State Power and Culture in Thailand 0938692607

Citation preview

STATE POWER AND CULTURE IN THAILAND

L

-3 “I W]

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER editor Monograph 44/Yale Southeast Asia Studies

State Power and Culture in Thailand

Edited by E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

Monograph 44/YaIe Southeast Asia Studies

Yale University Southeast Asia Studies James C. Scott, Chairman Marvel Kay Mansfield, Editor

Consulting Editors Hans-Dieter Evers, Universitat Bielefeld Huynh Sanh Thong, Yale University Sartono Kartodirdjo, Gadjah Mada University Lim Teck Ghee, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Malaya Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin Anthony Reid, Research School of Pacific Studies, Canberra Benjamin White, Institute for Social Studies, The Hague Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-061260 International Standard Book Number: paper 0938692-60-7 cloth 0938692-59-3

®1996 by Yale University Southeast Asia Studies New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8206

Distributor: Yale University Southeast P.O. Box 208206 New Haven, Connecticut U.S.A.

Printed in U.S. A.

Asia Studies 06520-8206

Contents I

List of Tables Contributors

page vi vii

1. The Power of Culture and the Culture of States E. Paul Durrenberger 2. Nurturance and Reciprocity in Thai Studies Penny Van Esterik 3 Tarnishing the Golden Era: Aesthetics, Humor, and Politics in Lakhon Chatri Dance-Drama Mary L. Grow 4. Rice, Rule, and the Tai State Richard A. O'Connor

1 22

47 68

5. Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand: Archival Anecdotes and Village Voices Katherine A. Bowie

100

6. Households and Villages: The Political-Ritual Structures of Tai Communities Nicola Tannenbaum

139

7. Rhetorics and Relations: Tai States, Forests, and Upland Groups HjORLEIFUR

R. JONSSON

v

166

Tables 5.1 Origin of servitude, by number of informants

109

5.2 Origin of servitude, approximation of actual numbers, based upon oral histories .

110

;

5.3 Breakdown of slaves by efhnic or geographical origin listed by number of informants

111

5.4 Slaves by ethnic or geographic origin weighted by estimated number of slaves

112

6.1 Tai household features

142

6.2 Tai village features

145

6.3 Tai supravillage relationships

151

vi

Contributors

KATHERINE A. Bowie, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin/Madison E. PAUL Durrenberger, Iowa

Professor

of Anthropology,

and

University

of

Mary L. Grow, Anthropologist with the Department of Family Medicine, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine HjORLEIFUR R. JONSSON, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, University

Cornell

Richard A. O'Connor, University of the South

Biehl Professor of International Studies,

NICOLA Tannenbaum, Lehigh University

Associate

Professor of Anthropology,

Penny VAN ESTErik, Associate Professor of Anthropology, York University, Canada

vii

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States in Thailand E. Paul Durrenberger

In this book six anthropologists analyze various dimensions of the relationships between state power and culture in Thailand. Anthropologists typically work far from the centers of power, and these are no exception. We see Thailand through their eyes from the viewpoints of rice- growing villagers of central Thailand, Shan (Tai Long) farmers of the northeastern province of Maehongsorn, slaves of northern Thailand, and people of the northern highlands. This is a view of Thailand from the peripheries in to the center rather than from the heights of the social and political pyramid down to the bottom or out to the edges. For Van Esterik, Grow, and O'Connor writing of Central Thai villagers, the periphery is social; for Tannenbaum writing of Tai, Bowie writing about slaves in northern Thailand, and Jonsson writing of highlanders, the periphery is geographical as well as social. One hallmark of anthropology is fieldwork —participant observation in a community. Anthropologists tend more to study the powerless than the powerful. And if one is going to study a community, it has to be at some place and some time. This situates anthropology in the local, the arena of interactions we can observe and keep track of in daily life. We tend to take culture as a set of attitudes or Richard O'Connor, Kendall Thu, Nicola Tannenbaum, Penny Van Esterik, James Scott, HjSrleifur Jdnsson, and Thomas Kirsch read previous versions of this essay and offered useful comments and advice.

2

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

behaviors or thoughts that inform these interactions and we try to identify, describe, and analyze this culture, and sometimes debate its abstract definition. Local culture is therefore central to anthropology. States are located somewhere else. We do not find them on streetcomers, in peasant villages, or on fishing boats, or, by definition, among the powerless. Because we cannot study them as local communities, anthropologists tend to think of states as lacking cultural properties. We observe that power is associated with states, whether we see it coming from the barrel of a gun or from the barrel of a fountain pen, but because we cannot localize it, we tend to think of it as noncultural. The cultural remains a property of local groups and powerless people. Geertz's writings have become popular among anthropologists because they ratify this view even as he struggles to conceptualize states and power in local terms or at least in terms of local consequences. All of this moves anthropology away from considerations of state power. But it is increasingly obvious in today's world, whether in dance performances (Grow), ritual (Tannenbaum), personal and regional histories (Bowie), the non-Thai peoples of the northern hills (Jonsson), or even the contemplation of the basic food —rice (O'Connor), or the very logic of nurturance of mother's milk (Van Esterik), that state power is pervasive and that, to understand local events and outlooks, we must contextualize them in terms of the machinations of states. Whether from the periphery or from the center, states, their policies, and their structures have become central objects of ethnographic description and concern (Thu 1992). They are the topics of these works. The concern of anthropologists with states is nothing new, though the incorporation of consciousness of states into ethnographic awareness may be a consequence of recent developments in transportation and communication technology that extend administrative agencies, schools, and other state apparatus to the furthermost reaches of the planet so that it is no longer possible to escape them, even by herculean efforts of romantic withdrawal into the world's frontiers. In the hinterlands, one meets United Nations peacekeeping forces, the Border Patrol Police, schoolteachers, health workers, revolutionary armies, units of national armies,

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

3

missionaries, foreign and domestic drug enforcement agents, urban people on holiday, refugees from economic or political disaster, drug warlords, or some other agents or victims of or respondents to state power. The refugees who flow into Thailand seek to legitimate themselves in terms, the Thai state sets for its citizens by purchasing documents of identity. Such identification papers have become important for refugees' survival as counterfeit citizens. Astrange and surrealistic market in personal identities has grown up as people change their names to match those of papers and alter their ages to fit available documents rather than the facts of their own biographies. In the process, people cease to match their official descriptions. Similarly, as international and national agencies demand numbers to describe conditions, local and national officials manufacture them to fit the desired molds. A Thai government that at one time promulgated policies to foster opium use and prostitution and developed these industries to captivate a work force for its own uses (Anderson 1978) now decries such practices under the puritanical gaze of others. That same government is tempted to blame sex tourism, drug trafficking, and a rampant AIDS epidemic on the perversions of foreigners rather than on the practices of its own officials and their policies. The American government that once used its Central Intelligence Agency to support the drug trade in Thailand (McCoy 1972) now sends its drug enforcement agents to combat it (Tannenbaum and Durrenberger 1990). These are not simply changes in government policy or reversals of direction engendered by more enlightened interpretations of facts. Contradictory practices and policies are and have been simultaneously for and against various vices. The point is not to criticize governments for inconsistency —a characteristic of all complex organizations including individuals —but rather to state that locales fail to match their descriptions. Only those who check realities beyond agency documents and provincial capitals on the ground from the vantage point of their own two feet are likely to see such discrepancies between manufactured fact and experienced reality. Today they find that ethnographic realities are no longer local (if ever they were), and that the

4

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

local is simply different from what it was in Malinowski's day, or even twenty years ago. Even Malinowski's islanders were not isolated, and Malinowski himself was surrounded not only by Trobrianders but also by missionaries, traders, and officials. Local realities are connected to national ones. I do not mean to discover the chapter in the village studies entitled, "The World Beyond the Village." I mean, rather, that the village is not on another side of that barrier of the "beyond." It is part of the same system, not apart from it, as Hanks recognized in his study of the historical dynamics of a central Thai village (1972). Many sociologists, political scientists, literary and other scholars take states as simply given, an unquestionable dimension of social existence (Durrenberger 1992). Some explain states by reference to their own component parts, in terms of the mechanics of interest groups, bureaucracies, power blocs, and classes (Anderson 1978). Social orders are like clock-work mechanisms. Each piece moves and in motion affects the others. Forms of thought do not enter the equations. Godelier (1986:190), for instance takes this stance with regard to all social relations. He argues that social relations systemically and mechanically affect social processes to make history quite apart from what people think about them. Social relations: exist independently of the mode of representation [culture] which the individuals living these relations may have. This in no sense means that the relations themselves do not evolve under the impact of men's conscious action. But although modes of consciousness [culture] may cause social relations to evolve, they do not in any way change their immanent properties. It is these properties which are the unintentional cause, the source of the effects which each type of social relation can have .... (emphasis original) Anthropologists, at least in the United States where archaeology is part of the curriculum, are aware that states are recent in the history of our species. The emergence of states and the nature of states as social forms have been traditional concerns of anthropology (Wright 1977). Cultural anthropologists and archaeologists alike interpret each individual case in terms of a global comparative perspective, contextualizing observations of local social and cultural life and historical processes in terms of what other anthropologists

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

5

and historians have observed in communities across the planet and through time (see e.g. Earle 1991). Among some anthropologists, the methodological imperative of first-hand experiential knowledge that demands observation of a particular place at a specific time —participant observation —has become enshrined as a celebration of the local, of the aesthetic appreciation of the particular (see Spiro 1992 for a critique). Even staunch supporters of this view situate their understandings in comparative terms not only with other places and times but in terms of the history of the species (Geertz 1973). This perspective, informed by a disciplinary history of the ethnographic and archaeological study of nonstate peoples, gives anthropologists what may be an atypical outlook in area studies. They are likely to mention dimensions of the Han empire of China in comparisons with the Trobriand Islanders, or mention the Buddhism of lowland Central Thai in the same breath with the tribal observances of highland Lisu, or to compare medieval France with twentieth-century Thailand. Anthropologists are likely to think of a continuum of political forms in which states are but one member, not the whole, and to understand states in terms of comparison with such other forms rather that in terms of comparison with one another. Anthropologists recognize egalitarian, rank, and stratified social orders, hl egalitarian systems there are as many positions of prestige in each age-sex category as people capable of filling them; in rank systems there are fewer positions of prestige in each age-sex category than people capable of filling them; and in stratified social orders there is differential access to resources. States arise only in stratified social orders as the institutional means for rulers to insure their continued privileged access to resources; and they always entail compulsion, hence, to say "state power" is redundant (Fried 1967). In egalitarian systems, the unequal distribution of benefits is wrong, but easily corrected by direct information exchange between reciprocating independent individuals. Instead of concentrating on the coercive or power dimension of social orders, one can focus on the exchange of information and the means for identifying and correcting inappropriate or bad decisions or actions, errors. In more complex orders, the independence of subordinates is traded for

6

E . PAUL DURRENBERGER

effective and efficient information handling arid decision making. Decision making becomes specialized, and some people make decisions about lower order decisions instead of about production or distribution. A third level of information processing corrects and coordinates lower level decisions. In certain conditions of material plenty, complex exchange, and conflict, such systems are advantageous, but they become self perpetuating, and "error" is not necessarily associated with inequitable distribution of benefits (Wright and Johnson 1975). However they were established, states operate to maintain order in stratified societies, societies in which there is unequal access to basic resources (Fried 1967). One of the problems rulers and administrators of states face is how to insure the continuation of their privileged access to disproportionate resources. Fried argues that stratified social orders can not long exist without states to systematize and routinize force to perpetuate them. They would relapse into more egalitarian forms (a dynamic that underlies the oscillation of Kachin [Leach 1954]), or become organized as states. In fact, stratified social orders can manage without states for some centuries if not indefinitely (Durrenberger 1992). One of the antimonies that runs through the discussions of the origin and persistence of states is between a voluntary choice and compulsion (Godelier 1986). When we perceive maldistribution today, we ask why its victims should tolerate it, especially since there are many more victims than there are beneficiaries. Mao Tse Tung summarized the compulsion argument in his aphorism that power comes from the barrel of a gun. But there are few examples of the kind of draconian police state that total control would dictate. Even the most totalitarian of police states find that the costs of force are overwhelming and that force is not especially effective because it is impossible to apply universally and it engenders its own opposition. States do not exist by force alone. They also regulate their people by means of thought control, to put it crudely. Hus may be through the sanctification of their existence via theology (Service 1975) or by control of the production and direction of secular thought by bureaucratic means (Thu 1992). If most people get less than they should and only a few get more, why do the oppressed not rise up

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

7

to take what has become a major major intellectual as as well to what is theirs? This has It is even more puzzling when people who have as political puzzle. It as in those those countries countries with with nonrepressive openly the means, as and openly democratic regimes, do not act in their own best interests. Hobsbawm shows how modem European states invest in ritual, pageantry, and (1977) follows Gramsecular forms forms of thought control. Williams (1977) states invest invest much to to create create hegemonic viewsci's argument argument that that states that represent their own interests, even against the interests points that of most of the people who who adhere to to them. The machinery of school, church, and media is forever reinforcing views of reality that sanction the privilege of the the rulers. modem states, a ministry of agriculture agriculture and its attendant attendant In modem machinery for the creation and curation of knowledge —an agricultural school —may be just as powerful creators of sanctification as —may be the popes and colleges of cardinals were in medieval Europe Europe (Thu 1992). Hobsbawm (1983a, 1983b) is especially clear, in his identificahi Thailand the sanctification of tion of public schools with churches, churches. In straightforward and, and, like sanctification in the monarchy has been straightforward other contexts, it has gone a long way way to remove the state from from "epistemological review" (Thu 1992), even by foreign scholars. Foreigners, whether tribesmen in the remote hills of Thailand, Tai in the closer valleys, northern Thai in Chiangmai, or American instruction students in classrooms in the United States, begin their instraction in the acceptance of hierarchy hierarchy when they start to to the unquestioning unquestioning acceptance leam the Thai language. They are schooled not only in the grammar learn and comportment postures and words of comportment of hierarchy hierarchy and the postures respect, but in the inevitability, naturalness, and acceptability of to rathierarchy, the Thai hegemonic view. These assumptions, used to ify state power, are questioned outside, from the questioned only from the outside, peripheries where they they are not not as strong, pervasive, or natural natural even if they are inevitable. for states. The The production of knowledge plays a central role for arose as servants to to modern modern states. states. In social sciences sciences themselves themselves arose as servants Europe, romanticism and and nationalism provided the impetus for for the development such'scholarly as philology, linguistics, and development of such’scholarly fields as folk studies, studies, as well as as sociology and anthropology anthropology (Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm 1983a). Folk studies become institutionalized institutionalized in Europe Europe as as studies have have become

8

E. E . PAUL DURRENBERGER

European ethnography which retains much the same same objectives and methods as earlier earlier folklore studies, while anthropology methods as has taken different directions, especially the United States especially in the States and Britain. Recent trends toward locating, inscribing, and enshrining "village wisdom" in Thailand are late late echoes of this romantic trend associated with nation making making (Nathalang (Nathalang 1990; Phongphit 1986; Phongphit and Bennon 1988). But But the Thai search for wisdom in the hinterlands is uneasy. Offices charged with the cultivation of national identity issue slick publications pointing to the wonders of a royal past. Bucolic romanticism romanticism has played little role in a society centered on the grandeur, power, and and freedom of royalty. In nineteenthcentury Europe, Icelandic leaders could argue effectively, in accordance with the romantic "folkish" ideology of the Danish metropolis, that Iceland's future should match the glories of its past (Wylie 1987:179). Since the 1950s, ideology makers in Thailand have found no glory in the folk until the past few few years, but have focused rather manufacture a view rather on the king and and court (Anderson 1978) to manufacture of "Thainess" that could claim hegemonic stature and be useful to to enlisting compliance. Godelier (1986:157) argues that there is: only one way of explaining how dominated individuals and groups can "spontaneously" consent to their own domination: the latter must appear as a service rendered them by the dominant, whose power henceforth seems so legitimate that the dominated feel it to be their duty to serve those who are serving them. The dominant and the dominated must must therefore therefore share the same representations if the strongest component in the power of the former over the latter is to emerge i.e. consent resting upon the recognition of the benefits, the legitimacy and the necessity of this power (emphasis original). He imagines that that the peasants of the Inca empire were so credulous that they surrendered surrendered all all of their their production to their rulers and accepted a third of their as their their just just portion portion because they their harvest harvest as actually thought their rulers made the cosmos cosmos work. He further supposes supposes that all all subordinates subordinates are as gullible and acquiescent as his imaginary Inca peasants. Godelier 's own France, it never Even in Godelier never worked like this, for there there is always the problem of whose culture is at stake. The culture and texts, the ruling of courts and the culture articulated and and propagated by" by"ruling

The Power of Culture Culture of States States Culture and the Culture

9

elites as a "public transcript" (Scott 1991) can be quite different from from, that of the people in the hinterlands whether those hinterlands are in the distance because of geography or or because of economy. Throughout medieval Europe, there was a great gap between what people did and thought in villages and and the political and religious messages of the ruling elites of state and and clergy (Ladurie 1978; Gurevich 1988; Le Goff 1980). An inquisitor, on the track of the Albigensian heresy in what is now the south of France conducted some 578 interrogations interrogations of local people, both both men and women, for 370 days from from 1318 to 1325, all all without aid of torture. This is as close to firstperson accounts of daily life as we can person can come, a record of which many an anthropologist would be proud. proud. He inquired about about all sorts of matters of conception and and practice practice including that anthropological favorite, incest. One of his his informants reported daughter, sister or or first first cousin reported "incest with mother, daughter, is not even even a sin; incest is merely a shameful act. To sleep with my second cousin . . . is neither neither a sin nor nor a shameful second shameful act. There is a common proverb ...: 'With a second mon second cousin, cousin, give her the works'" (Ladurie 1978:328). The inquisitor preserved the testimony testimony which is ample witness to the differences. To give but one further example, exacts tithes tithes from us by virtue of the "The Bishop exacts the law, but we we . . . refuse them them in virtue virtue of our customs" (Ladurie refuse (Ladurie 1978:328). In these villages, reciprocity reciprocity and the opinions of neighbors counted more villages, more than abstractions or or creeds (Ladurie 1978). Far from from being an age of blind faith, medieval Europe was seething seething with resistance, alternative formulations of doctrine, heresies, and rebellion against church and and state alike. In less extreme official theolform, Gurevich (1988) points to to differences differences between official and what local priests were teaching in medieval Europe. Tanogy and nenbaum and I (1988) found similar differences in local conceptions of Buddhism and Western analyses of textual textual Buddhism, between the Buddhism that villagers hear from monks and the scholarly'repscholarly 'repthat hear resentations of textual Buddhism. There is no no Thai culture as such to appeal to. One of the problems of ethnography is to sort sort out what kinds of culture there are in Thailand, an issue to which the papers of both Tannenbaum and and O'Connor speak in this book.

10

E. PAUL PAUL DURRENBERGER

Thailand, ruling elites have tried to establish their hegemonic In Thailand/ forms of thought by attempting to to control the Buddhist hierarchy, with media, by by expanding the school system, by by involvement and ideology surrounding the monarchy, by prepromoting ritual and empting the rhetoric of development, and even by appropriating foreign and domestic intellectuals. While there were and are conflicting factors in Thailand, a distinctively Siamese state with its own ideology emerged after 1932. The king emerged or was placed in the center of a Siamese ideology in the 1950s. Anderson (1978:211) argues that Western scholars have not developed cogent analyses of Thailand, in part because they have accepted elite views uncritically. There is great pressure in this direction, especially in area study programs. Language Language learning is central. central. With language lessons come lessons in etiquette etiquette and correct form. With these come definitions of self, gender, and class. These views are ratified by by repetition of similar self-views in the country and by by experience with Thai intellectuals and students at area oriented meetings. One often repeated aphorism is that Thai people (that is, the people of Thailand, because Thai often do do not distinguish the residents of a state from from an ethnic category) love the king. There is much evidence of this in the constantly repeated repeated slogans and ever present photographs of the king. I recall hearing a political scientist, speaking about legitimacy, report an'area report at an area studies studies meeting that that Moslem villagers he had interviewed in the south all supported the government, approved of it, and liked it. I asked how he had traveled to to the village. "In a helicopter," he answered. I asked if anyone had gone with him. "Some soldiers," he answered. Anyone would a. foreign political scientist love any government if questioned by a, who descended from the sky in a helicopter supported with a royal SWAT team. This guy could have taken some lessons in interview technique from the medieval French inquisitor. I don't think he was was stupid, but I don't think that discovering and reporting the opinions that of lowly villagers was his real mission. kafhin (offering celebration) Van Esterik's account of a Thai village kathin sponsored and and attended by urban people shows the distance between the conception and comportment of urban and village people as well

The Power of Culture The Culture and the Culture Culture of States

11

as as the contempt of the urban folk for the rural people. Sometimes, though, this feeling of contempt is tempered with paternalism. in roadwork on the When I participated participated with with rural villagers in king's birthday, which could show could be taken as as a spontaneous spontaneous show of affection and support, support, I saw it from from a peasant perspective. In the Shan village where I lived in Maehongson, the celebration fell at the height rice-harvesting season when every household needed height of rice-harvesting the rice every person to bring in rice. Even though people like to to get the or in expeditiously, a day more or less here or or there does not make or break a household's Everyone could stop work for a day, break harvest. Everyone but everyone was was loath to stop such important work work to celebrate the but king's birthday. The headman had to put himself on the line as the the mediator between the the villagers and the the government and call on every past obligation he could persuade people to could to persuade to turn out. Even so, one one group, who did not support the headman, headman, did not participate in the work and was conspicuously absent. and the conspicuously absent. They went visibly and defiantly about their business of harvesting rice in their fields next next to the road. The headman was anxious lest his villagers throw his credibility with the province officials into into question. He repeatedly stated to the villagers that the province officials would come to check that that they he could not get away with a false report, were doing the work, and he report, as many had urged. And check they did. urged. did. really had Surrounded by grumbling peasants who felt they really with mud, much better better things to to do, standing standing in a ditch, covered covered with mud, looking up at immaculately turned out Thai officials who could not not understand the local language and who were sitting in a jeep high up up on a dry dry road, I began to develop a different view from the one I had been presented at area study study meetings whether by by Thai or or forforeign observers. From the perspective of the jeep, the peasants may have seemed to peasants to b e happily compliant and complacent peasants and government. From die expressing love for their king and the perspective of the ditch they appeared otherwise. In the hills where I was was doing fieldwork, lowland Thai officials came to a Lisu Lisu village to to allow villagers the opportunity to make merit. These non-Buddhist non-Buddhist highlanders contributed, but they

12

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

interpreted the occasion as extortion or blackmail because of their own illegal weapons and illicit opium cultivation (Durrenberger 1975). Benedict Anderson (1978) argues that, although Thailand was all the characteristics never directly ruled by a'colonial power, itit has al! of an indirectly ruled state. Because its security was guaranteed by colonial powers and there was was no external external function for a military power, the Chakri kings used the military as a means for consolidation. The military therefore came to dominate the domestic political process. Rather than becoming passive, as modem monarchies have, the Thai royal family has remained active, a political subject questing for real power. Monarchy was identified identified with nation. In this semicolonial indirectly ruled polity, the monarchy-centered monarchy-centered centralizing centralizing colonial colonial style state developed developed no popular Siamese Siamese been no integration of "minorities" nationalism. Hence there has has been into the kingdom and no stable legitimate political order. In Burma, where the nation was not identified with the king and the monarchy was abolished, nationalism did develop. Burmans became one among many constituent groups of the nation, though their place and the nature nature of the union remains contested by arms for some thirty years or more. as it has been for In the old kingdom in Thailand, the state was was defined by the center, not the boundaries, and loyalty to a king did not define ethnicity. Entourages the early Bangkok Bangkok Entourages of people were incorporated into the state, and and leaders were given Thai titles. There were no minorities as such, just other kinds of people, some with more and some with less power, some with more direct direct and some with less direct connections with ruling groups. When the kings became modem Thai kings, ethnicity The kings ethnicity became more focal and problematic. became symbolic of the ethnic Thai monopoly of the state, became state, which was jealously guarded. Northern Northern Thai lines of ordination were toward minorities repressed and their books burned. Thai policies toward to repression, as have varied from indifference to to condescension Jonsson discusses in this volume. In Thailand, the Thai began to see themselves as the central with a royal central people, identified with royal family, a state. In doing so, they defined themselves not as one king, and a state. among many ethnicities, but the central national ethnicity and thus failed to comprehend other groups.

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

13

on African material, material, John and Jean Camoroff (1992) Drawing on reach similar conclusions. They argue that ethnicity is not primordial but related to specific historical forces; that its meaning and and salience differ according according to the the positions of different social groupings in has its origins in the incorporation incorporation of dissimilar social orders; that that it has that once established, groupings into a single political economy; and that it takes on the appearance appearance of an organizational organizational principle or or natural natural autonomous force. Ethnicity is a consequence of states incorporating autonomous various social social orders long orders into themselves, as anthropologists have long recognized in Southeast Asia. As Moerman put put it (1967:153), a Southeast Asian society's membership in the set called "tribal" can be described, defined, and analyzed only in in terms of that society's contrast to a civilized society which it may fight, serve, mimic, or even become—but which it can never ignore. even He goes on on to argue argue that social scientists should not use ethnicity or ethnic identification as explanations. He suggests "it is quite posor sible that ethnic cagetories are rarely appropriate sible appropriate subjects subjects for the are interesting human predicates" (1967:167). Cultural explanations are related to ethnic ethnic ones. Anderson (1978) understands Thai history in terms of the Anderson mechanics of a semidependent absolutist monarchy in conditions of guaranteed on a parguaranteed external peace. His analysis does not depend on particular ticular place or time and he draws parallels from all continents. In fact, his major critique of Western scholarship about Thailand is that Western scholars have tended to reify Thai culture and suppose that it is something exceptional, that Thai politics is a reflex of a unique set of cultural axioms. Of course, Thai, like Icelanders, Icelanders, Westman Westman Islanders, and Texans, are quick to inform one how incomparable their culture and and institutions are. Because Thailand was was never never administered by a colonial power, are no there are no archives full of documents documents compiled by by foreign rulers rulers for for foreign foreign scholars to analyze. analyze. It was not necessary, because it was not possible "to interrogate colonial materials in an inquisitorial "to interrogate penetrate to native reality through white mood if they were to penetrate documentation" (Anderson 1978:196). One might add Chinese Chinese documentation as well for many parts of Southeast Asia and the rest of Asia. Western scholars therefore accepted elite Thai views of

14

E.. PAUL DURRENBERGER E

matters and fostered an establishment rather rather than critical outThai matters the identification of the look among Thai specialists. They accepted the monarchy and the nation, even to the extent extent that tliat one anthropolomonarchy to a Lao Lao village as Thai Thai throughout throughout his gist, Tambiah (1970), refers to Buddhism in northeast northeast Thailand. Thailand. Bangkok elite elite never never study of Buddhism thought about the transformation between ethnicity and nationalto the scholity; itit remained unproblematic to the Thai, and hence to ars who uncritically accepted point of view with with no colonial ars who accepted their point record to challenge itit or offer a platform platform for a critical analysis. analysis. record Anderson’s major critique is that Western scholars simply accepted Anderson's elite Thai analyses wholesale. Thai intellectuals have not not been free to to chalFor various reasons, Thai structure lenge hegemonic views, even if they wanted to. Given the structure to perpetuate perpetuate preof academics in Thailand, some had good reasons to vailing views. When an American agricultural economist asked me to guide him on a tour tour of Shan water water control and irrigation systems, to I agreed willingly to his request to bring along two Thai colleagues. When they arrived arrived in a pickup pickup truck, truck, itit turned turned out that that neither of the Thai could could understand understand the local language, language, so the agricultural the interpreted. Their demeanor displayed the urban economist and I interpreted. person's contempt contempt for the rural, as Van Esterik dscribes in her essay. the daughter daughter As we continued our trip, I learned that one Thai was the other the son of the man man who owned the teak of a general and the other the area the sawmill concession in the area and the sawmill in Maehongson. I got the turned back to the province capital before they could observe party turned use of teak planks in violation of the concession. the illicit use to plant plant teak teak in the hillside swidToday, itit is government policy to fields that that provide places for growing rice for for those with with insufden fields ficient ficient irrigated irrigated land to to meet the the needs needs of their their households households It is these fields that make make a relatively egali(Tannenbaum 1992). It tarian tarian social life possible in some small villages (Durrenberger and Tannenbaum 1983). Because the teak reserves reduce swidden land, fewer opportunities for the the poorest of the rural rural people and there are fewer more opportunities for some of the richest urban for urban people. This procan be be made internationally internationally appealing appealing by reference reference to to the the gram can the logic of balances of payments payments "save a tree" rhetoric as as well as the to that that of balanced diets. as opposed to

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

15

If the hegemonic view as defmedby defined by the Thai Thai elites and and repeated by their apologists apologists is no no longer acceptable, neither are are views views of hegemony as the mechanical acquiesence of lower lower groups automatically accepted. Try as they will, rulers are are never quite as successful as they would like to be, as they sometimes imagine they are, in inculcating state approved modes of thought. Hence the need for inquisitors inquisitors in medieval France. The peasants will grumwill resist. Scott's Scott's ethnographic ble, and and the dispossessed experience (1985) with peasants challenged the received view of political scientists, similar to Gode tier's vision of consensus, that subordiGodelier's subordinate groups unquestioningly grant legitimacy legitimacy to to whatever whatever elites legitimacy is impossible, and that rule a state, that rule without legitimacy rule itself is sufficient, legitimacy; sufficient, to confirm legitimacy. Scott's experience also challenged the received wisdom that dictated that peasants are are tricked tricked or or fooled into into defeating their own interests. He found that peasants, far from being sufficiently stupid stupid along with self destructive doctrines received passively from to go along on high, are clever enough enough to know what is going on. They understand that the ruling articulate a version of culture that they they stand ruling classes articulate peasants to accept accept and abide abide by that benefits no wish the peasants no one but the elites. Nor do the lower orders simply acquiesce any any more than they did did in medieval Europe. They resist more or less actively, more they or less passively depending on the level of elite repression. repression. Scott or argues that only when the hidden transcript corroborates corroborates the public transcript is there sufficient evidence of the consent of the ruled. The public transcript, the stories the elite tell each other and and visiting academics, pardemics,. .is is not itself evidence of consent. Although people do participate in their own domination, the oppressed are not not oppressed to oppress themselves, but because they are are convinced to but because elites oppress them. They resist to the extent that they are able with the to are means means available to them. The "official transcript" —social life as the elites represent it— can be quite different from from the "hidden transcript" of subordinates. Studies of medieval Europe show this, as does the report report from the ditch varies from from the report from the jeep in Thailand. While ditch that varies the official transcript may provide evidence of willing complacency, the hidden transcript may indicate opposition (Scott 1991). In her

16

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

paper in this volume, Bowie shows that, contrary to elite representations and scholarly apologists, northern Thai slaves slaves were not treated as members of their owners' families, and that slaves did not like being slaves. Van Estrik points out, on on the other hand,, hand, .that do not see that villagers do their own resources returned to them in urban sponsored kathin, but view them as resources from a different system, like those that arrive at villages from the government. The ritual serves to emphasize this and rationalize the relationship in terms of nurturance. Nurturance and Nurturance itself becomes a focal symbol, central for for the elaboration of cultural and rhetorical content At the same time itit reinforces hierarchical and rhetorical content. relations relations and and legitimizes them, offering a vocabulary for compliance and one in terms of which people negotiate and and display power power and hierarchy. History matters, as O'Connor indicates, and and today, as and asserts its hegemony in many areas of Thailand, the Thai state asserts Thailand, as Van Esterik points out, rituals that stress the hierarchical relations of the center over the periphery are replacing communal communal emphasis on reciprocal reciprocal obligations. The dominant group is the least able to to take take liberties with with the symbols in which it is most heavily invested. Thus, Thai elites are are symbols committed to to an ideology and practice of power/protection power /protection and largess (Tannenbaum 1991). Thus, in spite of any any Buddhist ideology, must assume the role of beneficent beneficent patrons at the head Thai elites must of their their entourages lest they lose their credibility. As Hanks put itit (1972:86): The poor manager fails to balance membership with resources, resources, while the good manager gains and holds his members. But let him not be niggardly, for the man who fails to use his resources wholeheartedly heartedly for his followers may find himself as shunned as if he were bankrupt. bankrupt.

But there is nothing particularly Thai about about this. It was equally true of, for instance, medieval Iceland (Durrenberger 1992), and and no no doubt many other historical and ethnographic examples as well. In a small small rural Shan village that enjoyed few resources, the differences of wealth were not as extreme as is usual in Thailand (Durrenberger and Tannenbaum 1990). One man who had had been trading trading cattle was cattle was known to have had at least some temporary success. The

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

17

village sponsored sponsored, a festival, but he he was absent absent and did not contribute to it. it. When he returned, his fellow villagers villagers surrounded him and more or or less good humoredly demanded demanded that he he make make a sizeable contribution in local terms. When he demurred, his fellow villagers made it clear they would accept nothing villagers nothing less. Here the the distance between between the two two groups was minimal and and temporary, and demand was the demand was disrespectfully and rudely answered, played out and for these were rural people with no no urban or Thai polish about these were them. But But the point remained the same, if all the more visible for its them. mode of presentation. The subordinate subordinate classes usually live outside the direct gaze of the ruling classes, as many many villagers in Thailand do, especially those in the remote areas. But the various agencies of the government extend the gaze to the remotest comers of the kingdom. The Border Patrol are but one Police are d'etat, an intellione example. example. After the 1976 coup d'etat, up a post in the Shan village where I was gence officer took up was living. The young men drank with him, him, admired his fighting cock, and wagered with him until he left. Nevertheless, there is considerable latitude for the development of hidden transcripts in Thailand. One needs needs only to listen to hear hear them, as Grow shows in her her contribution to this collection. Of course, the elite never hear them directly hear or openly, because they they are are hidden. They may be surprised to hear or from the lips of foreigners, just just as Barry Barry Goldwater feigned feigned them from astonishment at his failure failure to astonishment United to gain the presidency of the United States because he had had not voted for him. had met so few people who had The elite cannot remain totally isolated from the circuits of folk are aware, to one degree or culture and and creativity. They are or another, of various dimensions of the the’hidden hidden transcript. Scott investigates the conditions under which this awareness is translated into oppression and and those under which the hidden transcript is more or less tolerated. He also explores the modes of labeling the secret transcript transcript and dealing with it. Sometimes, he he suggests (1991:144) that "those who perceive a lively resentment and envy who envy directed at them from below will easily become convinced that any reverses they suffer are the result of malevolent witchcraft." I.M. Lewis makes a similar argument (1971). The analysis of Thai concepts of witchcraft witchcraft would contribute to this discussion, but I am not aware aware of such an analysis.

18

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

Sometimes those who formulate such hidden transcripts are are labeled witches and burned; sometimes, they they are are labeled heretics and disciplined; sometimes they are simply assassinated by by state-sponstate-sponsored terrorists. Some give culture causal force; others relegate it to the realm realm of rationalization relations;some of the social, political, or economic relations;some argue minds of the ruled sufficiently argue that rulers have controlled the minds sufficiently that lower orders comply with to gain legitimacy while others argue that forced to do so. the wishes of the rulers only to the extent they are forced All agree that state power power and culture culture are somehow related; all of the contributors contributors to this book address some dimension of that relationship in Thailand. The relationship between between state power and and culture raises a numnumber of issues, among them: the power relationships among among different localities; the relationships among different. different, hierarchical levels;, the relative influence influence of culture and political and and economic relations relative relations events; the extent to which culture is shared among strata; on events; the extent whether, or to what extent subordinates are victims victims of false conconsciousness fostered by hegemonic state culture or whether whether they sciousness fostered hidden, transcripts; transcripts; reasons reasons for compliance and form their own own hidden, state control by by force versus state control by by thought conresistance; state trol. intend to resolve any of these issues. They are suffitrol. I do not intend ciently and another opinion will make ciently basic to be irresolvable, and make little difference. I do intend, however, to move considerations considerations of state power into into ethnography, and I would would hope hope to move move ethnography ethnography into hegemony and and cominto state power. Whether via mechanism of hegemony pliance or or by state power actively by secret transcript transcript and and resistance, state enters.the formation of cultures, shapes and gives them conenters.the shapes them, and tent. There is an inherent dynamic in the relationships among locals across levels of power. To understand local ethnographic manifesmanifestations, we have to situate them in terms of this dynamic of the forand resistance to to them. mation of state paradigms and

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

19 19

References Anderson, Benedict R. Studies of the Thai Thai state: The state of Thai studies. In The 1978 Study of Thailand: Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches,and Economics, History Prospects in Anthropology, Art History, History,.Economics, Elizier B. Ayal. Papers in and Political Science, edited by Elizier no. 54: International Studies, Studies, Southeast Asian Asian Series, no. 193-247. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, Southeast Asia Program. Cameroff, John, and Jean Cameroff Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: West1992 view. Durrenberger, E. Paul 1975 Understanding a misunderstanding: Thai-Lisu relations in northern Thailand. Anthropological Quarterly 48:106-20. The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland: Political Economy and Lit1992 Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. erature. Iowa Durrenberger, E‘ Paul, and Nicola Tannenbaum E.‘ systems. Ethnos 1983 A diachronic analysis of Shan cropping systems. 48:177-94. 48: 177—94. 1990 Analytical Perspectives on Shan Agriculture and Village Economics. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia StudStudies Monograph Series 37. Yale Council on Southeast Asia, Studies. Earle, Timothy 1991 Chiefdoms: Power, Economy,and Ideology. Cambridge: CamCambridge University Press. Fried, Morton 1967 The Evolution of Political Society. New York:Random House. Geertz, Clifford Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Godelier, Maurice 1986 The Mental and the Material:Thought, Economy,and Society. Bristol: Verso. Gurevich, Aron 1988 Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception. J Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanks, Lucien 1972 Rice and Man. Chicago: Aldine.

20

PAUL DURRENBERGER E. PAUL

Hobsbawm, Eric 1983a Mass-producing traditions: traditions: Europe, Europe, 1870-1914. In In The The Mass-producing Invention of Tradition, edited edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 263-307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983b Inventing traditions. traditions. In The Invention Invention of Tradition,edited Tradition,edited Inventing by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1-14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel George Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. New York: George 1978 Braziller, Inc. Edmund Leach, Edmund 1954 Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon. Le Goff, Jacques Culture in in the Middle Ages. Chicago: UniUniTime, Work and Culture 1980 versity of Chicago Press. Lewis, I.M. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Posses1971 sion and Shamanism.Baltimore: Penguin Books. McCoy Alfred W. 1972 The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Moerman, Michael identification. In In Being Lue: Uses and abuses of ethnic identification. 1967 edited by June Helm, Helm, Essays on the Problem of Tribe, edited 153-769. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nathalang, Ekavidya The Wisdom of the Thai Farmers:Contemporary Efforts for Cul1990 the 4th International International tural Reproduction. Proceedings of the Conference on Thai Thai Studies, vol. 3. Kunming, China: InstiConference on tute of Southeast Asian Studies. tute Phongphit, Serip, ed. Back to the Roots:Village and Self-Reliance in a Thai Context. 1986 Rural Development Documentation Documentation Center, VilBangkok: Rural lage Institution Institution Promotion. Culture Culture and Development, lage Series 1. Phongphit, Serip, and Robert Bennon, eds. Turning Point of Thai Farmers.Bangkok: Rural Rural Development 1988 Documentation Center, Village Institution Promotion. Culture and Development, Series 2.

The Power of Culture and the Culture of States

21

Scott, James New Haven: Yale University Press. 1985 Weapons of the Weak. New Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale Uni1991 versity Press. Service, Elman Origins of the State and Civilization.New York: W.W. Norton 1975 and Company. Spiro, Melford 1992 Anthropological Other or Burmese Brother: Studies in Cultural Analysis. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Tambiah, S SJ.J. 1970 Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in Northeast Thailand. CamCambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannenbaum, Nicola 1992 Hill fields, reforestation, and the the construction of inequality in Maehongson Province, Thailand. Paper presented at the 1992 meeting of International Association the Association for the Study of Common Property. Washington, D.C. 1991 Haeng Haeng and Takho: Power in Shan cosmology. Ethnos 56: (l-2):67-81. Tannenbaum, Nicola, and E. Paul Durrenberger 1988 Control, Control, change, and suffering: The The messages of Shan Buddhist sermons. Mankind 18 (3):121-32. Buddhist 1990 Hidden dimensions of the the Burmese way to socialism. In Perspectives on the Informal Economy, edited by M. Estellie Smith, 281-300. New York: University Press of America. Thu, Kendall M. 1992 Norwegian farm farm strategies and the state: Implications for a global pattern. Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa. Williams, Raymond 1977 Marxism and Literature.Oxford: Oxford Oxford University Press. Wright, Henry T. 1977 Recent the state. Annual Review Recent research on the origin of the of Anthropology 6:379-97. Wright, Henry Henry T., and Gregory A. Johnson 1975 Population, exchange and early state state formation in southwestern Iran. American Anthropologist 77 (2):267-89. Wylie, Jonathan 1987 The Faroe Islands: Interpretations of History. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.

2 Nurturance

in Thai Studies and Reciprocity in

Penny Van Esterik

Local and individuals whose and state systems are are connected through individuals lives are by both systems. Any model that are shaped shaped simultaneously by opposes local and state systems of power power and meaning meaning and and poses no connections between between them is unlikely to be grounded in the lived no experiences of people. Yet, as much as we recognize the the need to contextualize the local in terms of state power, we must pull away from reifying "Thai culture" as as a means of explaining the relation between these systems. .left systems. But it is essential that cultural analysis not be be.left out of the picture. Work such as Lucien Hanks's, "Merit and Power and Power in the Thai Social Order" (1962) and "Two Visions of Freedom: Thai and American" (1965), and and and Jane Hanks's "Maternity and its Rituals in Bang Chan" (1963) and "Reflections "Reflections on on the the Ontology of Rice" (1964) provide opportunities to explore the linkages between rural and urban systems, systems, or or local and national systems system's —not simply in distribution and utilization, but also in terms of terms of resource distribution symbolic capital and ritual exchange. Treading carefully among later treatises that have provided valuable insights into into a local and as power power and inside understanding of concepts such as and gender ideology in Thailand (Keyes 1984, Kirsch 1985), we we seek shared practices and local systems. and meanings that can articulate between state and Feeding and eating are critically important to the establishment and power relations in Thailand (cf. P. Van maintenance of gender and and power Esterik 1986, 1992). Liang, the Thai term for providing food or or eating

Nurturance Studies Nurturance and and Reciprocity Reciprocity in in Thai Thai Studies

23 23

together exemplifies -this shared practice. Liang provides the most widely understood arena for negotiating and displaying power and hierarchy, yet it is also a metaphor for intimacy and closeness. It It is to understanding basic to gender construction in Thailand. This paper explores how Hang as a system of reciprocity persists in a world increasingly dominated, by impersonal commodity increasingly' exchanges. I argue that liang is embedded in deeper and more more exchanges. Hang in enduring values values than those motivating commodity exchange. In fact, liang remains key to social interaction precisely because because it embraces a wide variety of alternate models models of exchange. Liang encompasses food exchanges requiring no reciprocity, balanced encompasses reciprocity, generalized reciprocity, and market exchange, stressing differing and nondiffering degrees of equality and and hierarchy in both ritual and ritual contexts. Liang successfully maintains 'the the logic of the gift exchange that creates relations between people even even in the.context of rapidly rapidly changing economic contexts. Liang incorporates a broad range of rules of reciprocity operating in different-contexts different-contexts of Thai some of these contexts. society. This paper explores some reasserted their traditional conRecently, anthropologists'have frameworks.forfor interpretation and have reflected cern with analytical frameworks and have more self-consciously self-consciously on are more on how their ethnographic statements statements are produced. This reflection leads naturally to the recognition of the role of past and scholarship and of. the life experiences of past scholars and and of ethnographers on current frameworks for interpretation. 1 The-Hanks have provided valuable insights into the key role of food sharing in Thai society. Yet, it is surprising that their insights have have notstimulated more research on this important topic, buildingfrom lated building from some of the Bang Chan Chan food habits studies (Hauck, Saovanee, and J. Hanks formulation of 1958). In addition to the insights of past scholars, my formulation research question reflects formative personal personal experiences in this research Thailand. During my first first years in Thailand, Thailand/ my my. husband and I were so often the recipients of Thai generosity, generosity,’ first as volunteers and we had to leam leam cient data. had made made into to temples to state the benevohad into candles and donated to lence of their rule. rule. It is not clear what rulers gave gave uplanders in exchange for wax. McCarthy (1900) mentions armed exchange armed conflict conflict between uplanders and a northern northern Lao Lao principality over between over access to beehives. He also discusses the migration of about 25,000 Khmu from the Luang Prabang area to the domains of Nan and Chiangmai. The reason was partly the vice-king's abuse to which the Khmu reacted by voting with their feet. The lure wage work in lure of the other principalities was primarily wage buy bronze drums to mark mark logging. Uplanders used their wages to buy prestige. The bronze drums were manufactured in Kayah state, an Kayah state, upland principality that maintained its power upland power through warfare and and slave raids among among uplanders and by trade in and lowlanders alike and and by teak (Lehman 1967b; Renard 1980). Khmu, Karen, upteak (Lehman Karen, and and Kayah upto the same process of colonial era loglanders related very differently to ging in what is now northern Thailand (Jonsson 1991). Their benefits were as interrelated as their interests were divergent. There is no uniform "uplanders' side" to economic relations with lowland courts. rulers' ability to lease out logging rights Late nineteenth-century made on subject populations and and made them significantly less dependent on from having to make freed them from make arrangements that would would benefit the rice-growing peasants. Chronicles sometimes specify the tribute tribute particular community (e.g. Mangrai 1981). Such stateduties of a particular to regulate or increase the court's court's revments often reflect an attempt to to do with the enue, and what gets handed over often has more to the particular officials involved (cf. Renard 1980). There is inherent tension over resources —products and and people —among people— among households, villages, regional centers, and and courts (Greenwood 1973; cf. Duara 1988), and consequently no fixed criterion for the evaluation of benefits. and The ritual statements that define the relative positions of villagers, regional centers, and courts do not require a consensus as to what

178

HJORLEIFUR R. R. J6NSSON JANSSON

they achieve, and in some ways a systematic variation in understandand contributes to its functioning. This ing is built into the system and suggests that the premodem polities of mainland Southeast Asia are not run via ideological control or hegemony. A partial consensus regarding ritual statements is necessary (cf. Leach 1954:279-81), but more to the running of polities has more to do do with the relative ability ability of courts, regions, and communities in uplands and lowlands to negotiate interactions in their favor favor or to their minimal disadvantage. Buddhist and other rituals that that link rulers with upland and lowland communities among them do not mystify communities and differentiate people about the nature of the world or of the social relations they engage in. Participating in these rituals may facilitate more beneficial relations with rulers, and may have have more to do do with evaluation of the alternatives (being raided raided for for supplies, a rival rival community deal and thus having more prestige, or the aggresreaching a better deal siveness of another court) to subject oneself to court) than any willingness to a particular particular court. Peasants are situation are not mystified about their situation are uplanders. As Scott (1985) puts puts it: (Scott 1985:304), and neither are " . . . the function of the dominant ideology may be be largely to to secure the cohesion of dominant classes, while the conformity of subordiinstead primarily on their knowledge that that any any nate classes rests instead other course is impractical, dangerous, or both" (1985:320). The separation separation of uplanders and lowlanders during the prepremodern period period was actively maintained by both sides. From the lowland perspective, uplanders were uncivilized and could not be members of a state society because they ignore and actively oppose the basic premise of fixed hierarchy. Thus in chronicles and in ritual, rulers must away to to the forested wilderness, beyond must define define them away the benefits of civilization. This fixed hierarchy is articulated differdifferently and with different different intensity in courts and villages. From the that rulers and perspective of upland nonstate culture, the premise that ruled were different kinds of people was unacceptable. Thus, even in cases where rulers had more relations with upland than lowland groups was the case in many of the narrow-valley groups (as was domains in the north), the two would never merge. The two managed this separation partly in terms of their their diametrically opposed notions of space —lowlanders lived in areas uplanders associated with witch-

Tai States, Forests, and Upland Groups

179 179

what lowlanders viewed as the domain craft; uplanders, inhabited what of wild animals and and evil spirits. the Thai nation-state, the the With colonialism and and the formation of the domestic and international market for forest products declined rapidly. As forests changed from being a source of various important products to being being a contested resource, uplanders lost their importance to lowland rulers and came to be viewed as an intrusive to element in the forests.

Modernizing Thai Nation-State Uplanders and the Modernizing Political and economic change toward centralization and capitalism now Thailand is usually explained in terms of the colonial in what is now encounter with France in Indochina and Great Britain in Burma, in particular the Bowring Treaty (cf. Ingram 1971). Hong Lysa (1984) particular has convincingly argued that Siamese rulers had had already already initiated initiated this process at the end of the eighteenth century by leasing out tax farming to members of the immigrant Chinese Chinese community. Tax farming cut down on the resources spent by local rulers and diminished their power relative to the growing Bangkok polity. The employment of the Chinese reduced the the likelihood of alliances and local authorities, and and this greatly increased between tax farmers and and the French the central treasury. The British annexation of Burma and annexation of Indochina, and the Siamese response to these, "made" the borders of what has become Thailand. The Bangkok polity used what had been the threat of foreign intervention to gain control over what tributary tributary polities. Rulers of Chiangmai and other northern polities had for for some time leased out rights to forests to foreign loggers, and and many and keeping elemany uplanders were hired for both felling trees and phants. Some rulers would lease the same forest forest to more than one one "corruption" logging operation. The Bangkok polity used this "corruption" to justify taking over over logging in the the north. It then increasingly pensioned off local rulers and replaced them with its own officials, salaried from Bangkok, and and thus independent from local backing. Taxation was changed from a somewhat negotiable amount of goods per per vilwas lage to nonnegotiable four four silver baht per household. As forest products lost their importance as export goods, there there was no longer a

180

HJORLEIFUR R. JONSSON JONSSON HJORLEIFUR

need to to maintain (Renard 1980). Between maintain relations with uplanders (Renard roughly 1910 and and the the 1950s, there was was little official official contact between between Thai and upland groups. Thai authorities and The colonial period shifted shifted trade trade relations in the region. region. One of was the the introduction of opium (see Adams 1972, Gedthe changes was its history in infhe Maran des 1976, and and McCoy 1972 for its {he region). As Maran (1967) has pointed pointed out, uplanders took to opium cultivation along uplanders took with a shift to more egalitarian egalitarian organization organization (cf. (cf. Durrenberger Durrenberger to a more 1989; Friedman 1987), as the proceeds of opium cultivation evened upland villages. The increased feasting success within and among upland taxation, as much as the new trade patterns, that that the colonial order brought to to mainland migration. brought mainland Southeast Asia, escalated upland migration. Many uplanders in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) escaped French taxation ation and moved westward to to the plateaus of the Shan States, Laos, and northern Thailand. Caravan trade from Yunnan sold opium to to Caravan trade government monopolies and bought uplanders' cotton. The vicinity of Muang Muang Sing, one of the trade centers, was the destination of many uplanders leaving the Tonkin area. McCarthy (1900) does not refer to any uplanders selling opium, but this may may have been done. A reason to think he would not learn about it is that McCarthy travelled with government officials, and the opium trade was a government monopoly. Reginald le May May (1926) relates that that by the early 1920s, Yao (Mien) uplanders in Nan sold opium to to the government monopoly (1926:173). He also reports the arrest arrest of a group group of Meo (Hmong), caught taking their opium to sell illegally (1926:229). The Thai opium monopoly was in Chinese hands, and Bematzik (1970: 697-98, cited in Durrenberger that in the 1930s, 1989:110) reports that to Chinese traders had persuaded whole villages of Akha and Lisu to grow opium exclusively and exchange itit for for food supplies with their neighbors. This regional and interdependent interdependent specialization, managed by Chinese traders and middlemen, was quite extensive still in the 1960s (cf. Miles 1972). It is likely that that along with the monopoly there was was always market. The government always a clandestine clandestine market. officials that all was was orderly could augment augment their their incomes by who insured that taking for their silence, and growers growers and officials officials tried tried to to taking monies for take Blofeld (1960), who visited a Mien take advantage advantage of each other. Blofeld near Chiangkham was one one of the centers centers of opium village near Chiangkham which was

Tai States, States, Forests, and Upland Upland Groups Groups

181 181

cultivation and distribution, mentions that the Mien would misinform the officials about harvest times so as to form to sell on the side, and and also that in one year, the police collected the annual tax thirty-seven times from this single village. Under international pressure, the Thai government declared opium illegal in 1958, 1958. This did not stop the cultivation of opium, but shifted the trade underground. A t the the same time, officials could could take advantage of their situation; outlawing opium left left the take further advantage growers without a bargaining position. Official contact with uplanders was re-established with increasing concern for security uplanders was security related to political change in China and conflict in Indochina. With U.S. backing and financing, Thai authorities set up the Border Patrol Police (BPP), ostensibly cooperation ostensibly to win the loyalty and cooperation of uplanders for defending the borders. were not not to to alienate uplanders by BPP officials were by getting getting them into trouble trouble for illegal opium cultivation (Walker 1980). This goodwill wanedin waned in the 1960s, with increasing international attention to opium produced by by Thailand's upland produced upland groups, and and concerns about forest destruction caused by swiddening. When, in 1967, some upland upland villages refused refused to put up up with increasing abuse from Thai police and military officials, officials, armed clashes broke out. out. This was was labeled labeled communist terrorism; it gained credibility in the lowlands munist lowlands because because of the presence of units Thailand in "the units of the Communist Party of Thailand jungle," and participation of upland upland and internationally because of the participation groups in the wars wars in Indochina. This justified intensive attacks by the Thai military power power over several years years (see Hearn 1974; Walker 1980). U.S. assistance to the Thai military fight against opium and and communism, subsequent international support to communism, to combat forest destruction, and simultaneous enforcement of land registration have have jeopardized uplanders' livelihood. Uplanders have, in general, serious difficulties acquiring acquiring the papers necessary for owning owning land. They are are increasingly pushed out of the highlands for the benefit of forest reserves, logging operations, an occasional summer palace for forest royalty, and and landless lowland peasants with access to to Thai officials or politicians who gain votes in return for for favors such as access to to land in the highlands. The extent extent of violence against uplanders is

182

HJORLEIFUR R. J6NSSON HjdRLEIFUR J6NSSON

(but see Dessaint 1972; Hanks and Hanks n.d.), beunderreported for short periods. cause of the persistent focus on single villages for lowlanders often Increasing contact between between uplanders and lowlanders leads to leads to conflicts, based based on fundamentally different different assumptions about the social order. Uplanders tend to to see themselves as being as good as anyone else and do not bow to people. Lowlanders expect their submission and gratitude for projects uplanders find of questionable value (cf. Durrenberger 1975, and, for a noncynical Thai (cf . Durrenberger Thai expression of this view, Deethet 1985).

very popular picture in in Hmong Hmong households is of His Majesty A very Hmong headman as an equal. The Hmong, who the King talking to a Hmong truly respect the Thai King, make make the conclusion that if His Majesty can talk to them on an equal basis, development workers ought to do the same. That they often do do do not has resulted in desired activities not being accepted as readily as ... . . . [development workers] wish. (Renard et al. 1988:164) that His Majesty is above the hierarchy The difference is of course that and sitting with an uplander is of no consequence to his position, development workers are trying to earn while development earn their promotions hierarchy through their "selfless sacrifice" of teaching within the hierarchy for Thailand. F.K. Lehman uplanders "basic manners" and respect for (pers. comm. comm. 1991) suggests that in sitting (pers. sitting at an equal level with the Hmong headman, the Thai king is interacting with him as the head of head of a foreign state, state, which then affirms the foreign-ness uplanders in the Thai nation-state. Sitting with an uplander, the king stated that that royalty provided for a unified country in ways that Thai governments and the military military had been been incapable of. In this way itit is, like many many other court rituals, primarily relevant to to the ruling class. Uplanders' of the same ritual, while Uplanders 7 own understanding the calendar photograph, was contradicted on all justified in light of die other levels of interaction with lowlanders. This suggests that, although uplanders may approach lowlanders in terms of their nonstate cultures, the penetration of state structures tures into more and more aspects of their their everyday lives lives means means that that uplanders can no longer maintain their cultural separateness from the state. The accumulated outcomes of people's actions, in the context of structures of inequality, cannot reaffirm the principles of are cut off from access to resources nonstate cultures. Villagers who are

Tai States, Forests,and Upland Upland Groups Groups

183

are less and less able to press better-off villagers to to redistribute their wealth to channel their wealth through feasting. The latter are are in a position to wealth to consumer goods, education for their children, or means of that increase local-level inequalities. production that The lowland meta-consensus, centered centered on hierarchy hierarchy and and control, portrays uplanders as lacking control because they are not visibly hierarchically organized —uplanders do not appear to follow anyone or or anything. One dimension of this is the Thai view of uplanders' sex life as uncontrolled: uncontrolled; Yao people are very and open in sexual matters and such a word veiy free and as "rape" has has no place in their language. As early as the age of 14 or 15 Yao young boys and and openly . . .. and girls will court instinctively and (Chaturabhand 1988:29, emphasis added) Young members of the [Miao] tribe have have complete sexual freedom

(1988:69) behavior among among the Sexual behavior the Akha is free, free, dramatic, and, it seems, instinctive .... instinctive added) (1988:103,emphasis added)

Lowland notions of gender inform inform this portrayal portrayal of uplanders' Lowland sex life.In sex life.In contrast to a rather complementary sense of gender in the uplands uplands (cf. Hanks 1988; Kammerer Kammerer 1988; Klein Hutheesing 1990; upland marriages as the "matching of souls," see Kirsch 1973), on upland lowland notions are are quite hierarchic and male-centered: lowland Thai men have traditionally been given three models of sexual relataking a wife wife and tions: of taking and being a husband-father, of taking a minorwife or concubine and being a lover-father, and of being the client of a prostitute. has never been reprostitute. Choosing any one of these options has garded as excluding any of the others.... Pragmatic liberalism in sex garded has and women have have in genhas been the prerogative of the Thai male, and eral been regarded merely as passive, waiting, and receptive objects of men's fickle desires. (Jackson 1989b:36-37)

middle-class Bangkok, women who actively In middle-class actively pursue men are called raed, raed, "rhinoceros," which underscores the connotation of unsubmissive women as wild or noncivilized, instinctual rather than controlled. Development efforts include, among other things, lessons in "basic manners," essentially "the art of wai," wai” which the

184

hjOrleifur r. jOnsson

"hilltribe club" of Chulalongkorn Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, has has been to uplanders on twice-yearly excursions into the hills for teaching to the last twenty-five years ( Dawidoff 1990). tile Wai is a gesture of relative respect, done by by placing the palms of one's hands together and and lowering the head a little. How How high one holds the palms is inversely related to one's relative status vis-a-vis the other person. person. The lower-ranking person is always the first to make the gesture, which the higher-ranking person then "acknowledges" (rap wai) or not. not. "The art of wai" goes along with a social sysand teaching uplanders this art is a way tem of essential inequality, and of civilizing them in the sense that they become hierarchized. Developing uplanders, civilizing them, entails providing them with someto follow, be it a particular development worker thing to worker or or agency, a government ministry, Buddhism, or or the notion of "Thailand" in the form of a flag, flag, a language, and and etiquette. Insurgent Insurgent villages are are renamed Banrakthai Banrakthai ("the village that loves Thailand"), Banthoedthai are given ("the village that respects Thailand"), etc. Upland children are tee-shirts with with a print of the Thai flag and the statement Nu Rak Muang Thai (Little (Little one one loves Thailand). While premodem polities and the modem nation-state are are equally "imagined" in the sense of and being culturally constituted, the fundamental difference consists of a shift from a center to a bounded entity as the defining feature of the imagined community (Anderson 1978; 1983a, b). Instead of being pushed into forests and pushed and thus beyond the glory of the center, uplanders are are now because they, as well as the forests, forests, are are ers now hierarchized within the bounded nation-state. relations combines The ideological aspect of upland-lowland nationalism, and ecology, predicated on the notions of nationalism, modernity, and control and power. Thai nationalism posits Thailand for Thai people, and defines uplanders as migrants from other nation-states nation-states such as China, Laos, and Burma. Defining uplanders as foreigners is as real as the definition of Ban Chiang pottery as Thai: both are are predicated on a clearly demarcated land area within which things and to be kept kept or foreign and either are Thai and and to be dismissed. are lowlanders associated with the cul"Thai" rulers and ruled are irrigated rice. Uplanders, non-Buddhist swiddeners, tivation of irrigated appear anachronistic at best. O'Connor (1983:95-113) argues that appear

Tai States, Forests,and Upland Groups

185

modernity replaced Buddhism as the most powerful ideology modernity has replaced present-day Thailand. Thai Thai are are modem Thai are the in present-day modem and modem Thai Siamese of Bangkok. It is they who who originate originate projects to to develop the country. country. "Development" "Development" (kan phattana) phattand) is equated the rest of the with "with the improvement of public works. . . . [This is] consistent with Thai society in which the monarchy prothe historical traditions of Thai moted and supervised population moted supervised public construction, while the population was obliged to to provide the the necessary labor" labor" (Demaine (Demaine 1986:95). Thai rulers' commitment to "development" is within the same paterpaternalistic framework as to the "moral order" of premodem states nalistic framework to (Chaloemtiarana 1979). The implementation of national and and regional development consolidation and development schemes is a major major arena arena for the consolidation and and privileges in the modem nationdistribution of power, wealth, and and its background state. Nicro (1991) discusses national planning and and and consequences in the "Northeast." She argues that, while ostensibly set up up by military rulers to to secure their power, national development schemes escalated the growth growth of the middle class that currently power of military cliques. The is the main challenge to the political power coup of 1932 moved moved the monarchy beyond active political debate, debate, which now concerns concerns control over the parliament, while the power of the royal As the middle class has royal elite is still quite considerable. As grown, the rhetoric of political debates has concerned development and democracy (since the 1970s), and and royalty has has (since the the 1950s) and been moved moved above above the debate. During premodem times, rivals for rule could accuse each other lacking in religious virtue, and each could argue that he he alone of lacking was righteous enough to make a domain "prosperous and was enough and happy." As Hanks (1962) has shown, the issue of whether a ruler had had position from merit or sheer power power was always ambiguous. This ambiguity was was exploited in intra-elite rivalries, and the elite was heavily invested in ideology of modernity invested in the ideology of morality. The ideology takes on the same ambiguity. What What gets called "Western modernity" takes (i.e. not truly truly Thai) is identified with selfishness selfishness and corruption (O'Connor 1983:98), so people people need to display selfless motives to to justify their power, wealth, and and privileges. While authorities successfully recruit recruit large numbers of people some are for the the development development effort, some are skeptical of the government's

186 186

JONSSON HjORLEIFUR R. J6NSSON

motives —without questioning modernization itself. Many of those disaffected disaffected with Thai politics join the ranks of NGO workers, selfto remote peasants and uplanders. Not lessly bringing development to questioning hierarchy, Organization (NGO) hierarchy the Non-Governmental workers expect gratitude from from the people they "save" in this way (see Deethet 1985 for a noncritical insider's account). Modernity, as a Thai Modernity as Thai ideology, ideology draws draws on notions of hierarchy and control. So does Thai Buddhism. Within the world view of premodem Tai states, forests were beyond control and, as such, became one of the places meditation monks would go to to test their powers. Recent forms forms of Thai Thai Buddhism draw on a modem, middle-class Thai world view, including notions of nature, rather than than on a preThai vious form of Buddhism: "Buddhism is so close dose to nature that the to be called a 'religion of nature'" (Laohavanich religion deserves to 1989:259). The new forms forms of Thai Thai Buddhism, mostly tuned tuned to to the middle class, have have emerged at the same same time time and in the growing middle same context as hierarchic modernity: The Thai middle middle class . . . despite its opposition to the establishment's monopolization of political power, retains a strong interest in maintaining social order and the the traditional symbols of political authority. After all, Thai middle-class theoreticians are not involved in subverting the institutions of monarchy monarchy, Buddhism, and the state state to suit their own political aspirations. but rather in adopting them to (Jackson1989a:223) This is the necessary background for understanding the growing "Buddhist ecology" movement in Thailand. Uplanders, as much as loggers, have become alien elements in the bounded and controlled Thai "nature," and uplanders doubly so so for being ethnically non-Thai. There is a parallel between the recent take-over of northern Thailand's forests from upland groups and the Siamese take-over of the same forests from Chiangmai Chiangmai about a century century ago. In both cases same the issue is "rational" control over resources the consequence is increasing state state control, and the issue of legitimacy is oriented toward agents external to to Thai states —colonial powers and foreign logging concerns in the last century; U.S. security organizations and international financiers for for opium suppression, ecological preservation, and development at the present.

Tai States, Forests, and Upland Upland Groups Groups

187

penetration primarily affects uplanders and peasants by by State penetration the conditions itit imposes on livelihood in enforcing laws limiting access to to land to to those holding Thai identification papers. The consequence is primarily the consolidation of land in the hands of the few with enough wealth and institutional connections to to gain the few favors of Thai officials. The dynamics of upland social organization no longer depend on shifting success in agriculture and feasting, but are grounded in unequal access to are to productive resources. Repeated raids on uplanders uplanders for opium raids opium cultivation, illegal swiddening, suspected communist sympathies are concrete enough to to and/ or suspected make alternative. make resistance to to state penetration an unrewarding to forge alliances with powerful powerful The only secure course of action is to outsiders outsiders for protection protection and and other other privileges, which very very few uplanders can afford. Mainland Southeast Asia is not underpoputo this century, and, faced with clearly demarlated as it was prior to cated nation-states, people cannot vote with their feet. Large groups of Thai workers and peasants who have lost their land or jobs are a sufficient indication that having the correct ethnicity and documents does not go a long way towards securing livelihood. As Anderson notes, the "nation" side of any nation-state, which posits an ethnically bounded equality (1983a), is always grounded in a bounded national national equality state which is premised on inequality and and bureaucratic expansion (1983b). While lack of Thai-ness is held against uplanders and others and can be used to to resources to the benefit of to bar their access to more powerful agents, having this Thai-ness means nothing without enough wealth and connections to make itit in a capitalist state. What development projects achieve is primarily the channeling for creating or elaborating hierarchies (cf. (cf. Hinton 1992), of funds for state into villages in ways ways which facilitates the penetration of the state unthinkable prior to the nation-state (Duara 1988, Greenwood 1973, Hirsch 1989). Forests are no longer dangerous, the abode of evil spirpow- ' its and tigers, where meditation monks would go to test their pow-' ers (cf O'Connor 1978; Tambiah 1984). Forests are now rationally controlled scarce resources, where city people go to look at "nature" Nature is controlled and is Thai, which makes (O'Connor 1989). Nature uplanders alien elements in the forests. Given the intensity of clearing forests of uplanders (Eudey 1989; Hearn 1974; Walker 1980), it is

188

HJORLEIFUR jOnsson HjORLEIFUR rr.. jOnsson

likely that the major factors preventing their complete round-up into reservations are the immense immense amounts of foreign exchange into tourists and development programs generated by international whose main attractions vary from Bangkok temples to to prostitutes to tribal groups. The most most common understanding of "development" "development" by by Thailand's and uplanders is as beautification, beautification/ land's peasants peasants and often compulsory, in villages and along roads. For development workers with with workers uplanders uplanders, the issue is much more "Thai" manners (e.g. uplanders showing the development workers the respect to which the latter think involves/ for for think they they are are entitled)/ entitled), while for the government itit involves, instance/ land/ instance, uplanders' following Thai laws regarding access to land, are driven off their land which in many many cases means that uplanders are in favor favor of a more more profitable alternative. The imagined developing community is ideological, ideological/ but does not guarantee guarantee hegemony. The Thai state is not not run by by ideology but by state is nonnegotiable, nonnegotiable/ and and by unequal power. The hierarchy of the state people act in terms of this hierarchy in their own best interests and people and may not always for the state. Ideological use of "development" may appear practice that this appear as hegemonic control/ control, but going against the practice ideology justifies would would be "impractical, dangerous, or both" both" (Scott 1985:320). many similarities in the ideological uses of Buddhism There are many and modernity, and, at the same time, there are important and important structural differences between premodem Thai Thai states states and the Thai nationRegarding the situation of uplanders, the greatest change has state. Regarding has derived from the boundedness of the state, the incorporation of forests within these bounds, and and the penetration of state state structures into even the remotest villages via education programs, forest reginto ulations, land registration, opium suppression, and agricultural ulations, agricultural development. The new structures people come up against in their day-to-day lives increasingly influence their decisions about livelithey to a hood and inform their motivations; they lead increasingly restructuring of the principles underlying upland culture along the lines of the state. The process is not not simply externally imposed — "local" people actively engage in itit according to their means and motivations. With the establishment of stratification, unequal access

States, Forests, and Upland Tai States, Upland Groups Groups

189

to basic productive resources within the village, better-off better-off houseto holds can choose to to ignore conventions regarding intravillage reciprocities and channel their wealth elsewhere. This implies, among among other things, changes in the societal dimensions of space; "uplanders" 'can become become "lowlanders" without previously common without the previously irrigated rice cultivation Buddhism (cf. (cf. Leach 1954). shift to to irrigated cultivation and Buddhism Within its national boundaries, the state now transcends all previously conventional limitations. In hi some ways the ideology of development is important in intraclass competition, in distinguishing those who unselfishly promote development for the well-being of others from from those who selfishly do not. serves the the same same purpose as displays of do not. In this capacity, it serves wealth and the use of violence, both of which ate are quite common in rivalries among near-equals. Anyone who can capture development has thereby justified the right to rule, but attempting to to dose close the system is self-defeating. The state hierarchy can only maintain itself as long as it expands, and in not monopolizing the flow of wealth and status, it makes itself susceptible to to radical shifts in which groups to do hold power. This openness and expansion of the system has to with the state's reliance on an international economy.

Conclusions The relations between actions and representations are are problematic be grounded in culture, society, sodety, and history. I began with and have to be Buddhist rituals which defined uplanders away as outside the glory difference between of Buddhist Buddhist polities. Given the fundamental difference these social systems and the important links between upland and lowland groups, I argued that that uplanders uplanders and lowlanders came to separate conclusions about this separation, each group thinking they got got a better deal than the other. I propose spheres of discourse for state rituals, some of relevance only to to the court, court, others to to wider wider audiences. Peasants are not captives of state rhetoric which defines fact the court as upholding the moral order, yet they accept the social fact of unequal power. In a state, that is common sense and not hegemony. The shift to severed to a capitalist nation-state severed connections

190

HJORLEIFUR

R. JONSSON

between rulers and and uplanders, and and did away with the partial autonomy of upland and lowland communities from the state. to pressure exterOpium was introduced and later banned due to polities, but the social dynamics it caused had as much nal to Thai polities/ do with a regional cultural and political system as with the global to do economic system. Uplanders took to opium cultivation in a move move toward a more egalitarian organization. The trade in Thailand was toward first power and and first in the hands hands of a monopoly set up to augment the power variwealth of a Bangkok polity, while clandestine trade occured variously for the benefit of the growers or officials. Making opium illegal has has made it a source of great wealth for officials, officials, Burmese insurand the international antidrug establishment. Raids on opium gents, and growers in Thailand serve serve Thai anti-uplander sentiments.They also provide a rationale for the international funding and legitimacy of the Thai government and military rather rather than for for the elimination of opium cultivation in Southeast Southeast Asia, where where 90% of it is grown in Kammerer 1989; Yawnghwe 1987), insulated from interBurma (cf. Kammerer national pressure. State penetration through the enforcement enforcement of land registration has led to hierarchies based on unequal access to basic productive has led Development/ modernity has replaced Buddhism as the resources. Development/ most powerful powerful ideology, and state penetration is mostly through the oin the govimplementation of development plans. Although many jjoin ernment's development most powerful avenue of ernment's schemes as the most social mobility, skeptics join the ranks of NGOs and nonselfishly nonself ishly take development where it is too costly for the state. Increasing contacts between uplanders and lowlanders have conflicts, as have led to conflicts, uplanders deny the premise of inequality while lowlanders take it fundamental and as fundamental and see themselves as far above non-Thai uplanders. ers. The lack of Thai-ness is held against uplanders, but, for Thai themselves, their ethnicity amounts amounts to nothing without without wealth or or and privithe right connections. Development, as access to power and leges, is up for grabs —anyone who can capture it thereby justifies the right to power. The success of ideology within this system relates to the use of violence as much as to to displays of wealth; the "imagto ined community" is not primarily a mental construct.

Tai States, States, Forests, and Upland Groups

191

Uplanders remain at the bottom of a hierarchy of social groups or less free to to live in a Thai world view. Although they were more or out their lives in their own way way in premodem states, they are now out increasingly barred from access to resources. This is partly for nationalist reasons of Thailand for Thai, but also because of state penetration which is grounded in a capitalist economy, and because of a redefinition of forests from the abode of evil spirits where only medmeditation monks would go, to a controlled and scarce resource looked by city people in their quest for nature. at by The shift in uplanders' uplanders'’ position from premodem Tai polities to the Thai nation-state has mostly to do with changes in culture as policy, with uplanders losing their bargaining position and and lowlanders living in terms of bounded, ethnically defined national entities rather than centers. The legitimacy of the Thai state is no longer dependent on local backing, but relates to to international priorities priorities regarding antidrug antidrug campaigns, ecological preservation, and regarding and ecoecoculture nor political economy is prinomic development. development. Neither culture mary; culture is political and and politics cultural. cultural. Any Any culture, as a cognitive system, is always acted out in social and the accumulated outcomes of those actions actions variously variously reaflife, and firm, modify, or change the cognitive system. Both lowland and modify, or upland shared within upland cultures have much room for debate. What is shared set of principles for action, interpretation of events, etc.; a each is a set meta-consensus. To reaffirm lowland culture, based based as it is on on a notion of a fundamental fundamental hierarchy, takes manifestations of an inherPremodem and ent inequality of power, wealth, and privileges. Premodem modem states equally equally reaffirm these principles, for all their other other differences. To reaffirm upland culture, centered on on rank and and the denial of fixed hierarchy, takes displays of competitiveness, denial primarily through feasting. This is increasingly less possible as the Thai state denies uplanders access to land; they can no longer channel the proceeds of agriculture into feasting. the state install measures of hierarAt the same same time, agents of die chy centered on the Thai state via education, law enforcement, regulation of land use, and and development projects. With the penetration of state structures, ideological as much as political and economic, upland culture is bound to be increasingly structured in terms of the

192 192

HJORLEIFUR R. J6NSSON JONSSON HJORLEIFUR

state. The violent reaction by the state, twenty-five years ago and in state. form of uplanders' resistance, some forms until the present, to to any form sustain a nonstate nonstate character. suggests that upland culture culture cannot cannot sustain forCulture is political because it embodies statements about about social forpremodem times, uplanders uplanders and lowlanders relegated mation. In premodem other to otherness in a complimentary to deny the chaleach other effort to but incompatible social orders. Such mutuality mutuality lenge of interacting but is unthinkable within the nation-state. The nation in all its supposed uniformity is always always lived out out in terms of a state, which generates uniformity and divergent interests and understandings and conflicting versions of what society is about. But as the various structures of the modem modem what about. But various structures Thai state become unavoidable or inevitable in the everyday lives of uplanders, upland culture ceases to be an alternative to to or a rejecand instead becomes a variation on the tion of lowland state culture, and culture of the state.

Tai States, Forests,and Upland Groups

193

References

Adams, Leonard R, II 1972 The historical setting profitable plague. In In The setting of Asia's profitable Politics of Heroin in in Southeast Asia, edited by Alfred Alfred W. McCoy. New York: Harper & Row. Anderson, Benedict 1978 Studies of the Thai state: The state of Thai studies. In The Study of Thailand, edited edited by E.B. Ayal. Athens, Athens, OH: Ohio Ohio University Center for International Studies, Southeast Asia Program, 54. 1983a Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism.London: Verso. 1983b Old states, new societies. Journal of Asian Studies 42:477-96. Archaimbault, Charles 1964 Religious structures in Laos. Journal of the Siam Society 52 (l):57-74. Baruah, T.K.M., transl. 1977 Lik Pu Can Lan: Advice From Grandfather to Grandchildren (attributed to to a 12th-century 12th-century Hkamti king (attributed king of Mogung, Mogung, Northern Shan States). Shillong: Government of Arunachal Pradesh. Blofeld, John 1960 People of the Sun: Encounters in Siam. London: Hutchinson. Bowie, Katherine Katherine 1988 Peasant perspectives on the political economy of the NorthChiangmai: Implications Implications for the the ern Thai Kingdom Kingdom of Chiangmai: understanding of peasant political expressions. Ph.D diss., University of Chicago. Chaloemtiarana, Thak 1979 The Politics of Despotic Paternalism.Bangkok: The Social Science Organization of Thailand. Chandler, David P. 1982 Songs at the edge of the forest: Perception of order in three Cambodian texts. In Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought edited by David K. Wyatt and Alexander Woodside. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monograph Series, 24. Chaturabhand, Preecha 1988 People of the Hills, 3rd ed. Bangkok: Duang Kamol.

194

hjOrleifur R. J6NSS0N hjOrleifur r. jGnsson

Davis, Richard Muang Metaphysics: A Study of Northern Thai Myth 1984 Myth and Ritual. Bangkok: Pandora. Dawidoff, Nicholas 1990 Three weeks in a hill village. Bangkok Post July 30, 3:41, 44. Deethet, Tuancai 1985 Maecan: Sai Nam Thii Phanplian (Mae Can [River]: Stream of Change). Bangkok: Thianwan. Demaine, Harvey 1986 Kanphattana: Thai views of development. In Context, Meanedited by Mark Hobart Hobart ing, and Power in Southeast Asia, edited and Robert Taylor. Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program. Dentan, Robert Knox The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya. New York: Holt, 1968 Reinhart, and Winston. Dessaint, Alain Y. 1972 The poppies are beautiful this year. year. Natural History 81 (2):30-37, 92-93, 95-96. Duara, Prasenjit Culture, 1988 Culture, Power,and the State: Rural North China 1900-1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Durrenberger, E. Paul Understanding a misunderstanding: Thai-Lisu relations in 1975 Northern Thailand. Anthropological Quarterly 48:106-20. 1989 Lisu ritual, economics, and ideology. In Ritual, Power,and Economy:Upland-Lowland Contrasts in in Mainland Southeast Asia, edited by Susan Russell. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies Occasional Papers, 14. 1993 Witchcraft, sorcery, fortune, fortune, and misfortune among Lisu highlanders of Northern Thailand. In UnderstandingWitchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, edited by C.W. Watson and R. Ellen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Durrenberger, E. Paul, and Nicola Tannenbaum Continuities in highland and lowland 1989 lowland religions religions of Thailand. Journal of the Siam Society 77 (l):83-90. Eudey, Ardith 1989 14 April 1986: Eviction orders to the Hmong of Huai Yaw Yee village, Huai Kha Khaeng wildlife sanctuary, Thailand.

Tai States, Forests,and Upland Groups

195

In Hill Tribes Today: Problems in Change, edited by John McKinnon and Bernard Vienne. Bangkok: White LotusORSTOM. Friedman, Jonathan Jonathan 1987 theocracy, and the opium trade. Generalized exchange, theocracy, (1):15-31. Critique of Anthropology 7 (1):15—31. Geddes, William R. Mountains,Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976 Migrants of the Mountains. Geertz, Clifford Geertz, Clifford 1973 New York: Basic Books. The Interpretation of Cultures. New 1980 Negara:The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali.Princeton: Princeton University Press. Greenwood, Davydd J. 1973 The Political Economy of Peasant Family Farming: Some Anthropological Perspectives on 'Rationality Rationality and Adaptation. Ithaca: Cornell University Rural Development Committee, Center for International Studies. Hanks, Jaine R. 1988 The power power of Akha women. In Gender, Power,and the Construction of the Moral Order: Studies from the Thai Periphery, edited by N. Eberhardt. Madison: Madison: University of Wisconedited sin-Madison Center for Southeast Southeast Asian Asian Studies, Monograph graph 4. Hanks, Lucien Merit and power power in in the Thai social order. American Anthro1962 pologist 64:1247-61. Hanks, Lucien and Jane R. Hanks n.d. Muang Kham: An ethnohistory of the Northern Northern Thai highlands. Unpublished manuscript. Hearn, Robert 1974 Thai Government Programs in Refugee Relocation and Resettlement in Northern Thailand.Auburn, NY: Thailand Books. Hefner, Robert 1990 The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretive History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hinton, Peter 1992 Meetings as as ritual: Thai officials, western consultants, and and development development planning in Northern Northern Thailand. In Patterns and Illusions, edited edited by by H.C. E.C. Chapman Chapman and and G. Wijeyewardene. Canberra: Australian National University.

196

jOnsson hjOrleifur Rr .. JONSSON HjdRLEIFUR

Hirsch, Philip development in The state state in the village: Interpreting rural development 1989 Thailand. Thailand. Development and Change 20:35-56. Holy, Ladislav, ed. Segmentary Lineage Systems Reconsidered. Belfast: Queen's 1979 University. Hong, Lysa Thailand in the Nineteenth Century: Evolution of the Economy 1984 and Society.Singapore: ISEAS. Ingram, James C. Economic Change in Thailand,1850-1970.Stanford: Stanford 1971 University Press.

Jackson, Peter r 1989a Buddhism, Legitimation,and Conflict: The Political Functions of Urban Thai Buddhism.Singapore: ISEAS. Male Homosexuality in Thailand.Elmhurst, NY:Global Aca1989b demic Publishers. Hjorleifur Jonsson, Hjorleifur in and out of Thai groups in 1991 Products and peoples: Upland groups on the Midwest Conference on polities. Paper presented to the Asian Affairs, Iowa City, IO. Kammerer, Cornelia Northern Shifting gender asymmetries among the Akha of Northern 1988 Thailand. In Gender, Power,and the Construction of the Moral Order: Studies from the Thai Periphery.,edited by N. Eberhardt hardt. Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph 4. Opium and tribal people in the Golden Triangle. Paper 1989 American the 88th Annual Meetings of the American presented to the Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November 17. /z ,„ Keesing, Roger M. structure: models and decision models of social structure: Statistical models 1967 A Kwaio case. Ethnology 6:12-16. Khanittanan, Wilaiwan Khanittanan, The order of the natural world as recorded in Tai languages. 1989 In Culture and Environment in Thailand: A Symposium of the Siam Society. Bangkok: The Siam Society.

Tai States, Forests,and Upland Groups

197

Thomas Kirsch, A. Thomas Feasting and Social Oscillation: Religion and Society in Upland 1973 Southeast Asia Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University University Southeast Data Papers, 92. Program Data in interpreting early 1984 Cosmology and ecology as factors in interpreting early Thai social organization. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15:253-65. 1985 and Cosmological factors in the "collapse" of the the Khmer and the "rise" of the the Thai: Interpretations Interpretations and speculations. presented to the Annual Meetings of the AssociaPaper presented tion for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, March 22. Klein Hutheesing, Otome 1990 Emerging Sexual Inequality among the Lisu of Northern Thailand: The Waning of Dog and Elephant Repute. Leiden: Brill. Laohavanich, Yenchai 1989 A Thai Thai Buddhist view of nature. In Culture and Environment: A Symposium of the Siam Society. Bangkok: The Siam Siam Society. Leach, Edmund R. 1954 Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press. Lehman, F.K. 1967a Ethnic categories in Burma and a theory theory of social systems. In Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, edited by Peter Kunstadter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1967b Kayah society as a function of the Shan-Burman-Karen context. In Contemporary Change in Traditional Society,vol 2, edited by J. Steward. niinois Press. Steward. Urbana: University of Illinois le May, Reginald 1926 An Asian Arcady: The Land and People of Northern Siam. An Cambridge: W. Heftier & Sons.

Mangrai, Sao Saimong 1981 The Padaeng Chronicle and the Jengtung State Chronicle TransCenter for South South lated.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center and Southeast Asian Studies. Maran Maran La Raw Raw 1967 Toward a basis for understanding the minorities of Burma: example. In Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, The Kachin example. by Peter Kunstadter. Princeton: Princeand Nations, edited by ton University Press.

198

HJORLEIFUR hjOrleifur R. r. jdNSSON j6nsson

McCarthy, James Surveying and Exploring in Siam. London: John Murray. 1900 McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. New York: Harper Harper 1972 and Row. Miles, Douglas Yao bride-exchange, matrifiliation, matrifiiiation, and adoption. Bijdra1972 gen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde128:99-117. Moerman, Michael '' ' 1967 A minority and its government: The Thai Lue of Northern Thailand, hi Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Hations, Thailand. In Nations, edited by Peter Kunstadter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nash, Manning The Golden Road to Modernity: Village Life in Contemporary 1965 Burma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nicro, Somrudee 1991 Development planning, politics, and paradox: A study study of Khon Kaen, a regional urban urban center in in Northeast Thailand. Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University. Nimmanhaeminda, Kraisri 1965 An inscribed silver-plate grant grant to the Lawa of Boh Luang. In In Felicitation Volumes of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 2. Bangkok: The Siam Society. 1967 The Lawa guardian spirits of Chiangmai. Journal cfthe qfthe Siam Society 55 (2):185-225. O'Connor, Richard A. 1978 Urbanism and religion: Community, hierarchy, and sanctity in urban urban Thai Buddhist temples. Ph.D. diss., Cornell University. A 1983 A Theory of Indigenous Southeast Asian Urbanism.Singapore: ISEAS. From "fertility" to "order," paternalism to 1989 to profits. In Culture and Environment: A Symposiumof the Siam Society.Bangkok: The Siam Society. Debate, traditions, and the Thai. Unpublished ms. n.d.

Ortner, Sherry 1984 Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26:126-66.

Tai States, Forests,and Upland Groups

199

Renard, Ronald D. Renard, 1980 Kariang: History of Karen-T'ai relations from the beginnings to 1923. Ph.D. diss.. diss., University of Hawaii.

Renard, Ronald, P. Bhandchart, G.L. Robert, M. Roongruangsee, Roongruangsee, S. Sarobol, and N. Prachadetsuwat Northern Thai Hills: The Impact of Hill 1988 Changes in the Northern Tribe Development Work. Chiangmai: Phayap University. Roseberry, William 1989 Peasants and and the world. In Economic Anthropology,edited edited by S. Plattner. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sahlins, Marshall 1972 Stone Age Economics.Chicago: Aldine. 1985 Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, James 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale. Smith, Bardwell, ed. 1978 Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Thailand, Laos, and Anima, Burma. Chambersburg: Anima. Smith, Carol 1984 Local history in global context: Social and economic transformations in in western Guatemala. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26:193-228. Swearer, Donald Donald K. 1974 Myth, legend, and history in the Northern Northern Thai chronicles. Journal of the Siam Society 62:67-88. J, Tambiah, Stanley J. 1976 World Conqueror and World Renounces Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984 The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets. Amulets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tannenbaum, Nicola 1987 Tattoos: Invulnerability and power in Shan cosmology. American Ethnologist 14:693-711. Tannenbaum, Nicola and and E. Paul Durrenberger 1988 Control, change, and suffering: The message of Shan BudBuddhist sermons. Mankind 18:121-32.

200

HjORLEIFUR hjOrleifur Rr.. jdNSSON jOnsson

Turton, Andrew Matrilineal descent groups and spirit cults 1972 Matrilineal cults of Thai Thai Yuan in Northern Northern Thailand. Journal of the Siam Society 60:217-56. Walker, Anthony Highlanders and government in North Thailand. 1980 Highlanders government in Thailand. Folk 21-22:419-49. Wallace, Anthony EC. Culture and Personality,2nd ed. New York: Random House. 1970 Wyatt, David K. 1976 Chronicle traditions traditions in in Thai historiography. In Southeast Asian History and Historiography, edited edited by C.D. Cowan and O.W. O. W. Wolters. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Yawnghwe, Chao Tzang The Shan of Burma: 1987 Burma; Memoirs of a Shan Exile. Singapore: Singapore: ISEAS.

STATE POWER AND CULTURE I N T H A I LAN D In this book six anthropologists analyze various dimensions of the relationships between state power and culture in Thailand. Working far from the centers of power, anthropologists view Thailand from the peripheries. For Van Esterik, Grow, and O'Connor writing of Central Thai villagers, the periphery is social; for Tannenbaum writing of Tai, Bowie writing about slaves in northern Thailand, and Jonsson writing of highlanders, the periphery is geographical as well as social. One hallmark of anthropology is participant observation in communities where anthropologists study the powerless. States are located somewhere else. We do not find them on street corners, in peasant villages, or on fishing boats, or, by definition, among the powerless. We observe that power is associated with states, whether we see it coming from the barrel of a gun or from the barrel of a fountain pen. It is increasingly obvious in today's world, whether in dance performances (Grow), ritual (Tannenbaum), personal and regional histories (Bowie), the non-Thai peoples of the northern hills (Jdnsson), or even the contemplation of the basic food, rice (O'Connor), or the very logic of nurturance of mother's milk (van Esterik), that state power is pervasive. To understand local events and outlooks, we must contextualize them in terms of the machinations of states. Even though they cannot localize state power, the anthropologists whose work is collected here see states, their policies, their structures, and * power as central objects of ethnographic description. The contributors bring anthropological insights to bear on questions of state power and integrate understandings of state power into local ethnographic accounts to produce analyses that will be of wide interest in all of the social sciences as well as Asian Studies and history.