Southeast Asia Program Series, no. 63. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2014. viii, 166 pp. (Illustrations.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-87727-763-7.
This book by renowned scholar Benedict Anderson hardly needs a review. It has an insightful introduction (by Tamara Loos) which can pass as an excellent review. It consists of essays that remain influential, with three of them previously published in Anderson’s critically acclaimed Spectre of Comparison. The essays in Exploration and Irony were perhaps not intended to become a book-length study of Siam, as every chapter can stand alone, unique and engaging. Of course, the decision to not meddle with the original text produces some inconsistency, such as Chulalangkorn in one chapter is Julalongkon in another, and there is a missing reference in a piece designed for an edited book, which appears only as “see Chalida Uabumrungjit’s essay” (144). Also, the year of Andreas Bonifacio’s revolution is given incorrectly. Aside from this, the organization of the chapters is well conceived, with the most recent essays at the end and postscripts added for some older essays.
The collection of essays shows that Benedict Anderson responded to the call of time by writing piece by piece following a sense of endless crises in Thailand, a country he came to love (which he would rather have called Siam for a good reason) after his long passionate engagement with Indonesia. How he builds up his new love relation after the first one is perhaps what makes the book a must-read for students of Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Another attraction is that his work is characteristically iconoclastic. He shows the newness of what one would think of as something that is very old, and the continuity of the old (the difficulty in overcoming tradition) in the assumption of the new. He can also deconstruct his own thinking while persuasively defending the validity of his long-standing argument. It is a work that is authoritative enough to see the ups and downs of a generation of Thai intellectuals (whom he personally knew), how they rose up against domination, and how they (thirty years later) were co-opted by power. There is a quality of human drama in what is after all a biography of a nation.
For me Exploration and Irony is a haunting text for it releases the ghost of Indonesia, represented by Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, a book that consists of Anderson’s most influential essays on Indonesia over two decades. He could have made his Indonesia essays a study of the country over forty years had he not been banned from Indonesia from 1972 until the fall of Suharto in 1998. The ban was a blessing in disguise for Thailand, for it now has a study almost equal (as first love can’t be replaced) to Language and Power. Exploration and Irony thus seems to carry a “spectre of comparison” with Language and Power. It is a “spectre” because one can better understand Indonesia through Siam and vice versa even though these two countries are very different. There is a chapter (“Radicalism after Communism”) that makes an explicit connection with Indonesia while showing how different they are, but there are many spectral moments in other chapters. For instance, the insights in the painfully argued chapter “Withdrawal Symptoms” (with footnotes as lengthy as the text), could be productively read by students of Indonesia to better understand the dynamics of the Suharto era. The tormented Thai middle class who demonstrated in Bangkok in 1973 brings to mind the relatively modest (though not less significant) students’ demonstration in Jakarta in 1974, both of which point to the impact of new class formation as a result of collaboration between American and Japanese power and national dictatorship in advancing capitalist modernization in the region. Meanwhile, the revival of royal rituals (under Marshal Sarit) recalls the invention of Javanese tradition in Suharto’s Indonesia as both countries sought to build a cultural foundation to stabilize the contradiction of “development.”
To continue, like Indonesia’s incomplete revolution under Javanese rulers (due in large measure to the power of “Javanese tradition”) the roots of Thailand’s “instability” lie in a “stunted and incomplete transition from kingdom to modern nation-state” (34). The modern Thai army resembles the Indonesian army under General Suharto, which never fought external forces. Instead it was mobilized against its own people, for internal order and stability. Thus was the state’s creation of the nation’s internal “others” through categories such as “Chinese,” “communists,” “the masses” and so on. There are episodes of killing in the spirit of public relations in both modern Siam and Indonesia. Meanwhile, “crises,” the key theme of this book on Siam, recalls Anderson’s depiction of the series of “internal” crises Java encountered since the late nineteenth century.
Exploration and Irony is a great country study much like Language and Power, though Anderson seems less tormented by Thailand. Exploration seems more distant as Thailand is analyzed through a series of “objective” historical conditions against other countries, which serves to make the country seem less unique. One gains great comparable knowledge of Siam on a variety of issues, but what makes all those issues matter is the theoretical framework that underlies the study. This theoretical framework stems from what Anderson saw as the difference between the nation and the state, and for those who have been influenced by his Imagined Communities (first published only in 1983), you immediately get a sense that Southeast Asia has long been the ground for his private reflections on nationalism. His study on Siam offered him great material to think about “official nationalism” and the state invention of tradition, and his work on Indonesia (and the Philippines) allowed him to appreciate the power of “popular nationalism,” and its subsequent death in the hands of an authoritarian state. One can already see the seeds of Imagined Communities in the series of early essays on Indonesia and Thailand.
The last part of Exploration and Irony consists of three essays and one set of “two Unsendable letters” which basically say that a true nationalist should be able to feel shame for his or her country’s misconduct. The last three essays, inspired perhaps by his earlier writing on “political communication” of New Order Indonesia, offer his most recent thoughts, with discursive materials from the media and visual environment. His meditation on films teases out a range of subjects (from gender and sexuality to class and ethnicity) that are hard to imagine by the fossilized Bangkok middle class. This cultural production, while (not always) beyond the reach of the state, offers hope for a counternarrative and different consciousness. The title of the last chapter, “Mundane History,” indicates just how much mundane materials from everyday life, which are often looked down on by the big data of the political science discipline and the regime of archival truth in history, can constitute a politically engaging scholarship. This is also a country study with a comparative dimension, as one can learn more about Indonesia through a reading of Thailand.
Abidin Kusno
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada