Thailand

The Worldly Kingdom

Maurizio Peleggi

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781861894601
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Tourist brochures and travel guides depict Thailand as an exotic country with a rich cultural heritage, strong religious traditions, and a popular monarchy. Historians also contribute to Thailand's international allure with chronicles of its unique historical and cultural continuity in comparison to the other southeast Asian countries, whose histories are stained by colonialism and nationalist struggles for independence.

Thailand challenges these stereotypes with a reinterpretation as well as an introduction to the emergence of Thailand as a nation-state. The book argues that the development of Thai nationhood was a long-term process shaped by interactions with the outside world, its pursuit of civilization, and, more recently, globalization. Maurizio Peleggi's original account investigates, among other issues, the evolution of the geographical and linguistic landscapes, changes in class and gender relations, the role of institutions and ideologies, modern cultural expressions, social memory, and the conception of the Thai national self as contrasted against the racial and cultural Others of Burmese, Chinese and Westerners.

Thailand is a concise and compelling introduction to the complexities that lie behind Thailand's exotic facade.

References

Introduction: Civilization, Globalization and the Thai Nation

1 Prince Damrong Rachanuphap, Monuments of the Buddha in Siam, trans. Sulak Sivaraksa and A. B. Griswold, 2nd edn (Bangkok, 1973) p. 4.

2 Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York, 1976), pp. 48–50.

3 Charnvit Kasetsiri, ‘Siam/Civilization–Thailand/Globalization: Things to Come’, paper presented at the IAHA conference, Bangkok, May 1996; Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The Quest for “Siwilai”: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Siam’, Journal of Asian Studies, LIX/4 (2000), p. 531; Craig J. Reynolds, ‘Globalizers vs. Communitarians: Public Intellectuals Debate Thailand’s Future’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, XXII/3 (2001), pp. 257–8.

4 Charles Higham and Rachanie Thorasat, Prehistoric Thailand: From Early Settlement to Sukhothai (London, 1998), p. 174.

5 George Cœdès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, ed. Walter Vella, trans. Susan Brown Cowing (Honolulu, 1968; [Paris, 1964]).

6 O. W. Wolters, History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY, 1999).

7 In works on Thailand the word is commonly used in its original Pali form rather than Thai (samgha).

8 Cœdès, The Indianized States, p. 222.

9 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2 vols (New Haven, CT, 1988–93).

10 D. R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire’s End (Durham, NC, 1996), pp. 13–14.

11 The deva (Thai, thep) are the 33 deities that inhabit with Indra the heaven at the top of Mount Meru, pivot of the lower world in the Hindu universe (see Chapter 5). Because of the deva iconography as winged figures, the name Krungthep is often rendered in English as ‘City of Angels’. The name of the dynastic era of Rattanakosin (‘Jewel of Indra’) comes from Krungthep’s appellation. The most likely etymology of the name ‘Bangkok’ is that of ‘village (bang, also ban) of plumes (kok)’.

12 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 42–4.

13 C. A. Breckenridge, ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting’, Comparative Studies in Societies and History, XXXI/2 (1989), pp. 195–216. See also David Cannadine, Ornamentalism (London, 2001).

14 Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Absent Presence: Discourse of CryptoColonialism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, CI/4 (2002), p. 900. The definition of semi-colony was first employed by Thai Marxists in the 1950s (see below, Chapter 4).

15 Bayly, The Modern World, p. 41.

16 Luang Phibunsongkhram (‘Lord Master of War’) was the title by which Plaek Khittasangkha (1897–1965) was commonly known. In 1941, when prime minister, Phibun granted himself the rank of field marshal, skipping those of lieutenant-general and general.

17 Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Bangkok, 1979).

18 Figures from John Girling, Thailand: Society and Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1981), pp. 235–6.

19 US aerial bombing of suspected North Vietnamese installations in Cambodia, which had declared its neutrality in the Indochinese conflict, started in March 1969 without the authorization of Congress. By the time bombing raids ended in 1973, US planes taking off from bases in Thailand had dropped on Cambodia half a million tons of bombs. The American aerial annihilation of Cambodia was a determinant factor in unleashing the fury of the Khmer Rouges, who came to power in 1975. See Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT, 2004).

20 Walden Bello, Shea Cunningham and Li Kheng Poh, A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (London, 1998), pp. 1–2.

21 Reynolds, ‘Globalizers vs. Communitarians’, p. 258.

22 Ibid., pp. 263–5.

23 Sulak Sivaraksa, ‘The Crisis of Siamese Identity’, in National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today, ed. Craig J. Reynolds (Chiang Mai, 2002), p. 34.

one | Landscapes

1 Pinkaew Laungaramsri, ‘Ethnicity and the Politics of Ethnic Classification in Thailand’, in Ethnicity in Asia, ed. Colin Mackerras (London and New York, 2003), p. 158.

2 The rai is a local acreage unit equivalent to 0.16 hectares/0.4 acres.

3 Norman Owen, ‘The Rice Industry of Mainland South-East Asia, 1850–1914’, Journal of the Siam Society, LIX/2 (1971), pp. 75–143; Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand: Economy and Politics (Kuala Lumpur, 1995), Maps 1 & 2, pp. 5–6; Tables 1.1, p. 16 & 1.4, p. 34.

4 Ibid., pp. 20–22.

5 Ibid., pp. 35–40, 51–7.

6 Walden Bello, Shea Cunningham and Li Kheng Poh, A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (London, 1998), chap. 9; Thailand in Brief 2004 (Bangkok, 2004), p. 54. The resettlement scheme was termed (in English) Land Redistribution Programme for the Poor Living in Forest Reserves (Khor Chor Kor, in the Thai acronym); it was devised in 1990 by Army general Suchinda Kraprayun (the leader of the coup that in February 1991 ousted the elected government led by ex-general Chatichai Chunhawan and was in turn brought down by street demonstrations in May 1992) and initiated by the Internal Security Operations Command, created in the 1960s to coordinate the fight against the Communist Party of Thailand.

7 Atlas of Thailand: Spatial Structures and Development, under the direction of Doryane Kermel-Torrès (Chiang Mai, 2004), pp. 74–5, 116–17.

8 Bello et al., A Siamese Tragedy, chap. 7.

9 Atlas of Thailand, p. 36. The percentage of Thailand’s urban population was 19 per cent according to the 1990 census and 31 per cent according to the census of 2000.

10 The Bangkok Recorder, December 1866, cited in Charnvit Kasetsiri, ‘Siam/Civilization–Thailand/Globalization: Things to Come’, paper presented at the IAHA conference, Bangkok, May 1996, p. 22.

11 Marc Augé, Non-places: An Anthropology of Hyper-modernity, trans. J. Howe (London, 1998).

12 Linguists and anthropologists make a distinction between the name ‘Tai’, referring to the group of languages and speakers thereof present across an area spanning Yunnan, the Shan states in north-eastern Myanmar, southern Vietnam, Laos and the western provinces of Cambodia; and ‘Thai’, referring to the Tai idioms and speakers thereof within modern Thailand.

13 For an overview of Thailand in the first millennium AD, see Charles Higham and Rachanie Thorasat, Prehistoric Thailand: From Early Settlement to Sukhothai (London, 1998).

14 See Georges Condominas, From Lawa to Mon,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Civilization, Globalization and the Thai Nation
• one Landscapes
• two Boundaries
• three Institutions
• four Ideologies
• five Modernities
• six Mnemonic Sites
• seven Others
• Chronology
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index