Craig J. Reynolds

Cosmologies, Truth Regimes, and the State in Southeast Asia

It has been said that post-capitalist society is a ‘knowledge society.’ Certainly the revolution in information technology has made the issue of knowledge production controversial and topical. Southeast Asian societies, while they may not be post-capitalist, have a thirst for knowledge as their capitalist classes become more complex and search for solutions to their problems. These problems of the middle classes are not only commercial, professional, and political, but also personal, psychological, and familial. Cable TV, satellite services, CD-ROM, the Internet, and so forth, sensitize us to the production, formatting, transmission, and reception of knowledge not only in our own age but also in the past. Since early times the state has been both shaped by and involved itself in the processes of knowledge formation and dissemination.

Globalisers vs Communitarians: Public Intellectuals Debate Thailand’s Futures

In the past decade Thailand’s bubble of prosperity expanded beyond the wildest dreams of investors and burst in the faces of those who had inflated it. By being the fastest growing economy in the world as well as the epicentre of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Thailand became a cautionary tale of hypergrowth. During the boom and especially after the bubble economy burst there were heated debates in Thailand’s highly energised public sphere about the accelerating pace of change, about political reform, and about the possible futures for the country and its people. All Asian countries subjected to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) regime of austerity saw their national economic sovereignty compromised, and in this respect the financial crisis of 1997 had clear parallels with previous threats to Thailand’s sovereignty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, as in the late 1990s, the ruling elites allowed sovereignty to be compromised. In this essay I endeavour to map out the intellectual contours of post-boom Thailand. While accepting that these public debates are concentrated in the Bangkok megalopolis, I would suggest that it would be a mistake to dismiss the dominant themes of these debates as fatally elitist or Bangkok-centric. The public intellectuals engaging the issues have close ties to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other activists elsewhere in the country. At the core of these debates is the need to empower local communities in order to contend with the pressures of international financial organisations such as the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Review Article: Tai-Land and its others

This is a splendid volume, long in gestation but well worth the wait. Drawing on a set of panels convened at a London meeting in 1993, Civility and Savagery brings together anthropologists and historians to ponder the interactions of Tai and non-Tai peoples in their relationships of ‘othering’ and subordination. As Andrew Turton points out in the preface, the collective project of the authors was to ‘enlarge thinking about the Tai-speaking region’ and to ‘overcome the limitations of essentialist, and in the end often racialising consequences’ of much previous scholarship (p vii). In the service of this aim, the methods and preoccupations of anthropology dominate the volume, although the anthropologists could not be faulted for historical sense. They pay as much attention to the past as do the historians to ethnography. Indeed, the degree of interdisciplinarity on display here seems effortless. I can think of no other recent volume of essays on South East Asia equal to the book in this regard. Moreover, there are no weak essays. Each one deserves respect. Academic conferences are the factories of scholarly production, occasions when new research is aired, though not always in a very finished form, and volumes that result from such conferences are not always as successful as this one.1 In the case of the International Conference on Thai Studies (ICTS), a peripatetic affair that began in India in the early 1980s and has since convened in other Asian countries,

Practical and Auspicious: Thai Handbook Knowledge for Agriculture and the Environment

Abstract This article is the first thorough examination of the Thai handbooks that are produced to explain agricultural and environmental knowledge. These khu-meu (handbooks) and tamra (textbooks) come into use when knowledge is moving from one party to another. They also establish symbolic correlations within the human, terrestrial world, or between the human, terrestrial world and the worlds of the gods, spirits, ancestors, or the unseen. Despite the fact that handbooks are pervasive for the organising, preserving, retrieving, transmitting and consuming of knowledge throughout the Southeast Asian region, there has been very little concerted study of handbook knowledge. Our analysis of environmental handbooks in Thailand shows that simplified mastery is a common goal of the handbook genre in both its “how to” and “reading signs” forms. The knowledge captured by the Thai language handbooks is of a practical, predictive kind and suited to particular circumstances. Such knowledge can ultimately bridge and blur the dichotomy between scientific and local epistemologies.