Notes on an Early History of Ethnography in Siam

Abstract

Defining anthropology as a specific form of ethnographic gaze as well as a field-based writing genre, I argue that Thai anthropology or anthropology as practiced in Thailand has not come to existence with the implementation of Thailand-Cornell Project in 1947 and the subsequent formal institutionalization of the discipline in the universities. In this article, I draw my discussion on origins and agency of the history of Thai anthropology from Prof. Anan Ganjanapan’s conceptual thought pertinent to “khon mong khon”, literally, an act of how a person placing some reflexive gazes over other people. I re-locate and re-situate the history of Thai anthropology from the widely-recognized post Second World War period to earlier historical moments between mid19th and mid20th centuries. I argue in this article that the embryonic stage of Thai ethnography is rooted in the indigenous ethnographic works commissioned by kings and later the governments. Early ethnographic writings in Siam must take into account of travelogues and other field or life experience-based writings by aristocrats, bureaucrats, Buddhist monks, and self-trained, indigenous ethnographers. The practice of ethnographic writing in Siam before the arrival of university-based modern anthropology was deeply informed by the traditional Siamese aristocratic and Buddhist modes of knowledge production, consumption, and circulation. It is further suggested that early forms of Siamese/Thai ethnographies were usually employed by Siamese rulers and elite as tools of self-fashioning, self-narrating and self-understanding in service of nation building and modernization projects.