Tai lands and Thailand: community and state in Southeast Asia

Andrew Walker (ed.)

Tai lands and Thailand: community and state in Southeast Asia

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009 272pp., ISBN 978 87 7694 049 2, £16.99 (pb)

Reviewed by Tomas Larsson, University of Cambridge

This book explores notions of community in the ‘Tai world’ that encompasses Thailand, Laos, Burma, and southern China. It touches on a number of long-running debates in sociology and anthropology (and classics such as Weber, Durkheim, and Tönnies are referenced) and builds on the works of, among others, Katherine Bowie and Jeremy Kemp, in challenging romantic notions of ‘traditional’ communities, providing resistance to and shelter from the ravages of state and market forces. In one sense the book is somewhat lacking in terms of relevant intellectual foils in the form of contemporary social scientific theoreticians. After all, the Asiatic Mode of Production has few proponents today. But that does not mean that the volume lacks polemical ‘edge’. This is, however, reserved mainly for non-governmental organisations, Thai public intellectuals, and, occasionally, state bureaucracies whose ‘solutions’ to social problems rest on overly simplistic understandings of community.

The book is divided into three sections, bookended by an introduction and a conclusion by the book’s editor, Andrew Walker. It is the latter contribution that most clearly succeeds in terms of identifying what’s at stake in the strategic manipulation of the meaning of community, by unpicking some of the reasons why advocates of community rights and empowerment became so disillusioned with the rural population’s electoral embrace of Thaksin Shinawatra that they more or less warmly welcomed the 2006 military coup which ousted his government – thus negating the voting rights of the country’s predominantly rural majority.

The deeper roots of such loss of ‘trust’ in the anti-capitalist potentialities of Thailand’s rural grassroots lie in a phenomenon that is highlighted in a chapter by James Houghton: the subversion of anti-capitalist, ‘community’-oriented NGO-implemented development projects for capitalist purposes by their intended beneficiaries.

In an excellent contribution Craig Reynolds explores the genealogy of the Thai term for community, chumchon, and its rise to political prominence during the Cold War, when ‘community development’ became a central part of the discourses and practices that sought to provide a veneer of political legitimacy to the anti-communist Thai state, as well as to the ‘progressive’ intellectuals that sought to challenge the legitimacy of the Thai Leviathan.

In a more empirically oriented chapter focused on a religious ceremony in a northern Thai village, Walker posits that the salient local conception of ‘community’ is represented not by chumchon but rather the discursive deployment of the term suan huam, which closely corresponds to the idea of a ‘common good’. This discussion remains focused on the local community, but it would have been interesting to explore the social and political logic of suan huam-thinking at national and perhaps also regional levels. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is currently in the process of creating an ‘ASEAN community’, which is one of the clearest and most ambitious contemporary attempts to politically manipulate and shift the boundaries of ‘we’-feeling and solidarity.

In that light, it is interesting to note that the contributions of, in particular, Nicholas Farrelly (on the Shan in the Thai-Burma borderlands) and Antonella Diana (on the Thai Lue in the China-Lao borderlands) emphasise the continued and increasing salience of national borders and identities. In contrast, three essays on Laos – by Holly High, Sarinda Singh, and Warren Mayes – in different ways highlight the continuing weakness of the Lao state in both these regards.