Article: Things look different

[PeteC]

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/life/Th ... 76283.html

MANOTE TRIPATHI
THE NATION February 21, 2012 1:00 am

Things look different
From the US Midwest, historian Thongchai Winichakul watches the issues that trouble his homeland (photo at link)

Thongchai Winichakul has been based in the US for 20 years. He is a professor of Thai history at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore.

So his brief visit to Thailand last week to consult local archives was a chance to reflect on what he regards as "outdated" thinking here on key issues, a refusal to keep in step with the rest of the world.

In a stimulating speech at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok, 54-year-old Thongchai said he's quite worried about this failing as he continues his research into Thais' collective intellectual and social memories.

Meanwhile he's raising the profile of the Association for Asian Studies, of which he was elected the first Thai president last November. He organises conferences for its roughly 9,000 members around the world.

"It needs to engage with the rise of Asia as an opportunity, a challenge and a new reality for all of us. I'm trying to connect more with Asia."

Thongchai has written extensively about Thai history, including the 1994 English-language treatise "Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation", which is much discussed to this day.

He believes the book has broad implications in areas quite apart from geography, and it has in fact been seen as a metaphor for many things. Among other issues, he sees nationalism written into Thai maps.

Dubbed by the journal Sojourn one of the most influential books among Southeast Asian studies, "Siam Mapped" won the Harry J Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies the year after it came out and has been translated into Japanese and Korean. A Thai edition is forthcoming.

Thongchai is now writing about his love for "intellectual history", in which he bolsters widely held beliefs that so far have had little basis in fact.

"Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting and Ambivalent Memories of the 1976 Massacre in Bangkok" addresses the black October that many people want to forget - while at the same time many others want to ensure we always remember.

Recalling Thailand's traumas of the past is one of the subjects Thongchai teaches in the US.

"The discourse about the tragedy has been silent for the past 20 years," he said last week. "Sometimes silence is not a bad thing, but I wanted to find out reasons for the silence.

"And there are more reasons than I thought. Some victims want to speak out, but they remain silent. There's tension between the memories - and the quest for justice - and the wish to forget and move on. There are also reasons why people want to forget and move on.

"At the social level," Thongchai said, "it's wrong to forget and move on without first confronting reality and learning some lessons. At the individual level, people have the right to move on.

"Interestingly, there's now silence among the victims. Perhaps it's down to the fact that people no longer see their involvement as an act of heroism. That has seemed to be the case over the past 10 years - nobody thinks he's a hero. Worse, if others know you were involved in the crisis, it can be quite damaging."

Thai society must learn from the past if it is to mature further, Thongchai said. A fully civilised society debates events and learns so that it can proceed from there.

He's been reading at length about how people learned and moved on from the Holocaust of World War II, from South Africa's apartheid horrors, from the bloody politics that polarised many Latin American countries, and even from America's era of McCarthyism, with its bitterly divisive witch hunts for perceived communists.

These, he noted, are all "stains on history". "The point is we need to learn then lesson first, and then we can forget the past and move on."

Thongchai pointed out that in the West it's unacceptable for a university to refuse anyone admission because his beliefs are at odds with its own. "That university will be investigated. In Thailand, though, a university that admits such students is investigated, but not those that reject them.

"I want to register their voices in my research," he said, referring to outcasts like the high-school student recently barred from Thammasat University for criticising the monarchy and later only reluctantly admitted.

Thongchai regards Thammasat's initial clampdown on the Nitirat group of scholars for its call to revise the lese majeste law as "outdated" and intolerance of opposing views as "disgusting".

"It's like blaming a rape on the woman 'because she was scantily clad'. We must blame the rapist, not the victim! The government should allow room for debate, and the people must agree on what types of behaviour are to be encouraged or discouraged. It should be the norm that it's wrong to blame the victim."

Thongchai is similarly incensed at intolerance for inappropriate behaviour in the mass media. He cited the host of a popular TV news-talk show who recently made a derisive remark using improper language. The host and the Nation Group, his show's sponsor, were broadly condemned but offered no apology.

Thongchai is also writing about the intellectual foundations for Thai science. He's traced the mainstream beliefs forming the bedrock of many ideas that have branched out. These include the birth of the "master narrative" of Thai history between 1900 and 1929, how Thais have dealt with farang the same way since 1850, why Thais think Buddhism is superior to other faiths, especially Catholicism, and why Thai authorities stress the importance of unity and duty.

Being based overseas, Thongchai believes he has a much better vantage point from which to examine issues in Thai society. He considers himself lucky to be working in between Eastern and Western culture and thus enjoying a broader perspective of both.

"The liberal-arts community in the US is strong, diverse and big," he said. "It's easy to find colleagues from different disciplines to discuss issues with, something you can't do here.

"And in the US there are more and more 'in-betweens' in academia. I think that's the trend. You need so take a step beyond your national history to experience new perspectives. It makes you more productive and competitive - and you need to compete with yourself a lot."