Instead of posting all the writings from various sources of yours and amongst many who are only using their pseudonyms, I haven’t seen any articles in Mandala which will at least show respect to the Thai people and give some constructive comment on our demise King. Thailand is in the middle of grief and all the posts which I have seen up till now (not one is positive) but only give misleading information about our monarchy. I agree with freedom of speech but you don’t go beyond the line and fascinating yourself with writings of various people who instead of writing at least something postive about our King rather than giving misleading information and doubtful where are all these false information come up except by cooking up from people who are against the monarchy of this country and think they know what’s really happening. I know you are one of the paid lobbyist of Thaksin without doubt after having reading your articles many times particulary the ones from our good friend Andrew McGregor. Cut the crap and find some better stories to post for the public as what happen in Thailand is our business and by using pseudonyms prove that it is possibly you what are behind writings of some of these people as everyday you have come up with articles from pseudonyms and if these people do really exist, why don’t they come out from shadow rather than writing in secrecy?????
Like most brilliant ideas, utterly obvious in hindsight!
This concept deserves some serious thought and then global application as a matter of urgency.
It’s past time higher education escaped it’s own thought bubble.
Better and more progressive ideas need to find their way into the mainstream in accessible language, the internet alone won’t do the job.
The biggest hazard independent thought faces, is being hijacked and modified to fit a third party agenda, but a robust discussion that avoids the temptation to over-intellectualize as it expands, could neutralize such modification.
Keep it simple, scholars.
I was not aware that the term ‘prostitute’ is offensive, and I am still not convinced it is. Chris, you suggest that it corresponds to a Thai term that designates ‘low class street hookers’ who do not send their earnings back to their families. You juxtapose this case to that of women who work at entertainment venues and send money back to their families, who you suggest should instead be called ‘sex workers’ following some Thai terminology.
I am not sure how we can assume that those who work on the streets do not send money back home and vice versa, but more importantly I wonder on what basis we should decide who deserves the supposedly less problematic label and who doesn’t. I am unsure whose these Thai terms you refer to are, but I doubt they are used by the workers themselves. To me they replicate a form of discrimination, and I would steer away from them.
Anthropologists stay for long periods of time with the people they study in order to get an understanding that is as legitimate as possible of the way they think and of the social world they live in. As nobody is a mind-reader, this understanding will always be filtered and ultimately interpreted by the anthropologist. There is no way out of it, and anthropologists these days recognize this and ackowledge explicitly their own personal biases and methological problems. There is no other discipline that questions itself this much.
As I have stated in the concluding paragraph to this article, my view is partial, and cannot be more than an initial attempt to make sense of what I observe among a restricted number of people.
Again as I highlighted in the article, people hold an infinity of cosmologies and we should be wary of ‘textbook’ notions of what Thai cosmology is supposed to be about. Again as stressed in the article, the rituals at Sanam Luang are new and dynamic: nobody is trying to freeze people in time here.
Mark Dunn,
You are parroting mainstream media BS. I suggest you read more and write less, until you’re up to speed on the reality of the late kings true ability to influence events.
His personal courtiers, with his express assent, could not, or would not, even curtail minor royals use of traffic clogging motorcades.
So much for supreme say in affairs of state.
I love Thailand, and the Thai people I’ve met. I’ve lived in the Kingdom, and worked alongside a number of Thais overseas. They were hardworking and reliable.
Unfortunately, I never discussed these things with them, it just wasn’t on my ‘radar’ at the time.
I now understand that some of those Thais were very likely to have been ‘yellow’ politically.
They were all overseas educated.
The Thais I maintain friendships with now, are less fortunate, but still have degrees from Thai universities, in the main.
They are not ‘happy campers’.
Some despise both main factions, but such is their current disgust and frustration, they are willing to risk a CP/Taksin regime in the hope it could open the door to better days ahead.
I have recently learned so much more about the true recent history of this beautiful country, and it’s frustrating, and truly heartbreaking.
Thailand has the potential to be an Asian superpower, were it run in a democratic, law abiding, and just manner.
The elite cannot fathom losing a fraction of their control.
The patronage system is just corruption with a prettier name.
They fail to see that a bicameral parliament would pave the way for a win-win.
Thailand is the perfect place to install a House of Lords, but only if access to it is porous, such as modern Westminster, and the judiciary, not the monarchy, or army, are made ‘untouchable’, but not above the law itself.
So long as the current dinosaurs, who really should have departed along with the revered Rama IX, remain in absolute control, then the only way out appears to point toward Thailand having a terrifying ‘Bastille’ event.
It’s not rocket science, but unfortunately, the powerbrokers can barely comprehend steam technology.
They are dragging the nation into turmoil, unrest, and chaos.
They risk the dismemberment of the nation itself, all because of greed, arrogance, and stupidity.
Finally, they should get over themselves.
The only argument they advance against change, to the ‘west’, is that internal politics is ‘their business’ they are right, of course.
But it’s a piss poor excuse for actively destroying the fabric of their own society, just so they can continue to indulge an expired sense of entitlement.
Cannot resist asking Mark Dunn where you have been during the last 50 years while Thailand existed as a military/ hyper royalty absolute arrangement. However on your side of the argument it is against the law for anyone to say/ write against what you said, if you are in Thailand that explains it, you are following their law. however Somchai is in Australia where there would be no laws against Somchai speaking the truth. By the way if you take a few minutes to study Thai history Mark you will learn that the coupists who overthrew the absolute monarchy ( 1932) were themselves overthrown, their liberal socialist constitution torn up and the absolute monarchy restored surreptitiously in a slightly different form, Somchai has observed correctly as he is legally able to do while based in Australia. By the way also Mark you write and I quote ” The King sometimes acts.. ” Where is this King you refer to?
For SEA in general, you may want to have a look at Benedict Anderson (Power in Java) and Geertz (Negara). For Thailand, the most seminal works are possibly those of Heine Geldern and Tambiah. Keyes and and other contemporary scholars have also written about it.
Absolute monarchy in Thailand was overthrown in 1932.
The Thai king, while very influential , has no direct power over government affairs. The Thai monarchy is held in high esteem by the vast majority of the public and is not a ” dictatorship “. The Monarchy acts as a living symbol of the Thai state/nation. The King sometimes acts as a referee of last resort when the politicians and generals ( who have the real power ) find themselfs in political deadlock.
“Antifascist on the molar level” ? That is so hilarious. How many grams of antifascism do I need to make a 1 molar aqueous solution ? Is it one molar or one molal ? What is the pH of a 1 molar solution of antifascism ? Or maybe it is one tonsil and not one molar. This is why the educational levels in the West barely exceed Malaysia’s.
“It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.” D&G
Ah, yes. A Deleuzian black hole, which is not to say a delusionary hole of another kind altogether.
The “white wall/black hole” system of facialization that posits the white face, the face of Jesus Christ, as the norm, procedes to determine relative worth by deviation from that and as such is the foundation of European racism.
As we are invited to gaze upon the face of Thai difference in these “articles” on NM we are simultaneously encouraged to slap ourselves on the back, us white men, with our black holes of subjectivity functioning to suck everything into them and allowing nothing to escape.
The white wall we are confronted with on this sight/site is of course the totalizing frame of “western liberal democracy” and the subjectivities performing themselves in these articles are black holes that allow nothing to escape that frame, no consideration of anything that deviates from the white face that refuses to admit to its own molecular fascism.
What Deleuze was reaching for with the concept of facialization and the white wall/black hole system was a way of talking about the European racism that is no longer racist but has drifted into “culturism” that now maintains “whiteness, reason and secularized Christianity as the markers of human superiority.”
What interests me, are serious efforts to dig down through the layer of mysterious ceremony to uncover the self-interest of its manipulators, identify who they are, and how they benefit. All cultures have their sacred ceremonies, including capitalism, and I am suspicious of all of them. Rather than do that kind of serious investigation, main-stream western anthropology seems to throw another layer of post-modernist mystery over the top.
Hi Michael….I live in Thailand or would like to live in Thailand more of the year than less of the year. Unfortunately my work takes me to Vietnam, Lao, Cambodia, Myanmar (am reluctant to work there until government comes to terms with the Rohingya and starts treating them as human being), Southern China, and occasionally for the freebies involved “exotic” places such as Papua New Guinea and Uzbekistan. I have been living here since the late 1990s although I first came to Thailand in 1969 before at least some NM readers were born. My Thai Meah, while not an ostentatious land-holder does own and farm larger parcels of land in Loei than than even “middle-income” farmers but makes 90% of her income from real estate and retail businesses in Bangkok. So yes, I know a little about rural Thailand including doing a poverty analysis nearly a decade ago. And yes, you are correct some enterprising rural women and to a lesser extent men buy clothing from Pratunam to resell in rural areas as they do from Bobae or even Talad Rong-Glua on the border with Cambodia but I think my point was that black mourning garment apparel is relatively expensive for poorer rural people as indeed it is for the urban working class. Have a good day!
Good questions Shane. In fact if you take the cosmologies constructed by Western anthropologists, then go an ask a Thai near you, I doubt you would find a match. Dig deeper and you still get other assumptions, explanations, key symbols and the like. Better in anthropology to start with the symbols that give meaning to people’s lives, then see what meaning they attach to them.
Does anyone of us ‘infidels’ deserves any rights at all in Islam believers eyes?
Quite sure the Muslim Kala in Yakhine are getting the shorter ends for now yet there are almost no Buddhist Bengali being appealed by any group for HR.
The lady should bring out this fact firmly established among the Muslim kala. The proof recent attack on the police.
The problem if this incidence is a political motivated, the Kala ignore the separation of military which is looking for excuses to carry out the notoriously atrocious, inhumane , 4 steps military solution in the Karen state.
Will the Kala able to handle the even shorter ends?
Chris you appear to have more empathy for people trying to make ends meet for them and their families than the anthropological cosmologists or is it the cosmological anthropologists? I spend a good part of my working life “defending” anthropologists from the generally brain-dead or lobotomized “development workers” who all cultures quite blandly. However, as a simpleton while I find analyses of cosmologies to be quite interesting I just wonder to what extent the cosmologies presented here are not actually in part the social construction of the anthropologists themselves. Nothing wrong with an “anthropological imagination” but too much cultural analysis and not enough structural analysis or vice-a-versa of course is interesting to read but it can also be a little one-dimensional on occasion. Still the world without anthropologists even though at the apex of “Empire” they were described as the “hand-maidens” of colonialism (no worse than those from disciplines such as political science that devised counter-insurgency strategies with some assistance from some anthropologists or of course economists who embraced neo-liberal economic policies) would be dull and uninteresting. Off to get more black clothes just in face their wearing during funerary rights is more strictly enforced……..)
Demanding turning Thailand completely black for a year is nut. Showing more loyalty wearing more black is not different than in North Korea people there had to cry loudly for their late leader..the volume of crying sound measures the loyalty…who dares not to do so! This is an evident to tell you how democratic the country is!
“I don’t see much mourning for Bumiphol – or the death of his Thai State – in Isaarn, currently”.
Oh such a sweeping comment Chris Beale, yes they are more relaxed about wearing black clothes tan their urban counterparts, but then many of them are not travelling far, so less important in local area, but measuring grief is problematic, I felt it. Admittedly it may be on a par with some groups mourning the loss of their soap operas on television, not to mention music etc.
I don’t think Lao PDR wants them, do they?
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Succession snapshot: back in black
Instead of posting all the writings from various sources of yours and amongst many who are only using their pseudonyms, I haven’t seen any articles in Mandala which will at least show respect to the Thai people and give some constructive comment on our demise King. Thailand is in the middle of grief and all the posts which I have seen up till now (not one is positive) but only give misleading information about our monarchy. I agree with freedom of speech but you don’t go beyond the line and fascinating yourself with writings of various people who instead of writing at least something postive about our King rather than giving misleading information and doubtful where are all these false information come up except by cooking up from people who are against the monarchy of this country and think they know what’s really happening. I know you are one of the paid lobbyist of Thaksin without doubt after having reading your articles many times particulary the ones from our good friend Andrew McGregor. Cut the crap and find some better stories to post for the public as what happen in Thailand is our business and by using pseudonyms prove that it is possibly you what are behind writings of some of these people as everyday you have come up with articles from pseudonyms and if these people do really exist, why don’t they come out from shadow rather than writing in secrecy?????
Professor, speak up and make a difference
Like most brilliant ideas, utterly obvious in hindsight!
This concept deserves some serious thought and then global application as a matter of urgency.
It’s past time higher education escaped it’s own thought bubble.
Better and more progressive ideas need to find their way into the mainstream in accessible language, the internet alone won’t do the job.
The biggest hazard independent thought faces, is being hijacked and modified to fit a third party agenda, but a robust discussion that avoids the temptation to over-intellectualize as it expands, could neutralize such modification.
Keep it simple, scholars.
The return of the divine king
I was not aware that the term ‘prostitute’ is offensive, and I am still not convinced it is. Chris, you suggest that it corresponds to a Thai term that designates ‘low class street hookers’ who do not send their earnings back to their families. You juxtapose this case to that of women who work at entertainment venues and send money back to their families, who you suggest should instead be called ‘sex workers’ following some Thai terminology.
I am not sure how we can assume that those who work on the streets do not send money back home and vice versa, but more importantly I wonder on what basis we should decide who deserves the supposedly less problematic label and who doesn’t. I am unsure whose these Thai terms you refer to are, but I doubt they are used by the workers themselves. To me they replicate a form of discrimination, and I would steer away from them.
Anthropologists stay for long periods of time with the people they study in order to get an understanding that is as legitimate as possible of the way they think and of the social world they live in. As nobody is a mind-reader, this understanding will always be filtered and ultimately interpreted by the anthropologist. There is no way out of it, and anthropologists these days recognize this and ackowledge explicitly their own personal biases and methological problems. There is no other discipline that questions itself this much.
As I have stated in the concluding paragraph to this article, my view is partial, and cannot be more than an initial attempt to make sense of what I observe among a restricted number of people.
Again as I highlighted in the article, people hold an infinity of cosmologies and we should be wary of ‘textbook’ notions of what Thai cosmology is supposed to be about. Again as stressed in the article, the rituals at Sanam Luang are new and dynamic: nobody is trying to freeze people in time here.
Thailand’s supreme reign
Mark Dunn,
You are parroting mainstream media BS. I suggest you read more and write less, until you’re up to speed on the reality of the late kings true ability to influence events.
His personal courtiers, with his express assent, could not, or would not, even curtail minor royals use of traffic clogging motorcades.
So much for supreme say in affairs of state.
Thailand’s supreme reign
I love Thailand, and the Thai people I’ve met. I’ve lived in the Kingdom, and worked alongside a number of Thais overseas. They were hardworking and reliable.
Unfortunately, I never discussed these things with them, it just wasn’t on my ‘radar’ at the time.
I now understand that some of those Thais were very likely to have been ‘yellow’ politically.
They were all overseas educated.
The Thais I maintain friendships with now, are less fortunate, but still have degrees from Thai universities, in the main.
They are not ‘happy campers’.
Some despise both main factions, but such is their current disgust and frustration, they are willing to risk a CP/Taksin regime in the hope it could open the door to better days ahead.
I have recently learned so much more about the true recent history of this beautiful country, and it’s frustrating, and truly heartbreaking.
Thailand has the potential to be an Asian superpower, were it run in a democratic, law abiding, and just manner.
The elite cannot fathom losing a fraction of their control.
The patronage system is just corruption with a prettier name.
They fail to see that a bicameral parliament would pave the way for a win-win.
Thailand is the perfect place to install a House of Lords, but only if access to it is porous, such as modern Westminster, and the judiciary, not the monarchy, or army, are made ‘untouchable’, but not above the law itself.
So long as the current dinosaurs, who really should have departed along with the revered Rama IX, remain in absolute control, then the only way out appears to point toward Thailand having a terrifying ‘Bastille’ event.
It’s not rocket science, but unfortunately, the powerbrokers can barely comprehend steam technology.
They are dragging the nation into turmoil, unrest, and chaos.
They risk the dismemberment of the nation itself, all because of greed, arrogance, and stupidity.
Finally, they should get over themselves.
The only argument they advance against change, to the ‘west’, is that internal politics is ‘their business’ they are right, of course.
But it’s a piss poor excuse for actively destroying the fabric of their own society, just so they can continue to indulge an expired sense of entitlement.
Thailand’s supreme reign
Cannot resist asking Mark Dunn where you have been during the last 50 years while Thailand existed as a military/ hyper royalty absolute arrangement. However on your side of the argument it is against the law for anyone to say/ write against what you said, if you are in Thailand that explains it, you are following their law. however Somchai is in Australia where there would be no laws against Somchai speaking the truth. By the way if you take a few minutes to study Thai history Mark you will learn that the coupists who overthrew the absolute monarchy ( 1932) were themselves overthrown, their liberal socialist constitution torn up and the absolute monarchy restored surreptitiously in a slightly different form, Somchai has observed correctly as he is legally able to do while based in Australia. By the way also Mark you write and I quote ” The King sometimes acts.. ” Where is this King you refer to?
The return of the divine king
For SEA in general, you may want to have a look at Benedict Anderson (Power in Java) and Geertz (Negara). For Thailand, the most seminal works are possibly those of Heine Geldern and Tambiah. Keyes and and other contemporary scholars have also written about it.
Thailand’s supreme reign
Absolute monarchy in Thailand was overthrown in 1932.
The Thai king, while very influential , has no direct power over government affairs. The Thai monarchy is held in high esteem by the vast majority of the public and is not a ” dictatorship “. The Monarchy acts as a living symbol of the Thai state/nation. The King sometimes acts as a referee of last resort when the politicians and generals ( who have the real power ) find themselfs in political deadlock.
Thailand’s black hole: a Deleuzian take
“Antifascist on the molar level” ? That is so hilarious. How many grams of antifascism do I need to make a 1 molar aqueous solution ? Is it one molar or one molal ? What is the pH of a 1 molar solution of antifascism ? Or maybe it is one tonsil and not one molar. This is why the educational levels in the West barely exceed Malaysia’s.
Professor, speak up and make a difference
About time.
Thailand’s black hole: a Deleuzian take
“It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.” D&G
Ah, yes. A Deleuzian black hole, which is not to say a delusionary hole of another kind altogether.
The “white wall/black hole” system of facialization that posits the white face, the face of Jesus Christ, as the norm, procedes to determine relative worth by deviation from that and as such is the foundation of European racism.
As we are invited to gaze upon the face of Thai difference in these “articles” on NM we are simultaneously encouraged to slap ourselves on the back, us white men, with our black holes of subjectivity functioning to suck everything into them and allowing nothing to escape.
The white wall we are confronted with on this sight/site is of course the totalizing frame of “western liberal democracy” and the subjectivities performing themselves in these articles are black holes that allow nothing to escape that frame, no consideration of anything that deviates from the white face that refuses to admit to its own molecular fascism.
What Deleuze was reaching for with the concept of facialization and the white wall/black hole system was a way of talking about the European racism that is no longer racist but has drifted into “culturism” that now maintains “whiteness, reason and secularized Christianity as the markers of human superiority.”
The return of the divine king
What interests me, are serious efforts to dig down through the layer of mysterious ceremony to uncover the self-interest of its manipulators, identify who they are, and how they benefit. All cultures have their sacred ceremonies, including capitalism, and I am suspicious of all of them. Rather than do that kind of serious investigation, main-stream western anthropology seems to throw another layer of post-modernist mystery over the top.
The return of the divine king
Hi Michael….I live in Thailand or would like to live in Thailand more of the year than less of the year. Unfortunately my work takes me to Vietnam, Lao, Cambodia, Myanmar (am reluctant to work there until government comes to terms with the Rohingya and starts treating them as human being), Southern China, and occasionally for the freebies involved “exotic” places such as Papua New Guinea and Uzbekistan. I have been living here since the late 1990s although I first came to Thailand in 1969 before at least some NM readers were born. My Thai Meah, while not an ostentatious land-holder does own and farm larger parcels of land in Loei than than even “middle-income” farmers but makes 90% of her income from real estate and retail businesses in Bangkok. So yes, I know a little about rural Thailand including doing a poverty analysis nearly a decade ago. And yes, you are correct some enterprising rural women and to a lesser extent men buy clothing from Pratunam to resell in rural areas as they do from Bobae or even Talad Rong-Glua on the border with Cambodia but I think my point was that black mourning garment apparel is relatively expensive for poorer rural people as indeed it is for the urban working class. Have a good day!
The rise and rise of Muslim politics
“…Perhaps this lack of an alternative at present allows for the continuity of an already outdated ideology…”
Yes, what amazes me is that many Muslims today remain fixated with a concept of governance almost a thousand years old.
The return of the divine king
Good questions Shane. In fact if you take the cosmologies constructed by Western anthropologists, then go an ask a Thai near you, I doubt you would find a match. Dig deeper and you still get other assumptions, explanations, key symbols and the like. Better in anthropology to start with the symbols that give meaning to people’s lives, then see what meaning they attach to them.
Reconciliation in Rakhine State
Does anyone of us ‘infidels’ deserves any rights at all in Islam believers eyes?
Quite sure the Muslim Kala in Yakhine are getting the shorter ends for now yet there are almost no Buddhist Bengali being appealed by any group for HR.
The lady should bring out this fact firmly established among the Muslim kala. The proof recent attack on the police.
The problem if this incidence is a political motivated, the Kala ignore the separation of military which is looking for excuses to carry out the notoriously atrocious, inhumane , 4 steps military solution in the Karen state.
Will the Kala able to handle the even shorter ends?
The return of the divine king
What are the sources for the ‘cone of light’ and this idea of receiving merit from the heavens and ‘irradiating it out’?
The return of the divine king
Chris you appear to have more empathy for people trying to make ends meet for them and their families than the anthropological cosmologists or is it the cosmological anthropologists? I spend a good part of my working life “defending” anthropologists from the generally brain-dead or lobotomized “development workers” who all cultures quite blandly. However, as a simpleton while I find analyses of cosmologies to be quite interesting I just wonder to what extent the cosmologies presented here are not actually in part the social construction of the anthropologists themselves. Nothing wrong with an “anthropological imagination” but too much cultural analysis and not enough structural analysis or vice-a-versa of course is interesting to read but it can also be a little one-dimensional on occasion. Still the world without anthropologists even though at the apex of “Empire” they were described as the “hand-maidens” of colonialism (no worse than those from disciplines such as political science that devised counter-insurgency strategies with some assistance from some anthropologists or of course economists who embraced neo-liberal economic policies) would be dull and uninteresting. Off to get more black clothes just in face their wearing during funerary rights is more strictly enforced……..)
Thailand’s black hole: a Deleuzian take
Demanding turning Thailand completely black for a year is nut. Showing more loyalty wearing more black is not different than in North Korea people there had to cry loudly for their late leader..the volume of crying sound measures the loyalty…who dares not to do so! This is an evident to tell you how democratic the country is!
The myth of King Bhumibol
“I don’t see much mourning for Bumiphol – or the death of his Thai State – in Isaarn, currently”.
Oh such a sweeping comment Chris Beale, yes they are more relaxed about wearing black clothes tan their urban counterparts, but then many of them are not travelling far, so less important in local area, but measuring grief is problematic, I felt it. Admittedly it may be on a par with some groups mourning the loss of their soap operas on television, not to mention music etc.
I don’t think Lao PDR wants them, do they?