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Maybe, one should note that “networks” are a principal building bloc in Thai society at all levels, from national-level actors through province to village. They do not constitute a particular form of social organization concerning only the monarchy. Generalized modes of social structuring seem to be less important.

On the network, you could begin by reading Handley, TKNS; Handley on the Privy Council; McCargo in Pacific Review; Kasian’s estimate of numbers, the Journal of Contemporary Asia special issue; Kobkua’s book and so on…. Not details down to the last name and each method, but you’d get the gist, if you are at all interested.

HI , i am too a thai ppl. and i have to sya that i could bare to read all the comment, coz all of harsh opinion on thai ppl and our king u guys made is sooo unfair. We all love our king, and its not b’c of propaganda, have u eva hear or read any of wat the king has done for thai ppl??? we r ppl with brain and heart of our own, and plz stop looking down on us! nad to grass root ” plz go fuck urslef and drop deat in the the planet u came from , yeah go back to Uranus”
ps i think ur a racist tooo!!!!

I certainly wish people would be precise in identifying this “Royalist network” who they are and exactly what the methods used to influence people are. Without details it seems all rather foggy. I do see frequently how people try to cloak their own aggression and dignify it by invoking the monarchy, but this has more to do with what is going on in the average joe’s head than the institution of monarchy.

That is the whole point, jon. The network is vast and ambiguous, connected by the usual Thai connections, so you really have to look hard: graduating classes, subordinates, personal sponsorship, blood relations, official positions, etc. Let me name a few members (dead and alive) of the royalist network: certain past military dictators, the entire privy council, Prem and his underlings, the Border Patrol Police (very much involved in the 6 Oct incident), some members of the military, the people at the Crown Property Bureau, rich families who give money to the royals in exchange for favors and particularly royal titles, government bureaucrats, His Majesty’s Private Secretaries, et cetera. Maybe in specific instances it would be easier to point out this network but in essence it is non-transparent and vague. Thai-style.

You cannot excuse the current monarch’s role in this network because he is the epicenter, the beneficiary, the patron, and the quasi-religious figure of this network.

That shirt is basically what Sonthi (the media mogul guy) did in his fire breathing PAD speeches to Thaksin. There was absolutely no way that Sonthi was going to allow Thaksin to love the King in his own way. Thaksin’s smart, he got Samak with unparalleled royalist credentials, to do his loving for him, in a way that no one, particularly Sonthi, now smothered in criminal defamation jail sentences, could equal or object to.

I will agree with you on this point. “Loving the King” has become such a polarizing thing in Thailand so much so that I would argue the King’s role as a unifying figure is ineffective. Particularly since he has always been meddling, I don’t think he has actually ever fulfilled his constitutional duties in this regard (or at least the way Bagehot dreamt it).

“Loving the King” does more harm to Thailand than good. It shrouds rationality, encourages wild, almost fanatical behavior, and is actually divisive. And court-convicted Sondhi Limthongkul milks this to his advantage.

[Also interesting is the way that intellectuals built up the institution of Buddhist monarchy to begin with, especially Tambiah with his simplification of the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, so popular that no one ever went back to the original sutta, but instead quoted him, except Steven Collins in Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities (1998), who with chapter headings like “Why all kings are bad” on Temiya Jataka I believe, is probably guilty of lese majeste. Check out the Tambiah and Melford Spiro debate over Spiro’s book review of Tambiah when Tambiah gets all angry after Spiro says that some Buddhist kings are actually violent and not at all like the sutta says they are.]

I could have told you that all kings whether Buddhist, Christian or Muslim will not necessarily hold on to their religious beliefs.

Our present King as well, he does not uphold Buddhist doctrine in deed perfectly, especially when he represents the confused and hypocritical ideals of Thai conservatism. Regardless of what the propaganda machine tries to say.

[My take on Thai conservatism is the notions of Thainess and Thai nationalism (one might even go as far as to say Thai xenophobia, the King has expounded an us-vs-them idea quite often in his speeches) coupled with Victorian-style morality and hypocrisy. All this smothered with a resistance to change and general fear mongering when change beckons makes up my take on Thai conservatism.]

To say any King is Buddhist is almost self-contradictory in my opinion. Did not Siddharta himself give up his princely title to pursue dhamma?

nganadeeleg: Sorry, the comment was the most constructive thing I could come up with given the nature of the text.

Wish I’d been able to see this earlier as there are so many interesting issues being raised. Just a couple of comments – most of the things being raised here can only really be sorted out after a lot more very detailed work in the region and I think we need to be a bit careful about some of the assumptions we make and get rooted into. As for language, yes, it seems that there is a lot more tonal functionality in Burma dialects of Jinghpaw and the most obvious point of reference for this could be the Christian sermon. But the missing link in this (and with many of the other comments really) is the inter-relationship with traditional ‘animist’ practices amongst the Singpho and the Jinghpaw. Don’t forget that the first local preachers (and the people whom the Baptist missionaries used to develop their missionary practices and their understanding of Jinghpaw spiritual conceptualisations) were joiwa dumsa spirit priests. This is a highly ‘sing-song’ form, so let’s be a bit cautious before heading too far down the ‘this is a Christian intervention’ route and at least consider it in relation to this possibility. Also, when you take a broader geographical view of tonal functionality – where does the influence of China sit with this? This is the border region where both Baptist and Catholic missionaries honed their trade, with surely a very high degree of tonal functionality too. We really need proper linguistic analysis of these forms that takes into account some of these issues too.
Related to this, I think we also need to beware of a simplistic rendering of the ‘Christian Kachin’ (and therefore the ‘Christian’ manau in Burma) and the ‘Buddhist Singpho’ (and therefore the ‘Buddhist’ manau in Arunachal). A number of points about this. There were until the 1970s at least very large numbers of Kachin Buddhists in Burma – the success of Christian missions in the region is a more recent development than is often presented. At the point of independence, animism (which for many people was practised as part of a continuum of beliefs that did not exclude Buddhism – which is what underpins the concern of some Kachin Christians today about the potentialities of any ‘animist revivalism’) was the daily practice of the vast majority of Kachin people. Christianity and Buddhism need to be considered in relationship with and part of a triumvirate of practices which includes ‘animism’. I did quite a bit of work on conversion decisions between Kachin animists (also their boundaries or otherwise with Buddhism for those affiliated with the Socialist regime in the 1970s/80s) and Christianity in the Kamaing region, and my very perfunctory reading of the situation in the Arunachal region is that once one takes Jinghpaw/Singpho animism into account, there is a common functionality about these religious shifts. There have been overtly Christian manau (more overtly so than one sees in these largely secular events that are pictured here in Burma or Arunachal) – but this was always a really big problem with the revival of the manau and still hasn’t been totally resolved. The ‘revival’ of the manau in Arunachal was linked from what I can gather with an explicit attempt in the 1980s (which was missionary to some extent, and to this extent remains so) to ‘bring Kachin culture’ back to the Singhpo in AP (hence the 24th anniversary). Also there is actually a realtively small coterie of people who have had a significant agenda of using the manau over the last ten or 15 years and that agenda spans India, Burma and China (and into Thailand – where one sees Buddhist symbols at the manau ground for obvious reasons even though there is a very complex religious make-up of the communities where the manau takes place). Again, I’m just holding up a few red flags as so many of the issues raised are really huge and can’t be dealt with fully in one blog – also I don’t have the answers myself, but have a sense that the focus of the thread perhaps needs reorienting). Finally, re: gumlao and gumsa in AP, my understanding of this (which I’m quite happy to be proved wrong about) is that the lineages that formed the majority of the groups migrating into AP have always had quite ambivalent or non-linear relationships with these categories (which again only becomes a problem if we start with the categories and try to sort things out from there rather than looking at the ground first). The fact that the Bisa and Ningroo chiefs are acknowledged in the Miao manau in a more open, laudatory way reflects a few things too- two of which are that Singhpo history is permitted a different framework of reference in India than it is in Burma (I could point out the relatives of a number of historically key chiefs in the Myitkyina manau which are pertinent to local knowledge of history but which have no relevance in a national history and thus won’t be placed centre stage); another is that there has been a reconfiguration of the term Duwa in Kachin state since the early years of the KIA and implicates the term in a broad range of categories and social constructs.
I hope these rather random comments make sense – my basic point is that we are all a very long way from getting to the bottom of what we are seeing here. And that it’s absolutely fascinating.

Just an addition to my previous comment now I’ve read this. Absolutely right. The only thing I’d add is that in Jinghpaw traditional ‘literature’ elephants stand as one of a range of symbols that coalesce together to identify a chief’s status and aren’t the primary designator or this (house size for example is more likely to be equated with the size of a buffalo rather than an elephant – and so on) refelcting some of the regional/ecological variants that get absorbed in different ways in Kachin concepts

Jon,

Maybe it is all the same thing. On the one hand we have an inability to scutinize powers behind the scene that may control what really happens. on ther other hand law enforcement, basic governmance and so forth is conducted in a way that is not professional or transparent.

Two side of the same coin. Until the all elements of politics are scuntinized, transparency is impossible. Until transparency is possible, government can not be fixed.

Royal scuntiny is a small, but integral part of this. The important thing is not to let the powerful do whatever they want just because they are powerful. I think it is hard to deny that the Royalist network is big, powerful, influential, and non-transparent.

Wait a sec… the insurgents have become more and more efficient and coordinated. Yet at the same time, the military thinks it can contain the violence and achieve a stalemate?

What exactly are they going to do differently to achieve this wonderful outcome? Because they have certainly failed so far.

Yes, indeed, let’s worry more about running red lights than running coups.