Good piece of work.
All it’s left to do, still the same, too, is “Educate” the ignorant, and wish for enough stigma to raise to bring Thailand’s misery to an end, so Thai “People” (notice the emphasis on people) can live a free and much more “peaceful” life.
There is no inevitable link between embourgoisement and democratization.
True dat.
While some segments of the middle class have shown their inclination towards royal fascism or whatever one might call the current state of affairs, based on recent history, the “lower class” or peasantry may be inclined toward democracy. There is a further irony in that, repelled by the prospect of enlightened rule under the current king, the middle classes may move leftwards, towards democracy or some better version of a constitution.
Not.
Constitutionalism seems like its own black hole.
I’m not sure how well class analysis holds up here, but substantial populations of Thai society, including the Crown Prince and his entourage, Sino-Thai businesses and businesspeople, including the former prime minister, as well as the huge population of foreign workers, foreign residents, domestic workers, students earning degrees abroad, etc. may not be as physically linked to the actual territory as before, as say in Burma, for example. Many/most of the oligarchs, including royals and generals, park their wealth offshore and many marry off an offspring or two into other cultures or nations as a global marriage/diversification strategy.
Wherefore the contemporary meaning of “Thai”? Or the Thai stock market? How do you describe an economy where only a portion of it is visible or official?
(the white market? the celestial economy?)
Not to put too much emphasis on it — and I certainly defer to scholars who are more current with the literature — but people who do political economy rarely leave space for cultural analysis, sophisticated or not; and cultural anthropologists are far less inclined to work their way through economic and political models from other disciplines. Thus, traditionally, given the decline of virtue in a Dhammaraja or hence a sacred capital — which is a given in Buddhist cosmology — alternative centers of energy and sacrality may spring up in the periphery. Or at least they did for centuries. Or people like Thaksin may attempt to move in on royal rituals. Or there may be new sources of nationalist energy offshore, in exile.
Thailand is still officially a Buddhist nation or kingdom. Both journalists and scholars working of traditional western models [that separate the study of politics, religion and economy] rarely give much weight to what’s going on in the Sangha. I can pretty much guarantee, however, that the so-called “peasants” on the periphery do. It’s just not making the headlines. One question is whether this prince is casting amulets, and if so, do they carry any sacred weight? Are they saksit? Who is his new astrologer? (none of these funerary rites are taking place without a royal astrologer) Or are there no contenders for the position given the fate of the last? Was the royal corpse really horizontal, as in a coffin, meaning there’s one cosmological distinction separating the royals from ordinary mortals forever let go?
So I ask both David and “Sam Michael,” both of whose work I really enjoy, as well as other NM contributors like Lee Jones: Where are the sources of light?
Wherefore new technology, social media and new global population flows (I hate that term) in your respective analyses? What is the meaning of modern Thai “nation-state”?
There is already such a deficit of knowledge, historically and otherwise, where does one start?
Usual question is what is in it for us. Essentially Asia’s “future” has been drawn up by multinational corporations directly or via proxies ADB, WB, IMF and monetary, financial and regulatory as well as infractructure projects were all in blue print ready to be obeyed. And the track record has been they have all been by all the Small Nation Governments (which include Burma) in South East Asia. It is unlikely that short of funding there would be any objection in principle for any road or thoroughfare criss-crossing the country as far as any ruler of the country are concerned.
Indeed there has been no discernable diffference between the actions and policies of the current hsitoric “People’s” government of most democratic kind and any other before that. For the “stellar job in cementing ties” there is nothing concrete or even in-concrete coming out of any of those highly glorified state visits anywhere, the sanction withdrawal being simple matter of course to facilitate multinational corporations to get in the country.
Most worrying is the “Passive-ness” or apparent total lack of any vision or plan for the country by the rulers except for various plans put in place by others in the name of ASEAN prosperity reminiscent of kindly Japanese “The Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” of 1940 albeit with better international institutional and better public acceptance via well orchestrated effusive opinion pieces in various media and academic and institutional publications. The foot print of all other resource rich country with only minimal external debt enjoying generous internationalization in Latin America and Indonesia has been instructive of how richness of comprado bourgeoisie is out of tune with a third of the populace who used to live in green fields now in filth filled slums.
The last seventy years are the clearest proof : In Thailand monarchy is anthitetic with democracy ; To obtain a true democracy, with equality, access to justice and the respect of human rights ,the Thais should have to abolish the monarchy and adopt a Republican constitution. I hope that they will be able to reach this goal ,if not completely peacefully, at least with the minimum of violence.
I find it interesting, People not born here but with strong views. Re “The King”
I wish I could tell you how compelling it is, when, from birth, we are indoctrinated. I was fortunate in some of my schooling was overseas – I broke the indoctrination so to speak. But I see Thais crying and genuinely bereft of themselves.
Please understand these are just regular folk. I wonder were the Germans indoctrinated like this, the Japanese, Cambodians under Pol Pot on and on.
Fear is a great tool to stifle debate – it is used extensively in Thailand AND I think it would have been worse, had it not been for foreign press.
So much more I can say, but every word I write places my family and I in great danger.
Keep up your good work New Mandala and be thankful you are free to speak from your location.
That’s an excellent post by Noppawan. How many “jai” – heart – words are there in Thai ? Hundreds, if not thousands. Both verbs and nouns. It is a very heart / feeling centred culture. And of course overwhelmingly Buddhist, which quietly preaches the supreme virtues of calm control, a calm heart – whatever the pain and suffering in this incarnation, through to the next. So here today one suffers immense grief as quietly and calmly as one is able. I’m therefore a bit surprised by some of the comments by farang here on NM expecting “hysteria”.
Tom, thanks for enlightening me, my main sources for this topic was the media – which did report that the King castigated Thaksin, I had not read his addresses, so thanks for those excerpts. But you dispute the 2,500 figure from Lee Jones and which many academics have used. Can we really rely on figures from the police??? as you suggest. They investigated themselves?
The otherwise enlightening NM coverage of the royal succession (and the interregnum) appears to lack a political economy dimension with the exception of the essay by Lee Jones. Two points need to be made. Firstly the cleavages in Thai society are class, as well as regionally, based. Freed from royal fetichism in what direction will the aspiring lower middle class turn? In the Philippines those of a similar social strata chose to support a strongman Rodrigo Duterte, aka ‘The Punisher’, a kind of Donald Trump who “shoots from the hip as well as from the lip”. There is no inevitable link between embourgoisement and democratization.
And the peasantry, who still make up more than half of the Thai population, now that ‘Father’ is no longer there, will they remain as quiescent as in the pre-Thaksin period? Charles Keyes’ recent study of the northern Thailand would suggest not.
Secondly, these social challenges are aggravated by Thailand being stuck in a “middle income trap”, or more precisely, as Pietro Masina has suggested in relation to Vietnam, an “uneven development trap”. Thailand’s particular variant of the Asian developmental state model has, perhaps, shown its limits. As a site for export-oriented production it is confronted not only with competitors with lower labour costs and a better skills base (such as Vietnam), but also with the consequences of a failure to invest sufficiently in human capital. Moreover for an economy partly based on tourism Thailand’s neighbor, Myanmar is rapidly becoming a serious competitor.
The period of mourning and that of palace intrigue may provide a respite from confronting these underlying issues, but they will not disappear.
As I was among those people there, I can’t answer you why we grief quietly, just the way we are, our culture, we are not grief hysterically usually.
I just wanted to pay last respects to him. I’m just an ordinary working class people who love the H.M. the King as who he is, his actions, his selflessness, his heart. I think you are right about this quote
“What was clear from the crowds of people mourning King Bhumibol was that these individuals were neither extremists nor that they were there under duress”
We are not the “hyper-royalism” as that analysts or pro-democracy rebelling us as we happen to love the king.
Thank you for these very constructive comments, Erick.
Our priority with this article was to attempt to make sense of very low-key/private/sober/dignified – you pick the word – displays of grief that seemed prevalent in Bangkok, in places ranging from the BTS/MRT to Sanam Luang during the procession. The degree to which grief appeared to be disciplined and contained – especially at a procession that was about grieving – struck us.
Our suggestion is that a new form of royalism has emerged next to – and not instead of – the ‘hyper-royalism’ we are used to. Whether these two different forms/displays of royalism belong, for instance, to different individuals or to different contexts remains to be investigated.
I must remark again that we are by no means trying to deny the existence of a violent form of ‘hyper-royalism’, nor to deny its tragic effects, among which is the recent mob in Phuket.
MN 38 unambiguously states dependent origination is something that can be realised or verified by each wise person. Therefore, if a version of dependent origination is not clearly visible in meditation, it cannot be dependent origination. DN 15 is obviously not the words of the Buddha because it defines certain nidanas differently than the other suttas and because it does not even include all 12 nidanas.
This broadly matches my experience at Sanam Luang as well. However, I do have some comments/questions, and provocations.
1) On what basis is the claim of an atomized, privated experience of grief being advanced? Sitting inside Sanam Luang, I was struck how almost everyone wandering up from the river side to claim a space to wait arrived in a group. And that these groups were constantly chatting with each other, sharing comments on memorabilia they brought with them or bought along the way. They became quieter as the procession was delayed and the sun bore down on us. But they still were noticeably an aggregation of groups, not atomized mass individuals. They were utterly quiet as the procession passed – and yes, generally confused about what was what in it, especially since we were not roadside – but quickly broke into chatter and reflections after the procession was over.
2) Is “hysteria” the best frame for describing and interpreting mass grief? I am not sure, and am in fact rather doubtful. And in what contexts and among which groups would we expect to encounter hysteria if it was to happen? Surely no one expected collective hysteria to sweep a crowd tens of thousands strong in a large public area. Are there perhaps not other modalities of public, collective grief we should be looking for instead?
3) That said, there have been cases of what might be labelled hysteria. The widely reported collective wailing, crying, praying and wishing for miracles at Siriraj Hospital when it was first publicly announced the King had passed. Surely this incident should be discussed and counterpoised – descriptively and analytically – to the scene at Sanam Luang the next day. Although I doubt it technically constituted “hysteria”.
4) What are we to make of the mob in Phuket threatening a family whose son supposedly posted lese majeste on social media? Is this another form of collective grief? Of hysteria? Of public mourning?
Facebook 
Twitter 
Soundcloud 
Youtube 
Rss
Death of a monarch or an oligarch?
Good piece of work.
All it’s left to do, still the same, too, is “Educate” the ignorant, and wish for enough stigma to raise to bring Thailand’s misery to an end, so Thai “People” (notice the emphasis on people) can live a free and much more “peaceful” life.
The lost kingdom
There is no inevitable link between embourgoisement and democratization.
True dat.
While some segments of the middle class have shown their inclination towards royal fascism or whatever one might call the current state of affairs, based on recent history, the “lower class” or peasantry may be inclined toward democracy. There is a further irony in that, repelled by the prospect of enlightened rule under the current king, the middle classes may move leftwards, towards democracy or some better version of a constitution.
Not.
Constitutionalism seems like its own black hole.
I’m not sure how well class analysis holds up here, but substantial populations of Thai society, including the Crown Prince and his entourage, Sino-Thai businesses and businesspeople, including the former prime minister, as well as the huge population of foreign workers, foreign residents, domestic workers, students earning degrees abroad, etc. may not be as physically linked to the actual territory as before, as say in Burma, for example. Many/most of the oligarchs, including royals and generals, park their wealth offshore and many marry off an offspring or two into other cultures or nations as a global marriage/diversification strategy.
Wherefore the contemporary meaning of “Thai”? Or the Thai stock market? How do you describe an economy where only a portion of it is visible or official?
(the white market? the celestial economy?)
Not to put too much emphasis on it — and I certainly defer to scholars who are more current with the literature — but people who do political economy rarely leave space for cultural analysis, sophisticated or not; and cultural anthropologists are far less inclined to work their way through economic and political models from other disciplines. Thus, traditionally, given the decline of virtue in a Dhammaraja or hence a sacred capital — which is a given in Buddhist cosmology — alternative centers of energy and sacrality may spring up in the periphery. Or at least they did for centuries. Or people like Thaksin may attempt to move in on royal rituals. Or there may be new sources of nationalist energy offshore, in exile.
Thailand is still officially a Buddhist nation or kingdom. Both journalists and scholars working of traditional western models [that separate the study of politics, religion and economy] rarely give much weight to what’s going on in the Sangha. I can pretty much guarantee, however, that the so-called “peasants” on the periphery do. It’s just not making the headlines. One question is whether this prince is casting amulets, and if so, do they carry any sacred weight? Are they saksit? Who is his new astrologer? (none of these funerary rites are taking place without a royal astrologer) Or are there no contenders for the position given the fate of the last? Was the royal corpse really horizontal, as in a coffin, meaning there’s one cosmological distinction separating the royals from ordinary mortals forever let go?
So I ask both David and “Sam Michael,” both of whose work I really enjoy, as well as other NM contributors like Lee Jones: Where are the sources of light?
Wherefore new technology, social media and new global population flows (I hate that term) in your respective analyses? What is the meaning of modern Thai “nation-state”?
There is already such a deficit of knowledge, historically and otherwise, where does one start?
Death of a monarch or an oligarch?
I pity the Thais, especially those poor folks.
Why the NLD needs deft diplomacy
Usual question is what is in it for us. Essentially Asia’s “future” has been drawn up by multinational corporations directly or via proxies ADB, WB, IMF and monetary, financial and regulatory as well as infractructure projects were all in blue print ready to be obeyed. And the track record has been they have all been by all the Small Nation Governments (which include Burma) in South East Asia. It is unlikely that short of funding there would be any objection in principle for any road or thoroughfare criss-crossing the country as far as any ruler of the country are concerned.
Indeed there has been no discernable diffference between the actions and policies of the current hsitoric “People’s” government of most democratic kind and any other before that. For the “stellar job in cementing ties” there is nothing concrete or even in-concrete coming out of any of those highly glorified state visits anywhere, the sanction withdrawal being simple matter of course to facilitate multinational corporations to get in the country.
Most worrying is the “Passive-ness” or apparent total lack of any vision or plan for the country by the rulers except for various plans put in place by others in the name of ASEAN prosperity reminiscent of kindly Japanese “The Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” of 1940 albeit with better international institutional and better public acceptance via well orchestrated effusive opinion pieces in various media and academic and institutional publications. The foot print of all other resource rich country with only minimal external debt enjoying generous internationalization in Latin America and Indonesia has been instructive of how richness of comprado bourgeoisie is out of tune with a third of the populace who used to live in green fields now in filth filled slums.
Some “Progess” for inspiration.
Why the NLD needs deft diplomacy
Wise words.
The lost kingdom
The last seventy years are the clearest proof : In Thailand monarchy is anthitetic with democracy ; To obtain a true democracy, with equality, access to justice and the respect of human rights ,the Thais should have to abolish the monarchy and adopt a Republican constitution. I hope that they will be able to reach this goal ,if not completely peacefully, at least with the minimum of violence.
The myth of King Bhumibol
I find it interesting, People not born here but with strong views. Re “The King”
I wish I could tell you how compelling it is, when, from birth, we are indoctrinated. I was fortunate in some of my schooling was overseas – I broke the indoctrination so to speak. But I see Thais crying and genuinely bereft of themselves.
Please understand these are just regular folk. I wonder were the Germans indoctrinated like this, the Japanese, Cambodians under Pol Pot on and on.
Fear is a great tool to stifle debate – it is used extensively in Thailand AND I think it would have been worse, had it not been for foreign press.
So much more I can say, but every word I write places my family and I in great danger.
Keep up your good work New Mandala and be thankful you are free to speak from your location.
Politics of the interregnum
a brilliantly written piece, seriously on the money.
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
‘Bank holiday’ may not be a precise translation. That’s why we left the Thai term in brackets.
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
Mind sharing what “other places where the Chakri monarchy was never fully accepted” are?
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
Brilliant. Thanks.
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
That’s an excellent post by Noppawan. How many “jai” – heart – words are there in Thai ? Hundreds, if not thousands. Both verbs and nouns. It is a very heart / feeling centred culture. And of course overwhelmingly Buddhist, which quietly preaches the supreme virtues of calm control, a calm heart – whatever the pain and suffering in this incarnation, through to the next. So here today one suffers immense grief as quietly and calmly as one is able. I’m therefore a bit surprised by some of the comments by farang here on NM expecting “hysteria”.
The myth of King Bhumibol
Tom, thanks for enlightening me, my main sources for this topic was the media – which did report that the King castigated Thaksin, I had not read his addresses, so thanks for those excerpts. But you dispute the 2,500 figure from Lee Jones and which many academics have used. Can we really rely on figures from the police??? as you suggest. They investigated themselves?
The lost kingdom
The otherwise enlightening NM coverage of the royal succession (and the interregnum) appears to lack a political economy dimension with the exception of the essay by Lee Jones. Two points need to be made. Firstly the cleavages in Thai society are class, as well as regionally, based. Freed from royal fetichism in what direction will the aspiring lower middle class turn? In the Philippines those of a similar social strata chose to support a strongman Rodrigo Duterte, aka ‘The Punisher’, a kind of Donald Trump who “shoots from the hip as well as from the lip”. There is no inevitable link between embourgoisement and democratization.
And the peasantry, who still make up more than half of the Thai population, now that ‘Father’ is no longer there, will they remain as quiescent as in the pre-Thaksin period? Charles Keyes’ recent study of the northern Thailand would suggest not.
Secondly, these social challenges are aggravated by Thailand being stuck in a “middle income trap”, or more precisely, as Pietro Masina has suggested in relation to Vietnam, an “uneven development trap”. Thailand’s particular variant of the Asian developmental state model has, perhaps, shown its limits. As a site for export-oriented production it is confronted not only with competitors with lower labour costs and a better skills base (such as Vietnam), but also with the consequences of a failure to invest sufficiently in human capital. Moreover for an economy partly based on tourism Thailand’s neighbor, Myanmar is rapidly becoming a serious competitor.
The period of mourning and that of palace intrigue may provide a respite from confronting these underlying issues, but they will not disappear.
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
As I was among those people there, I can’t answer you why we grief quietly, just the way we are, our culture, we are not grief hysterically usually.
I just wanted to pay last respects to him. I’m just an ordinary working class people who love the H.M. the King as who he is, his actions, his selflessness, his heart. I think you are right about this quote
“What was clear from the crowds of people mourning King Bhumibol was that these individuals were neither extremists nor that they were there under duress”
We are not the “hyper-royalism” as that analysts or pro-democracy rebelling us as we happen to love the king.
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
Thank you for these very constructive comments, Erick.
Our priority with this article was to attempt to make sense of very low-key/private/sober/dignified – you pick the word – displays of grief that seemed prevalent in Bangkok, in places ranging from the BTS/MRT to Sanam Luang during the procession. The degree to which grief appeared to be disciplined and contained – especially at a procession that was about grieving – struck us.
Our suggestion is that a new form of royalism has emerged next to – and not instead of – the ‘hyper-royalism’ we are used to. Whether these two different forms/displays of royalism belong, for instance, to different individuals or to different contexts remains to be investigated.
I must remark again that we are by no means trying to deny the existence of a violent form of ‘hyper-royalism’, nor to deny its tragic effects, among which is the recent mob in Phuket.
Unpopular facts about one of Buddhist philosophy’s most popular doctrines
MN 38 unambiguously states dependent origination is something that can be realised or verified by each wise person. Therefore, if a version of dependent origination is not clearly visible in meditation, it cannot be dependent origination. DN 15 is obviously not the words of the Buddha because it defines certain nidanas differently than the other suttas and because it does not even include all 12 nidanas.
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
not a bank holiday – SET opened and closed as usual on Oct 14.
The king still never smiles
tatllandsQueen tssopowerfulandwasverygoodforpeople best regards
Private: Managing the death of King Bhumibol
This broadly matches my experience at Sanam Luang as well. However, I do have some comments/questions, and provocations.
1) On what basis is the claim of an atomized, privated experience of grief being advanced? Sitting inside Sanam Luang, I was struck how almost everyone wandering up from the river side to claim a space to wait arrived in a group. And that these groups were constantly chatting with each other, sharing comments on memorabilia they brought with them or bought along the way. They became quieter as the procession was delayed and the sun bore down on us. But they still were noticeably an aggregation of groups, not atomized mass individuals. They were utterly quiet as the procession passed – and yes, generally confused about what was what in it, especially since we were not roadside – but quickly broke into chatter and reflections after the procession was over.
2) Is “hysteria” the best frame for describing and interpreting mass grief? I am not sure, and am in fact rather doubtful. And in what contexts and among which groups would we expect to encounter hysteria if it was to happen? Surely no one expected collective hysteria to sweep a crowd tens of thousands strong in a large public area. Are there perhaps not other modalities of public, collective grief we should be looking for instead?
3) That said, there have been cases of what might be labelled hysteria. The widely reported collective wailing, crying, praying and wishing for miracles at Siriraj Hospital when it was first publicly announced the King had passed. Surely this incident should be discussed and counterpoised – descriptively and analytically – to the scene at Sanam Luang the next day. Although I doubt it technically constituted “hysteria”.
4) What are we to make of the mob in Phuket threatening a family whose son supposedly posted lese majeste on social media? Is this another form of collective grief? Of hysteria? Of public mourning?