This study examines how Thailand’s Bun Phawet Festival, a traditional Theravāda Buddhist celebration in Sakon Nakhon Province, has been repurposed as a vehicle for environmental protest against potash mining expansion. Following the 2014 military coup, which restricted public assembly, and the 2015 granting of a potash prospecting license to China Mingda Potash Corporation without local consultation, residents of Wanon Niwat District embedded their protest within the Festival to circumvent state repression. Using ethnography, the research analyzes non-participant observations, documents, and semistructured interviews with forty key informants (local leaders, ritual experts, and activists) collected through a snowball sampling method from 2021 to 2022. The findings are presented in two parts: first, a contextual overview of Bun Phawet Festival as locally practiced; second, an analysis of its adaptation for activism. Three themes emerged: (1) Ritualistic: leveraging the festival’s prescriptive, scheduled practices; (2) connecting: invoking cultural authority and supernatural narratives to legitimize resistance; and (3) networking: fostering collaborative participation across community actors. The research reveals how traditional festivals and their religious rituals are being instrumentalized, while new symbolic practices are incorporated into the festival to amplify the environmental protest movement’s demands, that is, voicing opposition to potash mining and advocating for its termination.
Kallaya Hengthanarug (Fri,) studied this question.