Along with fatal injuries, wounds, and bruises, this book investigates unnatural death in late nineteenth century Siam. In vernacular perspective, unnatural death is seen as inauspicious and could be categorised as ‘tai hong’ (death caused by an accident, or any violent intentional means) or ‘tai ha’ (death by an infectious disease). Trais Pearson's study is an investigation into the former category of unnatural death, in particular, tai hong involving foreign residents, either Europeans or Asians registered as legal subjects of European imperial powers in the treaty port of Bangkok. The book traces the transition from the traditional Siamese authorities’ handling of inauspicious death to a new international approach, drawing on Western-style forensic investigations into suspicious deaths, in order to ‘assert [their] sovereignty in the face of particular constraints imposed by unequal treaties’ (p. 7).
When Siam inaugurated its reforms in the late nineteenth century, ‘the uninvited gaze of foreign residents’ on indigenous deathways in Bangkok—‘a topic of macabre fascination, ethnographic interest, and medical scrutiny’—had triggered a civilising process in dealing with the ‘manner of concern for the dead and dying in the Siamese capital’ (p. 3). (On the ‘civilising’ of deathways in Siam during that period, see Phattharanit Kiatthanawit's 2019 thesis, ‘Siamese state and society and the management of emotion: Regime of horror’, Chiang Mai University.) Traditionally, the bodies of those who had met with unnatural death were examined using a local forensic practice, a procedure called ‘kan-chanasut phlik sop’ (lit., investigation by flipping the body over) conducted by police and district officials, generally in a temple cemetery. To capture the subsequent transformation of deathways, Pearson conducts a meticulous interrogation of the remaining fragmentary inquest files which began their lives in the Siamese administrative archive after King Chulalongkorn's reforms in the late nineteenth century.
Pearson argues that novel technologies such as the electric tramway transplanted to fin de siècle Bangkok had transformed the vernacular concept of ‘inauspicious’ death—connected to potent spirits—to the modern phenomena of suspicious death caused by a spectrum of fatal accidents, from acts of god to negligence, and crimes needing scientific investigation. And one of the prime causes of these accidents came with the twin distinctive features of modern society, passenger rail travel and the speed of modern vehicles. Further, the asymmetrical treaties between Siam and Western imperial powers, beginning with the British in 1855, had not only galvanised Bangkok's economic expansion and brought in large numbers of foreign residents, but also meant that some unnatural deaths involving foreign subjects and legal entities such as the Bangkok Tram Company came under extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Customarily, the victim's family was given money for funeral expenses, to placate the spirit of the unnatural dead. This compensation was largely determined by social superiors, presumably as a form of noblesse oblige, especially if they had caused the fatal accident, with the amount calculated according to the deceased's status. Cunningly negotiating vernacular belief, the Bangkok Tram Company too adopted the practice of paying for funeral expenses in cases of tram-related deaths, in exchange for indemnity against future liability.
If the victim of an accident was a foreign resident, however, a barrister could file a civil suit against the offending party for compensation in a consular court. Nevertheless, filing against foreign legal subjects by a Siamese party was rather complicated, especially under Siam's curtailed jurisdiction, which resulted from the extraterritorial provisions in the unequal treaties. Technically, the treaties posited Siam as a semi-colony with ‘a plural legal arena’ in which ‘death … became a matter of transnational concern and expert intervention’ (p. 2). Thus, foreign residents suspected of criminal actions were exempted from Siamese law and law enforcement. Instead, legal proceedings against foreigners or foreign entities were tried in European consular courts, under the laws of their home country. In cases where Siamese officials pressed for justice on behalf of a Siamese subject, either for indemnity or penalty, an autopsy with forensic investigation by a physician was required. The dead were thus removed from ‘the public arena of the temple cemetery and the jurisdiction of executive authority into the sequestered space of the morgue under the auspices of professional Western medicine’ (p. 145). In other words, a new form of authoritative medicolegal knowledge was taking the place of local practice.
When the victims were Asian residents, who were possibly either subjects of Western or Oriental imperial powers covered by extraterritoriality, the treatment of their bodies raised some wider questions. Here too, forensic expertise was called upon to intervene ‘to ensure that the rights of the dead were adequately protected’ (p. 118). But the skin tones of colonised bodies were categorised along racial lines: in white-skin judicial speak, native medical agencies were not legally qualified, on the grounds of political affiliation and credentials. European experts were inevitably used, to meet the consular courts’ colonial standards. Extraterritoriality and the registration of Asian residents thus ‘blurred the racial and ethnic lines that had previously helped to define political belonging and its correlate, legal subjectivity’. On the one hand, foreign residents and consular courts objected to natives as acceptable medical authorities. On the other, they ‘elevated the bonds of political subjectivity over the dividing lines of racial differences’ (pp. 117–18). Pearson argues that these conflicts over acceptable evidentiary matters that brought in a new form of medicolegal knowledge to protect foreign subjects unintentionally helped create the Siamese legal subject in which ‘subaltern Siamese subjects came to be defined in legal terms through fatal encounters with tramcars’ (pp. 38–9). By chance ‘the notion of the accident had the effect of helping to codify the definition of a Siamese legal subject, [but] it did so without introducing a new regime of legal rights’ (p. 109).
As a result, argues the author, there was ‘a form of necropolitics, in the general sense of discursive and practical actions oriented around dead bodies’. Authoritative medicolegal knowledge ‘forged direct bonds between the state and the [dead] bodies of its subjects’. In turn, those dead bodies became ‘the morbid subjects of a sovereign necropolis’ (pp. 112–13). Regrettably, this new interface between the state and its subjects ‘was not a trajectory that tended toward democratic politics or the formation of recognisable forms of civil society. Rather, the new legal and medicolegal channels of concern for the bodies of Siamese subjects maintained and even bolstered traditional forms of authority and authoritative political culture both within and outside of the state bureaucracy’ (p. 4).
In attempting to reach a broader audience than the Thai or Southeast Asian studies communities, Pearson employs a comparative approach, drawing from a wide range of cases and theories in various imperial and colonial contexts. This is a must-read for those interested in the politics of death and of civilising reforms in Southeast Asia.
