Maurizio Peleggi, ed. A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Thailand, Inspired by Craig J. Reynolds

Abstract

A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Thailand, Inspired by Craig J. Reynolds Maurizio Peleggi, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2015, 208p.When a stellar cast gathers for the festschrift, the result is both a thoughtful reflection on the past oeuvre by Craig J. Reynolds, who inspired the essays, and a peek into the various issues and debates that will characterize the future of Thai studies.If not directly mentioned, Reynolds' influence and carefully crafted concepts from his decadeslong career in Thai and Southeast Asian Studies pervade the book. This can partly be attributed to the contributors' association with Reynolds as his students, colleagues, and friends. However, it would be wrong to assume that the volume represents a closed academic circuit. Reynolds' opuses span from the 1970s to the 2010s and counting. His seminal works illuminate important aspects of these often turbulent decades, such as the analyses of Buddhist and Marxist writings in Thailand and beyond, the charting of previously under-explored terrain of historiography in Southeast Asia, the clearing of the ground for intellectual and social histories in the area, the probing of the ideas of national identity and globalization, and the meditation on varied aspects of power, including its unorthodox linkage with magic and local knowledge. All the while, he widely borrows conceptual tools from, inter alia, semiotics, feminism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, but always subjects them to scrutiny and test in the Southeast Asian weather. The editor Maurizio Peleggi's introductory chapter well captures this across-the-board and seasoned nature of Reynolds' works and thoughts.In the essays that follow, three Reynolds' leitmotifs emerge quite clearly, namely: (1) power in its multifarious manifestations, (2) an emphasis on the outcasts of Thai history, and (3) knowledge, especially in its written forms of manual and historiography. All three permeate the chapters, although some bring each of these themes out more evidently than others.One common ground of all authors is that power operates in many fields. It operates in art historiography, in artifact of museological practices, in Buddha statues, and in beauty. Rather than in the eye of the beholder, according to Peleggi in his own essay (Chapter 4), Thai art is a discursive field of power, an intense playground of national myth and colonial rule. Power also operates in the visual sense as art history (and arguably all histories) works "to make the past synoptically visible" (p. 92), especially through classifying and inscribing meaning in objects. In Chapter 7, Yoshinori Nishizaki argues along the same line, though in a different context, that visibility is a matter of power. In his analysis, it is inscribed in a grandiose observation tower in the provincial city of Suphanburi, the public work that has become a symbol, a source of collective pride and social identity.We can also approach power via semiotics and politics of translation, as Kasian Tejapira illustrates in Chapter 9 where he discusses the term "governance" in Thailand in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis and the "shock doctrine" of neoliberalism. Kasian skillfully traces the transformation of the IMF's notion of "good governance" as part of its liberalization and privatization package imposed on crisis-ridden economies, to its Thai translation as thammarat, which was picked up and used by several groups with various intentions, be it liberal, communitarian, or even authoritarian.The collection also demonstrates that power exists in all levels of a society: it is concentrated in the elites' hands, but also practiced by the subalterns. When these forms of power clash, various mechanisms are called forth to resolve the tension, and they can be brute, hegemonic, discursive, or emotional. This formulation of power is encapsulated in a number of essays in the volume. …