For quite some time now, the history of modern Thailand has remained a surprisingly closed book for most students of modern South Asia. Surprising, because Thai history provides an obvious, and almost text-book, study in contrast to South Asian history of the modern period. Thailand is another and proximate Asian country that has experienced the gravitational pull of Europe over all its questions and agitations to do with becoming “modern”. Yet, unlike India, it was never formally colonized. Thai and Indian nationalisms, while showing some shared tensions over cultural domination by the West, have some significant differences that should engage...

Reviewing the Tate Britain gallery’s 2008 exhibition of British Orientalist painting—“The Lure of the East”—Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif takes exception to the work of William Holman Hunt. She decries him for having come east primed with “an ideology and a fantasy to impose upon the landscape and the people.”² Her mistrust, echoing Edward Said’s monumental text, Orientalism (1978), is directed at the ways in which power and fantasy combine in a manipulation of “The East” and its peoples. There is little need to rehearse the detail here of Said’s well-known views on the hegemonic construction by the (arguably...

Key questions addressed in this book are how culture, knowledge and identity have been produced in modern Siam/Thailand in relation to the global dominance of the West. Euro-American world dominance emerged in the nineteenth century after several centuries of growing Western influence on the world stage and, arguably, we are now entering an era when this supremacy is being challenged by the ascendance of China, India, Russia and Brazil. However, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, the period covered in the following chapters, Euro-American economic, political and military dominance was the context within which Thai culture, Thai self-understandings...

In a recently released film, Thawiphop (The Siam Renaissance, dir. Surapong Pinijkhar, 2004), Manee, a young Thai woman from the early twenty-first century who has grown up and been educated in France, travels back and forth between Thailand’s postmodern present and Siam’s early modern past.¹ In a scene set in the nineteenth century, she responds to questions from two nobles at the court of King Mongkut (r. 1851–1868) by offering harsh criticism of the Western influences in modern Thailand,

Our country is very modern. There are many skyscrapers. Everything has changed. We have cars, electricity, movie theatres. We dress...

From the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, European imperial powers imposed legal and economic restrictions on Siam, as Thailand was called until 1939. These restrictions limited Siam’s sovereignty in ways that made it comparable to a European colony. Siam, from this angle, appears colonized. However, this comparison uncritically locates Siam as a victim of the West without questioning the aggrandizing activities engaged in by Siam’s rulers or challenging the conformist historiography that it produces. Below I compare Siam to imperial Britain to reveal their arresting similarities. Siam most closely approximates patterns of British imperialism in its decision to create Islamic...

Fortuitously, perhaps, the injurious effects of “Paris Syndrome” have not been widely reported among the surge of Thai visitors that has graced the French capital in recent years. Nevertheless, the psychological intensity of “culture shock” to which “Paris Syndrome” speaks provides a timely lens through which to observe Siamese/Thai forays into the West, both past and present. This chapter opens with an examination of travellers’ tales through the ages, from the accounts of the first Siamese diplomatic missions to Europe in the seventeenth century, to the novels inspired by visits to the West by Thailand’s twentieth-century novelists. Drawing associations between...

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a native of Khon Kaen in Northeast Thailand, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, and twice a Cannes prize winner. This unusual trajectory defines his auteur identity, and has led one US critic to dub his distinct film style “village surreal”, an epithet which marks him out from Bangkok contemporaries of Thai cinema. When his second feature Sut saneha/Blissfully Yours (2002) won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2002 Cannes film festival, Apichatpong began to gain international recognition as a young filmmaker of significance. Within Thailand this recognition remained limited to a minority of...

One of the most troubling questions in Thai society since the nineteenth century has been how to deal with the farang, the Thai word for the West, Western, and Westerners (see the introduction, Herzfeld and Pattana in this volume). Over this period, the farang has been a temptation as well as a threat in the Thai imagination, a seductive but dangerous Other (Thongchai 2000b). To Thais of all social strata, the relationship with the West has entailed a paradoxical set of desires: how to catch up with the West without “kissing the asses of the farang” (tam kon farang); how...

One of the first appearances of the now-accepted Thai translation of the term “discourse”, wathakam, was in a satirical article, “On the Discourse of Camelology”, published in a 1988 issue of the journal Jotmai khao sangkhomsat (Sociology News and Notes) (Anonymous 1988). This parody of Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse begins with a story about an international research team consisting of a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German, an American, a Japanese man and a Thai who are assigned to undertake a comprehensive study of the camel. The Frenchman goes to the zoo to see the camel, spends half an hour...

Any discussion of alleged Western influence in Thailand must start from the premise that the signifiers of globalization neither necessarily originate in the West nor automatically imply acceptance of Western values. Globalization does not always originate in Western countries; the definition of the “West” is itself problematic; and the assumption that adoption of multinational logos and designer goods must mean adoption of their ideological implications simply reproduces the cultural imperialism that these items so often represent.² In this chapter, I explore instead the indeterminacy of cultural influence, arguing that—in matters as apparently discrete as the use of space, dress...

While Siamese/Thai culture, both historically and today, is widely recognized, at times even eulogized, for its pervasive syncretism, theories of cultural hybridity have rarely been used to analyse the patterns of cultural borrowing and fusion in the country. This is largely because accounts of cultural hybridity have emerged from and remain closely identified with postcolonial studies. As Marwan Kraidy notes, “Standing on the shoulders of the disciplines that debated syncretism, mestizaje, and creolization, postcolonial theory repopularized the term ‘hybridity’ to explicate cultural fusion” (Kraidy 2005, 57). As I noted in my earlier chapter, Siam/Thailand’s lack of a colonial history means...