Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xi, 266 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$62.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6606-8.
Maurizio Peleggi previously published Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), an ironic dissection of the social (political) construction of memory and a seminal text in the tradition of Ernest Renan’s (1882) essay on “What is a nation?”. The present book extends Peleggi’s reflective gaze into memory, albeit without the sharp focus of the earlier book, in an extraordinary and wide-ranging traverse of four (or is it more?) millenia of Thailand’s forgetting and contrived imagining of its origins.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, titled “Sacred Geographies,” comprises three chapters on the origins and iconography of a Theravada Buddhist landscape and its imagining; most interesting (for this reader) is chapter 2, addressing “the authentic, the copy, and the double,” with Walter Benjamin’s famed 1936 essay extended into the dilemmas of a Thai episteme. My disappointment: that Peleggi apparently declines to extend his argument further, into my own field of architectural representation. Such an extension might have cast a different light on chapter 1’s questionable argument of Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai as “twin cities,” to see the parti or overarching conceptual plan of Si Satchanalai as archetypal of Thai architectural hybridity—a possible counter to the present conservative stasis of Thai religious architecture.
The second part, “Antiquities, Museums, and National History,” also comprised of three chapters, turns to royal agency in the invention of a Thai/Siam history suitable to a claim of authentic antiquity. Chapter 6, the final of these chapters, however, turns to the Ban Chiang archaeology controversy: Do the discoveries there turn royalist attempts at legitimation on their head? More, do they question doctrines of China’s unique originary genius and of its cultural transference? The answer, from Peleggi’s careful and elegantly balanced reading of the controversy, is a nuanced yes! King Mongkut’s construction of Siam’s royal legitimacy had ignored the north and northeast; yet in drawing attention to other, more ancient cultures, Ban Chiang enabled other stories and other lineages. The “commanded memory” of the Chakri dynasty’s legitimating myth of descent from Sukhothai to Ayutthaya to Bangkok, begins to crumble; other, discordant histories become enabled. Similarly, in the absence of evidence of Chinese traces at Ban Chiang, the myth of (universal) Chinese diffusionism has come to be questioned.
The third part is titled “Discordant Mnemoscapes”; the first of its two chapters (chapter 7) shifts to the monstrosities of a more immediate past, in the Thai state’s vain attempts to suppress the memory of Thailand’s state-sanctioned violence and recurring massacres. Here Peleggi’s voice changes, from the ironic, scholarly detachment characterizing the earlier parts of the book (and redolent of the 2002 Lords of Things) to one more tinged with outrage, almost despair. The final chapter (8) is labelled “Rubbing the Past into the Present,” a word play on a 2000 installation at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument where passers-by were invited to make crayon rubbings of panels representing, among other things, the atrocities associated with that site. More interesting, however, is the chapter’s account of the resurfacing of previously suppressed photographs of the 1976 massacre of students at Thammasat University and of their present afterlife: photographs can “tell” what cannot be said, “making the unspeakable visible” (154). Peleggi might well have turned to more recent events and the atrocities of 2008, 2010, and 2014—in the age of the smartphone, suppression of images no longer works. Images can become instantly universal and the world has changed.
There is another point on which chapter 8 might have gone further. Chapters 7 and 8 present a depressing account of present-day divisions—Thailand’s multiple rifts—but a reflection is needed back to how other memories/suppressions from the past, recounted in the book’s earlier chapters, foreshadowed the agonies of the present. Otherwise what is the point of their present parading? There is, however, a counterargument to this complaint: as new technologies (the smartphone, the Internet) enable the proliferation of data and thereby of sites where a picture of history can be constructed—every person their own historian—Gianni Vattimo has advanced the idea of “the end of history” (Chicago Review 35, no. 4 [1987]: 20–30). From such a perspective, all that Peleggi can legitimately do is present the longue durée of Thai “commanded memory” and mandated forgetting (and are these not universal across cultures and nation states?), then throw the reader into his or her own personal task of making sense of the present Thai failed state. In this, the text performs well: we are confronted with the immensity of distortions of memory that the present age must negotiate, deconstruct, and challenge.
I do not think the reader of this book will be able to look at Thailand again—certainly not at Bangkok—outside the searing gaze enforced here. There is, however, an irony that runs through the text and which Peleggi highlights at the book’s beginning: “how to view Rome” is transferred on to Thailand. Surely the ultimate, epistemic colonization. Peleggi is splendidly generous in searching for Thai voices to emerge through the book’s text. However, its fundamental message, about the role of others in constructing “our” memories, inevitably also confronts Peleggi’s own project.
It is a great read, utterly challenging and inevitably transformative in the ongoing debates over Thailand’s cultural imagining of its past and its present.
Ross King
University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia