Maurizio Peleggi

From Buddhist Icons to National Antiquities: Cultural Nationalism and Colonial Knowledge in the Making of Thailand's History of Art

In the mid 1920s Prince Damrong Rajanubhab and George Coedes jointly formulated the stylistic classification of Thailands antiquities that was employed to reorganize the collection of the Bangkok Museum and has since acquired canonical status. The reorganization of the Bangkok Museum as a ‘national’ institution in the final years of royal absolutism responded to increasing international interest in the history and ancient art of Southeast Asia, but represented also the culmination of several decades of local antiquarian pursuits. This paper traces the origins of the art history of Thailand to the intellectual and ideological context of the turn of the twentieth century and examines its parallelism to colonial projects of knowledge that postulated a close linkage between race, ancestral territory and nationhood.

The hotel in history: evolving perspectives

ABSTRACT This discussion draws together six of the leading practitioners of hotel history in order to explore the state of the field and its larger relevance. Together they touch on questions related to imperialism and colonialism, science and technology, transatlantic connections, national distinctiveness (or lack thereof), as well as economic, social and cultural history.

Excavating Southeast Asia’s prehistory in the Cold War: American archaeology in neocolonial Thailand

The discovery and excavation in the 1960s through to the mid 1970s of several prehistoric sites in north and northeastern Thailand, the best known being the World Heritage site of Ban Chiang, were a major breakthrough in Southeast Asian archaeology. Evidence of an autonomous Bronze Age tradition contradicted colonial scholarship’s view of Southeast Asia as a cultural backwater that owed its advancement to imports from India and China. Subsequently, based on a dating later rejected, Ban Chiang was at the center of an international debate about the beginning of world metallurgy. Focus on chronological and typological issues has obscured the fact that American archaeologists surveyed and excavated sites in Northeast Thailand at the time when the region was thoroughly militarized to provide frontline facilities for the Vietnam War. This article examines the production of American archaeological knowledge on Southeast Asian prehistory in relation to the Cold War politics, and more specifically of Thailand’s neocolonial dependence on the United States.