[Tlc] Chris Baker on Peleggi in today's POST

[Michael Montesano]

http://www.bangkokpost.com/Outlook/26May2007_out01.php

BOOK REVIEW

Interacting with a wider world 
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

CHRIS BAKER 
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. 
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. 
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. 
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". 
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. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
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. 



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