Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Bunnell, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The original foundation of Bangkok reproduced the pattern of the preceding capital at Ayutthaya. That pattern has since disappeared from plain view as a result, less of “urbanization” in the usual sense, than of a deliberate refocusing of the city as a reflection of a larger national polity capable of taking its place in a world dominated by Western colonialism. Today’s urban aesthetics continue a pattern of crypto-colonialism that suppresses a sense of an earlier polity in which today’s working-class and minority populations would have had a more visible role. That earlier polity persists in spectral form, both in the shape of parts of the city and in the organizational habits of its poorer residents. Some of those residents have indeed tried to utilize official discourse to assert their claim to a more traditional identity than that represented by the bureaucratic state apparatus. They also pose a serious challenge to socially dominant ideals of urban beauty. By analyzing culturally specific concepts of beauty and examining the ways in which these poorer populations (notably the residents of the Pom Mahakan community recently destroyed by official action) evoke the spectral form of the earlier polity, we can see that the city remains tensely – if, to an outsider, often invisibly – caught between an elusive past and a difficult present.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, IIAS Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus, Leiden University; Senior Advisor, Critical Heritage Studies Initiative, International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden; a member of the doctoral research program in Beni Culturali, Formazione e Territorio, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”; and Chang Jiang Scholar, Shanghai International Studies University. Author of twelve books (most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, 2022) and numerous articles and reviews, and producer of two ethnographic films, he has served as the editor of American Ethnologist (1995-98) and is currently the editor-at-large (responsible for “Polyglot Perspectives”) at Anthropological Quarterly. His research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has most recently addressed the social and political impact of historic conservation and gentrification, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, and the ethnography of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the seminar.