Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xii, 267 pp. (Map, illustrations.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-33161-4.
In July 2003, on one of my many professional trips to Thailand, Professor Michael Herzfeld, an anthropologist from Harvard, invited me to visit the community at the base of Pom Mahakan, an eighteenth-century fort in the middle of the old city of Bangkok. Herzfeld had recently begun fieldwork research in this community in part because he found it to be comparable to heritage sites in Greece and Italy where he had carried out previous research.
The community at Pom Mahakan was begun in the late eighteenth century when the first kings of the current Chakri dynasty built a number of forts to protect the palace and government buildings in Bangkok, the then new capital of Siam. The members of the original community who had been given land at the base of the fort worked for the monarch or were the family members of these courtiers. Those living in the community today are primarily descendants of the original inhabitants.
Because Pom Mahakan is located near the Buddhist shrine known as the Golden Mount, which is in the centre of the old city known as Ratanakosin Island, it has long been of interest to Thai government officials and especially to the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), which seeks to promote historic preservation. Beginning in 1959 the BMA sought to buy out the modern-day inhabitants to preserve the fort and some of the houses and make the fort and houses into a government-designated cultural heritage site. While some inhabitants of the community accepted payment for their houses, others did not, seeing themselves as the most appropriate conservators of the heritage of the fort and the old houses located in the community. In 1992, the BMA “declared eminent domain over the private land behind the old fort near Ratchadamnoen Road and Wat Saket, saying it would build a park there,” to quote an article that appeared in Khaosod English in March 2016. Protests against the decree began in 1992 and continued until 2017. At the suggestion of a Thai classmate he had been close to in England, Herzfeld was drawn to this place because the protests centred on the question of who could claim ownership of the heritage of a historic site. As this was closely related to research he had undertaken previously in Europe, he decided to make the Pom Mahakan community the focus of new research in Thailand.
Even in my brief visit to the community in 2003, it became clear to me that the question of who has the obligation and responsibility for preserving heritage was highly contested; this was evident in my conversations with the very articulate residents introduced to me by Herzfeld, and even more through Herzfeld’s writings. The Pom Mahakan community was (and is) very small, numbering several hundred people. Despite the fact that the Thai Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration had the legal right to evict people from the area, it was not until 2017, after a military dictatorship had assumed power, that demolition commenced on homes whose owners had accepted compensation.
Herzfeld’s book details the long struggle of the community to be allowed to preserve the heritage at that site. In 2017, after the book had been published and widely praised—including by many in Thailand—Herzfeld returned to the community only to witness the dismantling of several residences in the community. In an interview published in Khaosod English on March 15, 2017 he described the experience as “sickening.” Instead of allowing the community to continue to serve as a mirror for the nation, it has become a casualty of the BMA’s imposition of its own view of cultural heritage. Some of the houses will be allowed to remain as a museum, but the residents—even though a few may be hired to work as guides—must move elsewhere. “If they are … forced to leave the site, a last lingering trace of the old Siamese polity—the polity of the ghosts venerated in the community’s shrines—will vanish, a barely perceptible wisp trailing the fast-fading echoes of memory into the greedy smog of modern Bangkok” (204).
Herzfeld found the story of the Pom Mahakan community intriguing because residents view it “as a microcosm of the entire [Thai] polity” (203). Herzfeld, on the basis of his long engagement with members of the community, argues that the community is not “so much a microcosm as a mirror, a mirror that reflects many of the tensions and brittle balances that plague Thai politics and governance today” (203). It is for this reason that his book is especially relevant for those seeking to understand cultural politics in contemporary Thai society as well as the politics of cultural heritage more generally.
Despite the apparent outcome for this particular community, the book will remain as a powerful tribute to the long-suffering residents of Pom Mahakan and it can and will still be read as a unique and relevant perspective on cultural politics in Thailand.
Charles Keyes
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
pp. 194-195