Starting today, and going through the weekend, is one of the most important festivals of Thailand, called Songkram. The word, which apparently comes from the Sanskrit word for “astrological passage,” is celebrated as a New Year’s Festival of sorts for Thailand, Burma, and many other Buddhist countries [1]. Like many New Year’s Day traditions, it is a highly anarchical day, which is why I would like to discuss it today.

I was unpleasantly reminded of the anarchical nature of this day when I was riding in the Legacy truck on my way to conduct some business at the office early this afternoon when the truck twice got with water by young children. Songkram is an excuse for Thais to get other people wet, and they seem particularly interested in getting foreigners wet. This weekend I am visiting some factories with some of my friends from the United States that live elsewhere in Thailand, and it just so happens that Chaing Mai has the most famous Songkram celebrations in all of the world. Just my luck. It is a common warning to wear one’s swimming suits under one’s clothes because one is going to get very wet. It’s good advice.

Many festivals throughout the world serve as days of anarchy in the midst of generally highly regimented and even tyrannical societies. It is not a coincidence that the heathen festival of May Day became a socialist Labor Day, a day of breaking free of restrictions and transgressing normal social boundaries. Heathen religion is full of such days, as there is a great tension between the high level of strictness in normal life and the occasional days where pressures and tensions are allowed to lower through giving people permission to ‘blow off some steam’ by participating in some sort of low level hooliganism as a sort of masturbatory action to release the tension and keep frustration against society’s oppression from leading to acts of rebellion.

In fact, I would argue that every society ruled by tyrannical and oppressive leaders is going to need some sort of time where pressure that could build and lead to rebellion is released in a way that is ultimately futile and silly and immature and dissipates. In Singapore, for example, there is an anarchic period every day for an hour (sort of like our “happy hour” in the west) where normal behavior rules are suspended so that people can relax and let their hair down. But this tradition is common everywhere. Wherever pressure becomes too much to bear, there must either be traditions where people can drink and play around for a little while to calm down again or that society and its rulers will be threatened by rising discontent. Too much chaos and order is threatened, but an order that has no place to let off steam is going to face serious problems in times of crisis. There is a delicate balance to maintain.

In lieu of actually making just societies where people are under less pressure on a regular basis, most societies tolerate (even if they do not officially condone) festivals where inappropriate activity is assumed because the other options are even less pleasant. The higher the stress a group of people are under, the more urgent the need for some sort of rituals to release that tension before it gets to critical levels. As it happens, Songkram is one of those festivals in Thailand, and it just happens to be most notable where I am. I was fortunate enough today to escape being soaked, but I strongly suspect I will not be so fortunate this weekend. We shall see.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songkran