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The blight of beautification: Bangkok and the pursuit of class-based urban purity
Abstract
‘Beautification’ is often invoked as a justification for forms of urban reorganization that threaten existing ways of life and ignore the aesthetic values and social needs of poorer residents. The case of Bangkok, dramatically exemplified by the official campaign to evict the community of Pom Mahakan, shows how little attention is paid either to the social problems that such modernist uses of ‘tradition’ are likely to cause or to the vernacular architecture that is being destroyed in the name of ‘development’ and of a harshly selective conservation regime. The future of Bangkok’s vernacular past looks decidedly bleak.
... Anthropologists studying the transformation of urban spaces have argued that the existence of a dominant aesthetic is related to a hierarchy of values and unequal social relations and can stand in the way of grassroots governance (e.g. Herzfeld 2017;Herzfeld 2004;Signorelli 1989). Michael Herzfeld (2017) has exemplified how, in the case of Bangkok, the beautification of urban spaces often comes at the expense of the social needs of the poorest inhabitants, who may suffer eviction, the destruction of 'vernacular architecture' in the name of development and modernity (Herzfeld 2017). ...
... Herzfeld 2017;Herzfeld 2004;Signorelli 1989). Michael Herzfeld (2017) has exemplified how, in the case of Bangkok, the beautification of urban spaces often comes at the expense of the social needs of the poorest inhabitants, who may suffer eviction, the destruction of 'vernacular architecture' in the name of development and modernity (Herzfeld 2017). Beautification can also be related to historical conservation and the concept of heritage, which can be among the factors leading to gentrification (Herzfeld 2010). ...
... Herzfeld 2017;Herzfeld 2004;Signorelli 1989). Michael Herzfeld (2017) has exemplified how, in the case of Bangkok, the beautification of urban spaces often comes at the expense of the social needs of the poorest inhabitants, who may suffer eviction, the destruction of 'vernacular architecture' in the name of development and modernity (Herzfeld 2017). Beautification can also be related to historical conservation and the concept of heritage, which can be among the factors leading to gentrification (Herzfeld 2010). ...
... Literature on heritage development and tourism has noted how the physical state of heritage sites is tailored to cater to tourist needs and desires, for example (Silberman, 2007;Urry, 2002). Development discourses have been demonstrated to produce spatial practices that alter heritage and cities (Oakes, 2016), while urban transformation can also result from the pursuit of a modernist aesthetic that dictates the erasure of noncompliant heritage buildings (Herzfeld, 2017). The choices made about the physicality of buildings and sites as they become subject to heritage development reflect underlying conceptions about how to manage the past in and for the present, as well as ambitions for the appearance of the landscape and the country. ...
... Such 'spatial cleansing' is aspirational and political; transformation of public spaces in the name of modernity and development is 'deeply associated with order' and the need to eliminate mess (Herzfeld, 2017). The preceding examples betray a concern with establishing a legible, highly-ordered, and rational nation -one that is not unmanageable or unclean. ...
The Rwandan government has undertaken ambitious development projects resulting in major changes to the country’s built environment, including the materiality of genocide heritage. This article focuses on the genocide memorials of Nyamata and Ntarama, arguing that these sites demonstrate how globally-circulating discourses of development and preservation are vernacularized, instantiated, and transformed in their encounter with the national imaginary. The forces that affect the material choices of heritage management here include Rwanda’s state-led imperative toward a particular physical ideal of development, UNESCO World Heritage-driven concepts of authenticity, and the Rwandan government’s need for evidence of genocide. Differently affecting each site, these factors result in multiple modes of material intervention. The article argues that the physical form of heritage sites is shaped by engagements between global and local discourses and ideals of heritage and development; these engagements direct the processes of preservation and intervention that ultimately determine how heritage is materialized.
... Sources: Bangkok (Boonyabancha, 1983;Di Tomas, 1998;Herzfeld, 2017;Moore, 2018); Ho Chi Minh City (Harms, 2012;Harms, 2013, Tran, 2019Tran D., 2018); Jakarta (Bunnell and Miller, 2011;Dovey, Cook and Achmadi, 2019;HRW, 2006;Irawaty, 2018;Padawangi, 2019;Van Voorst and Hellman, 2015); Kuala Lampur (Prasad, Abood and Vidal, 2017;Ibrahim et al., 2012;Kader, 2011); Manila (Calderson et al., 2019;Garrido, 2019;Hutchison, 2014;Shatkin, 2004;; Phnom Penh (Clerc, 2019;STT, 2016a;Mgbako, Gao and Joynes, 2010), Yangon (ADB, 2019;DUHD, 2019;Naing and Nitivattananon, 2020;Rhoads and Wai, 2020). ...
This paper aims to reveal how urban 'development-induced displacement' (Koenig, 2015; Neef and Singer, 2015) shapes and perpetuates modalities of spatial violence in the context of rapidly urbanising Southeast Asia. While Southeast Asian postcolonial scholars have explored some manifestations of spatial violence such as displacement, a comprehensive regional analysis is still lacking, especially in relation to urbanisation impacts and planning. Through a comparative lens, this study looks at the urban development contexts and histories of displacement in six cities; Ho Chi Minh, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Phnom Penh, and Kuala Lumpur. We aim to trace patterns of resemblance and specificities in the trajectories of spatial violence using four analytical lenses: political regimes of urbanisation, exclusionary invisibility and disenfranchisement, housing provision policies, and the regulatory repertoires of displacement. Across the studied cities, pressure for economic development and the non-recognition of informal settlements, socially, politically and spatially, has facilitated their progressive erasure from the urban fabric. Spatial violence has often been an institutionalised practice, inscribed in policies and masterplans-seen particularly in authoritarian regimes and in the context of neoliberalisation of urban governance. While condemning 'informality' on the surface, authorities have often used illegal/informal practices to evict communities , violating domestic and international laws. We argue that spatial violence has been repeatedly justified with arguments invoking the interest of the public, like the vision of a beautiful city, climate adaptation, and infrastructure development ; while, in the absence of adequate frameworks and provisions of housing, informality is both 'treated' with and produced by displacement.
... As a result, in both cases the public agrees with and supports heritage discourses of the redevelopment, regardless of their resistance against displacement (Harms 2012). The mask created by the values of cultural heritage and its associated ideas, such as beautification, high culture and economic benefit, legitimise the state-dominated urban redevelopment (Ghertner 2015a;Herzfeld 2017;Tomba 2017). In other words, heritage successfully evokes a set of shared and supposedly desirable values, which encourage political consensus and make it difficult for civil groups or individuals to articulate dissent or resistance against gentrification (Zhu 2020). ...
This paper explores the impacts of heritage-led urban redevelopment on local communities and the associated consequences of gentrification. The instrumental role of cultural heritage in urban governance presents an underdeveloped research field on gentrification. Especially in fast-developing countries like China, redevelopment is often associated with urban beautification that favours the interests of the affluent middle classes while disregarding the needs of the urban poor and migrants. This paper uses Qujiang New District in Xi’an and Taipingqiao in Shanghai as cases for examining the impacts of heritage-led redevelopment on the urban landscape and social fabric of Chinese cities. Following a qualitative approach based on built environment analysis and observation, together with in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this study shows how cultural heritage becomes an effective tool for governance in the context of urban redevelopment. The values generated by cultural heritage and its associated ideas, including urban beautification, high culture and economic benefits, legitimise state-dominated spatial reconstruction and the resulting gentrification and social fragmentation. Heritage-led urban redevelopment in China produces new spaces for social interaction, where the state’s control over its citizens is reinforced. These spaces support investors and upper-high class interests of capital accumulation and leave limited room for the development of alternatives.
... Relevant de la conception sélective développée par les élites thaïlandaises, cette démarche exclut les villages urbains (ban/bang) et quartiers ordinaires (yan), y compris lorsqu'ils ont été associés à la période fondatrice de la capitale du Siam comme Ban Khrua (Goldblum). Elle autorise l'éviction des communautés de résidents en vertu d'une conception de l'« embellissement urbain » qui, au nom d'une esthétique moderniste prétendument universelle, privilégie les grands espaces ouverts et les bâtiments monumentaux, au détriment des espaces de la vie quotidienne (Herzfeld 2006(Herzfeld , 2017. En revanche, l'élargissement de la notion de ville historique et de l'espace physique auquel l'association thaïlandaise LPC se réfère, trouve son pendant dans l'inclusion du mot malais kampung (village, quartier urbain traditionnel ou populaire) dans le domaine de la ville patrimoniale à Melaka, avec la reconnaissance de la catégorie des kampung warisan dédiés aux minorités (Kampung Peranakan, Malay Kampung Morten, Kampung Chetti, etc.), qui a constitué un argument pour l'inscription de la ville sur la liste du patrimoine mondial en 2008 (De Giosa). ...
... Relevant de la conception sélective développée par les élites thaïlandaises, cette démarche exclut les villages urbains (ban/bang) et quartiers ordinaires (yan), y compris lorsqu'ils ont été associés à la période fondatrice de la capitale du Siam comme Ban Khrua (Goldblum). Elle autorise l'éviction des communautés de résidents en vertu d'une conception de l'« embellissement urbain » qui, au nom d'une esthétique moderniste prétendument universelle, privilégie les grands espaces ouverts et les bâtiments monumentaux, au détriment des espaces de la vie quotidienne (Herzfeld 2006(Herzfeld , 2017. En revanche, l'élargissement de la notion de ville historique et de l'espace physique auquel l'association thaïlandaise LPC se réfère, trouve son pendant dans l'inclusion du mot malais kampung (village, quartier urbain traditionnel ou populaire) dans le domaine de la ville patrimoniale à Melaka, avec la reconnaissance de la catégorie des kampung warisan dédiés aux minorités (Kampung Peranakan, Malay Kampung Morten, Kampung Chetti, etc.), qui a constitué un argument pour l'inscription de la ville sur la liste du patrimoine mondial en 2008 (De Giosa). ...
... De même, le programme relatif à la conservation de Rattanakosin (Thumwimol 2004), citadelle royale de Bangkok, conçu par le gouvernement thaïlandais à l'occasion du bicentenaire (1982) de la capitale thaïlandaise, a suscité des controverses sur les choix patrimoniaux imposés, ceux portés par le DBA et ceux, à vocation universaliste, portés par les organismes internationaux. En outre, les projets d'aménagement visant à préserver les artefacts et les monuments associés à l'histoire du royaume et de la dynastie Chakri menaçant d'anciens quartiers d'habitation, des groupes d'habitants, telles les communautés de Tha Tien et du Fort Mahakan, se sont mobilisés contre leur expulsion des lieux qu'ils occupent depuis plusieurs générations (Herzfeld 2006(Herzfeld , 2017Ho & Chinnapong 2013). Des associations civiles se sont regroupées pour consolider leur capacité de négociation avec le gouvernement. ...
The accelerated urbanisation of Chiang Mai, the economic capital and tourist centre of the Northern region of Thailand, has been erasing the material traces of its urban and architectural past since the 1990s. As a reaction to the fear of a loss of local identity due to major urban restructuring, particularly in the residential areas of the former royal city, non-governmental associations are taking into consideration the ordinary heritage of the local communities which, until then, had been excluded from the heritage programmes of the national authorities. The article presents the results of our study of the pilot and experimental Fuen Ban Yan Wiang programme conducted by a collective of local associations, led by the group Little People in Conservation (LPC), which played a leading role in the reactivation of the expression moradok chumchon, understood as Heritage of the Community, in the 2000s. By comparing the words of heritage and their iconographic representations, in particular those of the “cultural mapping”, a critical analysis of the participatory approach of LPC is presented. In order to situate the strategy and action of its leaders in regard to national and international developments on the issue of the role of communities and the consideration of ordinary heritage, we explore the constitution and expansion of the heritage categories “Ancient Monument” (boransathan โบราณสถาน) and “Heritage of the Community” (moradok chumchon มรดกชุมชน) in Thailand and in Chiang Mai in particular.
... De même, le programme relatif à la conservation de Rattanakosin (Thumwimol 2004), citadelle royale de Bangkok, conçu par le gouvernement thaïlandais à l'occasion du bicentenaire (1982) de la capitale thaïlandaise, a suscité des controverses sur les choix patrimoniaux imposés, ceux portés par le DBA et ceux, à vocation universaliste, portés par les organismes internationaux. En outre, les projets d'aménagement visant à préserver les artefacts et les monuments associés à l'histoire du royaume et de la dynastie Chakri menaçant d'anciens quartiers d'habitation, des groupes d'habitants, telles les communautés de Tha Tien et du Fort Mahakan, se sont mobilisés contre leur expulsion des lieux qu'ils occupent depuis plusieurs générations (Herzfeld 2006(Herzfeld , 2017Ho & Chinnapong 2013). Des associations civiles se sont regroupées pour consolider leur capacité de négociation avec le gouvernement. ...
L’urbanisation accélérée de Chiang Mai, capitale économique et pôle touristique de la région Nord de la Thaïlande, provoque un effacement des traces matérielles de son passé urbain et architectural depuis les années 1990. En réaction à la crainte d’une perte de l’identité locale consécutive aux importantes recompositions urbaines, particulièrement dans les quartiers d’habitat de l’ancienne ville royale, des associations non gouvernementales prennent en considération les patrimoines ordinaires des communautés locales qui, jusqu’alors, avaient été exclues des programmes patrimoniaux des instances nationales. L’article présente les résultats de notre étude du programme pilote et expérimental Fuen Ban Yan Wiang conduit par un collectif d’associations locales, dirigé par le groupe Little People in Conservation (LPC) qui joue un rôle moteur dans la réactivation de l’expression moradok chumchon, entendue comme patrimoine de la communauté, dans les années 2000. Mettant en regard les mots du patrimoine et leurs représentations iconographiques, en particulier celles des « cartes culturelles », une analyse critique de la démarche participative de LPC est présentée. Afin de situer la stratégie et l’action de ses leaders concerannt l’élaboration nationale et internationale sur la question du rôle des communautés et de la prise en compte du patrimoine ordinaire, nous explorons la constitution et l’élargissement des catégories patrimoniales « monument ancien » (boransathan โบราณสถาน) et « patrimoine de la communauté » (moradok chumchon มรดกชุมชน) en Thaïlande et à Chiang Mai en particulier.
... While these acts of cleaning and greening are essential to place-making, they are motivated by the achievement of broader aesthetic and social goals. We argue that these actions and intended outcomes are collectively encompassed within the concept of beautification, or more precisely, resident-led beautification to distinguish it from municipal street tree planting, civic sculpture programs, and other top-down efforts that fall under the rubric of urban beautification (Herzfeld, 2017;Makhzoumi, 2016;Nasongkhla & Sintusingha, 2012). ...
Urban vacancy is a pressing issue in many cities across the U.S. and globally. A variety of greening strategies have been proposed and implemented for repurposing vacant lots, and their success depends upon the extent to which greening goals address the social needs of residents. The primary contribution of this paper is to explore the relationship between place and community within the context of resident-led beautification of vacant lots. We queried new owners of vacant lots purchased in disenfranchised neighborhoods through the Chicago Large Lot Program in 2015. We used a mixed-methods design that included three focus groups (n = 25) and a mail/ online survey (n = 197). Our work builds upon a relational place-making framework that casts the greening of vacant lots as acts of beautification with both physical and social expressions. Focus group findings indicated that resident-initiated beautification activities of cleaning, planting, and engaging with neighbors fulfilled personal goals in ownership while strengthening interpersonal relationships, which participants hoped could transform the community of their block. We examined these results in a path analysis of constructs developed from the survey. Results showed participants' interest in beautifying their lot positively influenced social interaction with neighbors and individual investments in caring for a new lot. Social interaction was positively correlated with place attachment, which in turn predicted sense of community. Individual investments and neighborhood change did not influence place attachment or sense of community. Our work suggests that resident led beautification of vacant lots can be an empowering way for communities to work for positive change. "What a powerful difference the lot has made on the block. It's about beautification where people know that good things are possible. We're not just bottom-feeders who live here. [These gardens that were once vacant lots] change culture.
Food fulfills the most basic need of human beings. The essentialness of food opens it up to many forms of significance, especially the relationship with the sense of place. Tourists are drawn to diverse locations in today’s global economic explorations of local food. When food is presented to inexperienced outsiders, however, its regional and socio-cultural associations are usually lost. In this paper, I will discuss the intriguing means which some rural Sani Yi restaurantRestaurant entrepreneurs in Southwest ChinaChina have employed to explore their food hospitality business. Through some artful tactics of authorial slippage, local stakeholders have asserted authority over various untraditional food contents, while managing a dynamic, interactive relationship with tourists. I will argue that it is precisely the process of de-contextualization and re-contextualization that gives local restaurantRestaurant food a flavorFlavor of indigenousness in the cosmopolitan world.
The ambitious Kashi Vishvanath Corridor in Varanasi (India) was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2019. Set to turn the site into a ‘world-class’ pilgrimage destination, the project entails the construction of a monumental path that connects the Ganges river to the city’s main Hindu temple. In the middle of the area under ‘beautification’, stands the Gyanvapi mosque—a longstanding target of Hindu nationalist campaigns to ‘liberate’ supposedly originally Hindu places of worship from Muslim presence. By combining ethnographic material collected through longitudinal research with a critical analysis of local Hindi newspapers, I trace the genesis of the Corridor as a ‘heritage project’. I suggest that, through it, a new heritage regime is being put forward to suit, and provide evidence for, current Hindu nationalist projections of India as a Hindu nation. However, I also argue that this regime is not just the result of a top-down agenda, but originates from a counter-intuitive process: bottom-up mobilisations of heritage by residents (who were eventually evicted) seem to have informed, if not provoked, subsequent official narratives and the branding of the Corridor as heritage.
In February 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake had devastating consequences for thousands of people living in remote mountainous areas of Papua New Guinea. As the physical world around them collapsed and decayed, many sought to understand what had happened within ontological frames grounded in science and Christianity. Both these speak of decay in physical or moral order, and an inexorable end that is without human cause. The ultimate effect of these new schemas negated the possibility that earthquake-affected local people might view themselves as agents of cause and control with respect to natural disasters, contrasting profoundly with traditional beliefs and practices.
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In February 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake had devastating consequences for thousands of people living in remote mountainous areas of Papua New Guinea. As the physical world around them collapsed and decayed, many sought to understand what had happened within ontological frames grounded in science and Christianity. Both these speak of decay in physical or moral order, and an inexorable end that is without human cause. The ultimate effect of these new schemas negated the possibility that earthquake-affected local people might view themselves as agents of cause and control with respect to natural disasters, contrasting profoundly with traditional beliefs and practices.
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
Gardening has long found its way into the American prison, but, in recent years, prison garden programs have achieved an unusual measure of popularity. In the perpetual reform of the penitentiary, this represents a programmatic turn in carceral administration back toward the “rehabilitation” of incarcerated people, the garden expected to “transform” them to reduce recidivism rates. This turn coincides with the rise of prison greening and sustainability initiatives, which are symbolically and politically linked to urban greening and sustainability. These moves present many contradictory implications which place the prison garden squarely within a dialectical process of exploitation and resistance. On the one hand, the (un)sustainable prison garden is permeated and limited by the logics of green racial capitalism: racialized accumulation by sustainability capital; a socioecological fix, which provides institutional legitimation through symbolic capital and justification for racist recidivism narratives; the depoliticization of carceral violence by the prison/urban greening alliance; and nefarious forms of carceral discipline and control. At the same time, prison gardens present radical possibilities through moments of resistance by: facilitating the survival and humanization of incarcerated people; incorporating tenets of a critical pedagogy; and developing carceral food justice practice. Given that this is a severely underexplored topic, I attempted to explore a breadth of possibilities and limitations in depth, opening up theoretical and empirical insights to inform future research endeavors. To this end, I draw insights from scholarship on urban political ecology, racial capitalism, carceral geography, food justice, and critical education studies.
Jay Fai has become perhaps one of the most famous street food vendors in Thailand. Her rise to international fame comes amidst large-scale restrictions on street vending enacted by the national and Bangkok municipal governments that began in 2014 but accelerated in 2016. From the perspective of Michelin reviewers and tourists that enjoy Jay Fai’s food, her story is a classic rags-to-riches narrative that should be celebrated. However, Jay Fai faces criticism from government officials as well as street vending advocates; a reflection of the tensions and complexities that surround street vending in Thailand. This article examines how street vending was incorporated into national identity and the Theravada Buddhist discourse that plays an important role in determining which vendors are worth championing. It reveals how moral language surrounding street vending is selectively mobilized by advocates and government officials alike.
Modernisation brings the decline of traditional crafts and practices and thereby of their old, linked communities. Memories of these communities might survive though only for a time. A public policy dilemma presents – whether to conserve communities and their crafts as ‘living museums’ (akin to a milieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s terms) for tourist titillation; alternatively to merely retain the traces of that culture, as a museum more conventionally understood (lieux de mémoire); or, alternatively again, to accept the ephemerality of culture and its metamorphosis? And, if the last, then how is that to be presented to the discerning tourist? The paper mostly uses the case of the ancient goldsmith community of Wat Koh in Phetchaburi city, Thailand, to reflect on this dilemma. At stake academically are two sets of dialectic opposites: history against memory, and memory against nostalgia – also the contingent dichotomy of tourism and memory.
Bangkok’s ancient city, Rattanakosin, is a major tourism focus displaying palaces, temples, exotic street life and frenetic waterfront. However, this ‘first-level’ heritage landscape makes little sense dissociated from that of an underlying ‘second level,’ comprising surviving remnants and lost memories of a vast array of other palaces whose occupants sustained the ancient Siamese state and accounted for a present culture of royal-elite-military hegemony. The first five Chakri kings had an immense multiplicity of sons who could serve as defenders of both realm and dynasty, later as royal ministers and administrators and as commercial collaborators. Multiple daughters were useful in buying loyalty of an often restive nobility. Royal fecundity, however, posed a real-estate challenge as sons had to be housed appropriately, calling for an extraordinary profusion of both large and small palaces. While most have now been swept away for other development, the remnants constitute a suppressed and uninterpreted cultural landscape that also intersects with multiple sites of both dark and hedonistic tourism. These intersections of first and second levels of heritage, then with both dark and hedonistic levels of heritage-identity, yield ambiguity, demanding interpretation.
In this article, we explore the temporal-and-spatial dimension of “compressed modernity”, a concept invented and developed by the Korean sociologist Chang Kyung-Sup. We examine the relationships between individual narratives and typical urban locations in Tongli and Zhenze, two water towns in the Southern Jiangsu Province, not forgetting the cultural and social dynamics of tourism and the protection of the local “cultural heritage”. The embedding, dis-embedding and re-embedding of memories and places in these water towns invite us to reconsider the modes of production of temporalities, their different figures and their various uses. This study opens avenues to question the concepts of modernity and postmodernity, by examining the relationships between urban spaces and social temporalities.
The present parochialism of Thai studies, although partial, suggests parallels with the situation of Modern Greek studies in the early 1970s. The cultural and political conditions attendant on both in the respective time periods—especially the prudery, emphasis on bourgeois notions of respectability, and restrictions on the scope and content of scholarship—suggest that a comparative framework, already emergent, would benefit both Thailand and Thai studies today. Thailand and Greece both represent conditions of “crypto-colonialism,” in which the combination of adulation and resentment of powerful Western nations produces a distinctive set of attitudes. Important cultural and political consequences flow from this shared condition, as is also contrastively demonstrated by the two countries’ very different recent histories. For example, censorship, once deeply intrusive but now virtually nonexistent in Greece, was instantiated by absent voices and official surveillance at the Thai studies conference at which this article was originally presented. A defensive posture, such censorship exposes an underlying sense of political weakness and cultural embarrassment.
This research presents an inquiry on the transformations of Rajadamnoen Avenue and its adjacent areas. Constructed in the late-19th century, this 3.2 km-long urban stretch has operated as a representation of power, therefore occupying a prominent space both in the urban fabric of the capital city and in the collective psyche of the Thais. Aside from serving the monarchy and existing power holders, the Rajadamnoen has functioned as the locus of all major contests to power and authority in Thailand. While challengers to power haved transformed its landscape, the avenue has also conditioned how and where the contestants could use it to make their marks, claims, demands, and representations. Because of such historical and political importance, the upcoming analytical and critical discussions first look into the Rajadamnoen as a symbolic device for the state and ruling authority to manifest, legitimize, and maintain political power. The focus of these investigations subsequently shifts to examine the avenue in terms of a contested space, where ordinary citizens haved re-appropriated it by means of semantic subversions to practice their social and political activities as well as to create their modern identities. Although the physicality of the Rajadamnoen has not been substantially altered during the past four decades, the political struggles have changed the meanings and memories of the avenue considerably in many ways. For that reason, this study seeks to illustrate the complexity and paradoxes in interpreting the meanings of this strip of urban space, which coexist, converge, contradict, and contest with one another.
This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albanian-Greek cross-border highway. It is not merely an ethnography on the road but an anthropology of the road. Complex sociopolitical phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, transnational kinship, social–class divisions, or post–cold war capitalism, political transition, and financial crises in Europe—and more precisely in the Balkans—can be seen as phenomena that are paved in and on the cross-border highway. The highway studied is part of an explicit cultural–material nexus that includes elements such as houses, urban architecture, building materials, or vehicles. Yet even the most physically rooted and fixed of these entities are not static, but have fluid and flowing physical materialities. The highway featured in this book helps us to explore anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to the infrastructure. Categories such as the house, domestic life, the city, kinship, money, boundaries, nationalism, statecraft, geographic mobility, and distance, to name but a few, seem very different when seen from or on the road.
Based on ethnographic research in a traditional Shanghainese alleyway-house neighborhood (known locally as lilong) during 2013–2015, this study describes how knowledge of the global encourages pragmatic local residents to foresee a different future and voluntarily get involved in the process of urban renewal to enhance their own interests. This study unpacks the notion of architectural heritage as a selling point of dilapidated structures, which is the means through which local residents mobilize their knowledge to benefit themselves in the fight against local government authorities and the market economy. “Gentrification from within” is the concept that I develop in this paper to explain this unique process of demographic change involving capital investment and cultural reproduction, in which the original residents themselves are the key actors in the diversification of a traditional neighborhood. © 2016 The Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong
World Conqueror and World Renouncer is the first comprehensive and authoritative work on the relationship between Buddhism and the polity (political organization) in Thailand. The book conveys the historical background necessary for full comprehension of the contemporary structural relationship between Buddhism, the sangha (monastic order), and the polity, including the historic institution of kingship. Professor Tambiah delineates the overall relationship, as postulated in early Buddhism, between the monk's otherworldly quest on one side and the this-worldly ordinating role of the monarchy on the other. He also examines the complementary and dialectical tensions that occur in this classical relationship, the king's duty to both protect and purify the sangha being a notable example.
A new revolution in homeownership and living has been sweeping the booming cities of China. This time the main actors on the social stage are not peasants, migrants, or working-class proletariats but middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs in search of a private paradise in a society now dominated by consumerism. No longer seeking happiness and fulfillment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, they hope to find material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities. This quest for the good life is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of urban China. Li Zhang, who is from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, turns a keen ethnographic eye on her hometown. She combines her analysis of larger political and social issues with fine-grained details about the profound spatial, cultural, and political effects of the shift in the way Chinese urban residents live their lives and think about themselves. In Search of Paradise is a deeply informed account of how the rise of private homeownership is reconfiguring urban space, class subjects, gender selfhood, and ways of life in the reform era. New, seemingly individualistic lifestyles mark a dramatic move away from yearning for a social utopia under Maoist socialism. Yet the privatization of property and urban living have engendered a simultaneous movement of public engagement among homeowners as they confront the encroaching power of the developers. This double movement of privatized living and public sphere activism, Zhang finds, is a distinctive feature of the cultural politics of the middle classes in contemporary China. Theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, Zhang’s account will appeal not only to those interested in China but also to anyone interested in spatial politics, middle-class culture, and postsocialist governing in a globalizing world.
On May 19, 2010, the Royal Thai Army deployed tanks, snipers, and war weapons to disperse the thousands of Red Shirts protesters who had taken over the commercial center of Bangkok to demand democratic elections and an end to inequality. Key to this mobilization were motorcycle taxi drivers, who slowed down, filtered, and severed mobility in the area, claiming a prominent role in national politics and ownership over the city and challenging state hegemony. Four years later, on May 20, 2014, the same army general who directed the dispersal staged a coup, unopposed by protesters. How could state power have been so fragile and open to challenge in 2010 and yet so seemingly sturdy only four years later? How could protesters who had once fearlessly resisted military attacks now remain silent? Owners of the Map provides answers to these questions-central to contemporary political mobilizations around the globe-through an ethnographic study of motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok. Claudio Sopranzetti advances an analysis of power that focuses not on the sturdiness of hegemony or the ubiquity of everyday resistance but on its potential fragility and the work needed for its maintenance. © 2018 by Th e Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
The three cities of Malacca, Penang and Singapore share a century-long history as the British Straits Settlements, with similar multicultural traditions and urban morphology of dense shophouse districts. In the post-colonial period, these have been the basis for the production of heritage for urban renewal, civic identity formation, and international tourism. Yet, each city has approached the production of its history as heritage in different ways. The differences have been specified in terms of whether heritage production has been led by the state, market or civil society, and criticised as ideology or ambivalently interpreted as formative of identity in the face of globalisation. As colonial port-cities integrating into or becoming a new nation-state, I argue that the production of heritage in the three cities is driven by the politics of post-colonial identity interacting with the political economy of urban redevelopment. I argue that the production of heritage is one facet in the production of space and an increasingly important one in globalising Asian urbanisms. We can specify the differences in production of heritage space in the three cities in terms of the orientation of imagination and the ends of production. I show that the three city-states have been interpreting its history for heritage production in either Asian or cosmopolitan imaginations and configuring its heritage production for either political identity formation or economic product development, or a mix of both. The differences, I demonstrate, are caused by the differing politics of post-colonial identity and economic development involving the three cities.
When describing Phú Mỹ Hưng, an upscale master-planned residential and commercial development located on the peri-urban fringe of Ho Chi Minh City, residents typically emphasize the light, the air, and the openness. They often comment on how modern it is and describe how it offers a new way of seeing the urban landscape—it offers a "modern view." The view residents describe is modern because it is unblocked, has depth of field, and allows people to see beyond the dense webs of social relations and concrete walls that circumscribe views elsewhere in the city. This modern view offers people a generalized sense of "release" or of becoming unblocked. In this article, I describe the ways in which residents and visitors engage with, discuss, and even write poetry about open spaces, parks, wide boulevards, and riverfront promenades in Phú Mỹ Hưng. In the process, I show that the modern view they describe is not only a way of looking at landscapes, but also expresses urban social aspirations, which can carry subtle, yet often powerful, political connotations. © 2016 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved.
This paper revisits Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966). A survey of this theory in architecture in the late-twentieth century reveals how it focused attention on relationships between dirt, cleanliness, and the design and organisation of space-an area previously neglected in architectural thought. Dirt remains an important focus within architectural and urban theory, with implications for practice. Yet, the intersections that scholars of the 1980s and 1990s made between Douglas' work and critical theory, feminist and psychoanalytic writings elicited problems with her structuralist approach that remain unresolved. These are apparent in considering relationships between dirt and cities-indeed, the aphorism Douglas invokes, "dirt is matter out of place", originates in discussions of nineteenth-century urbanisation. To better understand dirt's relationships with modern and late-modern capitalist cities, Douglas' insights can be productively read alongside post-structuralist accounts, including the psychoanalytic notion of the abject and recent neo-Marxian scholarship on the production of urban nature.
The contested concept of heritage has increasingly been used by powerful and privileged actors-the state, the wealthy, corporations, and even universities-to justify their expropriation of inner-city areas. Appealing to an alltoo-often ignorant version of “high culture,” they have increasingly excluded the poor, ethnic minorities, and other supposedly marginal groups from the right to inhabit areas designated as “historic.” One response has been the increasingly globalized “Occupy” idiom of social protest; another has been through local traditions of resistance grounded in long years of experience (as in several Asian countries). All such responses produce distinctive readings of the past; these alternative histories also challenge hegemonic discourse, as well as the practices of conservation associated with it, by either re-appropriating or challenging its basic premises. At the same time, they indicate the growing sense of precariousness among disadvantaged populations worldwide, especially among those for whom affordable rental arrangements are increasingly unobtainable. That situation threatens an even larger insecurity, as the prospect of swelling tides of displaced and dispossessed humanity threatens to create physical danger on the streets. It also undermines the very values of humanism on which the “high culture” tradition-itself, ironically, a proudly borne heritage-claims to have been built, and thereby threatens the well-being of that tradition’s self-appointed bearers. Deskilling in artisanship and the loss of basic skills in the educational sphere, the commodification of heritage and history, and the brutal application of “audit culture” logic to the management of urban space all converge in a dismaying scenario in which, without sensitive intellectual leadership, wealth will trump the search for critical cultural knowledge and so will also destroy the resource that is the healthy diversity of humanity’s past.
The Red Shirt movement, which reached its peak during May 2010, has been met with puzzlement and ambiguity by media and scholars in and beyond Thailand. Often presented as a one-man-driven movement or a 'peasant revolt', the movement has remained opaque to many observers. This article
analyses the ongoing conflict through the eyes of Isan (North Eastern Thai) migrants in Bangkok, especially motorcycle taxi drivers, as motivated by 'politics of desire'. In particular, the article explores how desires for consumption are voiced by a new emerging regional middle class with
a diffuse feeling of being stuck between an agricultural past and a self-employed present, due to structural limitations on social and personal development. The author examines the historical emergences and failures of these desires in a complex web of conflicting and overlapping claims to
representation, capitalism and class mobility. Positioning desires at the core of the analysis and exploring their configuration and suppression in Thailand through discourses of capitalist access, self-sufficiency and social justice allows severed links to be recovered and apparent contradictions
to be reconfigured. This seems necessary to understand the otherwise disconnected and incomprehensible economic, discursive and spatial dimensions of the Thai political conflict.
This article discusses the politics of rhythm and memory surrounding urban walking in Singapore. In recent years, the developmental state has organized programs to encourage ways to walk the global city it has built in the embrace of transnational capital. In the heritage trails in the city center and the inaugural Singapore Biennale of international art, which mapped the heritage trails, the state has appropriated historical space to synchronize the contradictory rhythms of the nation and globalization to cultivate cosmopolitan subjects. I show that the Biennale artists tried to subvert the state discourse on nation and heritage but only introduced alternative spectacles enhancing the visuality of walking the global city. Finally, I look at artist Amanda Heng's work, which by tackling the very act of walking, is a critical intervention into the state's appropriation of lifeworld rhythms and memories, bringing into question the spatial production of the global city.
In this article, I discuss the connection between spatial mobility and political mobilization among motorcycle taxi drivers during the 2010 protests in Bangkok. Through the study of their multiple roles, both as transport operators and as political mobilizers, I explore the nexus of mobility and mobilization and analyze motorcycle taxi drivers as central political actors in contemporary Thailand. In this sense, the article focuses on investigating the historical emergence of “technique of mobilization” based on modulation and control over mobility. I analyze acts of disruption of movement along major infrastructures as moments of time-space modulation as well as transformative strategies that set in motion alternative messages and configure new modalities of political mobilization. Focusing on such techniques, both in the 2010 Red Shirts protest and in other Thai political mobilizations, I explore the solidification of spaces of mobility as major political arenas for political struggles in contemporary Thailand.
On 27 december 1932, prince bhidayalongkorn, the President of the Royal Institute of Siam, delivered a special lecture titled “What are the conditions called ‘siwilai’?” [Phawa yangrai no thi riakwa khwam siwilai]. Transliterated from the English word civilized, the term was widely used in public without elaboration. Bhidayalongkorn reported that there was a debate whether Siam was or was not yet siwilai, often referring to England, China, Haiti, Tibet, and many other countries, but it was not clear what made them siwilai or not siwilai. He went on debunking the general understanding that wealth, power, territory, monogamy, gender equity, cleanliness, dress, etiquette, or mechanization constituted the notion of siwilai. The meaning was slippery, no matter how anybody tried to claim or use it politically (Bhidayalongkorn 1970).
This article comprises preliminary remarks about spatiality and power, with a particular focus on field data from Greece and Thailand (with secondary materials from Italy). I suggest that the creation of large open spaces in city contexts, generating a marked contrast with local tolerance of crowding, represents the intrusive presence of regimentation and aesthetic domi- nation. Within a larger pattern of conceding to hegemonic ideas about classical ornamentation as well as rational town-planning, such idioms of 'spatial cleansing' create a context entirely compatible with the current structures of economic inequality. They also occlude the understandings of past experience that characterize local groups wishing to remain in historic centers; it is noteworthy that in Thailand, where the middle class has not yet succumbed to the global fashion for antique domestic spaces as has its counterpart in Italy (and to a lesser extent in Greece), it is the poor who seem more interested in calibrating their lives to official master narratives in the hope of being rewarded with continued rights to inhabit their existing lived environment.
The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002) 899-926
The disciplines of social and cultural anthropology emerged from the ferment of West European world domination as instrument and expression of the colonial project. Although it subsequently turned against the practices and ideology of colonialism, it remains strongly marked by that historical entailment. Among the many effects of colonialism on anthropology, one in particular stands out: the fact that much of the discipline's theoretical capital is palpably derived from ethnographic research done in the colonial dominions.
While anthropology lays claim to global relevance, cultural groups that were never directly controlled by those colonial powers from which anthropology itself emanated (including countries, such as the United States, that practiced an internal form of imperial dominion) often seem suggestively marginal to the predominant forms of scholarly discourse.
Within this broad spectrum of exclusion, anthropology displays two major, closely intertwined absences—one conspicuous, the other furtive—from its theoretical canon. The conspicuous absence is that of modern Greece, the reasons rooted in the special kind of political marginality that has marked Greece's relations with the West throughout most of its history as a nominally independent though practically tributary nation-state. While it is true that the extensive production of ethnographic monographs about present-day Greece has done much to rectify the situation in recent years, it is only rarely that one encounters the country in, for example, introductory social and cultural anthropology textbooks—those photo-negative images of Western civilization introductory primers.
The furtive absence is that of the classical Greek culture. It is furtive because it shelters behind the multifarious signs of a presence, which melts into insignificance as soon as we attempt to grasp and identify it. Much is made of the roots of anthropology in Herodotean curiosity and in Attic philosophy, but it is of a prohibitively generic character. There seems to be surprisingly little that one could say with any confidence about the practical significance of ancient Greece in the intellectual genealogy of anthropological thought, despite a plethora of both casual allusions to, and specialized invocations of, a hypostatized classical past.
These twin absences spring from a common source in the construction of a discursive and geographical space called Greece. Greece tout court is almost always automatically assumed to be ancient Greece; the modern country, even in its own travel brochures, yields to the commanding presence of a high antiquity created in the crucible of late-eighteenth-century Aryanism—that same tradition of cultural eugenics that bred the Nazis' "race science" and, at least in one controversial but persuasive historiographic reading, occluded both Semitic and Egyptian ("African") contributions to European culture.
Although the German philologists and art historians who generated the neoclassical model of Greek (and more generally European) culture were not themselves military colonizers, they were doing the ideological work of the project of European world hegemony. While much recent literature has been devoted to the analysis of that project in the form of colonialism, I want here to initiate discussion of a rather specific variety—or perhaps it is an offshoot—of that phenomenon. I shall call it crypto-colonialism and define it as the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models. Such countries were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence.
Two such countries are Greece and Thailand. There are many more, and the variety among them—where, for example, should we place such diverse entities as the former Yugoslavia, Japan, or Mexico?—and further exploration is likely to undercut the category of crypto-colonies, producing still finer discriminations. Nevertheless, these two cases, while geographically far apart and separated by religion and language, display some common elements that at least should serve to open up discussion. I mostly confine my remarks here to Greece, but the Thai case will...
The nineteenth-century discourse on women's education in Greece was a part of a more general nationalist ideology aimed at promoting Greece's westernization. Arguments put forth by members of the educated elite concerning the quantity, form, and content of girls' schooling generally appealed to European examples. Curiously, many of this discourse's central ideas about the nature and callings of womanhood appear to be strikingly similar to gender-related ideas documented by ethnographers, and usually considered fundamental features of local communities or of Greek culture generally. The possible analogies and historical connections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century gender-related ideas suggest that ethnographers have overemphasized the Greeks' own sense of cultural specificity vis-à-vis "Europeans." Conversely, they have underestimated the extent to which Greeks see themselves through a "European" perspective and internalize a "European" identity.
This is an ethnographic study depending on long-term fieldwork for a better understanding of the way in which remembrance would be affected by the social change and the political environment involved, especially with the self-awareness of indigenous identity among local inhabitants brought by heritage preservation. In this paper I seek to examine the emergence of Hong Kong Heritage and how its establishment reflects the relationships interwoven between the indigenous inhabitants of the New Territories and Hong Kong government. Moreover, I will focus on several episodes collected in Ping Shan, where Hong Kong's first heritage trail is located, to explore the socio-political meanings of heritage preservation and gain a closer look at how heritage recalls a collective memory transforming a traditional settlement into a political arena of heritage.
Mass evictions have been increasingly linked to large international events, often called mega-events, around the world. This article looks back at the residential redevelopment in Seoul that surged just prior to the 1988 Olympic Games there to better understand how large events bring about change in cities. When existing documentation of the new housing construction boom and a corresponding large-scale dislocation of urban poor residents via aggressive evictions in the mid-1980s are correlated with data from primary and secondary historical sources, there is incontrovertible evidence of a causal link between event hosting and forced evictions. However, the data goes on to reveal that large-scale clearance, evictions and demolitions occurred in Seoul over an extended period before the Olympics as well as long afterwards, which suggests that the Olympics was in fact part of a broader process and practice of urban transformation in Seoul. Without discounting the effect of event hosting in this case, this raises the question of what motivates both event hosting and residential redevelopment, and whether the event offers an opportunity to refine and further institutionalize certain practices. The article proposes taking a longer historical view of the practice of clearance, evictions and demolitions in order to foresee the dynamics of event hosting in a specific city and to inform event-related planning. © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
In this study of space and power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s, Rabinow uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how social environment was perceived and described. Ranging from epidemiology to the layout of colonial cities, he shows how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, health and welfare administration, and social legislation.
Thesis (M.A.)--Chulalongkorn University, 2000 To trace how public monuments have functioned in both the political spectrum and national history in the twentieth century as they have been the images of the Thai nation. Public monuments, indeed, are essential in defining the modern art of Thailand. They have been the living witnesses of artistic achievements and political movements in Thai society. Not only are the monumental images visual manifestations of the state ideology, but more importantly, they also serve as the "visions" of their times, as they reinterpret history and revive culture. This study, hence, examines how Thai artists use scale, style, and symbol to produce political effect on one hand and create works of beauty on the other. Grouping some of the most well known public monuments into different "visions"-absolute monarchy, modern nationalism, traditionalism, and diversity, this thesis explores both how the public monuments intertwine into and interpret the concept of Thai nationhood and their changing roles in the development of Thai society in the last century ศึกษาที่มาว่าอนุสาวรีย์ของไทยต่างๆ มีส่วนทั้งในด้านการเมืองและประวัติศาสตร์ของไทย ในสมัยคริสต์ศตวรรษที่ 20 อันเป็นภาพลักษณ์ต่างๆ ของชาติอย่างไร อนุสาวรีย์ของไทยต่างๆ มีความสำคัญในการกำหนดรูปแบบศิลปะสมัยใหม่ของประเทศไทย เป็นประจักษ์พยานของความสำเร็จด้านศิลปะ และการเคลื่อนไหวทางการเมืองของสังคมไทยสมัยใหม่ ไม่เป็นเพียงแต่อนุสาวรีย์แสดงภาพต่างๆ ของแนวคิดของรัฐแต่ยังเป็น "วิสัยทัศน์ต่างๆ" ของสมัยนั้นๆ ทั้งยังเป็นการอธิบายประวัติศาสตร์และรื้อฟื้นวัฒนธรรม การศึกษานี้วิเคราะห์ว่าศิลปินไทยต่างๆ ใช้รูปแบบและสัญลักษณ์สำหรับการเมืองในมุมหนึ่ง และอีกมุมหนึ่งสร้างสรรค์งานที่สวยงามอย่างไร หากจะจัดกลุ่มอนุสาวรีย์ของไทยที่มีชื่อเสียงบางแห่งเป็นกลุ่ม "วิสัยทัศน์ต่างๆ" เช่นสมบูรณาญาสิทธิราช ชาตินิยม วีรบุรุษของชาติและอื่นๆ วิทยานิพนธ์นี้ศึกษาทั้งว่าอนุสาวรีย์ของไทย แสดงแนวคิดของความเป็นชาติไทยและบทบาทความเปลี่ยนแปลงต่างๆ ของอนุสาวรีย์แห่งชาติต่างๆ ในการพัฒนาการของสังคมไทยในศตวรรษที่ 20 อย่างไร
Interpreting Bangkok: The Urban Question in Thai Studies
- Marc Askew
Rattanakosin Charter: The Thai Cultural Charter for Conservation
- Chatri Prakitnonthakan
Debating Bukit Brown: Bringing a Cemetery to Life in Singapore
- Yew-Foong Hui
The Ambiguous Allure of the West Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press
- Rachel Harrison
- Peter Jackson
Fighting Restoration by Clinging to Remnants of the Past
- Seth Mydans
Pom Mahakan: Anurak roe Thamlai Prawatisaht
- Chatri Prakitnonthakan
The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value
- Michael Herzfeld
Siege of the Spirits
- Michael Herzfeld
A Lesson in Development
- Peerawat Jariyasombat
Distinction: Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice
- Pierre Bourdieu
Sathapatayakam Thai langjak rathprahan 19 Kanwa 2049 [Thai Architecture since the coup d'état of
- Chatri Prakitnonthakan
Cultural Resources Management in Historic Community in Bangkok: The Tha Tian Case.” Urban Research Plaza 4 (Urban Resources Management)
- Yongtanit Pimonsathean
Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value
- Michael Thompson
Phaen mae bot poea kaan anurak lae phathana krung Rattanakosin” [Master Plan for the Conservation and Development of Rattanakosin City
- Woranuch Charungratanapong
The Ambiguous Allure of the West