This dissertation focuses on the politics and practices of silk production and consumption in Thailand. Silks have been woven in the area of today’s Thailand for over 1,000 years, and they were historically key tributary gifts exchanged among kingdoms, as the choice of cloth bestowed rank upon recipients in an embodiment of political and social hierarchies. Today, silk is a powerful symbol of “Thainess,” the Thai royal family, enduring cultural heritage, and popular fashion. My ethnography explores the logics and recent history of silk’s myriad positionings, and it is centered on the activities of groups of highly skilled and ethnically minoritized Khmer silk producers in Surin Province who consider their techniques and silken results to be distinctly “Khmer.” I investigate the forms of belonging and exclusion that involvement in silk production generates in these communities, and I view silk as a vibrant material whose production and use also produces human and non-human subjects and relations. Silk’s meanings and functions illuminate shifts in sex/gender roles and relations, ethnic and national identifications, entomological and botanical classifications, and ideas about social class, intimacy, and hierarchy. I adopt a processual approach that begins with silkworms and ends with swaths of silk as they are wrapped around human and more-than-human bodies, and I illustrate how silk’s significances emerge through the efforts of a multitude of human and non-human actors. Through focusing on the material, sensory, and affective qualities of silks woven in Surin, silk’s shimmering surfaces become multisensory planes of possibility that invite consideration not only of human producers but also of silkworms, mulberry plants, looms and weaving technologies, spirits, patterns and motifs, and other non-human entities. Silk becomes a vital part of a web of distributed relations, and it plays a role both in reinforcing hierarchies and forms of political and royal domination, and in facilitating intimacies and interdependencies that help humans and other beings to cope amidst these dynamics.