Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. x, 190 pp. (Figures.) US$27.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3971-0.
A spectre is haunting Chiang Mai: the spectre of progress. Andrew A. Johnson has entered into a project to call forth this spectre, to make it visible amidst the ruins of economic uncertainty and in the thoughts and actions of people of the city. Johnson’s book is about ghosts and spirits (both phiin Thai), but ghosts and spirits broadly construed. The book is as much about the ghosts of bad deaths that haunt high-rise apartment blocks and lordly spirits channeled by otherwise marginalized mediums as it is about the ghosts and spirits of culture (watthanatham) and above all progress (chareon) that inhabit modern subjects of the Thai “educated classes.”
Focusing mainly on the past two decades and based on fieldwork conducted in 2006–2007, Johnson’s account of the “ruins of progress” may not satisfy those looking for a more materialist or political-economic explanation for the fate that Chiang Mai suffered in the post-crisis period from 1997 and post-coup period from 2006. He makes only passing reference to issues such as corruption, cronyism, real estate speculation and the like. In fact, like a medium himself, Johnson does not seek to “explain” progress, so much as channel it: to call forth the spirit of progress, such that his audience, the reader, can sense its presence in many, often surprising, places. For those interested in a cultural, discursive, ideational, and ethnographically grounded discussion of how diverse residents of Chiang Mai have experienced the haunting, elusive spirit of progress, the book has a lot to offer.
Johnson effectively, if often implicitly, organizes his arguments around various dichotomies drawn from the social and cultural context of his fieldwork. The most prominent is the dichotomy between phatthana (development) and chareon (progress), which maps onto an engagement Johnson takes up with questions over the importance of surfaces versus substances within Thai society and culture. As Johnson demonstrates at several points, drawing on specific cases from his fieldwork, his interlocutors critique numerous things—from Europe in general to specific newly built gated communities around Chiang Mai’s suburbs—as having the outward appearance of “phatthana” but lacking the (more important) substance of “chareon.” Here and elsewhere, Johnson critiques a range of scholarship on Thailand and readings of Thai society and culture, which will give specialists much to engage with in the text.
A more sociological dichotomy around which the book is organized is that of the “educated classes,” embodied primarily in architects and urban planners, and the socially marginalized, embodied primarily in spirit mediums but also undocumented (Burmese or Shan) migrant workers and others. Another unstated, but obvious, argument of the book is to critique the idea that the educated, professional classes are “modern” and “rational” and the marginalized classes are “superstitious” and “irrational.” Both, Johnson demonstrates, are haunted, possessed and driven by invisible spirits; and both (though this is a more muted point in the book) are occupied with practical, “rational,” material concerns. The master spirit haunting all these subjects (akin to a “master narrative” in other theoretical writing) is that of chareon.
The book is organized into five chapters, bracketed by a very brief introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1, “Progress and Its Ruins,” lays out the general themes and briefly introduces the main protagonists of the book (i.e., the “educated classes” and spirit mediums). It also introduces several theoretical issues, such as Freud’s “uncanny,” though with a light touch. In general, the book is written in a way that is theoretically informed but not overly jargon-filled. Chapter 2, “Foundations,” provides historical and broadly ethnographic information about Chiang Mai, in reference to the issues of progress, development, urbanity, spirit mediums and other topics upon which the work dwells. Chapter 3 provides an intimate and rich, if somewhat brief, account of Johnson’s encounters with spirit mediums, particularly a woman named Kham who channels three distinct spirits. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to a more extended discussion of charoen and the spirit of watthanatham (culture) amongst academics, architects and urban planners, who seek to bring progress and prosperity to Chiang Mai by reproducing an authentic, if “edited” version of Lanna (Northern Thai) culture.
General readers are likely to find the book engaging, as Johnson provides many vivid vignettes and stories drawn mainly from his field work, though they may also find it at times mystifying. Johnson states numerous explicit arguments here and there throughout the text, but in the end his overall argument remains more implied than stated—if indeed the book is meant as an argument rather than a mere description of Chiang Mai during a particular period. Johnson concludes by telling us that Chiang Mai is “haunted, not by its past, but by its present” (156). The spectre of chareon in the end would seem to be something of a trickster, offering substance beneath the veneer of phatthana but revealed here as more an apparition than an essence. In terms of a metaphor Johnson employs in several places in the text, chareon is a phantom pulling Chiang Mai’s subjects down the ladder of advancement rather than an enlightened spirit hoisting them up. For readers interested in the complex uncanny of (post)modern subjectivity, and certainly for specialists of Thai scholarship, the book is a rich contribution on contemporary Thailand from a closely attentive ethnographer.
Eric C. Thompson
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 962-964