Great piece Cam. I considered writing something similar, though I only had only a few brief encounters with Des in Thailand. I think a comment here will suffice instead.
When Des accompanied ANU students on the Thai-Burma border in 2012 he was generous and bold. He didn’t countenance the slackers. If you were keen, he would take you on trips to where you wanted to go, out of his own time, away from the rest of the group. He was always happy to answer questions. He could take a bit of banter and cajoling, performing a wry smile, though only rarely giving anything back.
I warmed to him immediately. By the end of our trip he had invited me camping back in Australia, a country and home that he loved, but was also endlessly frustrated by. Des could be very open in this way.
My own scholarly interests were forming at the time we met and he was a positive influence on me. I was lucky to have spent the very brief time with him that I did.
I believe the legal term is “hostile work environment.” It’s up to you guys to figure out where you and Thai studies as a whole stand in this equation. Apologies are always a class act. Before you drag out a token female, take a gender studies class, then incorporate the insights into your research. “Wimmen” as one of my advisors used to say (“the exchange of wimmen”, are major connectors of royalty and capital. Keeping them invisible would seem to work for both Thai power brokers and the men of Thai studies.
Interesting, since the editors of “Saying the Unsayable” (2010:3) included all of the references, and your essay in that same volume, “Virtual Divinity,” ch. 2, included none.
It’s called “erasure.”
If you note the dates on literature of Thai kingship, Bhumibol, etc. in that intro., my work was the earliest, and laid an extensive theoretical and ethnographic foundation on visual matters, hegemonic Images, language and silence, the enchantment of capital and the like, based on data directly related to the Palace, banks, and temple network. One would infer that several key area scholars were quite influential in burying it. As familiar as you are with the academic world, you know that those same scholars would have been readers for any book manuscript as well. Perhaps, as Beale says, it was merely “promising,” or perhaps many do not like to see women on this particular playing field, or even writing with authority on NM. Certainly few if any analyses of the monarchy deal with gender dynamics, which is quite mind blowing. What century is this? My favorite thing is being both patronized and having my work lifted without attribution and proper scholarly citation. Nice cocktail there. There was a little blowup at Harvard over that, I believe.
and P.S. (so glad to run into people who care about these topics, and Isan)
PrP was not going to back down on anything. When I interviewed him in his kuti, he pulled out his own tape player to record the interview. One of the excuses for his defrocking and jailing by Sarit was that he was homosexual.
During the interview (playing tricks on the farang, perhaps), PrPh had a naen (novice) massage up and down his legs as if it were nothing.
Yikes!
Kudos to Jame Giggacher for being so patient and assembling those photo essays on this format. It took me hours to dig them out of dusty albums, then figure out how to scan them into my computer (don’t laugh), but it really brought back memories. None of these technologies were available when I was doing my work. We, ahem, used the telephone. Ours were a first generation of dissertations on computer programs, which created a whole series of debates about who owned the program, who could use it, how much to pay the software developer, etc. Daunting expenses for graduate students. Different era. So I’m really appreciate of the younger generation who have been so supportive. The question of where my dissertation is online is part of that progression of technology and debate. How it got behind a pay wall, beats me.
Frankly, it’s been a while lol I think the Janus rituals/antinomies argument remain relevant in terms of dealing with the West, mirroring back western democratic ideals in Thai autocratic form. The CP and the nation are doing it now via mourning rituals, use of color, etc.: communicating radically different messages with opposed meanings to different audiences. I think structural transformations long periods of hierarchy punctuated by brief periods of democracy still hold, but I’m not so optimistic about a new democratic outburst anytime soon. New media and the faux notion of royalist democracy, sop to the U.S., blur a lot of lines. Now the Thai do not particularly need a sop to the U.S. given changing regional dynamics. In retrospect, I think comments about the secrecy of the Crown Property Bureau and its eventual revelation were right on, that a main failure of anyone studying the monarchy in recent decades was to keep “theoretical” discussion far, far away from the accumulation of capital. And it’s that capital amassed by the Palace, now controlled by the CP, now offshore, one assumes, in large part, that’s powering these succession dynamics.The point about hybridization of Thai cultural forms, etc. what’s being coded and decoded unconsciously by the population here is the ruler’s ability to master and synthesize opposed ideologies into a superior new “middle way.” It’s process more than any individual content. The king’s mastery of knowledge includes mastery of various communication media, ergo the wars over Twitter, FB, etc. as focus of the 112 law, the Thongdaeng wars. The antionomies/hierarchy/Janus ritual theories were developed from the data. I made them up. They were not derived from someone else’s theory imposed on the Thai situation. The important point about structural transformations I think is the populace, or a large portion of it, seeing power and influence as natural waxing and waning of spheres or circles of influence. The process is not envisioned as linear. Given the success of the year of mourning project, Buddhist ritual in this case is crushing regional ethnic diversity and defining international news. The prince successfully drew in Muslim women artists from the south in paying homage to his father. He knows the game quite well. As well as hill tribes (mostly women) from the north. Now, about the northeast… These are encompassing modes of the monarch specific to Buddhism, brilliantly refined and executed by King Mongkut. All in the interests of enchanting capital, making taboo incisive analysis of capital flows.
As a Canadian with the usual Canadian attitude to LGBT issues– a kind of not my business so go for it!– I am not only comfortable with my government’s generally outstanding record in regard to getting the state out of the nation’s bedrooms but proud that the government’s policies are generally in accord with the feelings and attitudes of the majority of Canadian citizens.
According to Pew Research, Indonesian people appear to be even more amazingly united than Canadians in their attitudes toward LGBT issues.
Whereas Canadians register 80% in favor of social acceptance, Indonesians come in at a remarkable 93% disapproval of social acceptance of homosexuality. You have to wonder what sort of a democracy Indonesia would be if the government and its officials were not to reflect what is obviously the consensus position of the vast majority of Indonesians.
Many Canadians remember when our federal government was promising to decriminalize marijuana over a decade ago in accord with majority opinion. The US ambassador along with other high-level officials in the Bush administration made it clear that this was not acceptable and threatened to “increase security” at the border, which, simply put, was a veiled threat to shut down a huge proportion of the Canadian economy.
So the decriminalization promise was shelved and the NDP leader justly lamented the passing of Canadian sovereignty.
It isn’t hard to imagine phraseology like this– “At the same time, previously suppressed Islamic politics also burgeoned, with Islamic-based organisations successfully infiltrating politics landscapes and using decentralisation to make Shariah based laws– being used by the Bush folks to talk about the “infiltration” of “pro-marijuanists” into Canadian politics, when from our perspective of course it was just how a majority of people thought and felt.
I wonder where the author of this piece stands on the development of democracy in Indonesia and whether he thinks that LGBT issues might benefit from a return to an authoritarianism that would bow to international pressure and redefine Indonesian sovereignty as something like “whatever the international community prefers”.
Good points Mark. No – by “free” I mean in the sense that US States are free. Or better than that, something like our Australian or Canadian models – I.e. federal systems UNDER THE MONARCHY.
If by “free” you mean independent state I’m very doubtful. I don’t believe that the majority of the people of Isan would support seceding from the Thai state. What’s more, I fear that any such attempt would make it very easy for the junta to justify the continuation of military rule. It is still early days but I suspect that, even under the ” less loved ” Vajiralongkorn, the monarchy will retain a great deal of respect, authority and influence among the masses. I cannot imagine a situation where the next Monach would not bring the full force of that authority and power to bear down on any movement that threatened the stability or the integrity of the Thai state. The result would be a bloodbath.
Christine – you broke open the Pandora’s box. When “rebellious Isarn” – as you correctly call it – wins its’ freedom and justice, you – and those on-the-ball ANU scholars who re-discovered your long buried brilliant, brave work. – will be revered. I think a free Isaarn will thank you – and them – immensely.
Christine,
For those of us who have read and appreciated your dissertation, several question are inevitable.
One primary one is which of your arguments about the dynamics of the 1970s do you still in retrospect find satisfying and which do you not? After all, every author of a dissertation inevitably looks back, after the passing of years, with a complex mixture of pride and shame concerning the complex mix of insights and confusions embedded in our initial first draft of arguments.
A second question is which of your arguments continue to have analytic purchase on present dynamics and which do not? After all, over the past 40 years much about royalty, Buddhism, ritual and political economy in Thailand has changed. Sometimes quite significantly.
A third question is how well do you think the theoretical framing of your documentary and analytic claims have held up? Historical explanations inspired by Marshall Sahlins’s ideas about “the structure of the conjuncture”, for instance, have generally fallen out of fashion in anthropology. Do you still feel that this approach holds value, perhaps even more value than other anthropological attempts to make sense of structural transformations in history? Do you feel that your theoretical arguments about antinomies, and the fundamental Thai antinomy of ideologies of blood & merit vs. ideologies of rank & ability, still hold in the wake of the intensifying globalization and hybridization of Thai cultural forms and ideologies across increasingly diverse Thai demographic populations?
Sure would have been good if NM’s editors had pressed Dr Gray to elaborate on how Kittiwuttho, members of the privy council, and Phimonlatham came to be in the same room, cooperating on a the organization of the kathin ceremony. One could say more, but . . .
Allen n Beesey – have you seen the extremely high numbers of Lao currently living in places like Udon Thani, Khon Kaen, etc. – not to mention that always also stronghold Nong Khai. The people’s army of the Lao PDR will NOT sit idly on the sidelines, if these phi-nong are attacked.
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Travels with Des Ball
Great piece Cam. I considered writing something similar, though I only had only a few brief encounters with Des in Thailand. I think a comment here will suffice instead.
When Des accompanied ANU students on the Thai-Burma border in 2012 he was generous and bold. He didn’t countenance the slackers. If you were keen, he would take you on trips to where you wanted to go, out of his own time, away from the rest of the group. He was always happy to answer questions. He could take a bit of banter and cajoling, performing a wry smile, though only rarely giving anything back.
I warmed to him immediately. By the end of our trip he had invited me camping back in Australia, a country and home that he loved, but was also endlessly frustrated by. Des could be very open in this way.
My own scholarly interests were forming at the time we met and he was a positive influence on me. I was lucky to have spent the very brief time with him that I did.
Cheers to the Insurgent Intellectual.
Soul of a nation
I believe the legal term is “hostile work environment.” It’s up to you guys to figure out where you and Thai studies as a whole stand in this equation. Apologies are always a class act. Before you drag out a token female, take a gender studies class, then incorporate the insights into your research. “Wimmen” as one of my advisors used to say (“the exchange of wimmen”, are major connectors of royalty and capital. Keeping them invisible would seem to work for both Thai power brokers and the men of Thai studies.
Soul of a nation
Interesting, since the editors of “Saying the Unsayable” (2010:3) included all of the references, and your essay in that same volume, “Virtual Divinity,” ch. 2, included none.
It’s called “erasure.”
If you note the dates on literature of Thai kingship, Bhumibol, etc. in that intro., my work was the earliest, and laid an extensive theoretical and ethnographic foundation on visual matters, hegemonic Images, language and silence, the enchantment of capital and the like, based on data directly related to the Palace, banks, and temple network. One would infer that several key area scholars were quite influential in burying it. As familiar as you are with the academic world, you know that those same scholars would have been readers for any book manuscript as well. Perhaps, as Beale says, it was merely “promising,” or perhaps many do not like to see women on this particular playing field, or even writing with authority on NM. Certainly few if any analyses of the monarchy deal with gender dynamics, which is quite mind blowing. What century is this? My favorite thing is being both patronized and having my work lifted without attribution and proper scholarly citation. Nice cocktail there. There was a little blowup at Harvard over that, I believe.
Soul of a nation
and P.S. (so glad to run into people who care about these topics, and Isan)
PrP was not going to back down on anything. When I interviewed him in his kuti, he pulled out his own tape player to record the interview. One of the excuses for his defrocking and jailing by Sarit was that he was homosexual.
During the interview (playing tricks on the farang, perhaps), PrPh had a naen (novice) massage up and down his legs as if it were nothing.
Yikes!
Kudos to Jame Giggacher for being so patient and assembling those photo essays on this format. It took me hours to dig them out of dusty albums, then figure out how to scan them into my computer (don’t laugh), but it really brought back memories. None of these technologies were available when I was doing my work. We, ahem, used the telephone. Ours were a first generation of dissertations on computer programs, which created a whole series of debates about who owned the program, who could use it, how much to pay the software developer, etc. Daunting expenses for graduate students. Different era. So I’m really appreciate of the younger generation who have been so supportive. The question of where my dissertation is online is part of that progression of technology and debate. How it got behind a pay wall, beats me.
Soul of a nation
Frankly, it’s been a while lol I think the Janus rituals/antinomies argument remain relevant in terms of dealing with the West, mirroring back western democratic ideals in Thai autocratic form. The CP and the nation are doing it now via mourning rituals, use of color, etc.: communicating radically different messages with opposed meanings to different audiences. I think structural transformations long periods of hierarchy punctuated by brief periods of democracy still hold, but I’m not so optimistic about a new democratic outburst anytime soon. New media and the faux notion of royalist democracy, sop to the U.S., blur a lot of lines. Now the Thai do not particularly need a sop to the U.S. given changing regional dynamics. In retrospect, I think comments about the secrecy of the Crown Property Bureau and its eventual revelation were right on, that a main failure of anyone studying the monarchy in recent decades was to keep “theoretical” discussion far, far away from the accumulation of capital. And it’s that capital amassed by the Palace, now controlled by the CP, now offshore, one assumes, in large part, that’s powering these succession dynamics.The point about hybridization of Thai cultural forms, etc. what’s being coded and decoded unconsciously by the population here is the ruler’s ability to master and synthesize opposed ideologies into a superior new “middle way.” It’s process more than any individual content. The king’s mastery of knowledge includes mastery of various communication media, ergo the wars over Twitter, FB, etc. as focus of the 112 law, the Thongdaeng wars. The antionomies/hierarchy/Janus ritual theories were developed from the data. I made them up. They were not derived from someone else’s theory imposed on the Thai situation. The important point about structural transformations I think is the populace, or a large portion of it, seeing power and influence as natural waxing and waning of spheres or circles of influence. The process is not envisioned as linear. Given the success of the year of mourning project, Buddhist ritual in this case is crushing regional ethnic diversity and defining international news. The prince successfully drew in Muslim women artists from the south in paying homage to his father. He knows the game quite well. As well as hill tribes (mostly women) from the north. Now, about the northeast… These are encompassing modes of the monarch specific to Buddhism, brilliantly refined and executed by King Mongkut. All in the interests of enchanting capital, making taboo incisive analysis of capital flows.
Who constructed LGBT identity in Indonesia?
Which example would that be?
1) Setting policies that respect the opinions and preferences of electorate?
or
2)Kowtowing to business community and surrendering government’s autonomy to preferences of US?
Who constructed LGBT identity in Indonesia?
God bless Canada. Thailand, Indonesia, etc. – could benefit a lot from Canada’s fine examples.
Who constructed LGBT identity in Indonesia?
As a Canadian with the usual Canadian attitude to LGBT issues– a kind of not my business so go for it!– I am not only comfortable with my government’s generally outstanding record in regard to getting the state out of the nation’s bedrooms but proud that the government’s policies are generally in accord with the feelings and attitudes of the majority of Canadian citizens.
According to Pew Research, Indonesian people appear to be even more amazingly united than Canadians in their attitudes toward LGBT issues.
Whereas Canadians register 80% in favor of social acceptance, Indonesians come in at a remarkable 93% disapproval of social acceptance of homosexuality. You have to wonder what sort of a democracy Indonesia would be if the government and its officials were not to reflect what is obviously the consensus position of the vast majority of Indonesians.
Many Canadians remember when our federal government was promising to decriminalize marijuana over a decade ago in accord with majority opinion. The US ambassador along with other high-level officials in the Bush administration made it clear that this was not acceptable and threatened to “increase security” at the border, which, simply put, was a veiled threat to shut down a huge proportion of the Canadian economy.
So the decriminalization promise was shelved and the NDP leader justly lamented the passing of Canadian sovereignty.
It isn’t hard to imagine phraseology like this– “At the same time, previously suppressed Islamic politics also burgeoned, with Islamic-based organisations successfully infiltrating politics landscapes and using decentralisation to make Shariah based laws– being used by the Bush folks to talk about the “infiltration” of “pro-marijuanists” into Canadian politics, when from our perspective of course it was just how a majority of people thought and felt.
I wonder where the author of this piece stands on the development of democracy in Indonesia and whether he thinks that LGBT issues might benefit from a return to an authoritarianism that would bow to international pressure and redefine Indonesian sovereignty as something like “whatever the international community prefers”.
Soul of a nation
Good points Mark. No – by “free” I mean in the sense that US States are free. Or better than that, something like our Australian or Canadian models – I.e. federal systems UNDER THE MONARCHY.
Soul of a nation
If by “free” you mean independent state I’m very doubtful. I don’t believe that the majority of the people of Isan would support seceding from the Thai state. What’s more, I fear that any such attempt would make it very easy for the junta to justify the continuation of military rule. It is still early days but I suspect that, even under the ” less loved ” Vajiralongkorn, the monarchy will retain a great deal of respect, authority and influence among the masses. I cannot imagine a situation where the next Monach would not bring the full force of that authority and power to bear down on any movement that threatened the stability or the integrity of the Thai state. The result would be a bloodbath.
Soul of a nation
Mark Dunn – what EVIDENCE have you got : that “the succession is going so smoothly” , as you claim ?
Soul of a nation
Christine – you broke open the Pandora’s box. When “rebellious Isarn” – as you correctly call it – wins its’ freedom and justice, you – and those on-the-ball ANU scholars who re-discovered your long buried brilliant, brave work. – will be revered. I think a free Isaarn will thank you – and them – immensely.
Soul of a nation
Christine,
For those of us who have read and appreciated your dissertation, several question are inevitable.
One primary one is which of your arguments about the dynamics of the 1970s do you still in retrospect find satisfying and which do you not? After all, every author of a dissertation inevitably looks back, after the passing of years, with a complex mixture of pride and shame concerning the complex mix of insights and confusions embedded in our initial first draft of arguments.
A second question is which of your arguments continue to have analytic purchase on present dynamics and which do not? After all, over the past 40 years much about royalty, Buddhism, ritual and political economy in Thailand has changed. Sometimes quite significantly.
A third question is how well do you think the theoretical framing of your documentary and analytic claims have held up? Historical explanations inspired by Marshall Sahlins’s ideas about “the structure of the conjuncture”, for instance, have generally fallen out of fashion in anthropology. Do you still feel that this approach holds value, perhaps even more value than other anthropological attempts to make sense of structural transformations in history? Do you feel that your theoretical arguments about antinomies, and the fundamental Thai antinomy of ideologies of blood & merit vs. ideologies of rank & ability, still hold in the wake of the intensifying globalization and hybridization of Thai cultural forms and ideologies across increasingly diverse Thai demographic populations?
Soul of a nation
How did it end up here?
Author Gray, Christine
Title Thailand the Soteriological State in the 1970s / Christine Gray
Imprint 1986
Thailand Information Center : Thesis 47951 v.1 CHECK SHELVES
Thailand Information Center : Thesis 47951 v.2 CHECK SHELVES
Descript viii, 945 p. (2 vol.)
Note Thesis (Ph.D.)–The University of Chicago, 1986
Soul of a nation
Not sure how it ended up here in this form:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/112534555/Thailand-The-Soteriological-State-in-the-1970svol1
I also have a 44 MB PDF of the original Chicago thesis version, but can’t quite recall from where I obtained it.
Defending the Faith
semoga aman aja ya
Soul of a nation
Sure would have been good if NM’s editors had pressed Dr Gray to elaborate on how Kittiwuttho, members of the privy council, and Phimonlatham came to be in the same room, cooperating on a the organization of the kathin ceremony. One could say more, but . . .
A rise in anti-Chinese rhetoric
Get rid of the contitutionalised policy that is legally biased to Malays, then we can talk so called assimilation.
If the Malays can’t give up the Bumi policy then why should the CHinese and others give up their cultures ?
Don’t forget this policy was created by the Malays themselves, so if you are looking for a scapegoat – look in the mirror
Soul of a nation
Ah, well. Where’s Occam when you need him?
The myth of King Bhumibol
Allen n Beesey – have you seen the extremely high numbers of Lao currently living in places like Udon Thani, Khon Kaen, etc. – not to mention that always also stronghold Nong Khai. The people’s army of the Lao PDR will NOT sit idly on the sidelines, if these phi-nong are attacked.