The Context: An Assault on Knowledge

As matters turned out, the conference itself provided disturbing illustrations of how intimidation works. Police and military agents were spotted in significant numbers; their presence appeared to be an attempt to instill fear. There were some post-conference threats, subsequently dropped, against the participants in one demonstration against the curtailment of academic freedom, and rumor—never substantiated as far as I have been able to ascertain—had it that six participants had been called in for the junta's notorious tactic of “attitude adjustment” (prap thasanakhati). But the most specific attack on academic freedom came when, over three weeks after the conference had ended, the main organizer, Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, and four others were charged with violating a law against political assembly by more than five persons because, at a panel on which they had been speaking, they allegedly unfurled a banner stating in Thai the unexceptionable truism that “an academic forum is not a military barracks.”Footnote ² Those accused face up to two years in jail. As two courageous commentators observed in the Bangkok Post, Footnote ³ this development may deter scholars from organizing other events in the country while it remains under military rule. Perhaps, indeed, that is the generals’ hope.

This incident is part of a larger—if somewhat vague—threat to academic freedom. The vagueness is not necessarily benign: uncertainty can be a potent source of disruption. It does at least seem clear that some academics, Thai and foreign, were unable to be present because of restrictions or warnings that it would not be safe for them to attend. At least one did not risk coming because he had been informed that he was on a watchlist. Three individuals had already been politically excommunicated, Thai citizens having been expressly forbidden to have online contact with them.Footnote ⁴ Another scholar who was featured on the original program, having been charged with lèse-majesté, was apparently in jail during the time of the conference. All the keynote speakers and the principal organizer explicitly—if, under the circumstances, generically—deplored the absence of potentially important contributors.

The subsequent action against the organizer himself suggests a deepening of the official allergy to critique. I hope that my analysis will expose some of the causes and possible outcomes of this condition. I will suggest that the parallel with Greece is significant not only because of the similarity between the two military regimes (albeit separated in time by five decades) but also because of similar dynamics in the historical genesis of the two countries’ respective political modernities, and especially in their relations with Western colonialism in the nineteenth century. Such historical parallels are consequential for the present and future. The deliberate deformations of the intellectual world that occurred in Greece during the colonels’ rule still resound in historical memory as one of those exercises in mind control that usually fail ignominiously in the long run. Why should the Thai situation end differently?

The Origins of a Surprising Comparison

There are clear historical reasons for choosing Greece as a basis for comparison with Thailand. As I undertook the task of drafting the original lecture, however, I was also conscious of a purely personal circumstance that shaped this choice in my own thinking. I entered Thai studies at a relatively late career stage, in my fifties. Many of my listeners could lay claim to far greater expertise in this arena than I will ever achieve. My first areal interest in my own scholarly field of anthropology was modern Greece, an interest that began in my schooldays and that I continue to cultivate with ongoing research, and it has been as a Greek specialist that I gained such reputation as I may have acquired among my disciplinary peers.

But that background, paradoxically, may serve as a surprisingly strong qualification for the present exercise. To understand why, we should look at the state of Modern Greek studies in the 1970s. It exhibits some striking parallels with Thai studies today. There was then a growing if small coterie of scholars interested in the history, literature, language, and social and cultural conditions of that small country at the extreme southeastern tip of the Balkan peninsula as it suffered under the jackboot of a remarkably intolerant, opinionated, and misguided military junta. Those scholars developed an impressive erudition in several fields. Their activity was often constrained, however, by the proviso that they should not offend the colonels’ prudery, crude nationalism, and ideological intolerance.

They also failed to develop much knowledge of neighboring countries, in part because of the conceptual and political restrictions then in force. Despite the crucial role of the Ottoman Empire in the formation of modern Greece, few modern Greek specialists then knew a word of Turkish;Footnote ⁵ most did not even know Italian, another language influential in the country's cultural genesis. As for Bulgarian, Albanian, and the rest, those seemed to be exclusively the preserve of linguists—and not many people came to hear their papers. It was only after the collapse of the military junta of 1967–74 and the consequent amputation of the dead hand of a deeply suspicious censorship office, and even more once the high tide of nationalism began to ebb around 1993,Footnote ⁶ that a more open-minded and deliberatively comparative perspective began to emerge, sometimes against lingering resistance.

Both the Greek regime of 1967–74 and the present government in Thailand have appealed to the idea of a primordial national culture, which it was their self-appointed task to protect from diseased foreign ideas. Their model also represents a strongly paternalistic perspective. Both, significantly, used the female body—Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha garnered a fair amount of ridicule for his criticism of a twerking teenage actress whose gyrations he found immodestFootnote ⁷ —to advance their metaphorical management of the body politic in a more general sense. Above all, their insistence on complete control meant, in academic terms, that neither comparison with foreign cultures nor any admission of foreign influence in their own would be acceptable, and this had a stultifying effect on scholarship that only a relatively few brave souls dared resist.

Comparison and the Limits of Globalization

The 2017 Thai studies conference focused on “Globalized Thailand.” On the surface, this suggests a much more optimistic perspective than would have been possible in the Greece of the colonels. Despite tourism, despite extensive American military and other aid, and despite an impressively far-flung diaspora, the Greece of 1967–74 was isolated by a military regime that tried to regulate every aspect of daily life from skirts and facial hair to the social and educational role of religion, exhibited no sense of humor, and was hostile to many of its neighbors. The idea of “Globalized Greece” would have seemed absurd. The scholarly study of modern and even of ancient Greek culture, many of its best exponents either censored or unwilling to lend any legitimacy to a regime that had little understanding of culture, languished in the deep shadow of an idealized past framed by the religious and nationalistic fanaticism of the government. Many topics could not even be touched, and certainly there was little basis for comparison with other cultural worlds. The study of contemporary Greek society and culture, in short, reproduced the self-isolated condition of the country as a whole.

An encouraging sign at the 2017 Thai studies event, in contrast, was a tentative but noticeable broadening of engagement with information about other countries. All the same, it was still evident that few scholars of Thailand currently had the competence to work comparatively across the national borders, although several had mastered minority languages or those of neighboring countries. Still fewer attempted comparisons that would entail professional knowledge of more distant places. In all fairness, I should note that such knowledge requires a massive commitment of time; my own understanding of Thai culture hardly reaches that of many much younger Thai specialists or is equal to my knowledge of Greece. The enviable depth of detailed knowledge possessed by many specialists in Thai studies, especially those who are themselves Thai or living in the country, also comes at a price; human energies and lives are finite, and the choice of depth as against breadth, while not one of absolute mutual exclusion, does mean that individuals will follow their personal inclinations, which is something they are perfectly entitled to do. Thai scholars are limited by scarce financial resources, inadequate libraries, and a punishing leave policy that does not allow enough time for the lengthy field research that anthropologists and others conduct.

The sheer effort to reach at least a broadly commensurate level of knowledge in a second region nevertheless opens up new questions about the first. Hitherto, Thailand has been treated intellectually as something of an isolate in a manner that recalls its increasingly restrictive state of political quarantine. In this it does often closely resemble the Greece of four and a half decades ago.

Moreover, talk of globalization, which is very common in Thailand, does nothing to alleviate that isolation. On the contrary, it shows that the critical and international perspective by which many scholars understand the concept of globalization is preempted by a consumerist vision. Even many of those who oppose the dictatorship do so in the consumerist modality much advanced by the prime minister ousted in 2006, Thaksin Shinawatra, and the battle now joined is clearly a class battle originating, to a significant degree, in consumerist desires.Footnote ⁸

Official historiography, as Thongchai Winichakul has pointed out, convinces many Thais studying abroad that foreigners have nothing to teach them about their own society and history.Footnote ⁹ I am not arguing that foreigners necessarily know better.Footnote ¹⁰ But a comparative perspective on the competing claims of indigenous and external scholarship would generate a more genuinely critical discussion—precisely what censorship is designed to suppress.

Those Thai scholars who have tried to be critical have found their voices silenced and their work rejected as a betrayal of national values. Greek scholars, during the period of military rule, experienced many of the same restrictions that their Thai counterparts experience today, including a long list of excluded topics and opinions, most of which were collectively condemned as “communist” or as unseemly—as undermining the very basis of the bourgeois code of respectability.Footnote ¹¹ Those restrictions had precisely the opposite effect of what was intended, with the result that today, despite conditions of economic hardship, Greek academic life hosts lively debate and constantly informs the operations of a rambunctiously healthy body politic.

Comparison as Irritant

What was it that prompted Greece to move so decisively in the direction of open, democratic debate? Even before the fall of the colonels’ regime, dissident writings were having a notable effect. Without question, it would have been inspiring to have had a text like Katherine Bowie's Rituals of National Loyalty circulating in Greece during the early 1970s.Footnote ¹² But the Greeks were already generating their own texts, and, by using fiction and poetry to push back against the stultifying effects of officially sanctioned historiography and ethnology, they worked their way around the literalism and legalism of the military regime. Prohibited by one of the regime's laws from publishing any books whose titles did not reflect the contents, a group of poets, novelists, and essayists produced a collective volume appropriately titled, in order to meet the requirements of this absurd regulation, Eighteen Texts.Footnote ¹³ Government officials could do nothing about this defiant move without making themselves look even more ridiculous. Eighteen Texts was a work of fiction and literary criticism rather than of ethnography or directly political polemic; two of the prose texts, for example, described imaginary Latin American states whose authoritarian leaders’ behavior seemed uncannily familiar. The book was not straightforwardly “about Greece,” although it mixed direct references with allusion, and its title was legal.Footnote ¹⁴

What is particularly interesting about this volume for my present argument is that its rhetorical indirection made it implicitly comparative—and the implications were hard to ignore. The colonels, moreover, clearly understood that they could not actually challenge the book's publication without turning a mere suggestion of similarity into a hard certainty—which would have defeated what they understood as their strategic purpose. So, acting on the literal-minded logic of a law they had themselves promulgated, they left it well alone. From a tactical point of view, however, that was an equally bad mistake: the book is credited with being one of those elements that, in the vague and indecipherable ways that characterize such processes, arguably helped to generate change. Its challenge was a productive irritant, goading people to see their predicament from outside—from, in short, a comparative perspective, and a parodic one at that.

In cultural terms, comparison offers a challenge to the static view of homogenous national culture propagated by the regimes under discussion. To be sure, comparison is neither unproblematic nor uncontroversial as a method. It is important to recognize that comparison is necessarily an imperfect art. It does not provide definitive answers, and can only suggest directions for new inquiry—but such inquiry is what a narrow vision would prefer to shut down, saving up disaster and ignorance for the years ahead. Comparison is always imperfect—that is its strength—and in some sense, as the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard is said to have remarked, it is ultimately impossible. But there is much to be gained in the effort to achieve such an impossible goal. Its besetting impossibility is the very source of its value as a political and conceptual irritant.

Sometimes, the irritation is pure prejudice. Greeks seem at times to resent comparison with an Asian country; some local commentators agree that this reflects a sadly racist attitude and reveals Greeks’ dependence on their ideological role as the living ancestors of the European ideal. Thais, on the other hand, are occasionally surprised that one would compare their country with one about one-ninth the size of Thailand, thereby revealing a conceptual focus on scale that overlooks the fact that both countries have undergone ravaging economic crises for intriguingly related reasons. Even as some deny the relevance of comparison, in so doing they highlight its importance—an importance, in short, that is clarified by every attempt to shut it down.

Indeed, every such attempt at silencing is a sign of weakness. Secure power and untrammeled democracy can live with truth. The absurdity of censorship practices under the Greek military regime of 1967–74 was a key factor in its downfall precisely because it helped to reveal the hollowness of the regime. The enormous amplification of censorship through its application to the Internet today produces an even clearer focus on the weakness it represents. Again, we should not overstate such comparisons. Comparison is always imperfect, let us again remember, and ultimately, perhaps, impossible. That is why it is useful.

Comparison and Colonialism

One of the common elements that Greek and Thai political culture exhibit is pride in never having been colonized by a Western power. But this claim is highly problematic in both cases, and comparison can reveal the reasons. I have argued that both countries are the victims of what I have called “crypto-colonialism.”Footnote ¹⁵ Such countries were only able to achieve or maintain their independence by accepting humiliating conditions imposed on them by the Western colonial powers, in this case Britain and France. These conditions prominently included the creation of clear, secure borders, containing a dominant ethnic group that defined the national culture in terms that were understandable to Western bureaucrats; this often resulted in the marginalization of ethnic minorities. These states also had monarchies that were willing to adopt Western standards of “civilization” and military discipline. Thailand (then Siam) and Greece fully exemplify the arrangement.

While in Greece, until the economic crisis began to bite hard in 2009, no one had openly embraced the concept of crypto-colonialism; critical voices in Thai studies, notably that of Thongchai Winichakul, were already using it in the Thai form ananikhom amphrang.Footnote ¹⁶ In Greece, however, the concept began to acquire some purchase as, under the austerity measures imposed by the European Union, people began to examine critically what had happened to the country in the recent past—how it had escaped the iron rule of the colonels and their Cold War predecessors and why it was nevertheless still struggling with the imperialistic designs of the most powerful European Union states.Footnote ¹⁷

The fall of the Greek military regime in 1974 was presaged by an uprising—recently celebrated in a prominent art exhibition in AthensFootnote ¹⁸ —by students of the Athens Polytechnic in November of the previous year. Emboldened by the news of a similar revolt at Thammasat University that ushered in a brief period of democracy in Thailand, they defied the tanks, holding up slogans, one of which was “Tonight [this place] will become Thailand!” There is thus a specific historical link between events in the two countries. But their subsequent trajectories have, tragically for Thailand, diverged in radical ways. Greece today, for all its economic woes, is one of the most robust democracies in Europe, and has clearly escaped from the cycle of coups and counter-coups of yesteryear. Reflecting the resurgence of violence in Thailand during the years following the 2006 coup, one Greek newspaper headline read, “Thailand: Again, and again, and again.”Footnote ¹⁹ Of course, no two situations are ever exactly alike: comparison, I repeat, is always imperfect and on occasion it may even seem to be impossible. But that is not a reason for avoiding the challenge that comparison poses to established frames of reference.

I respect the highly specialized work of area studies for the painstaking acquisition of skills that focused area work entails, and have drawn from it—and conducted some myself—in both Thailand and Greece. But at the same time, when we focus narrowly on areal concerns, we lose a great deal—the real gains notwithstanding—because, in so doing, we treat our object of study as a geographical, historical, cultural, and, indeed, political isolate; when, in a word, we act as though it also had no relevance for anyone else, and as though it therefore had no reason to listen to external critique. In so doing, we may also be guilty of reproducing and reinforcing a collective inferiority complex that often betrays a crypto-colonial history. This, in the academic world, is the attitude that by definition foreigners have nothing to tell local scholars—often coupled with the virtually opposite view that whatever foreigners do is worthy of emulation. This is not as paradoxical as it seems. Resentment and emulation together represent the effect of living in a society where a past and present of colonial domination cannot be admitted but must be faced every day.

Let me illustrate this attitude with an example from my own research on the tiny Pom Mahakan community in the Rattanakosin Island of old Bangkok.Footnote ²⁰ Earlier this year, I attended a meeting there with community leaders, representatives of the Bangkok Municipal Administration (BMA), and architects from the Association of Siamese Architects. Having requested the privilege of speaking, I managed to say a few things about the illogic of ignoring foreign observers’ views in a situation in which the BMA wishes, among other things, to develop the Pom Mahakan space for tourism and as a recreational facility. At this point, however, perhaps unconsciously instantiating exactly what I was complaining about, the deputy governor reached out for my hand in an apparently polite and conciliatory (and demonstratively “Western”) gesture. His reaction was immediately understood instead as a tactical instrument of extreme rudeness: he had used it to cut me off and to take over the discussion himself. Thai observers were shocked—which is probably why I was asked the next day for an interview with the national daily, Matichon!Footnote ²¹

My point is not, then, that Thais were collectively uninterested in hearing what I had to say. Quite to the contrary: the Matichon piece was a full-page spread, after all. Moreover, since the conference in Chiang Mai I have been assured that many Thais encounter the same lack of interest in their views. But mine were certainly inconvenient for a city government already bent on a policy that has also come in for some remarkably trenchant Thai criticism, not all of it from academic sources.Footnote ²² There are important reasons for which it is easier to dismiss or ignore foreign observers’ commentary. Those reasons are not an indication of political strength. Defensiveness is a sign of weakness—of the deeply felt need to conceal the collective and occasionally embarrassing inside knowledge that I have called “cultural intimacy”—and it seems, perhaps for good reason, to be markedly more noticeable in the crypto-colonies than elsewhere.Footnote ²³ Its most pernicious form is censorship, which is the antithesis of academic and journalistic freedom.

Comparison against Methodological Nationalism

This perhaps explains why, despite their professed contempt for eggheads, political leaders of authoritarian stamp react viscerally to anything that looks like intellectual critique. This can be as true of the democratically elected as of dictators; recall, especially, Thaksin's derisive attacks on Thirayuth Boonmee, a Thammasat University anthropologist and former political revolutionary whom Thaksin derided as much for his habit of wearing casual, elderly-looking pullovers as for the substance of his political critiques. Elected authoritarian figures must also face their electors, and this may sometimes temper such displays of defensiveness. For nationalistic and authoritarian leaders in general, however, anything that looks like “national studies” carries many sources of potential friction over what may or should not be discussed. Even the definition of Thai studies, rather like that of Modern Greek studies, is a central issue. At least Thai studies does not face the consequences of adding the word “Modern,” which for the Greeks was long the only effective guarantee of respect for the living as well as for the ancient and long dead!

But the problems do not stop there. Another question concerns the reasons for which a nation-state becomes the defining core of an area studies field. The nation-state as we know it today is a relatively recent, Eurocentric invention. Reducing our field to the lineaments of this highly successful but also very parochial concept makes us guilty of what Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller have called “methodological nationalism”—that is, of allowing the nation as defined by a bureaucratic state to determine the contours of our research.Footnote ²⁴

In the Thai studies context, the nation-state focus is particularly ill-suited to a long-term view of Siamese history. Before Rama V radically changed the form and structure of the Siamese polity and embraced the civilizational discourse of the Western powers, the Siamese people—speakers of predominantly Tai but also other languages—had lived in a polity whose conceptual form was very different from that of the European nation-state. That polity was modeled on the cosmological diagram—concentric circles around a generative center—of the mandala.Footnote ²⁵

The Thai powers-that-be presumably do not want a return to the mandala-based polity, any more than the European leaders are willing to countenance the proliferation of local separatist movements within their national territories. Their recalcitrance, however, offers us all the more reason for trying to achieve a perspective that is not dependent on the framework of the bureaucratic nation-state (Thai prathaet). That framework is especially inappropriate for the study of minority groups, whether within Thailand's borders or in Yunnan, Myanmar, or Vietnam. They, too, and perhaps more vigorously, seem to embrace the model of the concentric polity (moeang). Moreover, as Hjorleifur Jonsson has so vigorously argued in his most recent book about the Mien people, they have hardly been chased up into the mountains to die; they represent a vigorous alternative vision of the polity, one that escapes the constraints of crypto-colonial conformity.Footnote ²⁶

We find such alternatives in the cities as well. Not only the hardy residents of Pom Mahakan but all the street demonstrators—Yellow and Red Shirts alike—are operating with a very different model of collective political identity than that embodied in the bureaucratic nation-state. Those who have demonstrated against the current austerity regimes in Athens and elsewhere in southern Europe share some significant ground with these Thai protesters, especially the capacity to resuscitate visions of the polity that escape the logic of the crypto-colonial nation-state.

Such comparisons may initially seem outrageous; they challenge the primacy of the nation-state on a global scale. They are indeed imperfect—there are obvious differences among the cases thus brought into juxtaposition—and perhaps, in the end, the comparison will prove impossible to sustain. But that is not a reason not to make the attempt. Comparisons prove nothing, but they are deeply suggestive and heuristically valuable; they have the force of productive irony. Suggestion is what Shakespeare evoked in having Mark Antony call Brutus an honorable man. Such indirection may be as appropriate to current Thai cultural and political sensibilities today as it was, for rather different reasons, to Shakespeare's audience in seventeenth-century England.

“National Culture” and Comparison

The idea of a state-defined national culture is rarely challenged even by those who might want to argue about what specific “cultural stuff,” to use Fredrik Barth's felicitously irreverent phrase, it contains.Footnote ²⁷ Greeks talk about “Hellenism,” Thais about khwampenthai (Thainess), and so on. Most of the cultural imagery cited even by those who challenge the authority of the state comes from the state's own rhetoric. The people of Pom Mahakan, for example, while decrying the absence from the official canon of any substantive coverage of vernacular culture, invoke generic models of Thai culture and history in a language that perfectly mirrors that of the state.

The idea that “Thai culture” might not be defined by something national, as represented by state authorities, seems so counterintuitive, so contrary to common sense, that it behooves us to recall Gramsci's definition of common sense as conceptual hegemonyFootnote ²⁸ —surely the key to any putative explanation of why Thai students abroad remain so resistant, in Thongchai's account, to alternative visions of Thai social, political, and cultural history. In the same way, Modern Greek studies had to struggle hard to escape the grasping hand of the irredentist “Great Idea,” the claim that every land where Greek was spoken belonged by right to the Greek nation-state. Thai scholarship contends with strikingly similar blind spots, including the vision of a greater Tai-speaking world that should come together under the tutelage of the national Thais cast in the role of elder siblings (phi). Many citizens of Laos, for example, are revealingly irritated by such condescension.

The position of the Sino-Thai communities is similarly revealing. Rama VI's famous characterization of the Chinese as the “Jews of the Orient” is usually understood as telling us something interesting about the position of the Chinese in Thai society.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed it does. But it also tells us something much more fundamental, which is how Thais had come to understand what it meant to be Thai—that a biogenetic model of descent through blood lay forever in wait for any minority with the temerity to carve out a successful niche within the nation-state. This biogenetic model, a perspective of Western European origin that has shaped (among other phenomena) the North American understanding of kinship,Footnote ³⁰ also helps to explain why Greeks so often used to tell Greek-speaking foreigners that Greek was too hard for a foreigner to learn, while even today Thais often simply assume that someone with European features could not possibly be speaking Thai at all.

Minorities do not fare well in contexts defined by such an anthropologically unacceptable conflation of biology with culture. Ironically, it was the creation of modern nation-states led by bourgeois elites that first intensified the persecution of the two minorities in question—the Jews in much of Europe and the Chinese in Southeast Asia—but then also provided the enabling conditions for their emancipation and full participation. Benedict Anderson, Wasana Wongsurawat, and Benjamin Zawacki have all, in various ways, highlighted the dynamic, cosmopolitan, and transnational role of the Chinese in politics and economics, while Charnvit Kasetsiri notes the critical impact of scholars of Chinese descent on Siamese historiography.Footnote ³¹

Chinese nationalism is no less reductionist or essentialist than its Thai counterpart, and the two are to some extent in competition for the hearts and minds of the Tai-speaking peoples of Southeast and East Asia. Europe provides some interesting points of comparison with Chinese cultural revivalism overseas, as in the irredentist proselytization pursued overseas by Greece among Griko-speakers in Italy and among crypto-Jews in Portugal by Israel.Footnote ³² The use of cultural arguments to establish beachheads is effective because no nation-state will decry the principle behind it as most have, at various times, engaged in similar efforts. The Thai state has itself supported research on speakers of Tai languages in China and Southeast Asia, while current Chinese policy, as exemplified by the “Belt and Road” initiative, treats the Thais as collective kin to the Chinese people.

Comparison and Difference

The point of comparison is not to generate a stifling sameness. Comparison brings out differences that are at least as striking as the similarities. The role of monarchy, while a shared element in the genesis of the crypto-colonial state, has had notably divergent histories in Thailand and Greece, respectively. The Thai monarchy is an indigenous institution, even though, in the reign that consolidated its absolute authority at home—that of Rama V—it became increasingly responsive to Western pressure. By contrast, the Greek monarchy was foreign-imposed. The first “King of the Hellenes,” Othon or Otto (reigned 1842–62), was a ruthless Bavarian princeling, installed by the Western powers, who never succeeded in gaining the affection of his subjects and was eventually deposed. This historical background perhaps helps to explain why, after the young Constantine II attempted a counter-coup against the military regime in 1968, the colonels could easily stage-manage a referendum resulting in the abolition of the monarchy. A genuine referendum held by the transitional government that followed the regime's collapse produced the same result, probably in part as a result of the king's clumsy attempt to interfere again.

These different trajectories have produced radically contrasted contexts for scholarship today. In Greece, censorship of academic work is now nonexistent. Thanks in large measure to the wise leadership of the transitional prime minister (and subsequently president of the republic) Constantine Karamanlis, demands of the conservative establishment that had been upheld by the junta—the use of a formal, archaic language (katharevousa) for all official and most educational purposes and the illegal status of the Communist Party among them—were reversed. Moreover, Karamanlis, realizing that democracy and one-party rule were incompatible, created the conditions under which his own relatively conservative political party (New Democracy) would lose the 1981 election, although it would subsequently return to power in later elections. The Greek situation thus sharply veered away from the Thai trajectory, which seems stuck in a repetitive cycle. The point of comparison is not only to insist on unexpected similarities but also to highlight revealing differences.

Such an inquiry thus pushes us productively beyond the self-censorship that inhibits good scholarship and contributes to the isolation of our scholarly endeavors—the isolation that afflicts both what we do as scholars and the places where we do it. For example, it is interesting that almost all the countries that could be described as crypto-colonial have gone through at least one lengthy phase of authoritarian governance; Thailand has a particularly long history of military coups. One important difference is that Thailand has never had to bear Greece's burden of being considered the cultural ancestor of an entire civilization (“Europe”) and at the same time its deeply flawed descendant. That story was largely concocted by German scholars and instrumentalized by the Western powers, notably France and Britain, as a way of controlling a country that was expected to serve as a cordon sanitaire between the West and the Rest.

Such differences are significant. The similarities are nonetheless often surprising and usually revelatory, especially in two areas: the conflation of ethnic identities with the idea of a national culture, and the deployment of bourgeois models of respectability as a means not only of “beautifying” cities but also of forcing citizens to conform to certain standards of appearance.Footnote ³³ These are closely interconnected in the bourgeois imagination, and spring from concerns with cultural and ethnic purity. They have encountered some critical resistance in Greece. In Thailand, despite grassroots efforts, resistance to this stifling ideological complex has been largely silenced, although it may have simply gone underground in the face of massive state control.Footnote ³⁴

Similarity in Difference

Difference, paradoxically, can also exhibit similarity. I have already briefly noted the relationship between the Greek ideology of Hellenism (or Greekness conceived in terms of descent from the ancient Greek city-states) and the dominant model of Thainess (khwampenthai). Each lays claim to uniqueness, yet that claim seems to be contradicted both by their similarity with each other and with several other national models and by their shared derivation from distinctively Western, not to say Victorian, notions of respectability. Their claims to difference are grounded in a telling similarity.

Thus, for example, in the nineteenth century both Thailand and Greece made decisive moves to adopt Western dress. The Greek elite looked down on traditional dress as either “Turkish” or “folkloric”—two sides of the same contemptuous coin. The Thai dress code promulgated under the dictator Phibun (Plaek Phibunsongkhram, 1938–44, 1948–57) similarly treated Western dress as the model of modest respectability and civilization.

What goes for dress also goes for urban design. These two arenas reflect concepts of civilization that owe a great deal to the predominantly Western-derived models brought together under what I have called the “global hierarchy of value.”Footnote ³⁵ Their claim to uniqueness is, again, also a recognition that their sameness is to some extent of foreign inspiration. This paradox is also materialized in the layout of “national museums,” of which the specimen in old Bangkok is a fine exemplar. The claim to uniqueness is not, so to speak, unique to Thailand. I do nevertheless think it is fair to say that it takes an especially acute form in countries that can be characterized as crypto-colonial—countries in which cultural dependence on the West is both pervasive and largely inexplicit or even explicitly denied.Footnote ³⁶

Just before the 2017 conference in Chiang Mai, I was conducting fieldwork in a Greek village. There, an elderly man assured me that Greece had given the world its only civilization. How did he know that? I wondered. His reply was explicit: “Our schoolteachers told us so.” One sees here the institutional and rhetorical power of nationalist narratives; the example nicely recalls Thongchai's description of the impact of schooling on Thai students’ reaction to foreign scholarship. Moreover, the comment of a local bystander points to an even more interesting aspect of the encounter. This man argued that the claim that the Greeks had produced the world's sole civilization was a device to unite the once fragile country in the face of massive external pressures. Doubtless the claim to uniqueness expressed in this example is exceptionally strong. The bystander's reaction nevertheless also reveals the unease that attends all such claims as local people become more aware that their world does not exist in a vacuum.

That unease is palpable and has a distinct—and distinctive—logic: if we are not unique, we have no ultimate claim on national identity; if we are unique, we might not be recognizable as a nation by others with the power to decide. The only resort, it seems, is to imitate the uniqueness claims of more powerful nations. It is no coincidence that the Thai term siwilai (civilized) is of obviously French or English etymological origin—at a time when Siam was threatened by British or French invasion. There is an immediate parallel with the fort that gives Pom Mahakan its name; it was built to repel an expected French invasion, but today looms majestically over a street that Rama V and many other Thai leaders—including Thaksin—hoped would become “the Champs-Elysées of Asia.”

For another example of crypto-colonial cultural effects, we might consider the use of military-style uniforms of obviously Western inspiration. The use of uniforms for many areas of life that in most other countries demand only civilian dress, including student dress at university, suggests an intentional regimentation of the body politic. It harmonizes with the image of the monarch whose own military dress announces his role of supreme commander, not only of the armed forces, but of all those others who wear uniforms recognized as following a national standard.Footnote ³⁷ Where Thailand differs from the Greece of today, but not from that of the period of the colonels’ rule, is the penetration of everyday life by an expansion of this concept of uniformization. Uniforms serve a dual purpose: they are respectable; and they are a form of discipline—of both the body politic and the individual citizens’ bodies.

Embodiments of Paradox

There are other ways of marking the body for the nation. Some of these may nevertheless permit a measure of resistance to specific dictates of the central government on the part of those who in other respects are loyal citizens and above all loyal to the throne. In the past year or two, for example, there has clearly been an increase in the popularity of the nineteenth-century styling of men's and women's hair in a “Siamese topknot.” This perhaps reflects the increasing nationalism that has been encouraged by the present leadership; it may reflect the government's successful management of a significant part of, quite literally, the body politic. But when such bodily self-styling occurs in contexts of resistance to authority, it allows those who perform it to express their loyalty to national ideals even as they suggest that some of the incumbents of administrative positions are less perfectly Thai than themselves.

Thus, the residents of Pom Mahakan, most of whom are passionate royalists and many of whom supported the Yellow Shirts during the pre-2014-coup protests, are nevertheless locked in what may now be a doomed struggle with the authorities over their right to remain as residents on their site. About thirteen years ago, after performing as extras for a historical drama being shot on the site, some of them continued to wear hair and even clothes that continued the illusion of an earlier age. More recently, as the endgame neared, the community president, who had always sported a fine collection of amulets, began styling his hair and clothes in an obviously traditionalizing way. The logic of the moeang is such that at one level of the concentric set of identities one can be a loyal citizen, while at another one may be fighting the state for local interests.

The use of traditional Siamese costume and body styling can also be interpreted as an index of self-identification with a conservative establishment that adopts “politer” versions of the same accoutrements. At the same time, however, it expresses the community's tactical relationship to power from the start of its struggle a quarter of a century ago: an implication that the community represented a pre-Fifth Reign version of khwampenthai, a Siameseness that rested on respect for the ghosts of the original settlers royally sanctioned by Rama III. That respect implicitly also extends to the mandala-based polity and town plan that Rama V ended forever when he cut Rachadamnoen Avenue through its embodiment in the original city wall of 1782—right at the fortress known as Pom Mahakan itself—as part of the modernization that included the creation of today's nation-state bureaucracy.

Engaging with the authorities with the full panoply of politeness and formality that suggests a respectful attitude to power (much, I suggest, as the formal politeness shown me by the deputy governor represents an attempt to subvert the presumed crypto-colonial authority of the farang, or European-looking foreigner), the community president and his followers are nevertheless engaged in a desperate struggle for collective survival. I have elsewhere described, for example, the significance of how the president uses the wai (a gesture of respect with the palms of the hands pressed together) for signaling his acceptance of (or resignation to?) the encompassing structure of power while nevertheless trying to maintain the struggle he is waging for his community.Footnote ³⁸ His embodiment is as ambiguous as the constant tension in Thai life between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses would lead us to expect, as is his insistence that I should always hear his enemies’ point of view—an attitude that would, I think, be absolutely inconceivable in Greece. His fraternal joking with a senior municipal official even as the latter advances the final dismemberment of the community is another illustration of a style of engagement that would in Greece be treated as an effeminate surrender to overweening power.

But this man is anything but effeminate. His style, rather, speaks to the kind of hyper-masculine bandit (nakleng) idiom of which Marc Askew has written in his portrayal of Democrat Party politicians in the deep South of Thailand—an idiom that is also instantiated in the interpersonal performances described by the late Pattana Kitiarsa.Footnote ³⁹ That style, significantly, does not weaken the community president's claim on Thainess. To the contrary, it enhances it, even though—unlike his astonishing command of political rhetoric—it is hardly riap roi (orderly, respectable). His enviable ability to oscillate between the tough, culturally intimate nakleng image and the lofty rhetoric of respectability has outsmarted the authorities for many years, and helps to explain why, until the present government came to power, the community survived relatively unscathed and with an increasingly positive public image.

Here, too, there are perhaps unexpected Greek parallels and divergences. For example, national Greek politicians have also exploited a popular fascination with masculinity. A prime minister of the early 1990s, Constantine Mitsotakis, enjoyed a powerful base among the swashbuckling shepherds of the West and Central Cretan mountains where I did my research, and he exploited that connection to good effect. He was known to attend events where gunshots would be fired off in celebration—an illegal act, but one closely associated with precisely the image of indigenous masculinity that he sought to cultivate. In this respect, he resembled those Democrat Party strongmen of the Thai South. But the Greek model of respectability looked less to modern European models than it did, beyond them, to the stereotypical heroes of classical times—of that cultural model created, as I have mentioned, by a predominantly German scholarly tradition.

Moral values that have long been treated as traditionally Greek—especially regarding gender relations and power differentials—have turned out, in recent historical research, to have some strongly Western European, or “Victorian,” roots. In Thailand, too, the nineteenth century and several decades thereafter saw an almost surreptitious decline in female power, notably with regard to inheritance.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is perhaps hypocritical for Westerners to berate Thailand for the unfairness, as it seems to them, of these laws, given that what is presented today as a local tradition of gender hierarchy may in reality be directly linked to the steadily intensifying mixture of resentment and adulation of the West. This attitudinal complex, as I have suggested, characterizes and reflects the country's crypto-colonial situation. The adulation, which also passes for a claim on Thainess, is especially apparent in the constant insistence on being riap roi. Hence the Thai prime minister's expressed disgust with the twerking teenage performer. Hence, too, and more importantly, the nervous defense of a cultural intimacy that offers a relatively generous space to the presence of numerous forms of sexuality deemed embarrassing in the Victorian West but today fighting back under the rubric of LGBT rights.

Whatever may turn out to be the case, it is clear that such a comparison can situate Thai sexuality in a more global vision, a process to which the efforts of serious scholars like Narupon Duangwises and Peter Jackson have substantively contributed, and in which today the research of younger scholars like Jutathorn Pravattiyagul on the sexual politics of transgender (kathoey) identity in Europe also provides a newly cosmopolitan perspective.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, when one thinks of Greece and recalls how recently it became possible even to mention male homosexuality, Thailand's recession into the shadows of Victorian respectability may seem relatively minor and partial.Footnote ⁴²

Thailand, as I have noted, did not have to bear the weight of a German-invented vision of its ancestry to the European ideal—a problematic circumstance that even led the colonels, who were notoriously poorly educated, to ban certain ancient Greek works of literature on the grounds that these writings were sexually too explicit (and therefore did not fit the Victorian image of classical Greek propriety). For the colonels, it seems, Aristophanes could be as raunchy as any twerker, so his writings had to be excised from the official cultural genealogy as revealed in theatrical performances, while they were also, ironically, sanitized for use in the historically ignorant discourse of coup leader and dictator George Papadopoulos.Footnote ⁴³

Where Will Comparison Take Us Now?

Respectability, prudery, order—these are the marks of a militarist and bourgeois ideology that seeks to stabilize and isolate a national world whose values have already been partially modeled on the Victorian West. They are by definition resistant to the shock of cultural comparison; they represent an ideal of static civilizational purity. But they do not last forever. The weight of Greece's attributed role in the construction of Europe generated distinctive kinds of historical distortion in the management of ideas about bodies and sexuality, and those ideas quickly disintegrated after the collapse of military rule.

Thailand offers a different scenario. Although the Thai population as a whole does not accept official prudery as a measure of its historical identity, most urban, middle-class Thais—in this regard acting and thinking in a crypto-colonial modality like that of their Greek counterparts—would see a degree of sexual discretion as a mark of being riap roi.Footnote ⁴⁴ For military regimes, control of the body personal is often a means of controlling the body politic. And prudery is the commonest and most pervasive form of censorship. It has historically provided the model for the suppression of scholarly knowledge, which suffers grievous harm whenever it is subjected to the straightjacket of respectability.

In presenting these ideas about comparison at a conference in Thailand, I worried about the difficulty of saying so much about a cultural world so far removed from that of the Tai-speaking universe as is the Greek.Footnote ⁴⁵ I felt, however, that I could rely on the audience's now urgent need to examine the consequences of regimented ignorance on the future of Thailand. I hope that the comparisons I have sketched here will prompt productive discussion, including healthy disagreement, about all such pressing issues, and that attempts to silence critical voices will be recognized as the signs of weakness that such attempts always are.

The example of Greece, amidst all its admitted economic difficulties (and Thailand is hardly lacking in those today),Footnote ⁴⁶ offers some hope. Self-critical, open-minded comparison offers a way out of conceptual—and thus, ultimately, out of political—isolation. In this, scholars can truly set an example for others. In so doing, we must also remember that comparison, to return to the mantra around which I have constructed my argument, is always imperfect. On occasion it may even seem to be impossible. The surprises it springs, however, are also its great strength. They provoke new insight and new reflection on what might otherwise appear to be established truths.

Perhaps—let us be open-minded even about this possibility—comparison with Greece can show us nothing revealing about Thailand today. Perhaps the nation's leaders do not deserve comparison with such a failed regime in that other, distant, puny crypto-colony. Perhaps; we should always be open to disappointing possibilities. But we should remember, too, that Marc Antony called Brutus an honorable man. So were they all, said he—all honorable men. And we know what he really meant.