Thai cultural revolution: part 2

22 September 1996

Last week, Chang Noi wrote about how the official version of "Thai culture" is under attack from urban intellectuals. But there is another attack with a rural slant. The urban intellectuals are complaining: "Thai culture" is wrong because it leaves out the Chinese. The rural complaint says: "real" Thainess is a lot more rural than the official version.

As Thailand rushes into industrialisation, the villages are being sidelined. Rural culture is being overwhelmed by the modern, the urban. Many local leaders want to resist this trend. And many intellectuals, often with rural roots themselves, want to help them.

In the official version, the Thais originally migrated down from the hills now in southern China, and "Thai culture" flourished around the kingdoms of Sukhothai, Ayutthaya and Bangkok. Some historians and archaeologists suggest this version is nonsense. There were lots of people around in the area of modern Thailand before Sukhothai and before the supposed southward migrations. They had an advanced culture with its own uniqueness. If there were migrants from the north, they were probably just a few warrior leaders.

"Real Thai culture", in other words, has a very deep history. It is rooted right here. It is based on the villages. It does not depend on migrations and kingdoms.

Here some other historians and cultural scholars take up the story. The "Thai culture" from the Sukhothai kingdom to the present is not really "Thai" at all. Most of the rulers and aristocrats who shaped the culture in these kingdoms came from somewhere else. Scrape around in the history of Thailand’s really old-established families, and what do you find? Indian Brahmins, Persian traders, Chinese merchants, and even the odd Japanese mercenary and European pirate.

Much of what counts as "Thai" is a mix of Indian and Chinese. Take the language. The structure (monosyllabic, tonal, syntactic) puts it in the Chinese family. The script has been adapted from Indian Pali. Buddhism came from India, and has taken under its wing Chinese cults like Kuan Yin. Much of court culture is an extraordinary jumble of Indian and Chinese. Many classical dance forms use Indian-style gestures set to Chinese-style music.

To find real Thainess, the argument continues, you have to get away from this imported aristocratic culture. You have to go deep into the villages. Real Thai culture, according to this argument, is rural.

From this has come a movement to unearth village religion, folklore, mythology, dance, architecture, music - especially in the outlying north, northeast and southern regions. Some have extended this search beyond Thailand’s modern borders. Within Thailand, and especially in the central region, the urban-aristocratic culture has been a powerful force for over 500 years. It has distorted or suppressed the local "Thai" culture. To find the real thing, we need to look at the Thai or Tai peoples who have escaped this influence.

This has sent anthropologists and historians off to look at the Tai Dum in Vietnam, the Shan in Burma, the Ahom in northeastern India, and the peoples of Sibsongpanna in southern China. They hope to find a purer form of the rural culture. They hope to be able to reconstruct what is real rural Thainess.

They have found quite a lot which is roughly similar across different Thai groups, and which is rather unique. Houses on stilts. Worship of spirits (phi) of the ancestors and of the place. Community-binding ceremonies, especially the bai si. A concept of life-essence (kwan) as the basis for medicine, psychology and religious practice. Several variants of a unique myth of the origins of man.

For some, this has been enough to claim that Thai/Tai needs to be recognised as one of the great strands in Asian culture. It is less important than the Indian or Chinese strands. But it has its own uniqueness.

Without going to such intellectual lengths, many local leaders like the idea of a unique rural culture. In the 1970s, some rural leaders and development workers began to resist the government’s top-down development schemes. Gradually they evolved the idea that development should be based on "local wisdom" - the villagers’ own accumulated knowledge about what works - rather than theories which come from elsewhere. The same leaders understood that villagers would need greater self-respect and self-confidence if they were to resist the government. The idea that the countryside has its own history and culture has become part of the strategy to build this self-confidence.

These two strands have come together around the idea of "community culture" or wattanatham chumchon. The villages have their own culture, which revolves around the concept of the village as a community with its own customs, stock of knowledge, and solidarity. For the local leader and development worker, this is the basis for bottom-up development schemes and appropriate technology. For the cultural ideologues, this is the essence of the real Thainess, stripped of all its urban additions.

So the classic definition of Thainess is under attack from all sides. Urban intellectuals complain that it blots out the huge contribution of the Chinese. Rural leaders and rural-inclined intellectuals argue the official version is really very urban-biased and obscures a purer version which is aggressively rural.

To many outsiders, this whole debate is hard to understand, and slightly frightening. What is all this concern with origin, race, culture and nationality? Look at the Balkans, Ruanda, Ireland. Are not historical memories and racial myths the biggest cause of mass murder in the modern world? Why dig all this stuff up?

But this is to miss the point. The search for histories and origins is bound up with the advance of democracy. For a long time, people were told what to do, and told who they were. Now they have more chance to decide how they are governed, and more freedom to decide who they are. Challenging the official version of Thai culture is part of the mental transition from dictatorship to democracy. Cultural revolution is part of political revolution. In both, chaos is part of the learning process.