Making Sense of Malaysia

Making Sense of Malaysia

Review Essay / March 2003
Making Sense of Malaysia
Donna J. Amoroso
Cheah Boon KhengMalaysia: The Making of a NationSingapore / ISEAS / 2002http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/bookmarks/BM229/index.htmlFarish A. NoorThe Other Malaysia: Writings on Malaysia’s Subaltern HistoryKuala Lumpur / Silverfishbooks / 2002www.silverfishbooks.com
Two recently published and very different books by Malaysian academics preview what may become a season of assessments of the “nation-state” enterprise. The fifty-year anniversary of Malaysia’s independence, four years hence, will likely stimulate the commemorative and interpretive impulse of historians. New accounts of the pivotal late colonial period have appeared, based on newly available sources (Harper 1999; Kratoska 1998) and exploring popular memory (Lim and Wong 2000). Historians are also beginning to shift their attention from the “origins” and “making” to the history and socio-political landscape of the nation-state itself. Regional collaborations within the expanding membership of ASEAN and with its East Asian neighbors play a role as well. Cheah Boon Kheng’s Malaysia: The Making of a Nation is the first of a “history of nation-building” series resulting from workshops led by historian Wang Gungwu. Cheah, retired professor of history at Universiti Sains Malaysia and prominent scholar of Malaysian social and political history, has lived through the process of which he gives a very dispassionate account. (Volumes on the other original members of ASEAN are being written by Taufik Abdullah, Charnvit Kasetsiri, Reynaldo Ileto, and Edwin Lee.)
Malaysia’s recent past also encourages reflection about the foundations, definition, and resilience of the nation-state. The 1997 economic crisis, 1998 dismissal and subsequent trial of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, dramatic erosion of legitimacy of the long-ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO), and rise of an Islamist challenge to the secular, developmentalist state have coincided with and stimulated the growth of new public media (Khoo 2002). Farish A. Noor’s The Other Malaysia: Writings on Malaysia’s Subaltern History is a collection of essays written in the midst of these developments for the news website Malaysiakini.com. Not only is this a new kind of writing, but one that has found a public through the availability of new and independent venues on the internet. Farish is a political scientist and human rights activist who has emerged as both a “liberal Muslim” and critic of the “demonization of Islam.” Writing about politics in several publications, he took advantage of “a state of radical dislocation” to focus these essays on “the reactivation of the memory of the past and to bring to light aspects of Malaysia’s marginalized and subaltern histories and narratives that had been buried for so long” (v).
At this juncture, too, some of those marginalized voices are being recorded in individual, national, and regional “political memories” projects. The memoir of journalist and 17-year political detainee Said Zahari was published in Malay, Chinese, and English in 2001. (See Features in this issue.) The memoir of the late Khatijah Sidek, who challenged the patriarchy of Malay nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s, appeared in Malay in 1995 and English in 2001. The stories of these and others – especially those who were detained without trial, who were exiled, and whose participation in public life was cut short – are currently being recovered to challenge conventional truths of national history (Tan and Jomo 2001; Zakiah 2000).
Such productive “dislocation” in the national narrative allows us to read the two books under review as a glimpse into an emerging “history of Malaysia.” The authors are of different generations – in age, experience, and intellectual proclivity – and their discursive strategies reflect it. Although both professional academics, they seek somewhat different audiences and draw different parameters around their subject. Yet in taking their measure of the nation-state both books display and engage the powerful socio-political discourse that has constructed “Malaysia” through state practice and academic writing.
Contests for Malaya
With its strict focus on electoral politics, national policy, and the administrations of the country’s four prime ministers, Cheah Boon Kheng’s Malaysia offers an explanation of how the nation has evolved in practice. He begins by asking who: “Who would inherit power from the British? Who would receive independence?” Very pertinent questions indeed, and the way they are asked and answered reveals paradigms that originated in colonial rule and have been naturalized in the first half-century of Malaysia’s life as an nation. Among these are communalism as the organizing principle of the nation-state, elite-centered narratives of the nation, and other fundamental continuities from the colonial era.
Cheah locates Malaysia’s primary cleavage in the ongoing tension between Malay ethno-nationalism and a broader Malaysian nationalism, between ketuanan Melayu (Malay dominance) and communal power-sharing. He finds a pragmatic “give and take” that never resolves what are seen as inherent tensions, but that allows the enterprise to keep moving forward. While this might seem self-evident in even a semi-democratic parliamentary system, “give and take” is also a political position condemned by “exclusivist” Malay nationalists, so-called “ultras” who want to see the full realization of a “Malay nation.” Cheah’s main argument is that each of the country’s prime ministers “started off… as an exclusivist Malay nationalist but ended up as an inclusivist Malaysian nationalist” (236). Each of these men was concurrently president of UMNO, the dominant Malay political party. The two roles have different imperatives: the president of UMNO must attend to communal interests, while the prime minister of Malaysia must look after the whole, leading to that balancing of interests so deplored by exclusivists. That this has happened four times in the nation’s history suggests that the nation-state has developed its own logic, an imperative that makes everyone unhappy, but keeps everyone unhappy together.
A strong internal frame of reference structures Cheah’s account. His narrative begins in the postwar, pre-independence period of 1945-57, which established the constitutional, political, social, and economic form of the nation-state. It is followed by a chapter taking the argument through independent Malaya/Malaysia (1957-2001) and individual chapters on the administrations of the four prime ministers. Essentially a biography of the nation-state as self-made man, the childhood (1945-57) is that of an orphan. There are no references to structural or cultural predecessors, no “family history” to speak of. This is especially striking with respect to the components of the nation-state: “the Malays,” “the Chinese,” and “the Indians” appear on these pages without histories, fully-formed “communities” with self-evident interests to be advanced against each other. This will have implications for how the life of the nation is understood.
With knowledge of who the contestants are understood to be, we can return to the question, “who would receive independence?” The immediate post-war years were crucial, and Cheah argues that the Malays were cognizant of and engaged in the struggle to be born as a nation-state unencumbered initially by competition from the other communities. The postwar British plan to “impose direct rule” and replace the various legally sovereign sultanates and crown colonies with a Malayan Union providing equal citizenship to Malays and non-Malays was met solely by a “resurgent Malay nationalism.” Under conservative aristocratic leadership, the Malay community successfully mounted a broad-based and vigorous rejection of the plan, while the peninsula’s non-Malay residents, mostly immigrants and descendants of immigrants from southern China and the Indian subcontinent, responded with indifference. This ensured that negotiations to devise a successor state would take place almost entirely between British authorities and Malay representatives. Thus from 1946, “Malays [could] set the pace and agenda for the creation of a new ‘Malay’ nation-state” (2). Yet the leadership quickly retreated from its victory against equal citizenship to a position of pragmatic compromise in order to move toward self-government and independence. Cheah sees in the 1948 Federation of Malaya agreement “a major shift towards an inclusionary multi-ethnic nationalist perspective” on the part of an “enlightened leadership” (20).
This argument lends new insight to the familiar analytical framework of the “bargain,” one of several terms that have long been used to describe the arrangement that enshrines Malay political primacy in exchange for common citizenship, economic rights, and tolerance of non-Malay cultural and religious practices. Cheah goes on to examine competing ethno-nationalisms in the context of this bargain from independence to the present. He shows how, from the beginning, the prime minister has held the power to decide what concessions to make to the Chinese, whose most zealous articulators of the community’s cultural interests, the “chauvinists,” are always trumped by the enduring threat of extremist Malay violence (as in 1969) that enforces the bargain.
This argument has explanatory power, but also functions as a closed analytical system, limiting “nation building” to the political and defining the political solely in communal terms. In scholarship, as in life, the meta-discourse of communalism in Malaysia determines what questions can be asked (Mandal 2003). Was there really no contest for Malaya in 1945-46? Both communism and Malay anti-“feudalism” (a term explored below) represent long-running critiques of the colonial/national state that were at their strongest in the immediate postwar period, as Cheah’s previous work has discussed (Cheah 1983; 1988). It is likewise clear from this account, as it was at the time, that the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) was fighting for independence – at the Baling talks in 1955, future first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman “challenged the arguments of the communists that they alone were fighting for nationalism and freedom from British imperialism. The Tunku argued that the Alliance was also doing the same” (31). CPM leader Chin Peng’s offer to lay down arms in fact helped UMNO win “early” independence from Britain (i.e., before the armed insurgency had been militarily defeated). Further, Cheah points out that the communist party was not a “Chinese movement,” despite its predominantly ethnic Chinese membership, because the CPM was in ideological opposition to the colonial government and its supporters, including other Chinese. But after 1957, the CPM figures in this account mainly in relation to communal balancing: “The communists’ armed revolt was a constant reminder that dissatisfied non-Malays, particularly the Chinese, could run to the jungles to swell the ranks of the communist rebels and fight for social justice if the Alliance Government was seen to act unjustly towards Chinese and non-Malay rights” (80). And ultimately, the communist challenge is seen here as the means by which “the national government would justify the continuation of the draconian colonial Emergency laws which infringed fundamental human rights” and because of which “freedom was not fully nurtured” (33).
Yet even in the absence of an armed communist movement, we cannot seriously doubt that the national government would have retained these laws. (The formal end of the CPM’s struggle in 1989 did not result in their repeal. At present, more than eighty people are being held under the Internal Security Act without charges and beyond the reach of habeas corpus.) Apart from the regional grip of the Cold War which legitimized the repression of the non-militant left, certain socio-political fault lines presented fundamental, though less publicized, threats to the state as constituted and the nation as imagined by that state. One was manifest in the explosion of popular anger against the Malay rulers’ initial acquiescence in the Malayan Union plan. The “taming” of the Malay royalty by Dato’ Onn bin Jaafar, first president of UMNO, during the 1946 anti-Union, pro-Malay sovereignty campaign is cited here as “the best example of the full flowering of Malay nationalism.” Cheah feels the aristocrat Onn “best exemplified these aspirations of the Malay struggle, when he coined the cry, ‘Hidup Melayu!’ (Long Live the Malays) … instead of ‘Hidup Raja-raja Melayu!’ (Long Live the Rajas)” (17). Onn’s was a skillful maneuver in which long-mounting, repressed public anger against complicit and ineffectual leadership – both royal and aristocratic – was boldly channeled against the rulers in order to mobilize and modernize Malay politics within the party framework necessary to gain independence. But once the British government had agreed to negotiations that would lead to the Federation of Malaya, further democratic pressure threatened only aristocratic control of the nationalist movement. Onn then just as adeptly tamped down popular Malay participation in politics, a policy subsequently institutionalized by UMNO-led governments (Amoroso 1998). Emergency legislation soon drafted to contain communism had a chilling effect on all dissent, and not for the last time.
Communalism Enshrined
As indicated here, several political contests led to the independence of Malaya and the later formation of Malaysia. As these contests were interconnected through ethno-nationalist perception and mobilization, perhaps the most basic was the effort to uphold communalism as the organizing principle of politics and society. This is apparent in the debates surrounding the question of “Malayan” nationality that the British hoped to foster through the Malayan Union. Cheah quotes Tunku Abdul Rahman’s famous 1951 jibe, “who are these ‘Malayans’?” to introduce a useful recapitulation of the term’s history (5-15), which I will summarize even more briefly here. Perceived in opposition to Melayu (Malay), which provided the root for Persekutuan Tanah Melayu (Federation of Malaya, lit. federation of Malay lands), “Malayan” functioned as a rival root word, symbolizing the Union’s erasure of Malay sovereignty and elevation of non-Malays at Malay expense. This was largely agreed on by all sectors of Malay opinion. The radical nationalist and future PAS leader Dr. Burhanuddin Al-Helmy saw “Malayan” as a “colonial mold” that was narrower than, and destructive of, “Melayu.” On the conservative side, the Tunku always made a distinction between bangsa Melayu (Malay race or nation) as the nationality at the core of the Federation, and citizenship in that Federation. For this reason, as early as 1956, UMNO favored “Malaysia” as an inclusive yet Malay-centered name for the nation-state.
These words allow us to gain some understanding of the ongoing process of identity formation and the persistence of communalism. Cheah indicates the lack of a common political discourse between the Malay and English languages: Malay leaders might have used “Malayan” in addressing mixed audiences in English to describe “the country’s way of life and culture inclusive of both Malays and non-Malays” – this is, in fact, how non-Malays themselves used it – but:
“when speaking to only Malay audiences, the Malay leaders would use the Malay terms for the country, ‘Persekutuan Tanah Melayu.’ They would also use the term ‘bangsa’ which means both ‘nation’ and ‘race’. Delivered to Malay audiences, it would literally mean bangsa Melayu, the Malay race” (8).
“Malayan” was a slippery word then, having positive, inclusive connotations when used in English conversation, but evoking exclusion and destruction in a Malay-language context. In contrast, bangsa seems to be a sticky word and bangsa Melayu stickier still, agglomerating meanings that should have been distinguished, but for the fact that UMNO thrived by keeping them stuck together. Bangsa triumphed over the Malayan Union in the guise of “race” – the Malay lands belong to the Malay race – and once UMNO had established itself and the Federation on this point, bangsa Melayu acquired the status of core “nation” of the emergent nation-state. This nation-state had a negotiated and gradually more inclusive citizenship, but in Malay discourse, citizenship was distinct from and secondary to nationality, which was based on a putatively primordial and native “race,” rather than on a commonly-held political identity or values vested in the modern nation-state (which do not preclude separately-held ethnic identities). This was a precarious basis for a nation-state that eventually featured full citizenship for its non-Malay members. The notion was challenged conceptually as well when Malaya expanded to include Sabah and Sarawak. These places had their own natives, but they were not Malay. Hence the importance of the ur-native category, bumiputera (sons of the soil). By that time it was too late for bangsa to expand its own sense as “nation,” as became apparent in 1991, when Prime Minister Mahathir introduced his vision of Bangsa Malaysia, leaving his Malay constituents underwhelmed and uneasy.
Actually, it was Melayu that had a chance of acquiring an expansive meaning, not as a bangsa but as a “nationality.” In 1948 a coalition of Malay and non-Malay oppositional parties presented the “People’s Constitutional Proposals” as an alternative to the communally-based polity negotiated by the government, UMNO, and the Malay rulers. Cheah writes that the Malay PUTERA with “its coalition partner AMCJA represented the first inter-racial alliance of any consequence in this post-war period” (20). But this left-leaning alliance had a different purpose – to explore the process, not of balancing communal interests, but of creating a new political community in a place with strong historical and cultural identity that had been reshaped and populated by colonial rule. Their constitutional proposals, characterized by democratic features and immediate self-government, included a “Melayu nationality” to be voluntarily acquired and equated with citizenship, Malay as the national language, and Malay rulers as constitutional sovereigns. This was an ambitious proposal that would have required careful nurturing – Malays along with Chinese and Indians would have to trust a new nationality not to destroy their existing bangsa – but it was immediately dismissed by the government and UMNO. And the first attempt by a mainstream politician to move in this direction proved the danger of straying too openly from communalism. Dato’ Onn, after proposing to open up UMNO membership to non-Malays, had to leave the party he founded; his new non-communal Independence of Malaya Party lost early elections to the UMNO-led Alliance with the Malayan Chinese Association. The lesson learned, as Cheah sums it up: “The various communities seemed to prefer communal representation to look after their own communal interests” (28).
Despite his focus on electoral politics, election results, and political parties, Cheah does not allow his narrative to be overwhelmed by details. The historian’s long view shows how Malaysian politics has been ordered by Malay dominance within communalism, and his tight focus includes an integrated treatment of Sabah and Sarawak’s incorporation into the social contract through their leaders’ interactions with UMNO. Such communal ordering, of course, displaces the bloody fighting to internal arenas as groups struggle to articulate unified communal interests. This is the stuff of Malay politics and the crux of the dynamic Cheah explores in depth, such as factionalism within UMNO and rivalry between UMNO and the Islamic party PAS. But except for a few hints – as during the short-lived merger with Singapore, when the Tunku branded Malays there “traitors” for failing to elect UMNO candidates in the 1963 elections (100) – there is little attention to the process of creating and maintaining the borders of ethno-political identity. This account takes ethnic categories for granted, and by so doing, privileges the communal framework.
Cheah Boon Kheng’s linear narrative, focused on the balancing of tensions, asserts the existence of a multicultural, tolerant Malaysia, one in which ketuanan Melayu is here to stay but contained by the political logic of the nation-state. Farish A. Noor subjects that view of Malaysia and its paradigmatic underpinnings to cultural and historical interrogation. Although he acknowledges the nation’s success in achieving stability, he deplores its failure, which few would dispute, to create “a truly inclusive and all-encompassing national political arena and public space” (165), a logical outcome of the naturalization of communalism in the history and historiography of the nation. Farish seeks to deconstruct that historical narrative – along with its aura of inevitability – through three interconnected strategies. First, he recovers “forgotten aspects” of the past “that have been relegated to the margins or footnotes of political history” in order to remind his readers of historical contingency and affirm “the potential for change that remains with us still” (2). Second, he restores ideological motivation to the narrative, showing how and why certain erasures occurred and offering an alternative vocabulary to discuss Malaysian politics. Third, he examines the crippling consequences of a “flat and static historical narrative premised upon … simple essentialist notions of identity and difference” (vi).
Lineages of Leadership
In these essays, Farish systematically recovers past alternatives to present realities. He does this to counterbalance current trends in public morality (“Porn and the Sheik”) and student quietism (“Fine Young Calibans: Remembering the Kesatuan Melayu Muda [Malay Youth Union]”) and to complicate simplistic notions of the past (“How the Penghulu Shaitan [Chief of the Devils] Brought Islam to the Malay World”). He also draws attention to patterns in Malaysian history (“‘Holy Terror’ All Over Again?”) and to colonial and pre-colonial precedents (“Sultan Iskandar Dzulkarnain’s Mega-projek’ [Mega-project]”). He reaches into the past most often, however, to illuminate exemplary leaders or discredit those whose failures seem prescient. The overpriced tower built by Sultan Iskandar Dzulkarnain against the advice of his ministers, for instance, wittily reminds us of “the lack of accountability and transparency … in the feudal courts of the past” (13).
A bigger target is Sultan Idrus Shah of Perak, who was elevated to the throne in 1887, after Britain’s violent early years of rule in that state. He is perhaps best remembered today for the eponymous school that produced the first generation of secular Malay nationalists, the Sultan Idrus Training College (SITC). His reputation as a progressive leader was cultivated during the long years of his reign that saw the development of tin mining in his state, the profits and control of which moved from Malay to Chinese and hence to British hands. He is also known for voicing protest against Kuala Lumpur’s overweening administrative centralization, but he did not change his accommodating stance toward the colonial regime. Sultan Idrus, in short, can serve either a colonialist or nationalist reading of history. In 1913 he was awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order, an occasion recounted here to highlight the Malay inertia that lay at the center of the colonial order. Farish explains how the investiture “incorporated the native while disabling him… by reducing him to the status of passive recipient” of an award “he could neither match nor resist” (17-18).
In contrast to the Anglophile Sultan Idrus stands the Anglicized Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor, who was certainly not accommodating to the British and who managed to keep his state out of the colonial grasp for many years. Farish shows how his choices were historically determined by the relentless critique of “Oriental despotism” issuing from Singapore and the construction of racialized economies and administrations around him. But Abu Bakar, who mixed English habits with Muslim observances, outmaneuvered his opponents for quite some time by keeping on the move in ways both “discursive” and “geographical.” Refusing to “stay put” within the “epistemic and socio-political boundaries” of the colonial order of knowledge and power, he took his game to the enemy, hiring advisors in London, traveling to foreign capitals, and bolstering his international status as a sovereign ruler. At home, he effected the administrative and economic reforms the colonial power would itself have carried out, including bringing Chinese immigrants into his kingdom and its economy (as did King Chulalongkorn in Thailand). This tale of Malay ability and resistance to colonial power is not uncritical, however; Farish notes that the Sultan never altered his autocratic style, a foreshadowing of authoritarianism to come (“The Sultan Who Could Not Stay Put,” 33-55).
More recent historical figures fill some awkward silences in official Malaysian history which, following colonial precedent, begins with the birth of UMNO in 1946. But Malaya, with its massive immigration and crucial commodity exports, surely existed in the same colonial world as, say, Indonesia or Vietnam. Although the numbers of those experiencing the wrenching changes of modernization and urbanization were smaller, they did indeed exist. Ibrahim Yaacob was a student at the SITC in the late 1920s, one of many Malay-speaking newcomers to the colonial capital in the 1930s (“freed from the shackles of court and tradition of the Kerajaans and in an environment where they, too, were foreigners”), a journalist, and a founder of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda in 1938. His was the crucial generation of Malay radicals who proved the failure of the colonial “strategy of containment and policing” through education (80). They went on to articulate both the anti-colonialism and the social critique of their own society that would be necessary for nationalism to take root. Working with the Japanese during the war, Ibrahim and his colleagues tried to pursue independence in conjunction with Indonesia. Although Farish allows this effort to seem closer to realization than it was, more important is his observation that “it was the radical Leftists and nationalists who… introduced the politics of nationalism and anti-Colonialism into the country.” Exiled in Indonesia, Ibrahim, like others who did the intellectual work of imagining an independent Malaya, was relegated to the footnotes by the conservative intellectuals and aristocrats who usurped the nationalist movement (“Ibrahim Yaacob and the Rise of the Malay Left,” 75-110). The lesson for today: there was “a time when Malaysian youth were able and willing to question the circumstances around them even when it seemed as if all hope was lost” (69).
Farish’s “other” Malaysia contains much besides political history – literature, art, and religion in particular – but undeniably makes many of its political points through stories of leadership. To this extent it intersects with Cheah Boon Kheng’s Malaysia, in which the nation progresses through the characters and careers of prime ministers Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Abdul Razak, Hussein Onn, and Mahathir Mohamad. In leader-centered historiography, individual lives become prisms through which the nation – its successes, failures, possibilities, disappointments – is viewed. What accounts for such leader-centeredness in Malaysia’s political life and historiography and what are the consequences?
As colonial Malaya filled up with immigrants (not just from China and India, but from other parts of the Nusantara), today’s “Chinese,” “Indian,” and “Malay” communities were constructed and naturalized through census, economic recruitment and restriction, land tenure, and cultural elaboration. Socio-politically, the British “kept the different ethnic groupings isolated along vertical cleavages of group-loyalty, while maintaining their patron-client bonds with each ethnic grouping in turn” (Farish, 22). The defense of this social structure in the transition to independence – and its subsequent strengthening by the New Economic Policy of the 1970s and 1980s (Cheah, 144) – reinforced the vertical orientation within each group and empowered “enlightened” leaders who could balance the communally-channeled anger fomented by “ultras” or “chauvinists” with the compromise necessary to achieve viable citizenship, language, and educational policies.
There is no doubt that Malaysian politics has been dominated by the personality and power of such leaders, especially by the first and current prime ministers. But an analytical focus on the successes and failures of individual leaders perpetuates vast erasures in historiography. Among other things, it cannot explain how nationalism has (or has not) become “a state of mind, permeating the large majority of a people and claiming to permeate all its members” (Hans Kohn, quoted in Cheah, 42, n. 24). In focusing on the emotion-driven communal tendencies that pragmatic leaders must hold in check, it gives short shrift to democratizing movements from below. In privileging leaders’ pursuit of intra-communal unity, it colludes in suppressing analyses of gender, labor, the environment, and other “non-communal” concerns. Most importantly, the naturalization of leader-centered narrative effaces ideology from the analysis of politics and history. It is to this problematic that Farish addresses his most sustained argument.
Farish charges that “Malaysia today is ruled according to a neo-feudal political culture” in which “blind deference to authority” has been “re-invigorated and revived in no uncertain terms” (13). How can the words “feudal” and “neo-feudal” be applied to Mahathir’s relentlessly modernizing Malaysia? Is this a case of the political columnist’s aim for maximum reaction overcoming the scholar’s careful choice of terminology? In fact, by using this language Farish is situating himself within a current of Malay social criticism that can be traced back to Munshi Abdullah’s mid-nineteenth century condemnation of royal misrule (1970), through the radical, popular nationalism of the mid-1930s to 1940s, to more recent scholar-activists like Chandra Muzaffar (1979). In this vein, Farish reminds his readers of Malay leaders’ collusion with colonial rule. After European incursions disrupted networks of trade and wealth in the wider Southeast Asian world, ushering in a period of economic stagnation and disorder, colonial intervention on the peninsula was justified by “the notion of the disabled native” (18) whose decaying culture required European protection. But the imposition of central authority was obscured by the cooperation and entrenchment of elites like Idrus Shah of Perak. Native disablement, which also paved the way for the wholesale importation of labor, was then cemented in two ways: through a discourse labeling Malays as “superstitious,” “conservative,” “lazy,” “without method or order,” and having “proper respect for constituted authority” (Swettenham, quoted in Farish, 24); and through legislation that decreased their ability to move about geographically:
“The net effect was two-fold: Colonial ethnographic scholarship reconstructed the Malays as a backward race of agriculturalists and feudal serfs, while the newly-imposed Colonial legislation and regulations ensured that the Malay peasantry would be kept in precisely those areas of economic activity that were deemed compatible with their ‘natural’ Malay character: manual labour, farming and fisheries” (26).
It was this society – defined by disability and an ossified class structure – that was the target of nationalist, reformist, religious, and other modernist critiques from the early twentieth century. By the 1930s and 1940s, the ruling class-colonial alliance was coming under increased pressure from Malay urbanization and literacy, demands for new economic and political roles by all groups, penetration of foreign media, Japanese occupation, and postwar communal violence. Reviving the language of the secular left critique goes hand in hand with restoring the contribution of the radical Malay nationalists to the historical record.
How does the charge of neo-feudalism hold up in post-colonial Malaysia, where Farish sees a “combination of modern material development and antiquated cultural values” (119)? This part is more contentious but equally engaging. Farish shows how UMNO leaders have pursued a developmentalist agenda – “Malaysia Boleh” (Malaysia can do it) – while holding onto the very same stereotypes of Malay disability that characterized colonial discourse. Mahathir’s influential Malay Dilemma (1970) and the UMNO-sponsored Revolusi Mental (Mental Revolution; Rahman, 1971) both “presented an image of Malays as an inherently backward, ill-educated and pathetic race that was trapped in a dark world of superstition, blind deference to authority and lack of economic sense.” Although these familiar traits are now deplored, they are still used to justify the supremacy of “a patron-class of rulers” (124). It is not at all far-fetched to see how the government’s patronage policies are bolstered by “the impression that the Malays [are] somehow unable to cope with change and development without the help of the State and the UMNO party in particular” (125). Even Mahathir’s recent, parting lament that his biggest regret is his failure to modernize his people bespeaks the historical agency arrogated by leaders to themselves, even as they banish political speech from university campuses and detain political opponents.
That this argument can be made for the opposition PAS as well tends to support its validity. Farish recounts the career of the independent-minded PAS veteran Ustaz Abu Bakar Hamzah to illustrate it. According to Farish, Ustaz Abu Bakar’s view of Islam was not incompatible with democracy, development, and tolerance. In advancing these views, he ran afoul of his party, especially in the 1980s, when ulama (the religious elite) were elevated to positions of leadership. “He attacked what he regarded as the excessive dogmatism and fanaticism of PAS members” and the ulama’s “emphasis on loyalty and blind obedience.” In response, he was accused of being “a kafir (infidel) and munafik (hypocrite)” and expelled from PAS. In the “use of Islam as a weapon to silence the comments and ideas of others and to label others as ‘bad Muslims’,” we hear echoes of Tunku Abdul Rahman’s Malay traitors (“Remembering the Other Face of Political Islam,” 130-35).
Essentialism and Multiplicity
Any attempt to understand Malaysia as a nation-state will ultimately grapple with the problematic of Malay centrality in the body politic. Farish observes that media coverage of politics at times “would give the impression that this country was made up of only Malay-Muslims” (164), and a major focus of Cheah’s analysis is the factionalism within the Malay community that constantly threatens its political primacy. Yet there is something troubling at this center that Farish’s discussion of the colonial past allows us to understand. The story of Sultan Abu Bakar (he who could not stay put) is a sobering reminder that even the most dynamic and privileged individuals could not escape the immobilizing power of colonial categorization for long. Despite its cosmopolitan, trade-centered, diversely-origined history, all of “Malay” society was eventually trapped within the “hierarchy of racial characteristics” that assigned Malays to agriculture and feudal domination, condemned in perpetuity to be Swettenham’s “Real Malay” who “venerates his ancient customs and traditions, fears his Rajas, and has a proper respect for constituted authority” (24). Farish’s most important argument begins – in his more academic essays – with how “the fluid, shifting world of pre-Colonial Malaya was gradually arrested in every sense, epistemically as well as physically,” leaving “the signifier ‘Malay’… eventually reduced to essentialist terms, restricting its play and movement” (25). Combined with their constructed disability – “The Malays will not work,” reported a British travel writer – and consequent need for protection, this diminishment of Malayness was perhaps the deepest, yet least recognized, violence of colonialism.
Not surprisingly, the perpetuation of communalism as the organizing principle of independent Malaya/Malaysia did little to challenge this. In fact, the Federal Constitution of 1957 enshrined a narrow, political definition of “Malay” as one who spoke the Malay language, followed Malay custom, and was a Muslim:
“Rather than accept and celebrate the fact that Malay identity was complex, overdetermined, fluid and evolving, the Federal Constitution’s precise but ultimately impoverishing definition of Malay identity invariably reduced Malayness to a stock definition, reminiscent of the colonial categories of racial identity and difference of the 19th century” (221).
Why have Malay political primacy and the efforts of its strongest leaders – one does not dispute Mahathir’s sincerity on this point – not been able to reverse the diminishment of Malayness? The logic of the nation-state, as identified by Cheah Boon Kheng, may provide an answer. Remembering his opening question, “Who would inherit power from the British?,” we realize that the Malays, as core bangsa (nationality), have literally inherited the position vacated by the British at the apex of the communal-patronage polity. Yet simultaneously, they retain their role as disabled bangsa (race) in need of protection, as reflected in the recurring theme in politics and literature of “Malays in danger.” This frustrated Malay dominance results in unresolved anxiety and the ever-present threat of violence that in turn justifies repressive government. One fears that as long as Malaysia remains trapped in the logic of Malay vs. Malaysian nationalism – and Cheah makes a stong case for its resilience – it will be unable to solve the problem of disabled Malay centrality.
Will the Islamist alternative show a way out? To Cheah, PAS is a non-UMNO variety of Malay ultra: “As most Muslims in Malaysia are Malays, an Islamic state is actually another form of a ‘Malay nation’ except that Islamic principles become the basis of its administration” (240). And from his perspective, Farish condemns the Islamist search for purity that “narrowed the scope of Malay culture and identity and reduced Malay history to a mere few hundred years [since the arrival of Islam]” (42). But although Islam has lately colluded with UMNO in denying the richness and complexity of Malay culture (and added a shallow moralism to boot), Farish also shows that this was not inevitable.
It is in his discussion of Dr. Burhanuddin Al-Helmy, third president of PAS, that the most intriguing possibilities are raised. Detained in 1965, never to reenter politics, Dr. Burhanuddin has largely been written out of history by both official nationalism and his own party which reversed his legacy. As an author of the “People’s Constitutional Proposals” and its Melayu nationality, he “regarded national identity and cultural belonging as historically determined and … evolving categories.” He was a pragmatic intellectual, not least in his Islam, which looked to the future, not the past, and which was centered on human will and struggles in the “here and now.” In the tradition of Muslim modernism that PAS has left behind, Dr. Burhanuddin sought commonalities among nationalism, Islam, and leftism. Most importantly, he recognized that “the universalism of Islam had its limits… [that it] remained a particular universalism that could not be entirely reconciled with other universalist discourses… [and that] negotiation with difference and alterity was the key to political action” (Dr. Burhanuddin Al-Helmy and the Forgotten Legacy of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party,” 56-62).
Unlike UMNO feudalism and PAS medievalism, these are old ideas with current value. As a political activist and a Muslim intellectual, Farish draws from precedents like these when he looks “beneath the façade of a seemingly unitary space [to the] multiplicity of ‘Malaysias’ that are now coming out into the open” (4). Figures and examples from the past can reawaken the possibility of change if historians use them to reclaim traditions of fluidity, flexibility, and negotiation. These are not a different set of tools than those used to construct mainstream Malaysia. If Melayu nationality was a lost opportunity to continue an historical process of identity construction through nationalism, many other semantic constructs remain in play – Malaysia, ethnic harmony, tolerance – that can still be filled with new or expanded meanings and help put the Malay world back in motion.
Cheah Boon Kheng sees Malaysia as the careful containment and balancing of difference, both within and between ethnic communities. Farish Noor looks beneath hard-fought unified façades to multiplicities he seeks to recover and legitimize. Their books are instructive to read together, as Farish articulates and critiques the paradigms underlying Cheah’s biography and explicitly interrogates “the story of a multiracial Malaysia we constantly tell ourselves” (4). Together these authors illuminate the importance of paradigms in writing history and history writing’s discursive power in making and performing the nation. Donna Amoroso edits the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.
This essay benefited greatly from discussions with Jojo Abinales, Caroline Hau, and Sumit Mandal. I would like to express my thanks to Chiharu Takenaka for inviting me to the workshop “What is to be Written? Setting Agendas for Studies of History” at Meiji Gakuin University, 1-2 March 2003, at which an early version was presented.
References
Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, Munshi. 1970. The Hikayat Abdullah. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
Amoroso, Donna. 1998. “Dangerous Politics and the Malay Nationalist Movement, 1945-47.” South East Asia Research 6, no. 3 (November).
Chandra Muzaffar. 1979. Protector? An Analysis of the Concept and Practice of Loyalty in Leader-led Relationships within Malay Society. Penang: Aliran.
Cheah Boon Kheng. 1983. Red Star Over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict During and After the Japanese Occupation, 1941-1946. Singapore: Singapore University Press.
Cheah Boon Kheng. 1988. “The Erosion of Ideological Hegemony and Royal Power and the Rise of Postwar Malay Nationalism, 1945-46.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 19, no. 1 (March).
Harper, T.N. 1999. The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Khatijah Sidek. 2001. Memoirs of Khatijah Sidek: Puteri Kesatria Bangsa. Bangi: Penerbit UKM.
Khoo Boo Teik. 2002. “Writing Reformasi.” Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 1 (March). http://kyotoreview.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/issue/issue0/index.html
Kohn, Hans. 1965. Nationalism: Its Meaning and History. New York: Van Nostrand.
Kratoska, Paul. 1998. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin.
Lim, Patricia Pui Huen, and Diana Wong, eds. 2000. War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Mahathir Mohamad. 1970. Malay Dilemma. Singapore: Times Books International.
Mandal, Sumit K. 2003. “Transethnic Solidarities in a Racialized Context.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 33, no. 1: 50-68.
Rahman, Senu Abdul. 1971. Revolusi Mental (Mental Revolution). Kuala Lumpur: Penerbitan Utusan Melayu.
Said Zahari. 2001. Dark Clouds at Dawn: A Political Memoir. Kuala Lumpur: Insan.
Tan Jing Quee and Jomo K.S. 2001. Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History. Kuala Lumpur: Insan.
Zakiah Koya. 2000. “Malaysia’s ‘Longest’ Political Detainee [Kamarulzaman Teh]” Malaysiakini.com. November 2. http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/20001102001020.php


Review Essay / March 2003
Exposition, Critique and New Directions for Pantayong Pananaw
Ramon Guillermo
The Filipino language has two forms for the English word “we/us”: “tayo” and “kami.” In Bahasa Indonesia, the same distinction holds for the pair “kita” and “kami” (Johns 1997). “Tayo,” which is described as the inclusive form of “we,” refers to a collectivity composed of both the speakers and the listeners in a communication context. “Kami,” which is described as the exclusive form of “we,” refers to a collectivity composed only of those who are speaking and does not include the receivers of the message. The word “Pantayo” was formed by the combination of the root word “tayo” and the prefix “pan-.” (Probably the first incidence of this term was as “pangtayo,” used as the translation of pronombre/pronoun in the grammar book Balarilang Tagalog, published in 1910). The whole word “pantayo” could roughly be interpreted to mean “from-us-for-us.” The conceptual contradictory of “pantayo” is the concept “pangkami,” which was formed from the root-word “kami” and the prefix “pang-”/“pam-.” “Pangkami” roughly means “from-us-for-you.” The other half of the phrase, “pananaw,” means “perspective.” So “pantayong pananaw” would be equivalent to the rather awkward “from-us-for-us perspective,” while “pangkaming pananaw” would mean the “from-us-for-you perspective.” “Pantayo” refers to a self-subsistent dialogical circle consisting of active (speaking) subjects, while “pangkami” denotes a situation in which the speakers present themselves as an “other-directed” collective object under the gaze (and therefore the spell) of an Other.
The intellectual leader of the Pantayong Pananaw (PP) movement in the social sciences is Zeus A. Salazar. He was educated at the University of the Philippines (UP) and at the Sorbonne. His still unpublished doctoral thesis (Salazar 1968) already contained the basic ideas which would lead to his mature perspectives on cultural and historical methodology. He would continue to elaborate -these ideas in an increasingly systematic, intellectualized variant of the Filipino language throughout the 1970s and 1980s. After being deeply involved during Martial Law in the massive historical and ideological project initiated by the Marcos dictatorship called Tadhana (Marcos, 1976), several tentative and scattered articulations of the basic approach and philosophy of PP would appear in various magazines and short book introductions until the definitive systematic exposition of PP was published in 1991 as the essay “Ang Pantayong Pananaw Bilang Diskursong Pangkabihasnan” (Pantayong Pananaw as a civilizational discourse) (Salazar 1974; 1996; 1997). The implementation of the research agenda put forward in the basic programmatic statements of PP would be further actualized in a series of monographs published in the journal Bagong Kasaysayan (New History). While his intellectual leadership and remarkable originality have been vital, it should be clarified that Zeus A. Salazar is not Pantayong Pananaw. His influence as the moving force of PP extends from his contemporaries and colleagues in the field of history and various other disciplines to several generations of former students at the University of the Philippines. Among the scholars who have produced significant publications and theses/dissertations under the auspices of PP are Jaime Veneracion, Nilo Ocampo, Ferdinand Llanes, Portia Reyes, Efren B. Isorena, Vicente C. Villan, Mary Jane Rodriguez-Tatel, Jose Rhommel B. Hernandez, O.P., Myfel Joseph Paluga, Nancy Kimmuel-Gabriel, and Atoy M. Navarro. Meanwhile, the term “Pantayong Pananaw” has acquired several usages in the texts of Salazar and other scholars working within its parameters. Some of these are the following:
1) “Pantayong Pananaw” as a descriptive concept can pertain to any social collectivity which possesses a relatively unified and internally articulated linguistic-cultural structure of communication and interaction and/or a sense of oneness of purpose and existence (ex., “The Japanese have a strong Pantayong Pananaw”). Ethnic and social collectivities (including class or gender aligned aggrupations) within a single nation can thus be said to possess PP. The relative “integration” of ethnic communities in a national collective does not arise from the eradication of their sense of PP but from the subsumption of their ethnic identity under that of the nation.
2) Works and authors categorized as PP or having affinities with PP exhibit a certain style of thought and way of speaking based largely on a critique of colonial discursive strategies which up to now still proliferate in textbooks and more scholarly works. Some of these are:
a. “Discourses of influence” which attributes the origins of both the distinguishing elements and the motive forces of Philippine history and culture to “external” influences. These are also manifested as symptoms of unease or discontent with “one’s own” culture and of a constant striving to legitimize it by attributing its origin to some “more elevated” sources. The point of reference of discourses of influence is usually the originating culture while the receiving culture is merely analyzed in relation to its adequacy to or divergence from the original (ex., “Maria is beautiful because her father was half-Spanish”; “The Filipino is a jumble of traits from India, China, Europe, and America”). Discourses which focus on the purported “lack of identity” of Filipinos is an auxiliary discourse which accomplishes the preliminary act of emptying Filipino identity the better to fill it to the brim with influences.
b. “First Filipino” discourses which reduced Philippine history to a delayed repetition of western history (ex., “Juan dela Cruz was the first Filipino pilot”). Similar to this type of discourse is the constant Toynbee-like parallel-mongering between the Philippines and the West which presupposes that the western comparison would render the topic more intelligible to the reader than if it were just left to itself (ex., “Gabriela Silang was the Joan of Arc of the Philippines”). Once again, the point of reference is still “the West.”
c. Discourses of the “Discovery” (ex., “There is no more significant event in Philippine history than the discovery of the islands by the great Magellan”).
d. “Reactive” discourses which merely correct colonial misconceptions about Filipinos and Philippine history, thereby remaining trapped in a discursive dependency with colonial discourse (ex., “Filipinos are not like you say. We are also intelligent and civilized”). Expressions of condemnation or idealization of Philippine culture as contrasted with colonial and western values can be related to this type of discourse.
The net effect of these colonial discursive strategies would be to render the Filipino people into an heteronomous and inert entity incapable of making history but against whom history is merely made.
3) Another, more superficial, marker of belonging to the discursive community of PP would be the adoption of whole or parts of its specialized terminology, thus making these texts interlocked and intertextually related.
Beyond these surface features of Pantayong Pananaw are other more complicated features that define PP as a specific and original approach to practicing social science in the Philippines. There is no better way of expounding on these than to discuss some of the major issues which have plagued PP since its inception. These are: 1) its use of Filipino, the national language, and the relationship of PP to other schools of thought in the Philippine social sciences; and 2) problems of method revolving around the predominantly emic and hermeneutic approach of PP.
The Question of Language and the Philippine Social Sciences
Practitioners of the dominant social science paradigms in the Philippines, which hew closely to American traditions and intellectual trends, have had mixed and generally uneasy attitudes toward PP. A common judgment is that the once fashionable “indigenization” movements of the 1980s have been rendered passé by the late “postmodern” 1990s, as exemplified by Pertierra’s trendy exposition (1996). Despite this, PP projects itself not as a mere competitor-among-others in horizontal relation to other paradigms but as a sort of vertical sublation or Aufhebung, negating and containing all the others. It rejects the pluralist representation of PP as some kind of co-equal contender with other schools of thought and presents itself as the broadest synthesis both containing and negating all previous social scientific traditions in the Philippines, all of which it conflates and at the same time delegitimizes, under the single term “Pangkaming Pananaw.” In historiography, the latter includes even such historians with outstanding nationalist credentials as Teodoro Agoncillo (1956) and Renato Constantino (1978). Both the dominant paradigms (such as functionalism and positivism) and the oppositional paradigms (represented by Marxism) in western social sciences are resolutely grouped under this one label. PP presents a comprehensive, if sweeping, metahistory of the historical and social-scientific disciplines in the Philippines and claims for itself the future of Philippine social-scientific practice (Salazar 1991b).
PP is furthermore compelled by its own strictures against a “reactive” viewpoint and methodology to eschew in principle any sustained discursive exchange within the domain of what it considers to be a mere “localized” version of western social science. It refuses to enter into the parameters of a discursive domain which it considers already determined in advance by the dominant practices and perspectives of “western-oriented” social sciences. The most effective way a practitioner of conventional social sciences could enter into a fruitful dialogue with PP would be to enter the discursive domain of PP itself, above all to accept its linguistic parameters. The issue is therefore neither a refusal of dialogue in principle nor a blanket rejection of any theoretical engagement, appropriation, or negotiation, but the insistence that dialogue be accomplished within PP’s own discursive sphere. Such an imperative could be compared to the commonplace requirement of, for example, the American or Japanese educational system that foreign students pass language exams before being permitted to participate in the academic/intellectual life of their respective nations.
PP does not consider the possibility of any existing “neutral” sphere of linguistic/discursive exchange within the social sciences. Nevertheless, theoretical and linguistic polyglots could perhaps occupy intermediate positions as transitions between spheres of discursive exchange and could even engage in the translation of concepts and theoretical entities between spheres. Gaerlan’s (1995) impression that Salazar is “militantly” against translation is entirely mistaken. Only the complex mediating acts produced by inter-translation could possibly constitute the ground of a genuinely universal scientific community (Mendoza 2001) – a community not speaking past each other’s heads but one in real conversation. The privileging of hybridity as the alternative to the construction of national languages, as proposed by post-colonial theorists who point to the liberative appropriation by the “former colonies” of the advantageously “evolved” (Roxas-Tope 1998) English language, just completely fudges the issue. Paraphasing Marx, we could even say that that “all we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the ‘native’ lives merely to increase the Englishes of the world.” PP therefore does not emphasize linguistic in-betweenness but rather the commitment of the scholar to the strengthening and consistent embrace of the national discursive domain (or pook) in the national language. Furthermore, if the social sciences are understood as forms of liberative self-understanding rather than as alienated and alienating sciences of manipulation, their results should from the beginning be open as much as possible to the perusal, critique, and intervention of their purported object (e.g., the Filipinos as a “people”) before translating it “for a wider audience” is considered a priority. The active use and development of a national language is crucial in the attempt to mitigate the extremely alienated and undeniably elitist status of the social sciences in the Philippines.
Problems of Method
“Kasaysayan,” the Filipino word for history, is derived from the root word “saysay” which means “sense” or “meaning.” “Kasaysayan” is therefore a “salaysay na may saysay” or “meaningful narrative” (Navarro 2000). In his major expositions of PP, Salazar has characterized PP (within the historical discipline) as a synthesis of the indigenous conception of history with the historical methods developed by the western historical disciplines. A recent dissertation on Pantayong Pananaw (Reyes 2002) emphasized that “The idea of history as a discipline already experienced great developments from various scientists all over the world through the years, and so, it would be such a waste to simply ignore them all. These developments became the figurative tools and/or instruments of the historian in the practice of his science. The pioneers of Bagong Kasaysayan were aware of that from the beginning and that was why they were ready to appropriate the basic methods of science in application to a differently philosophically inspired historical narrative of Bagong Kasaysayan” (italics added). However, the question of defining the parameters of “scientific” practice and its relation to social scientific methodology in PP must still be thoroughly examined. (Many similar sophisticated analyses and important arguments have already been put to the fore in the critical literature on Sikolohiyang Pilipino [Filipino psychology] [Enriquez 1990] and the author has to apologize for repeating some of them here.)
Three important components of PP’s methodology shall be discussed below:
1) Emic and etic approaches;
2) Understanding and explanation;
3) The problem of ideology.
1) Emic and etic approaches
It might be sufficient to clarify the common charge against PP that it is a mere “nativism.” According to the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968), “The aim of [a nativist] movement is to purge the society of unwanted aliens, of cultural elements of foreign origin, or of both.” Closer acquaintance with PP’s programmatic statements and corpus of writings would frustrate any responsible scholar who wanted to pin it down to fixed “nativist” or even “essentialist” positions. It should be stressed therefore that PP is not by any stretch of the imagination an outright linguistic or theoretical “nativism,” although its adherents could occupy the following range of positions regarding the appropriation (pag-aangkin) of actual or purportedly “foreign concepts and theories”:
a) The weakest position would consider both the appropriation of theoretical terms and the use of emic, or internally generated, terms as equally valid methods for expanding the discursive sphere of PP as long as the great majority of texts are written and all verbal exchanges are conducted in Filipino. This weakest form is has been criticized as “writing in Filipino but thinking in foreign categories.”
b) The middle position would be the privileging or prioritization of the emic approach over the borrowing or appropriation of concepts, while not eschewing the latter in principle. The language of textual exposition shall likewise be in Filipino. Notwithstanding its relative reasonableness, difficulties with such an approach could also be observed, for example, in the Indonesian context where language planners propose such strange terms as “apurwa” (old Javanese-Sanskrit) or even “mesin hitung ajaib” (Dutch-Malay-Arabic), when “komputer” could just as well be used with much better results (Carle 1988).
c) The strongest and blatantly “nativist” position, which perhaps no one among the PP can consciously take, is the rigorous exclusion of any terminological/linguistic borrowing. This last position is so impossible that those who have naively taken it due to some romantic ultra-nationalism are easily and routinely attacked just by demonstrating how their own utterances and texts are inescapably involved in the process of linguistic and intellectual change and appropriation. Misunderstandings of Salazar’s position as strongly nativist have led some critics to charge him with inconsistency to his own principles by pointing out his borrowed concepts or by tracing his intellectual debts to European influences. Mulder (2000) even thought that PP implies that “the links with the outside world need to be cut.” In reaction to such conceptions, Ileto wrote that “the philosophy behind [Salazar’s] pantayong pananaw needs to be threshed out more. It could be more subtle naman than you portray it....To reduce it to a form of crude nationalism gets us back to a dead-end sort of discussion” (quoted in Abinales 2000).
It would be useful to point out here that the use of internal concepts to explain socio-cultural phenomena does not necessarily entail the use of the language of origin of these concepts in the exposition itself. A case in point here would be Enriquez’ variant of Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP) which pursued an emic approach even as the primary language of transmission tended to be English, especially in his later works (Enriquez 1994; 1995). This would lead to the assessment (Sta. Maria 1993) that PP offers a more effective and consistent route to social scientific “indigenization” than SP. Reynaldo Ileto’s famous Pasyon and Revolution (1979), a work rigorously organized around emic principles of analysis, also employed English as the language of exposition. It is therefore sometimes called, though uneasily, a “proto-pantayo” text.
The middle position would seem to be the most acceptable for PP. However, problems arise in interpreting the concept of “privileging” emic over borrowed concepts. Perhaps the best way to understand this privileging would be to consider it as a principle oriented towards the sustained assertion of Filipino and as part of the effort to maximize its rich linguistic and semantic resources in the development of a national social scientific discourse. If this is the case, parameters for linguistic borrowing from foreign languages should be based on minimal and stringently defined assumptions regarding the determination of the “fit, “compatibility,” or “appropriateness” which are usually mentioned in discussions of theoretical borrowing. Judgments regarding the “correspondence” of concepts to their objects cannot be determined in advance but can only be ascertained through unremitting processes of rigorous investigation and critique by the scientific community concerned. A process of theory construction which merely accumulated concepts with the simple intent of harmonizing them with a fixed and pre-rendered schematization of the cultural totality would render both theoretical borrowing and further scientific research superfluous. The notion that external concepts shall only be appropriated on the basis of their compatibility or correspondence with the pre-existing emic understanding of Philippine cultural, social, and historical phenomena can be illustrated by such commonly heard statements as: “The sakop [Filipino as follower or subject of a leader] by nature is authoritarian and hierarchic” (Mercado 1975). The implication of this is that non-authoritarian concepts are “foreign” and inapplicable to Filipinos. This problem can only be addressed once social scientific investigation is, once and for all, firmly distinguished from efforts such as those of Mercado (1994), Jocano (1992), or Agpalo (1996) to develop normative and distinctly reactionary “national ideologies” or Filipino Weltanschauungen.
It may be the case that this notion of compatibility rests on the assumption one uniform emic understanding of Philippine phenomena to which borrowed concepts should correspond. If so, how would one deal with the hermeneutic gap between interpreter and the interpreted? How would one construe the conflicts and errors of interpretation among interpreters of emic data? The act of interpretation would be superfluous if a transparent and unmediated grasp of transmitted meanings were possible. Hermeneutics presupposes as a condition of its possibility an inescapable separation or degree of alienation between the interpreter and the interpreted. The complete unification of the consciousness of the social scientist with an increasingly transparent object of analysis would be none other than the end of hermeneutics itself. In addition, when the concordance of any external concept with an internal concept, or its compatibility with the whole “system of thought” thus conceived, is the basis for accepting or rejecting concepts and ideas in the social sciences, then the problematic of theoretical “nativism” rises once again on the train of essentialism.
In itself, there is not much at stake in the essentialist and anti-essentialist dispute since it mostly revolves around the caricaturing and maligning of essentialism as some kind of unqualified Platonism. Some writers have sought to defend a dynamic conceptualization of essentialism opposed to the caricatured representation of it by the arbiters of post-(whatever) theoretical fashion. Mendoza, taking another tack, defends PP along two directions: the first by disputing its alleged “essentialism” and noting that PP leads the way to a “non-essentialist alternative” for construing Filipino identity (Mendoza 2001); the second by using Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “strategic essentialism” to assert the pragmatic function of essentialism within Philippine cultural politics (Mendoza 2002). Mendoza’s interpretation is somewhat forced but her careful reading of PP does allow a better appreciation of it as a whole and a deeper understanding than others have thus far countenanced.
Further clarification regarding Salazar’s conceptualization of cultural identity could be gained by comparing it with the African negritude phenomenon. Salazar’s early formation within a French intellectual milieu no doubt exposed him to the main terms of analysis of the negritude movement. Few European thinkers have received more spontaneous unwritten positive comment from Salazar than the German anthropologist or “cultural morphologist” Leo Frobenius (1973), whose ideas were also central to the fruition of Senghor’s and Cesaire’s conception of “negritude.” The contributions of Frobenius that were perhaps most helpful for the development of Salazar’s thought in an independent direction were his anti-Eurocentric historicism, his Kulturkreislehre (culture circles/areas) doctrine, and his unyielding position on the priority of hermeneutics and the method of understanding (verstehen) in the social sciences as opposed to the “mechanistic” method of explanation (erklären). Radically diverging from Senghor, Salazar emphatically rejected the structure of dichotomous oppositions which Frobenius posited in his binaristic cultural typology (Wittman, 2000/2001). As Sartre had already pointed out, the negritude movement simply accepted the spurious European representation of the African as a negation of itself and then elevated this to an ideal. Salazar himself noted that this way of going about it is no different from Levy-Bruhl’s conception of the so-called “primitive mentality” (Salazar 1989). The formulation of self-identity as a mere negation of the identity of an Other reduces the self to a dependent residue of the former’s plenitude. Research into one’s own culture(s) becomes a redundancy since knowledge of it could just as well be arrived at by a series of negations of the “well understood” cultures of the West.
Whatever may be the case, it should be obvious that PP has no stake in adopting either an essentialist or anti-essentialist position as a philosophical standpoint, though indeed it may superficially have more sympathy with an “essentialist” position. Instead, it should take up some kind of methodological premise or heuristic principle regarding the rate of change of cultural entities more in line with Braudel’s (1973) concept of longue durée. Knowing its untenability, Salazar has repeatedly criticized the assertion that “culture/cultural identity does not change.” As he has written, “We can understand our being, our Filipino uniqueness, in the study of history; but we cannot see our whole being in this, because what is unique in the Filipino is an historical entity – i.e., it has not been fixed or given for all time” (Salazar 1974). He would, however, contest the possibility of any thoroughgoing and massive transformation of culture within the short run, or “cultural voluntarism.” While it may be hypothesized that cultural totalities in general (whether ethnic, national, or civilizational) may possess both a certain degree of internal homogeneity and long-term stability, only actual investigation into these propositions as part of a programme of scientific research, taking into account both the synchronic processes of cohesion and dispersion and the diachronic processes of integration and disintegration, can prove or disprove these hypotheses and enrich the general knowledge of cultural dynamics. The criticism that such hypotheses regarding relative cultural stability are mere rationalizations for a reactionary backward looking “revivalism” can be answered by reference to Bloch’s concept of “non-simultaneity” (Bloch 1991), which allows the conceptualization of a structured, dialectical, and multi-layered conception of temporality.
2) Understanding and explanation
While Salazar may express a personal preference for hermeneutic understanding over empirical explanation, he would conceivably not contest the goal of social science in analyzing social phenomena distinct from the hermeneutic dimension. It is important in this respect that he does not deny that science is involved in the study of entities which are prior to and independent of discourse. As he asserted most emphatically, “One cannot say: the concept=phenomenon, because if it were thus then you would not need to approach the phenomenon, you would be content with the conceptual system” (Salazar 2002). This can be said to amount to an outright rejection of the idealist thesis that the concept simply “produces” its object. The implications are clear: that PP ought to broaden its disciplinal focus from its beginnings in a hermeneutically-based historical approach to allow greater scope for methodological pluralism appropriate to the different social sciences. As a point of clarification, the generally hesitant attitude of PP towards the use of causal explanation in the analysis of empirical, law-like features of social phenomena does not mean that they do not and cannot resort to detailed and even excessively meticulous analysis of facts and empirical data. However, as the Schmoller-Menger debate in economics (Small 1924; Menger 1963) has demonstrated, even the most thoroughgoing empiricism of the Schmoller type could still decline from any attempt at deriving general historical principles based on the observation of law-like behavior of social phenomena (Heilbroner 1985), just because its goal was simply to represent historical particularity and nothing more. The final lesson of that Methodenstreit (conflict of methods) is that the accumulation of empirical material in their particularity and the development of corresponding theoretical apparatuses to grasp historical generalities need not be opposed in principle and should in actuality support one another.
The writings of Salazar, replete with extensive exercises in semantic exploration and diagrammatic exposition, can give the impression of an overbearing emphasis on hermeneutic methodologies and an underemphasis on empirical explanation, if not the implicit dismissal of such approaches. This does not do justice to PP’s own use of such social sciences as linguistics, especially its comparative branch, which depends on such objectivistic methods as the search for empirical linguistic laws.
The question of “ideological conflict” is an instance where Salazar displays a marked tendency to minimize the value of empirical explanation. In cases where he does not dismiss ideological conflict as a mere transplantation of foreign ideologies to a “Filipino context” (Salazar 1991b), he nevertheless asserts that an existing “deeper level” of relative cultural uniformity is in fact what makes the conflict of class ideologies possible in the first place. This viewpoint both circumvents the qualitative analysis of the complex articulation of class ideologies with other ideological systems and evades the empirical question of the objectivity of class relations. The “resolution” of the latter issue evidently requires methods of empirical analysis not confined to hermeneutic or genealogical analyses of terminologies of social stratification (Kimmuel-Gabriel 1999). Much the same critique was levelled by Milagros Guerrero (1981) against Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution regarding the roots of peasant revolt in the Philippines.
The resort to what some rigorous emicists deem “unacceptable” quantitative “etic” concepts in the empirical analysis of social structure seems to rule out these types of social analysis altogether, as can be seen in their facetious dismissal of dependista theory, which they conflate with all other “theories of imperialist exploitation” as mere negative manifestations of colonial ideology. In this case, the empirical analysis of colonial/neo-colonial mechanisms of exploitation is “resolved” or “dissolved” merely by pointing out that this scientific problem is a belated manifestation of colonial ideology (pangkami), albeit in its negative “anti-colonial” form. (Salazar seems here to have given a unique twist to Atal’s [1990] fertile notion that all “indigenization” movements in the social sciences have had to go through a “reactive phase” in which they serve as a “rhetoric of counterattack” against colonialism.) Discursive analysis thus preempts empirical investigation, requiring neither attempts at empirical falsification nor even comprehension, much less genuine theoretical engagement with the theory of colonial/neo-colonial exploitation. It is no wonder then that such a position would be hard put to deal with or even recognize the significance of such topics as “cultural imperialism” which is consigned to a merely reactive dimension. Discontent with this deficiency in PP was included as one of the reasons why a group of “ex-PP” historians migrated to an ostensibly broader research agenda called “Kasaysayang Bayan” (People’s History) (Llanes, 1999).
Putting aside issues of whether it is possible to create a purely “affirmative” philosophy which eschewes all moves towards the “negative” and critical (Deleuze 1983), the practical step of striving towards social change requires acts of both affirmation and negation. In truth, a purely “affirmative” (also called “positivist”) approach would not be directed towards the interests of liberation but towards the “self-affirmation” of the masses of what and where they are now, a cultural “self-affirmation” of a people living in hovels and daily on the brink of starvation and despair. Enriquez’ (1995) “liberation psychology” employed another form of “hermeneutic” apparently derived from the methodology of “liberation theology” (the similarity in name seems to be not accidental) which attempted to read and define Philippine culture in the light of neo-colonial oppression and mass poverty and towards the direction of social transformation. This type of “hermeneutic circle” differs from that of Gadamer in that it requires the methodological unity of understanding and explanation, and interprets culture in the context of a structural analysis of social reality (Jay 1988). It also requires not just the empty and indeterminate negation of the existent characteristic of a purely reactive “negation of the negation,” but the prior positive affirmation of a liberative culture (Dussel 1988).
3) The problem of ideology
The two considerations above bring to the fore the problem of the possible divergence of social scientific explanation from the self-understanding of social agents of their own behavior. Within the current conceptualization of PP, divergences between the interpretation of social scientists and the “people” of social phenomena can only be explained by insufficient data or the “alienation” of the “elitist” social scientist from the “people.” Certainly, the use of English as the language of the social sciences underlines their tragic “distance” from the everyday lives of the Filipino people, but it is still conceivable (as it is in fact a reality in western societies) that a social science conducted completely in the national lingua franca could still arrive at interpretations of social phenomena which diverge in greater or lesser degree from the self-understanding of the subjects themselves. There can, as a matter of principle, be no complete unity between scientific and everyday understanding. This is not due to any perverse tendency of “the people” to cling to the “irrational” and “unscientific” but due to the inherent limitations which define science itself. Beyond the domains of “scientific knowledge” and the process of deepening this knowledge within history lie the ineradicable as-yet-unknown and ungrasped which constitute the very basis and rationale of scientific practice as opposed to scholasticism, or the mere ordering and codification of “the already known.”
Social practice does not merely live “within” science but resides within the domain of both science and the eternal “not-yet” of science in a complex, multi-leveled, and mediated relation. Positivist scientism aims to but cannot swallow the whole of social existence within its truncated sphere. Opinions about the superiority of science to discourses on existential and theological matters misconstrue the problem by framing the interaction between discourses in an hierarchical form. The question should instead be directed at how these discourses relate or come into conflict with, reinforce or articulate with one another (Therborn 1980). The confrontation between the discourses of science and everyday life points to the need for new mediating structures between these broad domains. The aim of these mediating structures should not be to collapse one domain into another, as in scientistic determinism or populist voluntarism, but, by means of preserving a creative tension, to arrive at new mediating practices which could lead to as yet unforeseeable transformations within these interacting domains. Not static self-containment but dynamic co-determination should be the goal. Following Hau’s (2000) proposals for the development of adequate “ethical technologies” for the “formation of the subject of action,” these technologies of mediation and “experiments in living” should transform the social sciences from elitist intellectual practices which view social subjects as mere passive objects of external manipulation into sciences for self-understanding and critical reflection upon social reality aimed ultimately at human liberation from political and economic domination. They should function to mitigate relations of power within, at the same time that they work to erode the dominant class and power relations in the larger society. The process is far from complete, but PP has already moved several steps towards the goal of developing these mediating structures by reducing the barriers of linguistic alienation and emphasizing dialogical practices (or talastasan) within and among Filipino social scientists and between the former and the “people.”
Finding New Bearings for Pantayong Pananaw
It has been the objective of this essay to demonstrate that PP, in its current form, has not arrived at satisfactory positions on some of the problems discussed above, and thereby tends to be overly restrictive in its formulation, even if coherent and oftentimes elegant. As a social scientific research programme, it is suggested here that PP should be reformulated to give its practitioners a wider epistemological and methodological compass. Conceptions of relative cultural homogeneity and stability should be considered as testable hypotheses rather than self-evident principles guiding scientific research. Likewise, PP should maintain a position of neutrality on ontological and epistemological questions which ought to be preserved as areas for scientific research and philosophical investigations rather than “solved” by programmatic statements. These steps are fundamental if PP is to advance to broader fields of social science beyond history and historical methodology. The more inclusive discursive sphere thus created would follow and determine its own unforeseeable dynamics. It may or may not save itself from fundamentally mistaken ideas, but it would be a great mistake to foreclose debates when the field has not yet been definitively laid. To unnecessarily divide the ranks of social scientists working in Filipino this early would further weaken an already precarious struggle for the use of the national language among the intelligentsia in the period of so-called “globalization.” To a certain extent, however, all of the proposals below already represent the de facto (if still implicit) principles currently guiding the practice of PP.
It is thus suggested that PP be explicitly reformulated along the following lines:
First, the principle of using the national language as the primary means of communication in Philippine social sciences should serve as the principal and broadest basis of unity and fruitful discursive exchange. The “pantayo” as a category of social scientific practice should thus cover a much broader, if less defined, group of practitioners.
Second, communication and translation protocols should be developed to facilitate a more productive intellectual interaction between Filipino and English language traditions in Philippine social science. Discourses of incommensurability and mutual incomprehension should be deflected into discourses of approximation where possible. PP’s determination and principled position of strength in regard to its use of the national language should allow it to be more expansive and accommodating to scholars with different linguistic preferences.
Third, the “pananaw” in PP should not be considered as pertaining to a coherent Weltanschauung but only as a broadly nationalist and critical viewpoint towards the development of an autonomous dynamic for the development of Philippine social sciences closely articulated with the aspirations of the Filipino people.
Fourth, efforts to develop appropriate and effective mediating structures between Philippine social science and the Filipino people, which PP has already begun, should be continually pursued and experimented upon as essential steps towards the radical restructuring of Philippine social sciences. However, progressive proponents of PP should emphasize that any such attempts at developing new methods of social and political interaction should never be idealistically understood in abstraction from the wider context of political and economic domination and exploitation. The whole point of these efforts is, after all, the liberation of the Filipino people.

Ramon Guillermo is assistant professor in the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman.
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Review Essay / March 2003
Problems in Contemporary Thai Nationalist Historiography
Patrick Jory
There are certain periods when historical discourses and their politics – who controls them, the mode by which they are disseminated, how competing histories are suppressed – become central to intellectual or public debate. In Thailand it has been some time since history provoked that kind of interest. Nationalist historiography appears to have achieved a position of hegemony that would be remarkable were it not for the fact that it apparently arouses little opposition. How secure, then, is this political and scholarly enterprise a hundred years after it was founded?
This article briefly outlines a number of problems for contemporary Thai nationalist historiography. The first of these is the subject of these narratives itself, the Thai nation. How has the historiography of the Thai nation fared, particularly since the critique of the concept of “nation” in the 1980s provoked by works such as Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition? Second, what is the role of the monarchy in these narratives? How does the monarchy’s current political and cultural influence limit the possibilities of Thai historiography? A third problem has been the representation of ethnic and regional minorities, which has challenged the previously unproblematic understanding of a unified, culturally homogeneous nation. A new issue that has appeared since the Thailand’s economic expansion of the 1990s is the effect of Thai nationalist historiography – as represented in TV dramas and movies, as well as in school texts – on relations with Thailand’s neighbors, which have led to diplomatic tensions. The next problem, for the moment, concerns mainly the professional historians of the academy: the influence of postmodern theory since the 1990s and its undermining of history’s truth claims. If Thai history is simply one story among countless others with no superior claim to authority over the past, how does it deserve its privileged status? Finally, there is the issue of professional history’s current state of near irrelevance to the way history is popularly perceived.
Formulations of the Nation
In the mid-1980s Nidhi Eoseewong, the dominant figure in Thai historical scholarship over the last twenty years, published a paper titled “Two Hundred Years of Thai History and Future Directions,” which proposed a model for periodizing the production of Thai historiography (Nidhi 2002a). According to Nidhi, Thai historical scholarship can be divided into three distinct periods, each of which is defined by an “identity crisis” experienced by the Thai ruling elite. The first is the Thonburi-early Ratanakosin (“Bangkok”) period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries following the fall of the kingdom of Ayuthaya to the Burmese in 1767. This catastrophic event provoked Thai intellectuals to pose questions about the weakness of the Ayuthaya state, its system of administration, and even Thai cultural “values” and sense of “identity” which may have contributed to its downfall (2002a, 6). The answers to many of these questions were to be found in history, and for this reason there was an outpouring of historical work produced by scholars within and around the Thai court during that period. But with the stabilization of the Thai state under the early Chakri kings, this surge of interest in history gradually faded.
A second “identity crisis” occurred in the aftermath of the Pak Nam crisis of 1893, when the French seized the left bank of the Mekong River and threatened the Thai state with full-scale colonization. The Thai elite was once again forced to reassess itself and explain the weaknesses that had led to this disaster. It implemented massive reforms to the kingdom’s system of provincial administration and underwent a no less massive cultural revolution in attempting to imitate the standards of “civilization” demanded by the European colonial powers to avoid being branded “barbarians.” This era saw the birth of modern Thai historiography, much of it penned by or published on the authority of the “Father of Thai History,” King Chulalongkorn’s younger brother Prince Damrong Rachanubhab. However, with the passing of the colonial threat, the Great Powers’ acceptance of an independent “Siam” into the colonial order of inter-state relations, and the subsiding sense of “identity crisis” rising from the growing familiarity of the Thai elite with western culture through western education and visits to Europe, the flood of original historical scholarship of the Fifth and Sixth Reigns began to slow. Even after the overthrow of the Absolute Monarchy in 1932 there was no radical questioning of the Thai past. Indeed, there was a new interest in western history (2002a, 23).
The third and latest period of Thai historiography, according to Nidhi, followed Sarit’s coup of 1957 and the ensuing “American Era” (Anderson and Mendiones 1985). This was the era of capitalist economic development based on the advice of western economic advisers, the outbreak of a communist insurgency in Thailand and government’s alignment with the United States, the escalation of the Vietnam War and establishment of U.S. military bases, and the flood of American popular culture into Thailand. At the same time, Thai students in numbers greater than ever before were funded to study at American universities. All this led to a new identity crisis for the Thai upper class, which once again asked, “who are we, and who shall we be in the future?” (Nidhi 2002a, 27). This third crisis ushered in a new era of historical scholarship which questioned existing historical knowledge – works such as Jit Phumisak’s Marxist reworking of Thai history (2000), the re-reading of ancient inscriptions (Prasert Na Nakhon 1982), original work in prehistory (Srisak Vallibhodom 1981), the beginnings of the history of ethnic minorities, and general interest in the problem of “Thai identity.” As in the two earlier phases, and for much the same reasons, this latest surge of interest in history and the production of original historical work began to wane in the 1980s. With the defeat of the communist insurgency (hastened by the end of the Cold War) and a rapidly developing economy by late in the decade, the Thai state had achieved a position of greater security than at any time since the colonial threat at the turn of the nineteenth century. Growing familiarity with western culture and greater “cultural self-confidence” also helped relieve the identity crisis created by confrontation with western (particularly American) culture in the 1960s. A clear indicator of the declining interest in history was the dramatic fall of enrolments in history departments in universities around the country. (2002a, 35-6).
Thus for Nidhi, Thai historiography as it has been produced over the last two centuries originates out of a desire on the part of the Thai elite to define a Thai self that is periodically threatened by outsiders.
If the “Thai nation” is a relatively unproblematic concept in this study, it becomes more problematized in Nidhi’s work from the 1990s, where, for example, he looks at the role of the state in promoting Thai nationalism through primary school textbooks (citing Anderson’s Imagined Communities) (Nidhi 1995b, 47) or the construction of monuments. Later articles for the news weekly Matichon Sutsapda also criticize conceptions of the Thai nation devised by the state (Nidhi 2002b). Yet Nidhi’s consistent theme is not that the Thai nation is an empty “construction,” but rather that its definition has been too narrow and that it ought to be fully representative, in particular of “ordinary” Thai men and women.
The other figure who has had a major impact on the history of Thai nationalism is Thongchai Winichakul. Unlike Nidhi, Thongchai writes and publishes in both English and Thai, and for this reason he is better known outside the Thai scholarly community. His influential Siam Mapped (1994), which is also inspired by Anderson’s work, focuses on the construction in the late nineteenth century of a territorial conception of the Thai nation, what he terms the “geo-body.” In this and other works Thongchai’s approach is far more critical of the concept of the Thai nation than Nidhi’s. This derives in part from his direct involvement in one of the key events of modern Thai political history, the massacre of students by security forces and village militias at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976. Thongchai’s critique of the Thai nation is thus not simply a disinterested exercise in academic analysis, but at least partly a dialogue with 1976 – the Thai “nation” has blood on its hands.
In contrast to its status in public discourse, the nation in Thai historiography is not an overbearing, oppressive, or untouchable presence. Saichon’s recent study of the concept of the Thai nation and Thai identity in the work of the chief ideologue of the Phibun era, Luang Wichit Wathakan, is yet another work that attacks these notions, or at least the manner in which they have been defined and disseminated by the Thai state (Saichon 2002). Within the community of Thai historians, therefore, the nation can be criticized, challenged, ignored, redefined, or deconstructed out of existence, with little controversy.
The same can not, of course, be said of the dominant element in current formulations of the nation, the monarchy. The monarchy’s overwhelming political and cultural presence (Jory 2001) in the Thai polity today limits what can be said about a number of key historical events, among them the overthrow of the Absolute Monarchy in 1932, the death of Rama VIII, the present king’s elder brother, in 1946, and the massacre of students at Thammasat University in 1976. These events will have to await a future era in historical scholarship for any radically new interpretation to be expressed publicly.
However, the main problem in Thai historiography is not so much what cannot be said, but that which is said. This is the basis of Thongchai’s critique of what he terms “royalist-nationalist history” (prawatisat baep rachachatniyom). For Thongchai, this is the ideology which currently dominates historical thinking in Thailand and which leaves no space in the national narrative for what should be central episodes, such as the 6 October 1976 massacre (Thongchai 2001). Thongchai’s genealogy of this mode of Thai historiography is somewhat different from that of Nidhi. Thongchai locates the origins of “royalist-nationalist history” in the Pak Nam crisis of 1893. The central theme of the new historical genre that developed after this event was the defense of “Siam’s” independence against foreigners (especially the western powers or the Burmese). The heros of the new genre are the kings, not on account of their membership of an illustrious lineage or their supernatural powers, as in the old royal chronicles, but for their role in safeguarding (or winning back, in the case of King Naresuan) Siam’s independence. But rather than seeing in the 1893 incident the Siamese “lamb” being terrorized by the French “wolf” leading to the “loss” of part of “Thailand,” Thongchai provocatively argues that the incident should be interpreted as the “big wolf” of France and the “small wolf” of Siam fighting over the “lambs” of Lao and Cambodian territories (Thongchai 2001, 59). As he demonstrated earlier in Siam Mapped (1994), Thai nationalist historiography has represented this incident by projecting modern notions of “nation” and “national territorial sovereignty” onto a situation in which state relations existed on the basis of feudal tribute and overlordship arrangements between otherwise “autonomous” polities. The success of royalist-nationalist historiography has been such that the representation of this event by the Bangkok aristocrats and nobility at the turn of the century has become a central myth of the Thai nation. While Prince Damrong and other members of the Thai court in the Fifth and Sixth Reigns gave birth to this new historiographical genre, it was ironically the monarchy’s enemies, the promoters of the 1932 coup, who ensured the victory of this genre over all others by its dissemination in barely altered form to the Thai population through the compulsory education system and state media. The outcome has been a greater dominance of royalist-nationalist historiography than could have been imagined in the era of the Absolute Monarchy (Thongchai 2001, 62).
While one might have expected this dominant historical narrative to have been shaken by the democratic uprising of 14 October 1973, Thongchai points out an irony of Thai history that 1973 “liberated” the dormant energies not only of “the people,” but also of the monarchy, which has subsequently enjoyed its greatest levels of popularity since the death of Chulalongkorn in 1910. Royalist-nationalist historiography thus became democratized. Its practitioners were no longer the aristocracy, but a new breed of bourgeois academics critical of the military regime. Yet a further irony is that within the plot of royalist-nationalist historiography, the instigators of the 1932 coup against the Absolute Monarchy, the Peoples Party, have now acquired the dubious reputation of being the originators of military authoritarian rule. In perhaps the supreme irony, Rama VII, the last absolutist ruler in Thai history, has become the officially recognized “Father of Thai Democracy”! Pridi Phanomyong, the leading intellectual within the coup group, has been rehabilitated to a certain extent, but shorn of his socialist ideals and with his loyalty to the throne intact (Thongchai 2001, 62-3).
For Thongchai, then, “royalist-nationalist historiography” is the strait-jacket which restrains any attempt to present a revisionist interpretation of Thai history. But more than this, although the point is understated for reasons mentioned above, this version of history is directly implicated in the massacre of October 1976.
If the monarchy is an ongoing constraint on the possibilities of Thai national historiography, it might be thought that the obstacles to a representation of a more regionally and ethnically diverse nation have been coming down in recent years. For a long time, Bangkok-centric discourses of Thai national identity determined the representation of the country’s regional and ethnic diversity. But with the improved national security situation of the 1990s following the end of the Cold War, Thailand’s “diversity” (khwam lak lai) has acquired a more positive value and has finally been embraced by the state itself – up to a point. The major impetus to this change was the middle-class “uprising” of 1992 that led to the democratization of the Thai political regime and the acceptance of the legitimacy of political pluralism. The corresponding erosion of the bureaucratic polity and the increased significance of the National Assembly and elected politicians have given increased political representation to regional groups. Use of regional dialects and appeals to local cultural identity, once viewed as threats to national security, are now the normal stuff of political campaigning. The new 1997 Constitution provides numerous formal protections for cultural minorities. The tourism industry, strategically important to Thailand’s economic development given its capacity to attract foreign exchange with minimal capital investment, promotes ethnic and cultural diversity as a key “resource” for the industry’s further development. Perhaps most important of all, since the bourgeois revolution and the development of consumerism beyond Bangkok, Thailand’s population is being conceptualized as a mass of culturally, linguistically, ethnically diverse markets. Companies and their advertisers will speak the language of whatever market they wish to target, thereby lending new legitimacy to such diversity, but within the parameters of the free market economy and the demands of consumerism.
The modern historiography of Thailand’s cultural minorities dates from at least the 1960s, but has greatly expanded since the 1980s and 1990s in the more liberal political environment. However, as Thongchai has pointed out (1995), for the most part this historiography rarely departs from the framework created by nationalist historiography from the centre. Indeed it could be argued that “local history” (prawatisat thongthin), as it is known, if anything affirms the truths of nationalist history rather than challenging them. The fact that Chiang Mai or Nakhon Sri Thammarat can claim to have existed as independent “Thai” states prior to Sukhothai, the first officially recognized state in the national narrative, is no longer controversial because Thai sovereignty over these regions has not been in question since the colonial period. However, the case of Patani is the clear exception. The historiography of the state of Patani written by local historians in both Malay and Thai are linked in spirit (if not directly politically) to the separatist movements that have sought to free Patani from Thai political control since its integration into the Thai state during the Fifth Reign and the deposition and imprisonment of its last sultan, Abdul Kedir. Davisakd has described the on-going struggle between Thai centralist and Patani local historians for discursive control of Patani’s past, which relates directly to the question of Patani’s sovereignty (Davisakd 2002a).
The expansion of tertiary education into the provinces from the 1960s and the changed political atmosphere and value surrounding cultural diversity has led to more research being conducted into ethnic and regional groups. Yet these studies have their own regulations regarding what can and cannot be said. In 2000 Arkhom Detthongkham from Nakhon Sri Thammarat’s Ratchabhat College published an ethnographic study of the culture of bull-fighting in southern Thailand. The study is a model of what local studies should be, capturing the “flavor” of the aggressive masculine culture of the south through the metaphor of the bull-fight (Arkhom 2000). The research was picked up by the national media – this was a time when the southern-dominated Democrats Party was in government – and within days Arkhom was forced into hiding following threats by local influential figures against what was interpreted as the study’s denigration of southern Thai culture. Here it is not the state, the traditional villain, but local politicians with otherwise prominent roles in the narrative of democratization and decentralization of the 1980s and 1990s who are setting the limits to intellectual freedom.
In other cases, local histories which seek to go beyond a centrist, statist-oriented version of Thai history highlight the role of the state in unexpected ways. In 1995 Matichon Group published a master’s thesis written by Saipin Kaewngamprasert on “Thao Suranari,” said to be the heroine who helped suppress a Lao “revolt” in Nakhon Ratchasima (Khorat) in the reign of Rama III. A monument to Thao Suranari was constructed by the new government in 1933 shortly after its suppression of the royalist Boworadet rebellion which had used Khorat as a base – further adding to the “rebel” city’s infamous reputation. The statue of Thao Suranari (or “Ya Mo” as she is more affectionately known) has since become not only a cultural emblem but also a religious landmark for the people of Khorat and, to a certain extent, the northeastern region generally. The crux of Saipin’s thesis is that there is no evidence from the reign of Rama III to indicate the existence, let alone heroism, of Thao Suranari. The implication was that the cult of Thao Suranari was constructed by the government to ensure the loyalty of the northeastern region to the Thai state, a loyalty that remained in question up to the 1960s. This thesis was interpreted as a slight on the people of Khorat. Demonstrations were organized by various groups in Khorat, goaded on by local politicians demanding, among other things, that the book be burned, that Saipin apologize to the monument, and that her master’s degree be withdrawn. Eventually Matichon was forced to recall the book; Saipin went into hiding and was later transferred from her school in Nakhon Ratchasima to another province. The episode has many lessons. It is an irony that what started out as a state cult has now become a crucial element in contemporary discourses of regional cultural identity. Moreover, the power of regionalism, so long suppressed by the Thai state, now resorts to the same tactics of intimidation used by the state when its foundations are questioned by academic scholarship.
Regional Relations
A new problem for Thai historiography, one that a number of Asian nations face, is the impact of nationalist history on relations with other countries in the region. During the 1990s, Thailand’s economic links with its neighbours – Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar in particular – reached a level not seen since prior to the colonial era. The impetus for these developments was Thailand’s capitalist expansion fueled by record economic growth from the second half of the 1980s. A new element in Thailand’s presence in these countries is its media, especially in the form of television dramas and movies. Over the last decade a number of Thai media productions, many of them with an historical theme, have led to diplomatic incidents. Relations with Myanmar, already strained over a number of security issues, deteriorated further after the Burmese regime criticized the hit 1998 movie Bang Rajan for its depiction of the Burmese as brutal marauders. The villagers of Bang Rajan are an icon in Thai nationalist history for having sacrificed their lives fighting the Burmese, who went on to besiege and eventually sack the capital Ayuthaya in 1767. The movie was produced in the wake of a resurgence of Thai nationalism following the economic crisis of 1997-8. The representation of the Burmese in another historical film drama, the 2002 Suriyothai, supposedly inspired by a dream of the Queen, is little better. In a response that same year, Burmese academic Ma Thin Win, presumably with the approval of the Burmese government, published a series of articles in The New Light of Myanmar critical of the sixteenth-century Thai king Naresuan, who is credited with saving the Thai “nation” from Burmese occupation. For several days Thai army radio stations broadcast a barrage of anti-Burmese commentary, even accusing the regime of slandering the Thai monarchy. The incident was only resolved after the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister were forced to intervene.
One major contributing problem is the historical textbooks on which these productions are largely based. These are written for the most part within the royalist-nationalist genre described by Thongchai that projects the national framework back onto the pre-nationalist past. The colonial nature of the pre-national Thai state – bringing into its political orbit the Lao territories, Cambodia, and the northern Malay states – is unquestioned. The textbooks are replete with often humiliating images of the Thai kingdom’s subjection of its neighbors. In one famous episode, King Naresuan is supposed to have beheaded the King of Lawaek (Cambodia) and bathed his feet with his blood. In another, the Lao Prince Anuwong, leader of a “revolt” against Thai rule in the 1820s and a nationalist hero in modern Lao historical discourse, is paraded through Bangkok in a cage before his eventual execution.
As Thailand’s relations with its neighbors becomes more intensive as a result of the country’s integration and increasing economic interaction within ASEAN, this historiography and its expression in Thailand’s exported cultural products will inevitably come under greater scrutiny and pressure to respond to contemporary political and economic demands.
Methodology and Consumption
The passions that nationalist history can stir among nations are based upon history’s claim to speak meaningfully of the origins of the nation. The entry of postmodernism onto Thailand’s academic scene challenges this claim. In September 2002 Giles Ungkhakorn, son of one of the heroes of the democracy movement of the 1970s, Puey Ungphakorn, and a leading leftist activist-intellectual in the country, published a short article in the business daily, Krungthep Thurakij (September 4), ostensibly relating his attendence at a “cremation ceremony for postmodernism.” The theme of the article was that postmodernism was little more than a rarified academic indulgence carried on by academics in ivory towers far removed from the struggles of the poor. Postmodernism had nothing to offer the “peoples’ movements” struggling for the rights of the poor against exploitation. On the contrary, it would be a positively dangerous influence on the country’s “progressive forces” if this academic “opiate” were imbibed by students and NGOs. The article set off vigorous debate among Thai academics and intellectuals both in Thailand and overseas via the internet and email, which are now challenging the popular print media as the primary site of intellectual debate. Ungphakorn had touched a raw nerve – the struggle between Marxism and postmodernism for the soul of the “critical” intellectual.
Postmodernism’s history in Thailand started in the early 1980s. But it is only since the late 1990s, in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the blow this caused to Marxist-inspired critical scholarship, that postmodernism has emerged as a serious potential rival. Interestingly, political science has been the discipline where postmodernism’s influence has been felt the most, and Thammasat University has been its preferred home. Chaiwat Satha-Anand was one of the first to use a Foucauldian approach in his Ph.D. thesis, “The Non-Violent Prince” (1981), and Foucault’s influence is also apparent in his recent history of the conflict between the Thai state and separatists in Patani (Chaiwat 2002). Chairat Charoensinolan’s study of the discourse of development (2000) has been the most influential work in recent years on the history of Thai economic development. Chairat also uses Foucault to criticize western discourses of development that have dominated economic thinking and policy making since the first Economic and Social Development Plan of 1961. He has since published another book on semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and their use in political science (Chairat 2002). Another Thammasat-based political scientist, Kasian Tejapira, of the October 1976 leftist generation, has grafted a postmodern approach onto his former Marxist-oriented views, particular Baudrillard’s work on consumption, semiology, and identity (Kasian 2001).
History appears to have felt postmodernism’s impact less than other disciplines. The historian whose approach owes most to postmodernism is Thongchai, as is clearly evident in his Siam Mapped. Among the younger generation of historians, Davisakd Puaksom has recently completed a Thailand Research Fund-sponsored project on the history of western medicine in Thailand, in which he draws on Foucault’s work on medical discourse and institutions and their control of the body (Davisakd 2002b).
The problem postmodernism poses for Thai historiography is its undermining of any attempt – whether liberal, Marxist, or royalist – to claim to represent a “true” interpretation of the Thai past. However, one of the major focuses of postmodern critique in the West, its questioning of reason, modernity, and the Enlightenment, has received comparatively little attention in Thai historical scholarship. While there have been attempts to show an indigenous origin for the development of reason in Thailand (Nidhi 1995a), the explanation of the coming of reason and modernity to the Thai kingdom has been dominated by the theory of the impact of western colonial power in the second half of the nineteenth century. There is much room for reinterpretation of this accepted truth.
Where postmodernism has been particularly influential in historical circles has been in its critique of the notion that historical truth may be attained through the use of reason and the rules of evidence, or what was formerly known as the “historical method,” as influenced by the positivist “scientific method.” Truth in historical discourse is a no more than a political construction of its author. But as Nidhi (among others) has pointed out, if all there is is “construction” and “deconstruction,” what else is left to do? (Nidhi 2002b, 35). The nation can easily be written away as a constructed fiction.
While these debates may consume professional historians, academic history today has less influence in the public sphere than it has had at any time since Prince Damrong initiated professional history writing at the turn of the twentieth century. What is today consumed as history by the Thai public consists of two forms: the royalist-nationalist history taught in the schools and popularized through bureaucratic channels; and products of the commercial media in the form of movies, TV dramas, and even advertisements, which are gradually becoming the dominant mode of reproduction of historical knowledge. While the history produced by commercial media is often based closely on the officially approved history of school textbooks, as was the 2002 movie Suriyothai, this is not always the case. One very interesting example is a popular genre of TV drama that plays on the theme of a contemporary character who has “slipped back” into the Ayuthaya or early Bangkok era, or a historical character who has “fallen” into present-day Thailand. Recent examples include the Channel 3 productions “Nirat song phop” (Journey through Two Existences) and “Plai thian” (The End of the Candle), which is an imaginative adaptation of episodes from the classic tale Khun Chang Khun Phaen. While partly inspired by the international success of historical fantasy movies such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the genre also seems designed to fulfil the desire of contemporary generations to overcome the disjuncture between an “indigenous” premodern past (experienced largely through the official history of school textbooks, state ceremony, and representations of national culture) and the westernized, modern present. History presented through the media, therefore, responds to the tastes of its consumers in an increasingly competitive cultural marketplace. Whatever the case, these televised historical dramas attract a popularity and public interest out of all proportion to the more traditional history of the school textbooks.
The issue of the contemporary lack of relevance of professional history was raised by Nidhi as early as 1986 when he argued that the very success of the professionalization of history in the universities since the 1960s was responsible for its declining popularity during the 1980s as historians grew estranged from the reading public and caught up in their “ivory towers” (Nidhi 2002a, 37). Nidhi’s solution to this problem, like many other Thai public intellectuals, was to write shorter, more popularly accessible pieces for popular news-magazines and the press in the hopes of influencing a greater section of the public. An extension of this idea has been his establishment of the “Midnight University” in 1997-8, a loosely organized “open” university dedicated to a higher education free of the problems of the state system and its narrow, instrumentalist service to the state and increasingly the business sector. The university has its own website, which has quickly become a major forum for academic debate in the humanities and social sciences (Mahawithayalai Thiangkhun 2003).
The dominance of the Damrong school of history (or Thongchai’s royalist-nationalist historiography) has from the early twentieth century relied to a great extent on the technology of print and the state’s control of its dissemination through the education system and mass media. It is possible that the greatest challenge to this mode of national history will come not from new academic methodologies but from new forms of dissemination and consumption of movies, TV dramas, and internet debate by new mass markets. Patrick Jory is coordinator of the Regional Studies Program at Walailak University, Nakhon Sri Thammarat, Thailand.
I am grateful for comments on the subject of this paper by my colleague Davisakd Puaksom. However responsibility for the paper’s final form including its weaknesses is of course mine alone.
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Review Essay / March 2003
Problems in Contemporary Thai Nationalist Historiography
Patrick Jory
There are certain periods when historical discourses and their politics – who controls them, the mode by which they are disseminated, how competing histories are suppressed – become central to intellectual or public debate. In Thailand it has been some time since history provoked that kind of interest. Nationalist historiography appears to have achieved a position of hegemony that would be remarkable were it not for the fact that it apparently arouses little opposition. How secure, then, is this political and scholarly enterprise a hundred years after it was founded?
This article briefly outlines a number of problems for contemporary Thai nationalist historiography. The first of these is the subject of these narratives itself, the Thai nation. How has the historiography of the Thai nation fared, particularly since the critique of the concept of “nation” in the 1980s provoked by works such as Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition? Second, what is the role of the monarchy in these narratives? How does the monarchy’s current political and cultural influence limit the possibilities of Thai historiography? A third problem has been the representation of ethnic and regional minorities, which has challenged the previously unproblematic understanding of a unified, culturally homogeneous nation. A new issue that has appeared since the Thailand’s economic expansion of the 1990s is the effect of Thai nationalist historiography – as represented in TV dramas and movies, as well as in school texts – on relations with Thailand’s neighbors, which have led to diplomatic tensions. The next problem, for the moment, concerns mainly the professional historians of the academy: the influence of postmodern theory since the 1990s and its undermining of history’s truth claims. If Thai history is simply one story among countless others with no superior claim to authority over the past, how does it deserve its privileged status? Finally, there is the issue of professional history’s current state of near irrelevance to the way history is popularly perceived.
Formulations of the Nation
In the mid-1980s Nidhi Eoseewong, the dominant figure in Thai historical scholarship over the last twenty years, published a paper titled “Two Hundred Years of Thai History and Future Directions,” which proposed a model for periodizing the production of Thai historiography (Nidhi 2002a). According to Nidhi, Thai historical scholarship can be divided into three distinct periods, each of which is defined by an “identity crisis” experienced by the Thai ruling elite. The first is the Thonburi-early Ratanakosin (“Bangkok”) period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries following the fall of the kingdom of Ayuthaya to the Burmese in 1767. This catastrophic event provoked Thai intellectuals to pose questions about the weakness of the Ayuthaya state, its system of administration, and even Thai cultural “values” and sense of “identity” which may have contributed to its downfall (2002a, 6). The answers to many of these questions were to be found in history, and for this reason there was an outpouring of historical work produced by scholars within and around the Thai court during that period. But with the stabilization of the Thai state under the early Chakri kings, this surge of interest in history gradually faded.
A second “identity crisis” occurred in the aftermath of the Pak Nam crisis of 1893, when the French seized the left bank of the Mekong River and threatened the Thai state with full-scale colonization. The Thai elite was once again forced to reassess itself and explain the weaknesses that had led to this disaster. It implemented massive reforms to the kingdom’s system of provincial administration and underwent a no less massive cultural revolution in attempting to imitate the standards of “civilization” demanded by the European colonial powers to avoid being branded “barbarians.” This era saw the birth of modern Thai historiography, much of it penned by or published on the authority of the “Father of Thai History,” King Chulalongkorn’s younger brother Prince Damrong Rachanubhab. However, with the passing of the colonial threat, the Great Powers’ acceptance of an independent “Siam” into the colonial order of inter-state relations, and the subsiding sense of “identity crisis” rising from the growing familiarity of the Thai elite with western culture through western education and visits to Europe, the flood of original historical scholarship of the Fifth and Sixth Reigns began to slow. Even after the overthrow of the Absolute Monarchy in 1932 there was no radical questioning of the Thai past. Indeed, there was a new interest in western history (2002a, 23).
The third and latest period of Thai historiography, according to Nidhi, followed Sarit’s coup of 1957 and the ensuing “American Era” (Anderson and Mendiones 1985). This was the era of capitalist economic development based on the advice of western economic advisers, the outbreak of a communist insurgency in Thailand and government’s alignment with the United States, the escalation of the Vietnam War and establishment of U.S. military bases, and the flood of American popular culture into Thailand. At the same time, Thai students in numbers greater than ever before were funded to study at American universities. All this led to a new identity crisis for the Thai upper class, which once again asked, “who are we, and who shall we be in the future?” (Nidhi 2002a, 27). This third crisis ushered in a new era of historical scholarship which questioned existing historical knowledge – works such as Jit Phumisak’s Marxist reworking of Thai history (2000), the re-reading of ancient inscriptions (Prasert Na Nakhon 1982), original work in prehistory (Srisak Vallibhodom 1981), the beginnings of the history of ethnic minorities, and general interest in the problem of “Thai identity.” As in the two earlier phases, and for much the same reasons, this latest surge of interest in history and the production of original historical work began to wane in the 1980s. With the defeat of the communist insurgency (hastened by the end of the Cold War) and a rapidly developing economy by late in the decade, the Thai state had achieved a position of greater security than at any time since the colonial threat at the turn of the nineteenth century. Growing familiarity with western culture and greater “cultural self-confidence” also helped relieve the identity crisis created by confrontation with western (particularly American) culture in the 1960s. A clear indicator of the declining interest in history was the dramatic fall of enrolments in history departments in universities around the country. (2002a, 35-6).
Thus for Nidhi, Thai historiography as it has been produced over the last two centuries originates out of a desire on the part of the Thai elite to define a Thai self that is periodically threatened by outsiders.
If the “Thai nation” is a relatively unproblematic concept in this study, it becomes more problematized in Nidhi’s work from the 1990s, where, for example, he looks at the role of the state in promoting Thai nationalism through primary school textbooks (citing Anderson’s Imagined Communities) (Nidhi 1995b, 47) or the construction of monuments. Later articles for the news weekly Matichon Sutsapda also criticize conceptions of the Thai nation devised by the state (Nidhi 2002b). Yet Nidhi’s consistent theme is not that the Thai nation is an empty “construction,” but rather that its definition has been too narrow and that it ought to be fully representative, in particular of “ordinary” Thai men and women.
The other figure who has had a major impact on the history of Thai nationalism is Thongchai Winichakul. Unlike Nidhi, Thongchai writes and publishes in both English and Thai, and for this reason he is better known outside the Thai scholarly community. His influential Siam Mapped (1994), which is also inspired by Anderson’s work, focuses on the construction in the late nineteenth century of a territorial conception of the Thai nation, what he terms the “geo-body.” In this and other works Thongchai’s approach is far more critical of the concept of the Thai nation than Nidhi’s. This derives in part from his direct involvement in one of the key events of modern Thai political history, the massacre of students by security forces and village militias at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976. Thongchai’s critique of the Thai nation is thus not simply a disinterested exercise in academic analysis, but at least partly a dialogue with 1976 – the Thai “nation” has blood on its hands.
In contrast to its status in public discourse, the nation in Thai historiography is not an overbearing, oppressive, or untouchable presence. Saichon’s recent study of the concept of the Thai nation and Thai identity in the work of the chief ideologue of the Phibun era, Luang Wichit Wathakan, is yet another work that attacks these notions, or at least the manner in which they have been defined and disseminated by the Thai state (Saichon 2002). Within the community of Thai historians, therefore, the nation can be criticized, challenged, ignored, redefined, or deconstructed out of existence, with little controversy.
The same can not, of course, be said of the dominant element in current formulations of the nation, the monarchy. The monarchy’s overwhelming political and cultural presence (Jory 2001) in the Thai polity today limits what can be said about a number of key historical events, among them the overthrow of the Absolute Monarchy in 1932, the death of Rama VIII, the present king’s elder brother, in 1946, and the massacre of students at Thammasat University in 1976. These events will have to await a future era in historical scholarship for any radically new interpretation to be expressed publicly.
However, the main problem in Thai historiography is not so much what cannot be said, but that which is said. This is the basis of Thongchai’s critique of what he terms “royalist-nationalist history” (prawatisat baep rachachatniyom). For Thongchai, this is the ideology which currently dominates historical thinking in Thailand and which leaves no space in the national narrative for what should be central episodes, such as the 6 October 1976 massacre (Thongchai 2001). Thongchai’s genealogy of this mode of Thai historiography is somewhat different from that of Nidhi. Thongchai locates the origins of “royalist-nationalist history” in the Pak Nam crisis of 1893. The central theme of the new historical genre that developed after this event was the defense of “Siam’s” independence against foreigners (especially the western powers or the Burmese). The heros of the new genre are the kings, not on account of their membership of an illustrious lineage or their supernatural powers, as in the old royal chronicles, but for their role in safeguarding (or winning back, in the case of King Naresuan) Siam’s independence. But rather than seeing in the 1893 incident the Siamese “lamb” being terrorized by the French “wolf” leading to the “loss” of part of “Thailand,” Thongchai provocatively argues that the incident should be interpreted as the “big wolf” of France and the “small wolf” of Siam fighting over the “lambs” of Lao and Cambodian territories (Thongchai 2001, 59). As he demonstrated earlier in Siam Mapped (1994), Thai nationalist historiography has represented this incident by projecting modern notions of “nation” and “national territorial sovereignty” onto a situation in which state relations existed on the basis of feudal tribute and overlordship arrangements between otherwise “autonomous” polities. The success of royalist-nationalist historiography has been such that the representation of this event by the Bangkok aristocrats and nobility at the turn of the century has become a central myth of the Thai nation. While Prince Damrong and other members of the Thai court in the Fifth and Sixth Reigns gave birth to this new historiographical genre, it was ironically the monarchy’s enemies, the promoters of the 1932 coup, who ensured the victory of this genre over all others by its dissemination in barely altered form to the Thai population through the compulsory education system and state media. The outcome has been a greater dominance of royalist-nationalist historiography than could have been imagined in the era of the Absolute Monarchy (Thongchai 2001, 62).
While one might have expected this dominant historical narrative to have been shaken by the democratic uprising of 14 October 1973, Thongchai points out an irony of Thai history that 1973 “liberated” the dormant energies not only of “the people,” but also of the monarchy, which has subsequently enjoyed its greatest levels of popularity since the death of Chulalongkorn in 1910. Royalist-nationalist historiography thus became democratized. Its practitioners were no longer the aristocracy, but a new breed of bourgeois academics critical of the military regime. Yet a further irony is that within the plot of royalist-nationalist historiography, the instigators of the 1932 coup against the Absolute Monarchy, the Peoples Party, have now acquired the dubious reputation of being the originators of military authoritarian rule. In perhaps the supreme irony, Rama VII, the last absolutist ruler in Thai history, has become the officially recognized “Father of Thai Democracy”! Pridi Phanomyong, the leading intellectual within the coup group, has been rehabilitated to a certain extent, but shorn of his socialist ideals and with his loyalty to the throne intact (Thongchai 2001, 62-3).
For Thongchai, then, “royalist-nationalist historiography” is the strait-jacket which restrains any attempt to present a revisionist interpretation of Thai history. But more than this, although the point is understated for reasons mentioned above, this version of history is directly implicated in the massacre of October 1976.
If the monarchy is an ongoing constraint on the possibilities of Thai national historiography, it might be thought that the obstacles to a representation of a more regionally and ethnically diverse nation have been coming down in recent years. For a long time, Bangkok-centric discourses of Thai national identity determined the representation of the country’s regional and ethnic diversity. But with the improved national security situation of the 1990s following the end of the Cold War, Thailand’s “diversity” (khwam lak lai) has acquired a more positive value and has finally been embraced by the state itself – up to a point. The major impetus to this change was the middle-class “uprising” of 1992 that led to the democratization of the Thai political regime and the acceptance of the legitimacy of political pluralism. The corresponding erosion of the bureaucratic polity and the increased significance of the National Assembly and elected politicians have given increased political representation to regional groups. Use of regional dialects and appeals to local cultural identity, once viewed as threats to national security, are now the normal stuff of political campaigning. The new 1997 Constitution provides numerous formal protections for cultural minorities. The tourism industry, strategically important to Thailand’s economic development given its capacity to attract foreign exchange with minimal capital investment, promotes ethnic and cultural diversity as a key “resource” for the industry’s further development. Perhaps most important of all, since the bourgeois revolution and the development of consumerism beyond Bangkok, Thailand’s population is being conceptualized as a mass of culturally, linguistically, ethnically diverse markets. Companies and their advertisers will speak the language of whatever market they wish to target, thereby lending new legitimacy to such diversity, but within the parameters of the free market economy and the demands of consumerism.
The modern historiography of Thailand’s cultural minorities dates from at least the 1960s, but has greatly expanded since the 1980s and 1990s in the more liberal political environment. However, as Thongchai has pointed out (1995), for the most part this historiography rarely departs from the framework created by nationalist historiography from the centre. Indeed it could be argued that “local history” (prawatisat thongthin), as it is known, if anything affirms the truths of nationalist history rather than challenging them. The fact that Chiang Mai or Nakhon Sri Thammarat can claim to have existed as independent “Thai” states prior to Sukhothai, the first officially recognized state in the national narrative, is no longer controversial because Thai sovereignty over these regions has not been in question since the colonial period. However, the case of Patani is the clear exception. The historiography of the state of Patani written by local historians in both Malay and Thai are linked in spirit (if not directly politically) to the separatist movements that have sought to free Patani from Thai political control since its integration into the Thai state during the Fifth Reign and the deposition and imprisonment of its last sultan, Abdul Kedir. Davisakd has described the on-going struggle between Thai centralist and Patani local historians for discursive control of Patani’s past, which relates directly to the question of Patani’s sovereignty (Davisakd 2002a).
The expansion of tertiary education into the provinces from the 1960s and the changed political atmosphere and value surrounding cultural diversity has led to more research being conducted into ethnic and regional groups. Yet these studies have their own regulations regarding what can and cannot be said. In 2000 Arkhom Detthongkham from Nakhon Sri Thammarat’s Ratchabhat College published an ethnographic study of the culture of bull-fighting in southern Thailand. The study is a model of what local studies should be, capturing the “flavor” of the aggressive masculine culture of the south through the metaphor of the bull-fight (Arkhom 2000). The research was picked up by the national media – this was a time when the southern-dominated Democrats Party was in government – and within days Arkhom was forced into hiding following threats by local influential figures against what was interpreted as the study’s denigration of southern Thai culture. Here it is not the state, the traditional villain, but local politicians with otherwise prominent roles in the narrative of democratization and decentralization of the 1980s and 1990s who are setting the limits to intellectual freedom.
In other cases, local histories which seek to go beyond a centrist, statist-oriented version of Thai history highlight the role of the state in unexpected ways. In 1995 Matichon Group published a master’s thesis written by Saipin Kaewngamprasert on “Thao Suranari,” said to be the heroine who helped suppress a Lao “revolt” in Nakhon Ratchasima (Khorat) in the reign of Rama III. A monument to Thao Suranari was constructed by the new government in 1933 shortly after its suppression of the royalist Boworadet rebellion which had used Khorat as a base – further adding to the “rebel” city’s infamous reputation. The statue of Thao Suranari (or “Ya Mo” as she is more affectionately known) has since become not only a cultural emblem but also a religious landmark for the people of Khorat and, to a certain extent, the northeastern region generally. The crux of Saipin’s thesis is that there is no evidence from the reign of Rama III to indicate the existence, let alone heroism, of Thao Suranari. The implication was that the cult of Thao Suranari was constructed by the government to ensure the loyalty of the northeastern region to the Thai state, a loyalty that remained in question up to the 1960s. This thesis was interpreted as a slight on the people of Khorat. Demonstrations were organized by various groups in Khorat, goaded on by local politicians demanding, among other things, that the book be burned, that Saipin apologize to the monument, and that her master’s degree be withdrawn. Eventually Matichon was forced to recall the book; Saipin went into hiding and was later transferred from her school in Nakhon Ratchasima to another province. The episode has many lessons. It is an irony that what started out as a state cult has now become a crucial element in contemporary discourses of regional cultural identity. Moreover, the power of regionalism, so long suppressed by the Thai state, now resorts to the same tactics of intimidation used by the state when its foundations are questioned by academic scholarship.
Regional Relations
A new problem for Thai historiography, one that a number of Asian nations face, is the impact of nationalist history on relations with other countries in the region. During the 1990s, Thailand’s economic links with its neighbours – Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar in particular – reached a level not seen since prior to the colonial era. The impetus for these developments was Thailand’s capitalist expansion fueled by record economic growth from the second half of the 1980s. A new element in Thailand’s presence in these countries is its media, especially in the form of television dramas and movies. Over the last decade a number of Thai media productions, many of them with an historical theme, have led to diplomatic incidents. Relations with Myanmar, already strained over a number of security issues, deteriorated further after the Burmese regime criticized the hit 1998 movie Bang Rajan for its depiction of the Burmese as brutal marauders. The villagers of Bang Rajan are an icon in Thai nationalist history for having sacrificed their lives fighting the Burmese, who went on to besiege and eventually sack the capital Ayuthaya in 1767. The movie was produced in the wake of a resurgence of Thai nationalism following the economic crisis of 1997-8. The representation of the Burmese in another historical film drama, the 2002 Suriyothai, supposedly inspired by a dream of the Queen, is little better. In a response that same year, Burmese academic Ma Thin Win, presumably with the approval of the Burmese government, published a series of articles in The New Light of Myanmar critical of the sixteenth-century Thai king Naresuan, who is credited with saving the Thai “nation” from Burmese occupation. For several days Thai army radio stations broadcast a barrage of anti-Burmese commentary, even accusing the regime of slandering the Thai monarchy. The incident was only resolved after the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister were forced to intervene.
One major contributing problem is the historical textbooks on which these productions are largely based. These are written for the most part within the royalist-nationalist genre described by Thongchai that projects the national framework back onto the pre-nationalist past. The colonial nature of the pre-national Thai state – bringing into its political orbit the Lao territories, Cambodia, and the northern Malay states – is unquestioned. The textbooks are replete with often humiliating images of the Thai kingdom’s subjection of its neighbors. In one famous episode, King Naresuan is supposed to have beheaded the King of Lawaek (Cambodia) and bathed his feet with his blood. In another, the Lao Prince Anuwong, leader of a “revolt” against Thai rule in the 1820s and a nationalist hero in modern Lao historical discourse, is paraded through Bangkok in a cage before his eventual execution.
As Thailand’s relations with its neighbors becomes more intensive as a result of the country’s integration and increasing economic interaction within ASEAN, this historiography and its expression in Thailand’s exported cultural products will inevitably come under greater scrutiny and pressure to respond to contemporary political and economic demands.
Methodology and Consumption
The passions that nationalist history can stir among nations are based upon history’s claim to speak meaningfully of the origins of the nation. The entry of postmodernism onto Thailand’s academic scene challenges this claim. In September 2002 Giles Ungkhakorn, son of one of the heroes of the democracy movement of the 1970s, Puey Ungphakorn, and a leading leftist activist-intellectual in the country, published a short article in the business daily, Krungthep Thurakij (September 4), ostensibly relating his attendence at a “cremation ceremony for postmodernism.” The theme of the article was that postmodernism was little more than a rarified academic indulgence carried on by academics in ivory towers far removed from the struggles of the poor. Postmodernism had nothing to offer the “peoples’ movements” struggling for the rights of the poor against exploitation. On the contrary, it would be a positively dangerous influence on the country’s “progressive forces” if this academic “opiate” were imbibed by students and NGOs. The article set off vigorous debate among Thai academics and intellectuals both in Thailand and overseas via the internet and email, which are now challenging the popular print media as the primary site of intellectual debate. Ungphakorn had touched a raw nerve – the struggle between Marxism and postmodernism for the soul of the “critical” intellectual.
Postmodernism’s history in Thailand started in the early 1980s. But it is only since the late 1990s, in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the blow this caused to Marxist-inspired critical scholarship, that postmodernism has emerged as a serious potential rival. Interestingly, political science has been the discipline where postmodernism’s influence has been felt the most, and Thammasat University has been its preferred home. Chaiwat Satha-Anand was one of the first to use a Foucauldian approach in his Ph.D. thesis, “The Non-Violent Prince” (1981), and Foucault’s influence is also apparent in his recent history of the conflict between the Thai state and separatists in Patani (Chaiwat 2002). Chairat Charoensinolan’s study of the discourse of development (2000) has been the most influential work in recent years on the history of Thai economic development. Chairat also uses Foucault to criticize western discourses of development that have dominated economic thinking and policy making since the first Economic and Social Development Plan of 1961. He has since published another book on semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and their use in political science (Chairat 2002). Another Thammasat-based political scientist, Kasian Tejapira, of the October 1976 leftist generation, has grafted a postmodern approach onto his former Marxist-oriented views, particular Baudrillard’s work on consumption, semiology, and identity (Kasian 2001).
History appears to have felt postmodernism’s impact less than other disciplines. The historian whose approach owes most to postmodernism is Thongchai, as is clearly evident in his Siam Mapped. Among the younger generation of historians, Davisakd Puaksom has recently completed a Thailand Research Fund-sponsored project on the history of western medicine in Thailand, in which he draws on Foucault’s work on medical discourse and institutions and their control of the body (Davisakd 2002b).
The problem postmodernism poses for Thai historiography is its undermining of any attempt – whether liberal, Marxist, or royalist – to claim to represent a “true” interpretation of the Thai past. However, one of the major focuses of postmodern critique in the West, its questioning of reason, modernity, and the Enlightenment, has received comparatively little attention in Thai historical scholarship. While there have been attempts to show an indigenous origin for the development of reason in Thailand (Nidhi 1995a), the explanation of the coming of reason and modernity to the Thai kingdom has been dominated by the theory of the impact of western colonial power in the second half of the nineteenth century. There is much room for reinterpretation of this accepted truth.
Where postmodernism has been particularly influential in historical circles has been in its critique of the notion that historical truth may be attained through the use of reason and the rules of evidence, or what was formerly known as the “historical method,” as influenced by the positivist “scientific method.” Truth in historical discourse is a no more than a political construction of its author. But as Nidhi (among others) has pointed out, if all there is is “construction” and “deconstruction,” what else is left to do? (Nidhi 2002b, 35). The nation can easily be written away as a constructed fiction.
While these debates may consume professional historians, academic history today has less influence in the public sphere than it has had at any time since Prince Damrong initiated professional history writing at the turn of the twentieth century. What is today consumed as history by the Thai public consists of two forms: the royalist-nationalist history taught in the schools and popularized through bureaucratic channels; and products of the commercial media in the form of movies, TV dramas, and even advertisements, which are gradually becoming the dominant mode of reproduction of historical knowledge. While the history produced by commercial media is often based closely on the officially approved history of school textbooks, as was the 2002 movie Suriyothai, this is not always the case. One very interesting example is a popular genre of TV drama that plays on the theme of a contemporary character who has “slipped back” into the Ayuthaya or early Bangkok era, or a historical character who has “fallen” into present-day Thailand. Recent examples include the Channel 3 productions “Nirat song phop” (Journey through Two Existences) and “Plai thian” (The End of the Candle), which is an imaginative adaptation of episodes from the classic tale Khun Chang Khun Phaen. While partly inspired by the international success of historical fantasy movies such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the genre also seems designed to fulfil the desire of contemporary generations to overcome the disjuncture between an “indigenous” premodern past (experienced largely through the official history of school textbooks, state ceremony, and representations of national culture) and the westernized, modern present. History presented through the media, therefore, responds to the tastes of its consumers in an increasingly competitive cultural marketplace. Whatever the case, these televised historical dramas attract a popularity and public interest out of all proportion to the more traditional history of the school textbooks.
The issue of the contemporary lack of relevance of professional history was raised by Nidhi as early as 1986 when he argued that the very success of the professionalization of history in the universities since the 1960s was responsible for its declining popularity during the 1980s as historians grew estranged from the reading public and caught up in their “ivory towers” (Nidhi 2002a, 37). Nidhi’s solution to this problem, like many other Thai public intellectuals, was to write shorter, more popularly accessible pieces for popular news-magazines and the press in the hopes of influencing a greater section of the public. An extension of this idea has been his establishment of the “Midnight University” in 1997-8, a loosely organized “open” university dedicated to a higher education free of the problems of the state system and its narrow, instrumentalist service to the state and increasingly the business sector. The university has its own website, which has quickly become a major forum for academic debate in the humanities and social sciences (Mahawithayalai Thiangkhun 2003).
The dominance of the Damrong school of history (or Thongchai’s royalist-nationalist historiography) has from the early twentieth century relied to a great extent on the technology of print and the state’s control of its dissemination through the education system and mass media. It is possible that the greatest challenge to this mode of national history will come not from new academic methodologies but from new forms of dissemination and consumption of movies, TV dramas, and internet debate by new mass markets. Patrick Jory is coordinator of the Regional Studies Program at Walailak University, Nakhon Sri Thammarat, Thailand.
I am grateful for comments on the subject of this paper by my colleague Davisakd Puaksom. However responsibility for the paper’s final form including its weaknesses is of course mine alone.
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