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Benedict Anderson and Siam Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
Extract
In the wake of the bloody coup of 1 October 1965, three young Indonesia scholars, Ruth McVey, Fred Bunnell, and Ben Anderson, all working with George Kahin at Cornell University, set out to explain how things had gone so wrong. They began their analysis with a careful examination of the patterns of promotion and transfer in the Indonesian military, which seemed to indicate that tensions between Javanese and other officers played a major part in the coup. Keen to make this information available to other scholars, they quickly wrote up a draft version of their findings and tentative conclusions, and circulated it to a few friends and colleagues. This fateful decision, ironically, would reshape our understanding of Siam. Subsequently banned from entering Indonesia, McVey and Anderson would produce influential work on Siam, while mentoring younger scholars through thesis supervision and edited volumes. This collection, Exploration and irony in studies of Siam over forty years, is comprised of nine of Anderson's articles each outlined below, with an introduction by Tamara Loos, a successor of Anderson as director of Cornell's Southeast Asia Program. Loos' introduction places the articles in historical perspective, and in the context of Anderson's own personal history, including his networks of colleagues and students, and his other work. The essays provide an opportunity to reflect on Anderson's contribution to Siam Studies, as they illuminate the influence he had in opening up new directions for research, and new ways of conceptualising Thai politics.
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2015
References
1 Actually published in 1978 after, and no doubt overlapping with, ‘Withdrawal symptoms: Social and cultural aspects of the October 6 coup’ in its creation, it clearly takes precedence both in its conception and for understanding Anderson's contribution to Siam Studies.
2 Riggs, Fred W., Thailand: The modernization of a bureaucratic polity (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1966)Google Scholar.
3 Textor, Robert, From peasant to pedicab driver: A social study of Northeastern Thai farmers who periodically migrated to Bangkok and became pedicab drivers (New Haven: Yale University, Southeast Asia Studies, 1961)Google Scholar.
4 Pridi Bhanomyong was leader of the civilian faction in the 1932 uprising where Phibun was leader of the military faction. The two later became political rivals. The killings were carried out by followers of police chief Phao Sriyanon, who by then may have been more powerful than Phibun.
5 Anderson, Benedict, The spectre of comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the world (London: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar.
6 Eoseewong, Niddhi, Pen & sail: Literature and history in early Bangkok, ed. Baker, Chris and Anderson, Ben (Chiangmai: Silkworm Books, 2005), especially Baker's ‘Afterword’, pp. 361–84Google Scholar.
7 ‘State of Thai Studies’, p. 45; Anderson, Benedict, ‘The changing ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950–1990’, in Southeast Asian Studies in the balance: Reflections from America, ed. Hirschman, Charles, Keyes, Charles and Hutterer, Karl (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1992), pp. 25–40Google Scholar.
8 ‘Few intellectuals in court of public opinion’, Bangkok Post, 28 June 2010.
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10 McCargo, Duncan, ‘Network monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand’, Pacific Review 18, 4 (2005): 499–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Phoumisak, Jit, Chom na sakdina Thai (Bangkok: Sripanya, 2007), pp. 61–2Google Scholar, or in translation, Reynolds, Craig J., Thai radical discourse: The real face of Thai feudalism today (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 1987), pp. 57–8Google Scholar. See also Hobsbawm and Ranger's notion of invented tradition, where the absolute state reinvents traditions to restore pre-existing social relations in times of rapid change; Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terrance, eds., The invention of tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
12 Thus the underlying problem with the succession: the behaviour of the current monarch fits middle-class images of Thainess, so that he can serve as an exemplar of their vision of Thainess, while the behaviour of the future monarch does not. And if the future monarch does not exemplify Thainess, it becomes more difficult for the middle class to assert its cultural superiority over other classes.
13 Winichakul, Thongchai, Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of the nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997)Google Scholar, chap. 1.
14 Defining and even measuring Thainess (khwampenthai) has been the central preoccupation of Thai Studies in Siam, so that it has been complicit in this prioritisation of central Thai aristocratic culture over other Siamese cultures.
15 Seksan and Kasian were Anderson's students; Thongchai was Craig Reynolds' student at the Australian National University. All three were student activists in the 1970s, with Seksan and Kasian escaping to the jungle, while Thongchai chose to stay in Bangkok to face arrest and lese majeste charges.
16 Aguilar et. al.: 117. Anderson is writing specifically here of Fa Diaw Kan and Aan journals, calling them direct descendants of Sangkhomsat Borithat, and noting that there are no similar journals in Indonesia or the Philippines. Since Anderson was close to the editors and writers of Sangkhomsat Borithat it is not surprising that he now writes for their descendants.
17 Kasetsiri, Charnvit, ed., Ni Siam Kuk (Bangkok: Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbook Project, 2002)Google Scholar.
18 Charnvit, Ni Siam Kuk, pp. 96–7.
19 Anderson, Benedict, The fate of rural hell: Ascetism and desire in Buddhist Thailand (Calcutta, New York, and London: Seagull Books, 2012)Google Scholar.
20 Bangkok Post, 7 Nov. 2014, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/441888/army-plans-monument-to-kings.
21 Anderson does not discuss the choice of Thanin for the name of the father. Thanin Kraiwixien was the appointed prime minister after the October 6 massacre, and reportedly had the strong support of the king. Thanin was responsible for the violent suppression of the left.
22 Handley, Paul, The King never smiles: A biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; the book is banned in Siam, yet has circulated widely.
23 Ironically the one time he did not take this approach, the result was his best-known work, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (1983), where the crucial section on Latin America is based on a limited number of English language sources.