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<TITLE>Chris Baker on Peleggi in today's POST</TITLE>
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<P><A HREF="http://www.bangkokpost.com/Outlook/26May2007_out01.php"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">http://www.bangkokpost.com/Outlook/26May2007_out01.php</FONT></U></A>
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<P><B><FONT COLOR="#800000" SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">BOOK REVIEW</FONT></B><BR>
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<B><FONT COLOR="#800000" FACE="Times New Roman">Interacting with a wider world</FONT></B><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"> </FONT>
<BR><B><I><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">A thematic history of Thailand, with the nationalism left out, provides a fascinating look at how Thai identity and Thai culture have been shaped by outside influences</FONT></I></B><I></I><BR>
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<B></B><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">CHRIS BAKER</FONT></B><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"> </FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">What makes Thai culture special is its lack of any real specialness. A century ago, Prince Damrong Rajanubhab put forth this idea, arguing that the strength of Siamese culture was simply its ability to borrow and adapt from everybody else. In this book, Maurizio Peleggi has updated this thought with a modern twist. While Damrong was thinking mainly of Siam's genius in absorbing religions and political systems from India, commerce and statecraft from China, dress and design from Persia, Peleggi focuses wholly on the borrowings from the dominant West over the last 150 years. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Peleggi is a historian who has written one book on the transformation of the Thai monarchy from feudal tradition to bourgeois internationalism in the late 19th century, and another on the past as an object of fascination and commerce. Here he takes his readers on a tour through Thai history, concentrating mainly on the period from the 1830s onwards. Instead of chopping this history into chunks of time, he has organised it into themes. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">A chapter on "Landscapes" covers the development of rice agriculture, the idea of Thai ethnicity, and the self-conscious creation of a national culture. "Boundaries" traces not only the national frontiers, but the divisions of people into social groups and genders. "Institutions" highlights the special importance of the monarchy, bureaucracy and the Buddhist Sangha. "Ideologies" sketches the reception Thais gave to ideas of nationalism, communism and democracy. "Modernities" covers dress, knowledge and literature. "Mnemonic Sites" deals with sacred places, museums and monuments. The final chapter, "Others", discusses the role of the Burmese, Chinese and Farang in the Thai imagination. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Each of these themes is a self-contained essay. Some are brilliant bits of analytic compression and sparky insight. Some are boxes of bits with more variety than coherence. Read as a whole, they offer an impressive panorama, full of unusual angles. In his own words, Peleggi offers "a thematic examination of the social, political, cultural and intellectual forces that shaped the process of state formation and nation building". </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">His overriding idea is simple and compelling. From the earliest times, the leitmotif of Thai history has been a "yearning for association with the dominant world civilisation of the day". Way back, that was India. Later it was China. Since the West emerged as the centre of a single world system in the 19th century, the main theme in the history of Thailand (and of much of the world) has been the absorption and replication of the great trends in the history of the West. Thais stopped wrapping their bodies with strips of cloth, and adopted tailored clothing. The old feudal mandala was replaced by a Western-style nation-state complete with borders, bureaucracy, myths, history and monuments. Across those borders leaked ideas of nationalism, communism and democracy to shape political contest and debate. Knowledge was reconceived within a Western framework of the sciences, and taught in schools and universities patterned on global models. Thais began to read novels, go to the cinema and buy newspapers. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">This approach is an antidote to the enthusiasm for the sort of history, beloved by states and nationalists, which claims that a country is very unique and hence very special. Here, such state history has focused especially on the proposition that Thailand was never colonised, and that the credit for this fact is due to the role of the monarchy as an architect of modernisation. By contrast, Peleggi paints the monarchy as a pioneer of efforts to import the great themes of the West in order to become civilised, developed, modern and global. But Peleggi does not limit this observation to the monarchy. Rather he shows that as the old elite centred on the monarchy has given way to a new urban middle class of bureaucracy and business, there has been surprisingly little change of course. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Although he argues that the great themes of Thailand's recent history are global themes, he is not saying that those themes play out the same way here as they do everywhere else. His title says it all. Thailand is worldly in the sense of being open to influences which are global, but is also a kingdom which in today's world is rather unusual. The book's cover features that icon of modernity, the mobile phone, tinged saffron by the reflected colour of a novice monk's robe. Peleggi's point is that it makes no sense to imagine Thai identity or Thai culture as something pure and distinct. They have always been shaped by interaction with a wider world. In the current climate, the essay which may attract the most attention is the last one on "Others". Every nation selects certain peoples to play the roles of outsiders - contrasts and threats which help to define an identity for the nation. Peleggi identifies the Burmese, Chinese and Farang. The Burmese were demonised to provide a contrast to the Buddhist kingship of the new Chakri dynasty, and to serve as the imagined threat to a newly conceived Thai nation. But as Burma has imploded under primitive military dictatorship, this threat has been reduced to the minor irritants of illegal drugs and migrants, and is only kept alive by desperate flights of cinematic imagination. The Chinese were intermittently demonised as "the enemy within" in the early 20th century, but since their descendants have become the dominant influence in economics, politics and urban society, this phase is now reconceived as an aberration in a much longer history of Sino-Thai friendship. That leaves only the Farang. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">Since the 1830s, the Thai elite has been fascinated with Westerners as a source of technology, knowledge and entertainment. But, at the same time, this fascination has been wedded to fear. Westerners are, in Peleggi's words, "objects of both admiration and repulsion". King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) translated Shakespeare on the one hand, while criticising his countrymen for the "cult of imitation" of Western tastes on the other. A century later, the gilded progeny of the Bangkok elite flock to Boston for their education, and return to rail against globalisation. Thaksin Shinawatra presented himself as a global businessman while making a show of "declaring independence" from the IMF. This book is a study of the mentality, aspirations and fears of Thailand's changing elite over the course of 150 years. It rarely strays into the area of popular culture. Sport, television, the tabloid press, pop music and local performance culture are never mentioned. Perhaps if the book had ventured more into the streets and villages, Peleggi's theme of fascination with the West might have needed some adjustment. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">The book is beautifully produced and generously illustrated. It offers an intriguing approach to Thai history. Peleggi concedes that this approach demands a bit more from the reader than a conventional history would, but the result is a very wide-ranging attempt to track the aspirations of the Thai elite, especially over the last century, and the way those aspirations have shaped many aspects of the country. </FONT></P>
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