Siege of the spirits tells of contestations over the right of a community of less than 300 people to keep living in a historic part of downtown Bangkok, Pom Mahakan, a small settlement adjacent to a citadel that dates to the 1780s and the reign of Rama I. The central issue is whether a highly significant public space can be occupied by ordinary people who are simply getting on with their lives. Across Southeast Asia, this bone of contention is more commonly recognised in relation to forest communities, but here we see it in relation to national heritage and bureaucratic control in a metropolitan downtown area. Pom Mahakan is situated right by Rachadamnoen Avenue and the Golden Mount Temple on the so-called Rattanakosin Island. That is, it lies at the intersection of royal and national Thai significance and of international tourism. The community has repeatedly received eviction orders of varying severity from the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), but it has also attracted many supporters, both Thai and foreign.

The contestations have gone on for two decades or more, and they have long attracted attention. The community, Pom Mahakan:

Herzfeld deftly weaves his ethnography and analysis in relation to a chronology of events, a description of the community and its dynamics, and the theoretical, analytical, and political issues of heritage, control, tourism, and beauty, along with the give-and-take of political negotiation. The ethnographic narrative is situated in relation to the historical dynamics of nation building, the legacies of 1970s violence, political contestations, and various permutations of political actors and actions since the 1990s. Such once-important players as Chamlong Srimuang, Samak Sundaravej, and Thaksin Shinawatra are described in ways that highlight their complexity and contradictions. But we also get good descriptions of various members of the Pom Mahakam community, and their interactions, conflicts, and accommodations.

While the narrative centres on the tensions between the Pom Mahakam community and the BMA, these reflect broader tensions between two modes of political community — the premodern moeang and the modern prathaet. These tensions boil down to the contrast between community (with its various kinship implications) and society, territorially bounded, hierarchically organised, and bureaucratically managed (or authoritarianism and egalitarianism, p. 191). Framed as such, this resembles a contrast between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (‘community’ versus ‘society’) that was of foundational importance in European sociology and anthropology. But in Thai Studies it is used as a means of dividing the premodern from modern worlds.

Herzfeld draws on Chinese ethnography of the Dai Dehong in Yunnan, who are ethnolinguistically related to Tai-speakers elsewhere, for the foundational notion of moeang as rooted in kinship, solidarity, and flexibility (pp. 48–9). He contrasts this with an image of crypto-colonial relations to highlight how not-colonised Siam took on various modern colonial-era state- and bureaucratic trappings that undid the moeang for the realities of prathaet hierarchies and control. In my view this is a fascinating issue and something that ideally should encourage some historiographical and anthropological debate.

For the history of Southeast Asia there are several possible alternatives. Among them is the notion that hierarchy and community are alternative principles of society that have always been co-present in Southeast Asian social life (rather than marking a historical shift). Comparative work in Sumatra suggests that authority and consensus were always in tension as the principles of social relations and kingship.

This study of Pom Mahakan and of Bangkok highlights the lasting importance of ethnographic attention to local detail. The study aims at general issues of heritage, history, urban spaces, modernity, and belonging/eviction. But it is obvious that individuals and historical accidents play important roles. The leaders of the Pom Mahakan community were very skilled at public relations and image management and at the same time they were only concerned with the continuity of a small and rather poor community. The particularities of the Thai and Western supporters of Pom Mahakan are important parts of the story. And the mayor of Bangkok comes to play a key role in a story where the BMA bureaucracy and the local community are the main adversaries. The election of Apirak Kosayodhin as mayor brought to power a conciliatory politician who had none of the arrogance of his predecessors and who was instead interested and invested in the diversity of his city. During his tenure, many of Pom Mahakan's issues took a positive turn, and once his term ended things became more insecure again.

Herzfeld is interested in describing and analysing the intriguing coexistence of protest and of claims to national- or urban belonging that he has found in Pom Mahakan, of the simultaneous assertions of moeang and prathaet by a rather marginalised people. Cases of political agitation by Karen and Mien highland peoples in 1990s Thailand reveal similar ambiguity, particularly in how a marginalised people insisted on their national credentials in public protest. But Herzfeld is not concerned with such in-country comparisons, or with comparing mainland to island Southeast Asian cases on the tensions between authority and community. His angle instead straddles heritage studies and the particularities of the case material, bringing a fresh angle to a story that polarised Bangkok but had little reach beyond that city. The book will be of considerable interest for students of heritage, culture, anthropology, urbanism, and related fields, and, last but not least, is very engagingly written.