologically’,11 yu fai can be read as a practice inseparable from a cosmology: a way of being in and making the world. To engage yu fai as cosmotechnics is to take seriously that healing requires rethinking the very terms of reality itself. We have to look at our ontological windows instead of merely through them.
The disconnection from this way of seeing and being in the world leaves us stranded in a place we know too well: mass extinctions, climate collapse, care outsourced to markets, and a collective grief that no ritual can contain.
Extractive logics are killing us and yet we cling to them desperately. It is sadly easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of colonial capitalism.12 They flatten living systems into legible units for state or market use, turning living worlds into resources to be mined. In these extractive zones, midwifery becomes superstition, plants become ingredients, rituals become wellness protocols and humans become proxy-figures.13 What is celebrated as rational development results in alienation, severing us from each other, our environments, our rhythms, our more-than-human kin. The hierarchies and divisions that structure modernity – racism, patriarchy, extractivism – are not separate problems but expressions of the same architecture. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put it: ‘This shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?’14
Happy endings and cruel optimisms: Thai massage, stereotypes, and the colonial hangover of wellness
Today, the most visible remnant of this vast healing cosmology is – ironically – Thai massage. Thai massage became a shapeshifter, a testament that survival ‘in capitalist ruins’ depends on ‘symbiosis’ – even when that symbiosis is with the very forces of commodification and erasure.15 Long before it became a wellness trend or national brand, Thai massage was part of a system of communal care. Intimately entangled with the Thai Woman stereotype, and often inseparable from each other, Thai Massage is a modern construct that has been packaged, certified, and sold.
Such survival-in-distortion did not happen in a vacuum. It was forged through encounters with state power, militarism, tourism, and global wellness markets that continually tore massage from its cosmological ground. Codified at Wat Pho in the nineteenth century, massage was made legible to the state and separated from other healing lineages. By the twentieth century, this separation hardened. Medicine was elevated as clinical and scientific, while massage was pushed into a feminised, commodified, exoticised register of relaxation. Singled out as the emblem of Thai healing, it became hyper-visible, but only as fragment and distortion.
The production of that superficial visibility can be traced through the twentieth century. During the American War in Vietnam thousands of soldiers passed through Bangkok, Pattaya, and Udon Thani, transforming agricultural villages into informal military leisure zones. While prostitution was officially banned, it was tacitly tolerated for the foreign currency and geopolitical favour it brought.16 In this moral grey zone, Thai massage became both a moral problem and an economic solution: a soft front for a much harder economy of militarisation and desire. The result was the creation of an eroticised labour class, commodified and stigmatised – a process that glued Thai women’s bodies to the service of massage in the global imaginary. From this moment onward, ‘Thai massage’ and ‘Thai woman’ travelled together as intertwined stereotypes: compliant, exotic, available. A legacy that peaks every time Thai women are perpetually asked for a ‘happy ending’.
When Thailand became a stop on the overland hippie trail from Goa, spiritual seekers, disillusioned with capitalist alienation and the warmongering of the West, drifted into Chiang Mai and other northern towns. They brought not only the desire to receive healing but to possess it. Thai massage was learned through intimate apprenticeship, sharpening the subtle senses over years of repetition. The influx of foreigners shifted this modality.17 The now-familiar sequence – feet to head, flips, side stretches – emerged from this epistemic flattening. Designed for tourists and foreign students, an intuitive practice was translated into a step-by-step routine.
Tourism and air travel only accelerated these changes. Massage shops mushroomed, and by the 1980s, its popularity could no longer be ignored by the state. In response, the government launched the Thai Massage Revival Project (1985) and later established the Institute of Thai Traditional Medicine (1993). The version it promoted was a codified technique of pressure along sen lines, requiring minimal body contact and suitable for the global stage.18
This state-driven industrialisation of Thai Traditional Medicine displaced a vibrant pluralism, where multiple modalities once coexisted. Unlicensed healers who continue to practise outside standardised forms are pushed to the margins. Though many still offer their services, their illegitimate status makes it difficult to make a living or transmit their knowledge. Many completed the state curriculum, but the real training came through lineage and far exceeds the official syllabus. Those healers embody what we might call enchanted modernities. They carry rhythms that persist outside the medical-industrial complex. However, when they can no longer teach or practise, what is lost is not ‘tradition’, but the capacity to live in relation.
The Thai Woman stereotype is a bleak inheritance, and situated at the receiving end of it, I have to believe in its passing. Pop culture offers hope. Thailand is now in its White Lotus era. The old stereotypes of Thai women – as docile, seductive, peripheral – are beginning to lose their grip. The gaze has turned elsewhere, fixating instead on the fractured psyche of the White Man (see the now-infamous chamomile tea monologue). Thailand’s cinematic role has shifted: once a backdrop for backpacker adventures and sex tourism, it is now staged as a site of luxury healing and high-end escapism. But when wellness replaces sex as the fantasy, what kind of healing is desired here?
These are the questions to carry as we step into the bright, curated interiors of contemporary wellness. On the frontier of this emerging genre of luxury wellness are high-end retreat centres emerging all over the country. One of those is located on the so-called ‘green lung’ of Bangkok, a man-made river island just south of the city with more and more plastic waste accumulating at its shores. In a little oasis amidst post-industrial pollution from elsewhere, influencers and the ultra-rich embark on things like the ‘Life & Soul Longevity Retreat’ with Deepak Chopra to experience a bespoke journey of personalised wellness: moving from cutting-edge medical diagnostics to ancient healing wisdom (as if these were not grounded in antithetical ontologies altogether). Supposedly here you can have the cake and eat it all. The retreat opened with a ‘traditional’ welcoming ceremony. Alongside bananas, popped rice, joss sticks, candles, tobacco, and flowers, guests also offered a symbolic 32-baht ka khru fee to the teachers (in addition to the 17k USD the for the retreat). One influencer described the chanting in ‘Balinese (?!) and Sanskrit language’ as mesmerising.19 On the final day, participants were ‘treated to a COSMOSS workshop’, where Kate Moss was reading from her Love Letters – a set of 150 affirmations.20
Among wellness trend forecasters this retreat is described as an indicator of where luxury wellness is going to take us over the next few years.21 Across Thailand, a new species of spa mirrors this cosmopolitan wellness aspiration: pastel interiors with blond wood, terrazzo, concrete, and ambient lighting. A visual language designed to create distance from the ambiguous spaces of sex tourism. My favourite of this species is tucked in a back alley at the edge of Silom’s Patpong district.22 I keep on going back there even though I know that this is not healing but a sleek form of suspension. A liminal escape that soothes the symptoms of urban toxicity while leaving its causes untouched. These polished environments feel restorative, but their very existence depends on the same infrastructures of overdevelopment, exploitation, and disconnection that make us sick in the first place. As Lauren Berlant reminds us, wellness often takes the form of cruel optimism: it promises repair while binding us more tightly to the very conditions that exhaust us.
Curious, still, about this ‘future’ of wellness, I visited the sister resort of the infamous influencer escape where wellness is advertised as ‘for everyone’. For about 200 USD, I signed up for a one-day retreat. I was welcomed by a muscular man who spent nearly an hour inputting my answers to a catalogue of questions about my health into his iPad. All this information, such as my avoidance of processed sugars would be passed on to all the departments for a tailored experience, so goes the ambitious promise. After a crystal sound bath in what looked like a fitness studio dotted with instagrammable pink crystals, I was rushed by my personal consultant to my next appointment. Sipping a glass of ginger-lemongrass tea from a massive dispenser in the lobby, I was handed yet another form, this time asking me to rate my stress level on a scale of 1 to 10. Looking at an A4 page of questions, I began to feel stressed. Later on, ten minutes into my IV drip, staff hurried in with yet more paperwork. With my right arm connected to the machine, I was asked to sign with my left hand – bureaucracy proving more urgent than relaxation. Behind me, the steady rustle of paper sorting became its own soundscape. Forty minutes later, another staff member arrived with two madeleines, neatly labelled with ingredients: flour, pistachio, eggs, and – refined sugar. This is wellness under the logic of administration.
Flattening has its own rhythm. When pressed into bureaucratic form, complexity leaks elsewhere. The hum of paper machinery was irritating but also telling: cosmotechnical healing has been rewired into a bureaucratic reality. Relations based on trust in the practitioner, intuition, and subtle senses are replaced by forms, signatures, and standardised procedures: paper realities within a growing apparatus that is needed to administer these wellness experiences. Paperwork itself becomes the new ritual.23
If paperwork has become the ritual of bureaucratic wellness then algorithms are the next iteration. The future of health, we are told, will be precise, personalised and predictive. This trend of datafication rests on the assumption of a singular, self-contained ‘data body’ – stripped of context, relations, multiplicity. It continues the detached scientific body that Dr. Bradley once imported to Siam, now updated for the digital age. If biomedicine once flattened cosmotechnics into anatomy, then AI solutionism is its digital reincarnation – a sleek new version of the same old illusion of disconnection. What really happens when data-algorithms attach to our bodies, turning us into cyborgs and replacing self-knowing with biometric feedback is that we come to trust data over intuition. The result is not awakening or empowerment but disembodiment and alienation from bodily connection.
Flattening and its leaks: glimmers of a future already here
Set against this narrow vision remain the cosmologies of midwives and healers, feminist and relational thinkers, Indigenous philosophies, and even quantum biologists. Across worlds and disciplines, they converge on a simple truth: health and life are not grounded in competition but in intuitive relation as symbiosis. When my Chinese doctor takes my hand and listens to my pulse with her perfectly manicured fingers. Without asking a single question or doing extensive blood screenings, she knows everything and more than I do about my current state.
During my acupuncture session she has her assistant turn the air-conditioning down and roll in an infrared light to be placed over my womb.24 I am seen and taken care of in what feels like a therapy session, a health check-up and a treatment all at one. And when I visit P Daeng, our plant teacher in her home in the mountains of North Thailand, she prepares a locally and seasonally sourced juice that is aligned to my Thai birth chart. Such moments feel complete in themselves. Call them glimmers: fleeting fragments of connection that surface despite the flattening. The difference between all this beauty and the epistemological poverty of wellness solutionism is not anecdotal but ontological. Perhaps ‘personalisation’ is not about tailoring a package to a consumer profile but about situating a body within the cosmos.
What if the wound is not only mine, not only Thailand’s, but the world’s – split open by centuries of flattening, yet still leaking life? In the cracks of the medical-industrial complex, in the glossy interiors of luxury spas, in the paperwork hum of wellness bureaucracies, something keeps slipping through. Steam carries prayers. Plants carry intelligence. Bodies carry worlds.
These are not remnants of a past to be archived, but frequencies of a future already here, insisting on relation. To listen to them is to refuse the fantasy that healing is a commodity, a protocol or a package to be personalised by data. It is to sense again that we were never alone. That mothering is not a gendered labour but a cosmological practice. The womb that mothers the mother, the world that mothers us all.
As David Graeber reminds us, we make the world – and could make it differently. Yet yu fai and other traditional healing practices know that we never made it alone. The habitable world emerged through cosmic and microbial collaboration, not through human design: stars burning themselves into elements, bacteria breathing the first air, plants turning light into atmosphere, volcanic heat stirring oceans, mycelium weaving soil into life.
So the question is not whether Thai healing can survive modernity, or whether stereotypes can be dismantled by critique. The question is whether we will dare to be with the glimmers. Whether we will let the leaks guide us. Whether we will choose the fullness of relation over the flatness of extraction. Always and forever, everything depends on how we choose to inhabit the world.