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Last month The Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific hosted the ANU Thai Studies conference.
The event brought together leading experts from Australia, Thailand and further afield to examine state and governance, suppression and violence, gender and social formation, and Thailand in the world, among other issues.
In this video, Thongchai Winichakul from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, delivers the conference keynote address. He talks about the trans-cultural influence of Thais educated abroad on both Thai academia and Asian studies.
Watch the full lecture in the player above.
Once he gets rolling, he has some interesting things to say.
I would like to know, however, why Thaksin was not brought in for the same sort of “nakrian nok” satire as Abhisit.
When you think about it, Mark is more like a luk khrueng, having been born in England and lived there for much of his life.
Thaksin is the more interesting case.
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Huh? I don’t believe anyone would seriously confuse Abhisit as being “luk khrueng,” because his hi-so heritage insulates him from being associated with that term, which carries a lot of baggage beneath the surface, despite being born and having spent so many years in England. (After all, HM the King himself was born in Cambridge [the other Cambridge] and educated in Switzerland).
Now “nakrian nok” is another matter: his Etonian and Oxford pedigree certainly qualify him as educated abroad, but who would want to accuse Abhisit of being “nakrian nok” in the pejorative meaning of the term? I think the obvious answer would be Suthep Thaugsuban, who has often been at odds with the Abhisit and Korn wing of the Democrat Party, and who is reported to have made the famous dismissive statement “I don’t respect farangs”.
There are a lot of dangerous right-wing idealogues in the news these days, like Suthep threatening to return to “activism”, and that poor excuse for a monk “Buddha” Issara, and there are just as many lurking about in Thai academia.
Thongchai places Abhisit at the bottom of his spectrum of “nakrian noks”, as the Oxford graduate who “never left Thailand”, but I see him a rung or two up the ladder as the apologist, such as when in his BBC interviews he has tried to defend and explain Thai xenophobia and its current rejection of liberal democracy.
Are Thaksin and Yingluck “nakrian nok”? In the strict sense of the word they are, although Yingluck’s critics can’t have it both ways if they still want to be contemptuous of her Thai and English language ability. What has always made Thaksin and Yingluck “korng nok” or outsiders is that they are FROM OUTSIDE BANGKOK: they come from Chiang Mai, and are of Sino-Thai heritage that is only a generation removed from China; they represent the new majority that live in the North and Northeast.
As it happens I was in Chiang Mai on December 6, 2014–the day following the King’s birthday. I found it curious that NOT a single resident I observed while traveling from Chiang Mai to Mae Rim was following Prayut’s recommendation to wear yellow shirts for the month to honor the King. I guess yellow shirts are permanently out of style there. This is just one example of the new reality of a badly divided Thailand.
Getting back to Thongchai’s talk, I am much more pessimistic than he is about the future of Asian Studies in Thailand. The repressive actions of the military against Thai academics and intellectuals, still ongoing, is having a chilling effect. If it persists for another year or three, I believe it will result in a purge of all those who have not been sufficiently cowed by their “attitude adjustment” campaign.
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Thai Studies has been reduced to bipartisan politicking and grandstanding. In 30 years when all the current participants are dead and gone, someone will likely write an objective history of “what actually happened.”
Until then, versions of events that do not denigrate Abhisit while praising Thaksin, will surely engender opprobrium from the Thai Studies presidium, an elitist group that bars entry from humble teachers of local origin with: 1. difficult to reach foreign conference locations and high conference attendance costs, 2. inaccessible scholarship in elitist western academic journals, most of which are barely accessible at all in Thailand or any other Southeast Asian nation, as well as 3. inaccessible teaching (no MOOCs)….
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Has the video been uploaded to vimeo or …?
I would very much like to see it, but cannot from Indonesia. There was the same problem a few months ago with the interview with Greg Fealy about the shortcomings of Indonesian President “Jokowi”. In this case you later uploaded the video to youtube
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Hi Marc
The video has now been uploaded to YouTube, so you should be able to view it.
You can also see it at ANU channel on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqsGr2w_9N8
Enjoy,
James
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P.S. vimeo as well as several other websites are blocked in Indonesia because of the so-called “anti-pornography” law.
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Hi Marc
Yes unfortunately the video was shot by an external company which only host on Vimeo. We will look in to getting it on to YouTube as soon as possible.
Cheers,
James
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