Revisiting Ideas of Power in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

The five essays in this collection examine ideas of power in Southeast Asia and reflect on foundational studies by Lucien Hanks and Benedict Anderson on Thailand and Indonesia. The essays by Hanks and Anderson crossed anthropology and area studies. The cases explore the relevance of their work in Southeast Asia and comparatively, in relation to academic consensus and debate, social entanglements, political divergence, negotiation, pluralism, and reflexivity. The essays suggest that ‘the state’ is a problematic notion, and that the common conflation of society and the state hides a range of tensions between the rival principles of hierarchy and community. We examine power in relation to socialism, hierarchy, indigeneity, Buddhism, marginalisation, and nonstate identities, through fieldwork encounters as much as through historical and regional contrasts and comparisons on the ethnic frontiers of the modern nations of Indonesia, Laos, and Thailand.

KEYWORDS:

• Notions of power
• Southeast Asia
• comparisons
• hierarchy
• community

Introduction

Debate and differences of opinion and interpretation are common in anthropology. To some, such divergence within the discipline offers an occasion to take stock and then to suggest an ostensibly more satisfying and unified way forward. Ortner (1984) described an ever-growing divide between idealists and materialists in US anthropology and proposed its resolution through adopting practice theory. More recently she has offered a new look at theoretical trends through a contrast between predominant political pessimism and a set of works that focus on good-ness, happiness, and ethics (Ortner 2016). Kapferer (2013, 827) points to tensions between ‘relativism and universalism [as] … a negative and self-defeating dualism in anthropology’, and offers some suggestions toward overcoming the problem.

This collection of essays neither seeks nor offers any such assurances or certainties. It aims instead for a regional and comparative examination of specific issues between anthropology and Southeast Asian case studies. The authors sought to juxtapose unlike cases and to cross between Island and Mainland Southeast Asia and each side’s scholarship, in relation to particular ideas of power and society. The project began with a conference panel that revisited Lucien Hanks’s (1962) ‘Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order’ and Benedict Anderson’s ([1972] 1990) ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’.¹ The two articles stand as significant contributions to the study of culture, society, and politics in Southeast Asia, and reached interdisciplinary audiences. Each highlighted the importance of local cosmologies and localised understandings of power. The two cases share an attempt to challenge mainstream Western approaches to development intervention in Southeast Asia in the years after the Second World War (O’Connor 2022, this issue). Edmund Leach characterised the academic intersection with global politics in that era in the following manner:

In this age of neocolonialism many Western intellectuals are obsessed with the idea that they have a duty to aid in the ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ of the countries in the Third World, a process which is commonly interpreted as that of persuading Africans and Asians to acquire an acquisitive enthusiasm for all the technical gadgetry that goes along with the American Way of Life. In this view it is suspected … that the traditional religions of the East are an obstacle to progress. This in turn has encouraged serious inquiry into how far there really is a relationship between religious ideology and practice … and the processes of economic and political change. (Leach 1971, 1)

Our angle on power is anchored to research: whether it be in the field, through comparisons and contrasts, and in the process of writing. We are interested in seeing how things play out and how they add up, and to work from there toward a sense of what power is and how it operates. Our working notion of power tends toward fields of interaction. It fits the perspective that Stephen Lansing borrows from Michel Foucault: ‘[Power] is not an institution, and not a structure, neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical relationship in a particular society’ (Lansing 1991, 130, quoting from The History of Sexuality).

Bruno Latour (2005) insists that sociology makes an unwarranted move when it takes society or power-relations for granted. He suggests instead that only by tracing the networks of actual relations can we stand on firmer ground, analytically as much as descriptively. O’Connor (2022, this issue) points out that neither Hanks nor Anderson set out to study notions of power in Thailand or Indonesia. However, they each offered power as a productive angle on social life, political dynamics, and history as they worked through their separate case studies. As adherents of ‘the Democratic Enlightenment’ they challenged the obviousness of Western modernisation ideologies. Since hierarchical relations were of central importance in Thai and Indonesian social dynamics, both Hanks and Anderson focused on how they played out and how they were conceptualised and justified.

The focus on the discursive dimensions of power and its deployment, and on the need to historicise particular frameworks of power relations, suggests some affinities with the work of Michel Foucault (1991, 1998). This is especially so regarding his insistence on the quotidian, productive and creative sides to power:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. (1991, 194)

American anthropologist Sherry Ortner (2016) offers a very different understanding of Foucault’s work. Her perspective on Foucault’s notions of governmentality, biopolitics and subjectification appears to be widely shared among US American scholars:

The work of Marx and Foucault, each in its own way, both defines and represents the shift to ‘dark theory,’ theory that asks us to see the world almost entirely in terms of power, exploitation, and chronic pervasive inequality. Some of Foucault’s work is an almost perfect exemplar of this concept, a virtually totalizing theory of a world in which power is in every crevice of life, and in which there is no outside to power. (2016, 50–51)

However, Latour (2005) suggests that the apparent US American consensus on what Foucault really meant could not have been predicted from the original:

No one was more precise in his analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made and no one was more critical of social explanations. And yet, as soon as Foucault was translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had ‘revealed’ power relations behind every innocuous activity: madness, natural history, sex, administration, etc. This proves again with what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought: even the genius of Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion. (2005, 86, n.106, emphasis original)

In Western approaches to social life and politics, there is a common tendency to offer explanations in terms of cultural specificity or some universalistic ‘practical reason’ (Sahlins 1976; see discussion in the next section). Such insistence on an either-or explanation of power in relation to ideas of culture does not seem of importance regarding the works of either Hanks or Anderson, or of Foucault, for that matter. Political dynamics need to be understood in local terms – which involves situating them in relation to local discourses, histories, and conflict – but that does not imply ‘culture’ as some master-key to social life. The appeal to ‘culture’ as an explanatory force is peculiar, particularly since we all ought to know better: Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s (1952) survey of the use of the term in Western scholarship found at least 168 alternative meanings. Any uniformity to ‘culture’ in anthropological explanations is an analytical fiction; the term has been made to serve a range of analytical and political ends.

In American anthropology the overemphasis on culture as meaning can be attributed to Clifford Geertz (1973). ‘Culture’ matters to an understanding of power and social life, that much is clear from the insistence on discourses and on the historical and areal specificity in the works of Hanks, Anderson, and Foucault. However, none of them offers culture-as-meaning as an explanation. A focus on practice (Bourdieu 1990) is a different matter, and if the culture concept is relevant then it needs to be framed equally in relation to function and history as ‘custom’ (O’Connor and van Esterik 2012). The work of Stephen Lansing (1991) offers an example of culture terms of function, adaptation, and problem-orientation. Michel Foucault’s (1991, 1998) insistence on discourse and practice, and his attention to historical shifts and ruptures, offers a range of cases against any understanding of culture as a closed world of meaning. Clifford Geertz’s (1973) interpretive anthropology is by now old hat and stirs little interest, but the emphasis on culture as meaning has resurfaced through the ‘ontological turn’ and has generated plenty of new debate (Ramos 2012; Nadasdy 2021). While much anthropology most likely falls between the poles of materialism and idealism, these rival ideological extremes capture intellectual attentions much more easily than the common indeterminacy of the middle ground. The next section shows that in studies of power in Southeast Asia there has been a recurring contestation over the role of culture and oppression in relation to ‘the state’.

Power, Culture and Oppression in Western Studies of Asian Societies

The Western study of Asia avails some radically divergent angles on the importance of local cosmology for social and political life, and a range of perspectives regarding inequality and power. During the 1950s, studies of political life in Asia suggested that culture could variously mean all or nothing, or that it might mean three separate things in the same place. In his Political Systems of Highland Burma, Edmund R. Leach asserted; ‘that a conscious or unconscious wish to gain power is a very general motive in human affairs’ (1954, 10). However, his main argument in the book was that this general quest had systemically different implications in northern Burma depending on whether people’s interactions drew on egalitarian, ranked, or stratified models of social relations. Robert Heine-Geldern’s Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia (1956) called attention to the central significance of cosmology, divinely inspired rulers and regalia, and of the importance of ritual. Looking more broadly at Asian societies in history, Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism (1957) offered the opposite perspective, insisting that political dynamics revolved around the control of the means of production such as irrigation. The material basis for despotic rule involved the embedding of commerce and industry with government and its bureaucracy. Herold Wiens’ (1954) overview of historical dynamics on China’s southern frontier, adjacent to Southeast Asia, maintained that the expansion of ‘the Han’ majority posed an ever-increasing threat to culture and society among the ethnically diverse hill tribe populations.

Karl Marx had drawn on information about Bali to make his case about the Asiatic Mode of Production as marked by the control over irrigation by the court and the ruling class. Wittfogel later expanded on this mode of analysis. Clifford Geertz (1980) swung the analytical pendulum in the opposite direction, in his account of politics in nineteenth-century Bali as being about state theatrics. In his analysis; ‘kingship was the master image of political life’ (1980, 124):

The Balinese state … was always pointed … toward spectacle, toward ceremony … It was a theatre state in which the kings and princes were the impressarios, the priests the directors, and the peasants the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. [M]ass ritual was not a device to shore up the state but rather the state was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power. (1980, 13)

In stark contrast to this analysis, James C. Scott (2009) makes a case for the ‘padi-state’ in Mainland Southeast Asia as the explanation for the so-called hill tribes. In his analysis, the state emerged in tandem with sedentarism and intensive agriculture; wet rice cultivation that availed the state’s taxation and; ‘the drudgery, subordination, and immobility of state subjects’ (2009, 10). Scott claims that the highland peoples emerged in reaction to this dynamic, as the people fled the lowland state’s oppression and taxation. They devised various strategies to achieve freedom and egalitarianism in highland nooks and crannies that lay out of the state’s reach; culture, agriculture, kinship, and religious dynamics all served to ‘escape’ the state. Since about 1950, however, the modern state has had the means to ‘bring nonstate people to heel’ (2009, 78) through roads, surveillance, and various technologies of control.

These western theoretical perspectives share the sense of power as a matter of states and as about the relations of inequality between rulers and subjects. It is in terms of this shared ground that they offer radically different understandings; states were either benign and enchanting or they were malign and oppressive. Both Geertz and Scott offer a nostalgic look at premodern Asia. Geertz maintains that the traditional state was undone as ‘the colonial bureaucracy and after it the republican …  locked the negara in Weber’s iron cage [of modernity]’ (1980, 133). Scott insists that the premodern state had a limited reach; for two millennia it could not impose its control on highland peoples. Modernity, these very different perspectives on Asian politics suggest, represents the loss of (a) state ceremony as paradigmatic of the social order, or of (b) highland freedom and egalitarianism away from the state’s reach.

The two angles are radical simplifications of Southeast Asian histories and societies. Both seem to echo certain western rhetoric that had taken hold in the colonial era, of the mystic Orient and the cruel Orient.² These alternative models convey opposite understandings of the relations between courts and the countryside, which call for some comparisons. Julio Caro Baroja (1963) showed that such rival perspectives on relations between city and country had informed western writing on the Mediterranean region for over two thousand years. The opposite views have allowed for debate and factionalism among educated westerners for ages, but the moralism that has been mapped on social and spatial categories systemically misconstrues the dynamics of social life.

Such rival paradigms offer radically distinct notions of history and society, and can serve as an example of how science works (Kuhn 1970). The scientific domain of physics is divided on the question whether light is a particle or a wave. Rather than arrive at some consensus, the scientific community split over the issue and then each camp developed the separate tools and methods to affirm their understanding as correct. There is some parallel in how academic disciplines (anthropology, political science, history, sociology) can develop profoundly different notions of what might otherwise be seen as the same reality, divide into rival camps, and take unique shape in different societies (Barth et al. 2005; Kuklick 2008).

Can we go past rival models and toward some assessment of the claims that have been made? Geertz was clear about the state’s lack of control over irrigation; he insisted that the case for Oriental despotism had no material basis. But it doesn’t follow that politics and society were about court ceremony and pomp. An examination of the social life of the bulk of the population in farming villages offers no support for the notion that the peasants were the state’s ‘supporting cast, stage crew, and audience’. It seems, instead, that the courts were generally of trivial significance in society. Geertz himself points out that it was the hamlets (banjar) that upheld and enforced the law: ‘[G]overnment, in the strict sense of the regulation of social life [including taxes and fines] was carried out by the hamlet, leaving the state free to dramatize power rather than to administer it’ (1980, 47–48). Balinese society was organised by task groups that overlapped and intersected: Hamlets organised community life, irrigation societies (subak) organised the equitable distribution of water, and temple congregations (pemaksan) took care of a given set of rituals. Villages were not uniform and bounded. Instead, the countryside was; ‘an extended field of variously organized and variously interrelated social groups’ (1980, 47–48).

Stephen Lansing’s (1991) study of irrigation in Bali showed the centrality of water temples and their rituals, and did not suggest that courts and kingship were of any particular societal significance:

Temple rituals literally call into existence the task groups that manage the terraces for economic production. These groups have no separate existence apart from the water temple system. In this sense, the temples provide a vehicle to achieve voluntary social cooperation in the management of irrigation on which every village – and society as a whole – is utterly dependent. (1991, 52)

Scott’s notion of the egalitarian highland village that successfully avoided the state is, much like the theatre state, an analytical assumption that can be checked against the evidence. Southeast Asia was shaped by trade, and much of the wealth of kingdoms and trade-entrepots was derived from forest products. Courts and traders were involved in multi-ethnic networks that brought goods from a range of environments, including forests and highlands (see Jonsson 2022, this issue). The Thai (Siamese) state of Ayutthaya was a major player in regional politics and international trade during the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. The main city rivalled London and Paris at the time but this impressive state had no agrarian base (Baker and Phongpaichit 2017), which suggests comparisons with the much older ‘state’ of Srivijaya on Sumatra. Both of these cases challenge all the western expectations of ‘the state’ as either focused on ceremony or rooted in the exclusive and oppressive control over basic productive resources.

There is no real evidence to support the Oriental despotism-thesis, and no real evidence for the idea that for centuries or millennia the highland people had been runaways aiming for freedom and egalitarianism. However, it is interesting to examine the historical evidence that fits the case. The cases that ‘prove’ the argument are exclusively recent situations of political breakdown in Burma and Thailand. In Burma after 1962, the Burman national military organised to fight against the Shan, Mon, Karen, Kachin, and other ethnic organisations that had been alienated by Burman ethnic chauvinism. In Thailand by the 1920s or ‘30s, provincial governors started to alienate and dispossess ethnically- non-Thai highland farmers who then were repeatedly on the run away from extortion by agents of the police and military. The situation lasted until about 1980. In contrast, several highland settlements were well connected politically and economically; they were stable and prosperous and agents of the authorities never tried to intimidate them (Jonsson 2022, this issue).

Scott’s (2009) contrast of the state and the highland peoples generalises for Asian history over two millennia from exceptional cases from modern Burma and modern Thailand that have no parallels in the highland situation in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, or in southern China. He drew significantly on ethnographers about Thailand’s northern hills. They had emphasised the integrity of ethnically non-Thai village farming, culture, and social organisation and had missed the evidence for how this marginalisation was recent and un-representative of Southeast Asian history.

For all their differences, the models offered by Geertz and Scott share the notion that ‘the state’ adds up and, further, that it has a particular moral character. Thus, power, as that which makes the state and its rule, is made to appear as a blessing or a curse. The papers that follow do not share this notion of the state’s uniformity, nor the clear moral binary. Both Hanks and Anderson indicate the prevalence of patron-client networks whose ubiquity was matched by their general impermanence. Society was rarely united in an overarching organisation, in spite of pervasive local rhetoric of a universal hierarchy that culminated in a ruler. This rhetoric coexisted with various practices that pulled in other directions.

In some of his other work, Lucien Hanks (1972; Sharp and Hanks 1978) placed greater emphasis on ecology and history than on notions of merit and power. Elsewhere, Benedict Anderson (1983, 1991) called attention to the tension between society and the state, where the modern nation state at times replicated the structures of the colonial state while at other times it rested on profound anti-colonial sentiment. The following section gives a brief overview of the two central articles, while the other essays in this issue suggest additional perspectives.

Foundations

The essays by Hanks and Anderson suggest ways of looking at society and politics in Central Thailand and in Java, respectively, during the 1950s and ‘60s in terms of what people knew or assumed about the world, what motivated them, and how they might assess interpersonal relations. The two articles share a focus on motivated actors and on the actors’ knowledge and assumptions about power and social life. The essays are focused on local notions of power because these ideas were of central relevance in Southeast Asian societies. Also, both scholars sought to hold certain Western convictions at arm’s length, about rationality, politics, motivation, professionalism, efficacy, and such. The essays can be critiqued for overdrawing ‘the Thai’ or ‘the Javanese’, but the cases share an effort to counter Western notions of the intrinsic deficiency of Eastern ways of knowing and being in the modern world.

‘Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order’ (Hanks 1962) calls attention to the fundamental importance of hierarchy in Thai worldview. The article discusses the centrality of Buddhist notions in social life, an alternative current that relied on brute strength or wealth, and the profound instability of Thai society. Hanks does not privilege the perspective of Buddhist monks on the social world. He recognises the reality of a range of Thai perspectives, shaped by different social position and unequal means, and insists that no member of Thai society can take their position for granted. Everyone is looking to advance their position within unstable networks of unequals. Anyone might face a sudden loss of status. Underlings may leave for elsewhere, superiors may dismiss dependents, and a person may leave their spouse: ‘In this shifting social scene, contracts and promises sincerely made are little better indicators of future action than casual statements’ (1962, 1256). Merit, a person’s status and worth in cosmic terms as a result of good and bad deeds over many lifetimes, explained her/his social position and stable benefits, but this however was not a knowable quality. People’s position might rest on power only, wealth or strength that had no karmic backing and was thus unlikely to last. Hanks insisted on the logical coherence of Thai social life and at the same time he laid out how chaotic it could be as any actor must continually guard and push their own position.

Lauriston Sharp, Lucien M. Hanks, and Jane R. Hanks were central characters in the interdisciplinary research project in Thailand that centred on the community of Bang Chan, at intervals between 1948 and the early 1970s (Sharp and Hanks 1978, 13–15, 26–30). The project was in many ways foundational to the Western anthropology of Thai society. Later, the project and some of the scholars became a magnet for critique, for allegedly ignoring political conflict or for overdrawing consensus in Thai society (Namsirichai and Vichit-Vadhakan 1976). Claudio Sopranzetti’s (2018) recent study of street protests and political conflict in Bangkok calls attention to the essential importance of Thai understandings of power, through the contrast and tension between amnat and barami (blunt power versus morally charged charisma). This is the same emphasis and tension as Lucien Hanks had singled out decades before as merit and power. Given the clear match, it is notable that Sopranzetti (2018, 244–255) conspicuously distances his case from Hanks’s analysis and denies any connection to it.

This denial of a particular affinity and indebtedness makes sense with reference to academic factionalism and generational divides, where taking sides against Bang Chan studies has served as a declaration of membership in a particular academic camp. Edmund Leach (1984) called attention to such ‘unmentionables’, the importance of factionalism and personal conflicts and dislikes in academia, in his critique of Adam Kuper’s (1983) overemphasis on intellectual schools in the history of British anthropology. Benjamin White’s (1983) study of the reception of Clifford Geertz’s (1963) Agricultural Involution suggests one perspective on the issue. Initially, Geertz’s book was well received but in the late 1970s, it had become a magnet of criticism in the English-language academia, and then ‘Geertz-bashing’ developed into an academic focus of sorts (White 1983, 18, 29). The work of Geertz had a very broad appeal, particularly after his The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz 1973) had become a canonical text in Western scholarship as interpretive anthropology.

The dynamics of factionalism are understudied. Association and dissociation (through selective citations, position regarding prominent scholars, debates, critique, and otherwise) are important dimensions of academic identity: self-making as much as group-formation. These are not simply expressions of individual agency; the peer review process is perhaps the most notable side of how the members of particular academic societies monitor, instruct, bully, exclude, encourage, and otherwise influence one another in relation to allegiance-groups and intellectual trends. Matthews (2010) calls attention to the hegemonic position of US American scholars and publications in the world of anthropology (books, journals and the referee system), that matches how world systems theory defines core–periphery relations. The profound inequalities of the international academic status system may be another ‘unmentionable’, one that the intellectualist histories of the discipline have distracted us from.

The reception of Lucien Hanks’s work on Thai society and culture was largely limited to Thai studies. Disagreeing publicly with his work has had only ‘local’ relevance, unlike the occasional heated debates on the value of globally-recognisable scholars like Geertz. In this context, the so-called Thailand Controversy is somewhat revealing. It concerned allegations in 1970 that Western anthropologists working among the hill tribes of northern Thailand were feeding information to the Thai or US military that then was used for military attacks on the highland communities. The allegations of transgression still have academic currency (Price 2011), while some insist that they had no empirical basis (Hinton 2002; Jonsson 2014). The resonance of the ‘Thailand Controversy’ varied; there were place-specific debates within anthropological associations in the USA, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere around 1970 about the US war in Vietnam. The debates drew additional energy from civil rights- and anti-war activism and from reactions to police suppression of student protests that varied from one country to the next. The subsequent relevance of the controversy in the USA relates in part to a choice between Eric R. Wolf or Margaret Mead as iconic of where and how (American) anthropology should be positioned in the world. That is, the original (alleged) scandal is of tangential importance to the continued relevance of the issue in the social life of academia in different countries and at different moments.

In this setting, ‘Eric Wolf’ and ‘Margaret Mead’ are abstractions, fictional or mythical characters of US anthropology who acquire significance through people’s identification with or against them on particular grounds and in relation to a larger world. This intersubjective process is curious, interesting, and understudied. The dynamic produces systemically misleading understandings and histories of anthropology. For instance, unlike what our historians declare; ‘“There were two Durkheims”; the positivist and the “almost-dialectician”, charting the “relationships between society and states of consciousness”’ (Boon 1982, 54, quoting Robert Murphy). These are intersubjective dynamics; whichever Wolf or Durkheim we include when writing an article, the character will stand as what in psychoanalysis is called ‘an intersubjective third’ between self and other as ‘a guarantor of meaning who permits the play of desire’ (Crapanzano 1992, 72).

Both Lucien Hanks and Benedict Anderson insisted that ideas of power had to be situated in social life and in understandings that were specific to languages, histories, cultures, societies, and the like. In his ‘Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’ Anderson (1990) highlights the importance and coherence of Javanese ways of knowing and being. Anderson’s (1965) Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese stands as an important precursor to this study, in its serious attention to wayang (shadow puppet theatre) characters and narratives as reference points for values, political action, social life, the assessment of behaviour and reckoning with conflicting loyalties. That study has an interesting parallel in James Peacock’s (1968) analysis of ludruk working class theatre in the Javanese city of Surabaya as a source of social imaginaries and aspirations. Anderson’s ‘Idea of Power’ chases after the ideas that animate the political universe. In Java, hierarchy is a fundamental principle; power is charismatic and centred on a leader who must nevertheless actively work to retain his power. Nothing in Western political theories could account for Javanese political dynamics or imaginaries, they had to be understood on their own terms:

Bureaucracy there was, but it drew its legitimacy and authority from the radiant centre, which was seen to suffuse the whole structure with its energy. In such a society, ‘charisma’ was not a temporary phenomenon of crisis, but the permanent, routine, organizing principle of the state. (1990, 76)

Anderson makes an important point about cultural translation as he declares parity between Western and Javanese ways of knowing. He stands firmly on relativist ground and takes a Javanese perspective to make his case through an imagined reversal: ‘Westerners have a concept of kasekten quite different from ours; they divide it into concepts like power, legitimacy, and charisma’ (1990, 20, n.8). While he stresses the key importance of a ruler as the centre of power, he does not suggest that society or politics add up to a singular structure:

[The image of the administrative structure is hierarchical, but it is really made up] of stratified clusters of patron-client relationships [where] officials gather around them clusters of personal dependents, on the model of the ruler himself. These dependent’s destinies are linked with the success or failure of their patrons. (1990, 47)

This sense of the social world resembles what Lucien Hanks (1962, 1975) had described for Central Thailand. The internal social tension appears comparable between the two settings and the two analysts:

The good society is not strictly hierarchical, since a hierarchy presupposes a certain degree of autonomy at each of its various levels. The movement of traditional Javanese thought implicitly denies this, seeking ideally a single pervasive source of Power and authority. (Anderson 1990, 36)

Hanks and Anderson associated their separate but similar understandings of power with a central state-population, ‘the Thai’ and ‘the Javanese’. Directly and indirectly, they assumed that ethnic majority-minority divides marked distinct political realms. The assumption was pervasive in scholarship, and it expressed how ethnic lines in these nation states were drawn during the 1950s and ‘60s. For the most part, Western scholarship on Southeast Asia aligned academic disciplines to the ethnic lines, with political science and history working in and with state society and the urban majority populations, and anthropology in the hinterland with peasants and ethnic minority Others; tribal groups.

Hanks’s work is largely forgotten outside of Thailand-studies and some subsequent scholars dissociate their work from his, while Anderson’s renown is on solid ground. There are institutional and social dimensions to the difference. Hanks taught at Bennington College, a small liberal arts college with only undergraduate programs. Anderson taught at Cornell University, that was and remains prominent both nationally and internationally. Cornell has a strong program in Southeast Asia studies, with the means to attract and support graduate students. Anderson was a founding editor of the journal Indonesia, that since the sixties has been at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary Indonesia-scholarship. He was an active member of the Southeast Asia Program, and was for decades very involved in training and influencing graduate students. Socially and intellectually, the institutional framework enabled Anderson to leave an imprint on the field in ways that were never possible for Hanks. Further, the reception of Anderson’s ([1983] 1991) study of nationalism turned him into an international academic celebrity by the late 1980s.

Identity, Diversity, and the Essays

My case rests on a distinction between ethnography and ethnology that needs some explication. The five essays in this collection acknowledge the unique strength of the ethnographic approach, but our concern with ideas of power pulls us toward areal, comparative and historical issues. The ethnographic paradigm has generally led anthropologists to assume that society is a coherent unit and that culture or social organisation add up within an ethnic group. The ethnological approach suggests a distinct alternative. Fred Gearing’s (1962) study of politics among Cherokee points in this direction: Different activities (warfare, farming, ritual) had distinct and separate social implications. One lesson from his study is that it may be empirically misguided to infer any single social or political organisation for ‘a people’. A study of dual organisation (moieties) among Winnebago (now Ho-Chunk) peoples showed that the members of the separate units had very different understandings of their shared social universe (Levi-Strauss 1963).

Robert Lowie’s (1920, 1927) ethnological examination of social organisation and the state suggests that complexity is foundational. For instance, even the smallest communities may be organised in terms of the alternative principles of kinship, territory, and voluntary organisations. Lowie noted the ubiquity of voluntary associations in Native American communities, that often fell from view in the ethnographic quest for the social organisation of an ethnic group. He insisted that territoriality and sovereignty were features of all societies, so that the attempt to distinguish states from non-state societies was completely misguided. While groups were often very clearly distinguished, individual Native Americans might be members in several distinct societies at the same time. That is, the common notion of tribal society (uniform, kin-based, egalitarian) had no empirical support (Lowie 1948).

I use ethnology in reference to studies that have a comparative, historical and areal (regional) focus that does not stop at ethnic or national boundaries. This analytical angle is not specific to anthropology. Enfield’s (2005) areal linguistics suggest one comparison. He arrives at unexpected results by looking below the level of ‘the language’ and ‘the community’ and comparing instead sound-units. For instance, the languages of Cham, Lao and Khmer belong to three distinct language families. Conventional linguistics would focus on a language or a language family. However, Enfield found that the three languages share a vowel structure that none of these languages have in common with their supposed linguistic ‘relatives’. Speakers of these languages have lived adjacent to one another for centuries or millennia, and it seems that they have agreed to sustain certain differences while their extended interactions have produced many unexpected commonalities. Southeast Asia is far from uniform in terms of culture and social life, but the areal focus offers a productive way to counter the tendency to generalise for ‘the Thai’, ‘the Javanese’ or another ethnic group or nationality. The ethnographic approach has generally been anchored to fieldwork in particular communities, but ethnology requires a range of methodological adjustments from that practice.

The cases that Hanks and Anderson made about Thai and Javanese societies rested on notions of clear ethnic lines and hierarchies. Such ideas were common at the time, and also in the historical archive. Individual chronicles often convey identity as singular and exclusive, but the genre as a whole demonstrates a diversity of views. Anthony Milner’s (1982) study of Malay political ideas at the eve of colonial takeovers is one example. He focused on a Sumatran chronicle that affirmed absolute and clear lines of difference and inequality between the Malay associated with state-society and the Batak of the hinterland. The ethnically-Other Batak could become acceptable only by taking on Malay ways and becoming Muslim. Milner’s findings about rule and hierarchy fit all the standard expectations in the Western scholarship on precolonial Southeast Asia. In relation to this implicit consensus, Jane Drakard’s (1990) study of court chronicles of Barus, in another part of Sumatra, offers an analytical surprise. The state that she explored had two courts, a kilometre apart, and each had separate lines of allegiance to the inland Batak peoples. The chronicles of these two royal houses suggest distinct political ideals. One conveyed rule expressly in terms of authority, which is what one would expect from the studies of Hanks, Anderson, and many others. The other Barus chronicle insisted that rule was a matter of consent between the ruler and the public, and that authoritarianism was unacceptable. My third example is from Henk Maier’s (1997) study of another Malay chronicle. The narrative describes a courtier’s journey from Malaka to somewhere in or around Sumatra. Maier calls particular attention to a section on people’s notions of identity in relation to purity and mixing. The people at the court the man visited suggest that he not think too much about assumed purity. They were cordial and relaxed, and explained to the visitor that they were ‘playing relatives’ together across difference.

The three sources suggest divergent Malay notions of power, identity and society. It seems worthwhile to entertain the idea that the divergent notions are simultaneous, alternative and at odds, rather than to engage in academic simplification by picking the one we like best as the correct version and dismissing the others as wrong. The diversity in the three cases counters ideas of clear ethnic lines and a singular political culture. Instead, this comparative angle on the Malay world – in relation to the Javanese and the Thai – suggests that the range of political frameworks which Leach (1954) claimed for northern Burma has many parallels within Southeast Asia.

British colonial control imposed an ethnic grid that divided Malaya’s population into Malay, Indian, Chinese, and Other. This framework is still of societal and political significance (in Singapore, as well), and has stifled various politics toward greater equality in Peninsular Malaysia. It is thus important to note that in Sabah in East Malaysia, this ethnic grid was never imposed, and Sabah identity politics have taken distinctly different shape. Several Sabah tele-movies appear to delight in pluralism and interethnic equivalence and reversals through narratives that could not have been possible in Peninsular Malaysia (Yamamoto 2012). There is clear divergence within Malaysia regarding notions of identity and society, and it is equally clear that different parts of the country can evolve very distinct configurations, dynamics and tensions regarding identity.

The analytical consensus among scholars of Thailand has long settled on the sharp binary opposites of the Thai and their highland Others in terms of inequality and estrangement (Anderson [1978] 2015; Turton 2000; Morton 2017; Winichakul 1994). However, this consensus ignores the numerous counter-examples past and present of familiarity and cordial relations across ethnic lines that hint at the range of simultaneous Thai views on identity, society, and internal diversity (Jonsson 2022, this issue). ‘The Thai’ are no more singular than Malay or any other identity. The general point is made very clearly by Anthony Wallace (1970). In his view, culture as singular (the replication of uniformity) had no empirical support. Instead, culture anywhere has been intrinsically varied and is best seen as the organisation of diversity.

Political scientist Kasian Tejapira (2009) provides an important examination of the range of alternative Thai social priorities that appeared in debates about how to render the concept of ‘good governance’ in Thai. This was an issue after the 1997 financial crisis that devastated the Thai economy. The International Monetary Fund had made it a condition of its financial rescue package that the Thai authorities guarantee practices of good governance. Among the Thai politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and others involved in debating the issue, there emerged a consensus on thammarat, ‘dharma-rule’, as the adequate term. However, the meaning of the term itself was contested from at least five angles, that Tejapira labels state-controlling, national consensus, authoritarian, liberal, and communitarian. Each angle has distinct implications for matters of power, society, the market, and democracy.

Thai discourses express a range of views and insist on priorities that are often at odds. Richard O’Connor’s (1983) study of indigenous Southeast Asian urbanism calls attention to an enduring tension – in premodern as much as in modern times – between the opposite values of community and hierarchy. Giuseppe Bolotta’s (2021) study of the cultural politics of childhood in Bangkok slums shows significant variation and tension regarding the rival principles of hierarchy and community in Thai discourses. Among Buddhist monks, some are devoted to status differences and notions of universal hierarchy while others prioritise activism and social justice. Various social actors insist on children as inferior beings who are only to express deference, while others suggest their rights and agency in a denial of any intrinsic inequalities. Some of the children have formed gangs, for support and camaraderie, on society’s margins. The one ‘gang of loners’ that Bolotta was able to learn about defined itself in deliberate opposition to the pervasive emphasis on older-younger status-inequalities in Thai society, and its members insisted on pronouns that assumed equality among them (2021, 137–141).

Thai social life does not express a consensus, but instead an on-going contestation among alternative viewpoints and perspectives. For instance, historian Thongchai Winichakul (1995) shows that among the writers of Thai history there has been a significant shift from an exclusive focus on Thai-ness, Buddhism, the monarchy, and hierarchy, to the Marxist critique of the abuses and inequalities of the sakdina-hierarchy of old, and on to local histories that stress diversity and specificity and refuse to grant any particular importance to hierarchy, royalty, or Thai ethnicity. Winichakul depicts the three emphases as successive, but it is as plausible that they are simultaneous, alternative, and at odds, and that Thai or other Southeast Asian discourses commonly express divergence and debate.

In her study of contemporary Indonesia, Lorraine Aragon (2022, this issue) situates a diversity of views on identity and politics. Examining legal debates, she calls attention to two distinct ideas of power in Indonesian society. She finds that groups aligning themselves with the authorities insist on a universal hierarchy whereas various other groups insist on alternative orders anchored to local cosmologies, negotiated exchanges, and regional specificity. Her case also reveals profound problems resulting from the effort to import the global category ‘Indigenous’ without regard to particular histories, social relations, or political negotiation. The study indicates profound tension within the state, between authoritarianism in relation to the effort to situate Indonesia globally and the pluralism that is evident in the attempt to embrace religious diversity and to undermine the structures that had sustained interethnic discrimination.

Aragon’s research leads her to notice how Anderson has conflated two distinct local Indonesian understandings of power. One assumes hierarchy and the court-centre, while the other is tuned to innumerable place- and people specific relationships involving precedence and negotiated alliances. From the capital city, this difference might seem immaterial, but from the various field sites whence Aragon has drawn her examples this difference is essential. She insists that; ‘the historical and contemporary evidence indicate that both authoritarian unity and more inclusive diversity framings of power have coexisted in Indonesia, and Southeast Asia generally, for a long time’. These models never merged.

Holly High (2022, this issue) critiques the apparent consensus among Western scholars about Laos as an authoritarian state where socialism is said to be simply an ideological veneer. Such scholarly consensus is an interesting topic of study, for the light it offers on the workings of the academic world. High draws on a range of fieldwork encounters to challenge the understanding, and shows that socialism is in fact a lively and positive element of Lao society and politics. Looking in particular at how one village solved the problem of having a reliable source of water, she shows flexible fields of interaction where the importance of collaboration has outweighed that of authoritarianism or of inequality.

Having initially been very critical of the concept of ‘the village’ and not curious about socialism in Laos, High recognised during her second (and long-term) research project the obvious and everyday relevance of both. The village as a site for collective action and accountability is an on-going project, in the sense that everyday concerns are framed by relations with the current government, and with corporations interested in mining or logging. The village managed to take the matter of water supply into their own hands, after several efforts by higher administrative levels had failed. The issue is new but the emphasis on the priorities of the community as balancing those of hierarchy is an old one.

Kraisri Nimmanhaeminda (1965) showed that the Laws of King Mangrai (from northern Thailand) emphasised the centrality of communally maintained irrigation systems. Anyone who misappropriated, damaged, or refused to contribute to a community’s irrigation system faced heavy fines or even death, while transgressions that did not threaten the community’s livelihood were met with lighter fines. This does not come across as the privileging of the punitive state. Instead, the legal code is adamant about the equitable distribution of water within the village as a societal priority. Socialism, as the topic emerged to High in the field, emphasises collective action, reciprocal well-being and social responsibility. It is new and imported and it also evokes older regional principles of making rulers accountable to their subjects, where there is continued tension between the alternative priorities of hierarchy and community.

Nicola Tannenbaum (2022, this issue) examines how her understandings of ideas of power have changed over time, and how her embodied knowledge from fieldwork informs her revisiting of the issues, with herself in the comparative picture. The Shan in Thailand’s northwest are Buddhist but, as Tannenbaum found, preconceived notions of Buddhism were a major obstacle to an analysis of Shan understandings of power. Contrary to her expectation of inequality in patron-client relations, she finds that networks across difference of status and resources avail negotiation and flexible relations where people can over time develop reciprocal demands and mutual accountability. Here, power does not bring freedom from social obligations, which one may expect based on the theoretical model, but rather contingent entanglement.

Drawing on fieldwork encounters that span decades, Tannenbaum situates the Shan examples vis-à-vis the Thai and Javanese cases. But she also examines the ideas of power in personal networks of relations that include the fieldworker and her associates over forty years, and finds a situatedness and reciprocity to power that is often missed when hierarchy is taken as axiomatic. One of her projects centred on tattoos, and it pushed her to recognise the apparent contradiction that keeping Buddhist precepts had no connection to the practice of morality or restraint: Power was morally neutral, and Buddhism in the abstract offered no guarantees. The Shan insistence on the morally neutral character of power places their understandings closer to Anderson’s Javanese than to Hanks’s Siamese Thai, but it also appears that the three models are quite comparable. It seems clear that Hanks had overdrawn the importance of Buddhism, and that he had assumed that Buddhist notions such as of merit would automatically import a moral dimension to the workings of power in social life.

Hjorleifur Jonsson (2022, this issue) takes a lead from Hanks, particularly the difference between his emphasis on hierarchy and clear ethnic lines and a much later focus on possible parity in interethnic relations. He is particularly focused on what there is to learn about Southeast Asian societies from the hills. Much scholarship has assumed fundamental divides and inequality between tribal peoples and lowland states. Ethnographers studied the hill peoples of Thailand and exaggerated their findings to fit expectations regarding tribal society. Subsequent scholarship assumes remote isolation in order to make a theoretical point about how modernity was a fundamental break with the past. This scholarship has roundly obscured pervasive legacies of pluralism and political negotiation, and its findings regarding modernity have invented a directionality to history that is highly questionable.

The insistence on Thailand’s ethnic divide is prevalent and commonplace, and Jonsson chases after evidence to the contrary. The material ranges from trade relations in prehistory to old epics, interethnic contracts, and modern fiction. This is material that ethnography has tended to ignore. Emphasising a custom of civil pluralism as a region-wide pattern, he points to tension between the alternative principles of hierarchy and community. The consolidation of the modern Thai nation state led to pervasive marginalisation of highland people in Thailand’s north. This is somewhat analogous to the systemic marginalisation of ‘animist’ populations in Indonesia, and has a clear contrast in the multi-ethnic national ideology of Laos. Among the three cases, there is no regularity in the consequence of nation-building while all of them are confronted with issues of managing diversity.

Richard O’Connor (2022, this issue) situates the work of Hanks and Anderson in relation to the West after the Second World War, and in relation to Southeast Asian societies and scholarship. He notes that neither scholar sought to iron out his understanding into a singular image of their topic. Anderson’s writings about the state in Indonesia never settled on a single version of what power or the state really were. Instead, the inability to erase fundamental tensions, divergence, and complexities reveal his commitment to the social world. Hanks similarly emphasised merit and power as alternative principles that stood in continual tension in Thai social relations. In their separate ways, they suggest a similar analytical commitment to the social world; the theorist in each gave sufficient room for the fieldworker while there might be lasting tension between them. The rival principles of the ruler, the state, and the nation resonate with the tension between hierarchy and community, and the ambiguity and tension between merit and power in Hanks’s case. The tensions may seem old but the continued manifestation of fault lines in terms of rival social priorities, such as in Thai contestations over the implications of ‘good governance’ show that the issues are of continued relevance in social life as much as in academic studies.

O’Connor also reflects on topics in the four case studies in relation to Hanks and Anderson, and regarding anthropology and Southeast Asian studies. Our papers do not aim to canonise Benedict Anderson or Lucien Hanks for their work. Instead, we take these scholars (or at least their perspectives from many decades ago) along to re-examine the fields where we work and to reflect on ways of knowing particular places and times, the region through comparisons, and contemporary anthropology. The studies by Hanks and Anderson motivated and sustained interdisciplinary conversations among scholars of anthropology, history, political science, religion, literature, and beyond. That’s how we wish it to stay, debate and all.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Our first meeting was at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Denver, Colorado, in March of 2019, at the initiative of Lorraine Aragon and Nikki Tannenbaum. We had a follow-up virtual meeting (between Australia and three different time-zones in the USA) in late May 2021. Comments and suggestions from the Editors and anonymous reviewers for Anthropological Forum and from my fellow-panelists were of considerable help as I worked out and revised this Introduction.

2 The mystic Orient is well known from Said’s (1978) work. The cruel Orient was a discourse of critique that emphasized corrupt or unworthy rulers and often served to justify western intervention and colonial take-overs: ‘Each [highlander] has to pay tribute to his Laos or Siamese master. Without the [highlanders] their lazy, pleasure-loving, opium-smoking masters would have to work, or die of hunger. The extortion practiced upon these kindly-dispositioned people has frequently driven them into revolt’ (Hallett 1890, 122–123). This is from a British writer about Siam and French-ruled Laos.