For a love of ‘the Thais’: US imperialism and the tender violence of Thai studies

ABSTRACT

Since the inception of Thai studies, scholars have been preoccupied with the construction of a moral stance in the service of power. Intimate knowledge of the Thai interior and the ability to speak for the Thai ‘native’ has unwittingly supported intervention disguised as a warm embrace. Recent studies have shown how this sentimental mode of engagement was central to enabling US expansion during the early Cold War. Area Studies specialists who travelled to Thailand did so as part of this same cultural milieu. Adopting the ‘village’ as the backdrop, their efforts to represent the Thai villager committed what Laura Wexler has described as a tender violence: restoring the native as a legitimate subject by collapsing the multitude of complex voices, experiences and priorities into a bound set of useful observations. The result was the replacement of colonial markers of difference with new and acceptable ones. It was a process that proved vital to an imperial expansion, led by the United States, but enthusiastically supported and ultimately shaped by the Thai elite.

KEYWORDS:

• Thai studies
• US imperialism
• sentimentalism
• Orientalism
• anthropology

Notes

1 The full quote was taken from a lecture I attended at the State Department, Washington D.C., 29 September 2010. Kissinger said:

To me, the tragedy of the Vietnam war was not that there were disagreements — that was inevitable, given the complexity of the (conflict) — but that the faith of Americans in each other became destroyed in the process. It was America’s first experience with limits in foreign policy, and it was something painful to accept.

2 In August 1953, the National Security Council was spooked by a coup attempt by a group of prominent Air Force chiefs and led by Kach Songkhram. According to National Security Council documents, they had plotted in connivance with Vietnamese Communists to overthrow the Thai government. Most troubling was that the plotters were reportedly abetted by King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Whether true or not, the incident clearly indicated anxiety about the need to shore up the support of the King (see National Security Council 1953).