At the ANU, the College of Asia and the Pacific (which encompasses the Faculty of Asian Studies, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Crawford School of Economics and Government and Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy) is hosting an upcoming information evening for prospective graduate students.  New Mandala readers in Canberra (or nearby) who are considering their future study options will find it a worthwhile event.  All the details are available here.

And readers who are, for the moment, far from Acton may also want to consider their ANU options.  With that in mind, feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about Asian Studies at the ANU.  I am more than happy to put you in contact with the appropriate people.

In early 2003 there was a flurry of interest in history in Baan Tiam, a small village in northern Thailand. Partly this was a result of the newly elected headman’s interest in initiating new projects that would raise the profile and prestige of the village. There were also central government initiatives aimed at promoting local culture. I attended a long meeting at the district office which discussed the possible establishment of cultural centres in selected villages throughout the district. In meetings like this culture equals tradition which equals the past. The meeting was followed by a visit to the district high school where a dark and dusty room was filled with old farming tools and other pieces of domestic paraphernalia. It was a district museum in the making. 

Baan Tiam’s new headman was appropriately impressed. Perhaps the village itself could develop a museum. There were plenty of old people. There were sufficient old farm tools that hadn’t yet been sold off to antique dealers or interior decorators in Chiang Mai. And there was a planned handicraft centre where under-employed old people could demonstrate traditional skills. But, to get things off to a solid start, the headman felt that there was a need to compile a record of the village’s history. Pictures? Photos? A brochure? Perhaps even a book.

History is elusive, and there was work to be done in order to capture it. My research assistant was quickly recruited to compile a brief account of key events in the village’s past.  Interviews with grandmothers and grandfathers - living repositories of tradition - were readily arranged. There were some good stories of early settlers, of forest sprits, floods, elephant camps and even a “postal dog” that British timber workers used to send messages down river to the old district centre. I was excited. But as more and more historical detail was collected the project started to unravel.

I discussed this with Ning, a young woman who was a keen supporter of the headman and who was keen to collaborate with his various projects. For Ning, the headman represented a “new generation” of “democratic” leadership. A new generation needed a solid grounding in tradition. However there was a problem. Ning told me that the different stories collected from the old people did not fit together. They were inconsistent. Some appeared to be wrong. Some of the old people didn’t remember so well any more. They were just too old to be historically reliable. How could they be checked? What if the village ended up writing a history that wasn’t true? It could end up in embarrassment rather than prestige.

In an attempt to counter these anxieties of authenticity, I attempted a rather lame explanation of a more narrative approach to history. It was a half-hearted attempt assisted by some locally brewed medicinal fortification. The aim of the project (and it is amazing how quickly in Thailand activities can become “projects”) should be to collect different stories. Grandmother Noot’s claim that the original village name came from a nearby mountain stream could be set alongside Uncle Maa’s memory that the village was given its name by a minor chief from Chiang Mai. Historical interest lay in diversity rather than consistency.

It was a hard message to sell. I needed a metaphor…

A good Thai dinner, I suggested, didn’t involve blending all the dishes together into a single serving. A meal relied for its interest on the contrasting textures and flavours of the different dishes. In the same way, the Baan Tiam History Project (now it had a name!) should aim to present different people’s stories, setting them alongside each other so that readers - or visitors to the vaguely imagined village museum - could savour the different perspectives. I didn’t even think about trying to translate “hybridity” but I was rather pleased about my culinary metaphor. 

But a good meal and a good history are two quite different things. The project soon ran out of steam.

Local politics played a part. There was plenty of the usual gossip and dissent about the headman wasting time and money on history and culture. He had even used some of the village committee’s precious budget to buy a camera to document traditional activities. Things got a bit ugly when a roll of film was seized by one of the candidates for the provincial assembly election, convinced that the headman’s photography had captured illegal electoral canvassing at a village festival by a rival candidate.

The handicraft centre, where the museum was to be located, was eventually constructed. But it was tainted by a bitter dispute when the “public” land on which it was built was seized from one of the village elders (the uncle of the village abbot!) who considered the land to be his own private property. It wasn’t long before the empty handicraft centre was converted to the community shop.

History was soon forgotten and the headman’s developmental attention was diverted to one of the Thai state’s more contemporary preoccupations - compost.

But I was not so readily put off. With the help of some persistent research assistants I have continued to collect fragments of Baan Tiam’s unreliable history. I plan to present these, with some commentary and analysis, in a series of New Mandala “Anthroblog” posts over the coming months.

Perhaps I will start with landscape.

Southeast Asia in the seventies can scarcely avoid its measure of difficulties and troubles as the result of the mass of unsolved problems which confront even the most successful of the governments in the region.  It seems proper to suggest that all the evidence which is currently available points towards an absence of cataclysms, but it leaves the strong possibility of recurring revolt.  The long history of revolt in the region is insufficint basis for an expectation that instances of revolt will mark the future as they have marked the past.  The continued existence of the factors which have led to past revolt is, however, a strong reason for believing that many years have still to pass before true stability can replace the transient calm which seems the best hope for the region in the near future.

- Extracted from Milton Osborne (1970), Region of Revolt: Focus on Southeast Asia, Ringwood: Penguin Books, p. 194.  At the time, Milton Osborne was an Associate Professor of History at Monash University.  A helpful list of some of his other publications is available here.

The first time was the worst, although the second was pretty bad too. The only two times in my life I’ve been on an intravenous drip.

I’ve had malaria about 20 times — although I can’t be sure exactly, because towards the end I was self-diagnosing, and medicating with Artesunate and Mefloquine. During this period in the mid-to-late 1990s I was travelling regularly in KNU (Karen National Liberation Army) Fourth and Six Brigades, and the Mon ceasefire zones, home to some of the most drug-resistant strains of malaria in the world. In the rainy seasons I would walk into places which during the dry season were more or less accessible by 4-Wheel Drive. Looking back, I can’t properly explain why I didn’t use mosquito repellent or nets. Jungle macho, I suppose — plus the fact that the villagers we stayed with had none of these things. Towards the end, I had built up some resistance, and was throwing off a fever every four-to-six weeks, without thinking much of it. I would barely take the afternoon off work, and more than once made the five-six hour drive from Sangkhlaburi to Bangkok with a 40° fever, and veins full of quinine derivatives, Red Bull and paracetamol. I discovered that the best way to regain strength after a bout of malaria was eating dogmeat taut gratiam (fried in garlic). However, I had to explain to General Shwe Saing that dog wasn’t the only meat I liked to eat. (The sound of yelping, followed by gunfire, followed by silence, followed an hour or so later by an invitation to dinner became too regular a routine.) I also discovered that a bottle of Singha beer processed through a liver only recently recovered from PV malaria produces a devastating hangover. (I still shudder to recall my dark brown piss during bouts of PV, full of dead blood cells, if I understand correctly: thus ‘blackwater fever’.)

Anyway, the first time I picked up malaria was on the Tenasserim River, way down south, in 1992. By the time I got back to Chiang Mai, I was feeling pretty rough. I took several malaria tests, but each came out negative. (I hadn’t realised that the paracetamol I was taking to control the fever was also masking the evidence of parasites in my blood.) The small NGO I was working for thought I was malingering, and packed me off to the border. By the time I got to Mannerplaw (KNU headquarters, until 1994) I had the classic symptoms: high fever spikes, aching bones, tingling skin, terrible teeth-chattering chills, searing headache, and a strange light-heartedness, followed by drenching sweats and sleepless exhaustion. I had my blood tested again at a KNU clinic, and was gratified to be told I had PF malaria (+ three). I spent the next two weeks in Too Wa Lu hospital (which I later learned had been assessed by a French medical agency, which recommended that it should be de-commissioned, and encased within concrete, as a public health risk). Towards the end of my stay, a young Karen soldier in the next bed died of his battle wounds in the night, without as far as I could tell having regained consciousness since arriving in hospital the afternoon before. A few days later, I was back in my small house in neighbouring Pwe Ba Lu village. It took me at least a week to re-gain enough strength to walk a few hundred yards into the main village. I was struck by how un-moved most people were by accounts of my ordeal. Everyone on the border had malaria, time and again. It was just something you put up with. My incredibly friendly and gracious Karen hosts were far more concerned that I had no access to regular electricity or Western food.

However, on that first awful night, even the lovely and imperturbable Thramu E- was taken aback. I was thrashing about on a bamboo bed, hooked up to quinine and saline drips, which had yet to kick in. A huge, round, black, cartoon-like pig burst through the door, and started charging in circles around my sick-bed. I called out to Thramu: “Get rid of that pig - before it rips the needles out of my arm!” She just giggled - but looked really quite frightened. When the hallucination subsided, I found myself bursting into snippets of half-remembered teenage punk anthem, which also rather alarmed E-. After a while (I don’t know how long, as I was later told that I had slipped in and out of a coma, and was in danger of collapsing into a full-blown cerebral malaria), I decided to kill myself. I had got into a spot of romantic bother, which combined with the malaria, the drugs, and my natural disposition to paranoia, had formed in me a sudden conviction that all my problems could be easily solved, by ending my life. Immediately, I was able to view my troubles in perspective: after all, these were trivial concerns, in the context of my own death. In that moment, I felt a surge of life-affirming well-being, which came with the realisation that I didn’t have to kill myself.

I spent another two weeks on that sweat-soaked bed, before I had the strength to walk out the door. In all that time though, as the quinine went drip, drip, drip — and my head went buzz, buzz, buzz — I knew that it was going to be okay.

Ashley South is an independent analyst, who specialises in politics and humanitarian issues in Burma and Southeast Asia. His most recent book is Ethnic Politics in Burma: States of Conflict. 

New Mandala is currently experimenting with ways of linking blogging with more conventional forms of academic writing. Earlier this week we launched Four Letter Words to encourage guest contributors to write short essays that reflect on their scholarship and experience in mainland Southeast Asia.

Today I am announcing another, much more self-centred, initiative. I want to attempt to write some pieces of ethnography “out loud”. I want to use semi-regular blog posts to build up a body of ethnographic material that will form the basis for a book chapter and/or a journal article.

My ethnographic focus will be the northern Thai village of Baan Tiam, which has featured on New Mandala many times already. My initial thematic focus will be on history - both on the actual history of Baan Tiam and on the way history is selectively remembered and drawn on in contemporary discussions within the village.

I’m not sure exactly where this will lead. It’s an experiment. I have plenty of field notes to draw on and some general ideas about how to link things together. I can also see, vaguely at this stage, how the discussion of history may link to some of the discussions of politics and economic transformation that I have already featured on New Mandala. I expect that some of the “Anthroblog” posts will be relatively well put together. Others will be much more fragmentary. I’ll try to keep it readable and relatively engaging but I don’t want to hide the twists and turns and doubts and false starts (and false middles and false finishes) that are typical of academic writing.

I am hopeful that some New Mandala readers will be drawn into this “writing out loud” process. I hope that readers’ comments open up lines of critique, suggestion, new enquiry and theoretical reflection. Who knows, I may be able to come up with ways of incorporating some readers’ comments into the final text itself.

My plan is to contribute “Anthroblog” posts about once per week. Sometimes they may be more regular, sometimes considerably less. I hope you enjoy my experimental exploration of Baan Tiam’s unreliable past.

Chiang Mai - A woman turned up at the Doi Suthep Temple and made noise with a “hand clapper” to protest against visiting Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat. Somchai was talking to the abbot at about 9:30 am when the woman turned up and shook the hand clapper. She was taken away by police immediately.

Let’s hope the police handle the clapper with care. PAD sightings this far from Bangkok are exceptionally rare. The pandas at Chiang Mai zoo could have a rival!

The most recent victim of this law is Melbourne man Harry Nicolaides, who has worked in Thailand as a university lecturer and freelance writer. He was arrested at Bangkok airport on 31 August 2008. As Nicolaides continues to languish in a Bangkok prison cell, the use and abuse of the lèse majesté law has received a modicum of worldwide scrutiny.  However since 21 September, Nicolaides’ case has been completely out of the news.

He has been quietly forgotten.

Lèse majesté is a weapon used to defend the perceived honour of Thailand’s royal family. According to Paul Handley, the author of an unauthorised 2006 biography of the king, “[i]n Thailand, all that truly stands between royal virtue and London-tabloid-style media treatment is the lèse majesté statute.”

Since Handley’s controversial book–which is banned in Thailand–there have been a number of high-profile cases of lèse majesté involving foreigners. The two most recent instances where accusations have been levelled at non-Thais are illustrative of the problems with implementing this law.

In December 2006 Oliver Jufer was charged with the offence after defacing images of the king in Chiang Mai during a drunken spree. He was held for four months without bail, and after a quick trial was sentenced to ten years in prison. Jufer served another few weeks before he was pardoned by the king and deported to his native Switzerland.

At the time, outrage about his draconian treatment for an act of immature vandalism led to even more outlandish attacks on the Thai monarchy. There was a flurry of provocative and childish online protests that used the global reach of the YouTube video-sharing website to mock the Thai royals. In response, the Thai government banned YouTube. This sparked further international bemusement and condemnation. To conform to local expectations of fair comment, YouTube is today only available in Thailand in filtered form.

Since the Jufer fiasco, in April 2008 the BBC’s Bangkok correspondent Jonathan Head has been embroiled in a lèse majesté fight of his own. He has not been charged but is the subject of ongoing investigations. Head’s case is related to that of Jakrapob Penkair, an outspoken critic of military intervention in Thai politics and an eloquent ally of deposed former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Comments made to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand during 2007 landed both men in trouble.

When only Thais are involved, lèse majesté does not get as much attention. But one case that has entranced the international press involved student activist and social critic, Chotisak Onsoong. Earlier this year he was charged with lèse majesté after refusing to stand during the playing of the king’s anthem at a Bangkok cinema. Almost unique among recent lèse majesté cases, Chotisak welcomed the charge with further acts of public defiance.

The view of the king himself on lèse majesté is not completely clear. In his 2005 birthday speech he cautioned against the over-exuberant use of this criminal provision. Nonetheless many factions within the Thai elite continue to indulge in episodes of lèse majesté accusation and counter-accusation to score political points.

The king’s formidable media management apparatus is apparently comfortable with this situation. While he may have some personal reservations, the king has yet to make any explicit recommendation that lèse majesté be abolished. Perhaps it remains too useful as a tool for stifling open public debate about the role of the royal family in national political and economic life. Lèse majesté helps guarantee an unrelenting public diet of positive royal news.

In Thailand, it is even hard to report the details of a lèse majesté charge without fear of sanction. Detailed reporting runs the risk of repeating the offence. Self-censorship reigns. So Harry Nicolaides will be unlikely to ever see substantial details about his case published in the Thai media.

Hopefully foreign journalists will exercise their greater freedom to report on his predicament. Some, including the BBC’s Jonathan Head, The Age’s Peter Gregory, Reuters, the Associated Press and Reporters Without Borders have already made important contributions.  But for the past two weeks there has been silence.

All reports suggest that the charge relates to a passage in an obscure book published by Nicolaides that describes the rather flamboyant private life of a Thai prince. This may have been an error of judgement on Nicolaides’ part but it does not, in any way, justify his current treatment. Respect for other country’s legal systems is all very well. But this is a law that silences Thais and foreigners alike. It prevents what we would regard as perfectly normal, if somewhat prurient, reporting on royal lives. More importantly, it muzzles public discussion of a range of issues that lie at the heart of Thailand’s ongoing political crisis.

The Australian media could be doing more to highlight the plight of Nicolaides and to open up broader regional discussion on this outdated taboo.

Mya Ketu either wasn’t thinking very hard or, more likely, was trying not to. There are innumerable examples from around the world of poets condemned for crossing the ambiguous line between furtive secrecies and criminal laws, from Ovid to Oscar Wilde, Marcos Ana to Vaclav Havel. Mya Ketu was himself writing under a government which considered anything contrary to its economic and political program to be offensive, and must have known about banned poems and authors.

In the three decades since, things have gone from bad to worse and the game of hide and seek between Myanmar’s writers and their censors has continued. Some years ago Anna Allot released a small and excellent book with translations of short stories and accompanying comments on how their writers sought to confound their scrutinizers but still speak to their audience. (The full text of the book, Inked Over, Ripped Out, is on the Burma Library.) Some of the stories were published, some not.

Recently, two very different poems that were published attracted wide interest and raised official ire for these very reasons. The poems are “February 14”, by Saw Wai, and “Diparinga”, by Kyi Maung Than.

Saw Wai’s case is the more straightforward of the two. There is little room for doubt that he (or someone) deliberately wrote what roughly translates as “Pow-er cra-zy Gene-ral Than Shwe” into the opening syllables to each line of the short poem, although it is plausible that the magazine editor didn’t notice the covert message in the rush to meet his deadline. That the piece was written for Valentine’s Day and was released in an entertainment weekly called Love Journal only adds to its delicious irony.

Officials embarrassed by inadvertently letting February 14 onto the streets are doing their best to make up for the error. Saw Wai has been in prison for over nine months and is now on trial for intending to cause fear and alarm among the public, whatever that means, for which he will probably get two years. Although news reports say that a censor admitted under oath that the poem was cut from 12 lines to eight after it was originally rejected, his testimony is unlikely to make any difference to the outcome of the case, especially given that the butt of the joke was the Great Father. The journal was also suspended for a week and its editor forced to sign a document to guarantee that this sort of thing won’t happen again.

The cause of offence in Kyi Maung Than’s piece, which was carried in the June edition of Cherry variety magazine, is less obvious. The poem’s title is the ancient name for Depayin, the upcountry township where in May 2003 a crazed army-backed crowd set upon a column of vehicles escorting Aung San Suu Kyi on her last tour before she was put back under house arrest. But its leading stanzas set the scene a good 700 years before that event, with all the usual crap about prior glories and kings. It is in the second half that the poem goes awry, moving outside historical limits: “In this town/ Heroes were lost/ In this town/ Traitors were fledged/ In this town/ A youth/ Fell from his cycle/ In this town/ A woman/ Her time not come, did not lose her life…” It ends in a somber mood, the author remarking that whenever he passes through the town he is frightened by ghosts of the past.

This time around, it was not the poet but the monthly’s editor who was targeted, with an order from the censors that he must be sacked for their screw up, and that a new editorial board must be established. A second editor was reportedly also removed, but no charges were laid and nor was the periodical ordered to stop publishing.

Why did Cherry Magazine get off more lightly than Love Journal? Why has Saw Wai been prosecuted but Kyi Maung Than not? It could be because the second poem was less direct than the first. But it could just as soon be a consequence of timing, money, personal contacts, or accident. Perhaps New Mandala readers know more. In any event, Myanmar’s writers will continue to hone their skills at working between the lines, and although the censors spend their days looking for clues of furtive secrets seemingly crossing the fuzzy border between poetry and criminality, from time to time a double meaning is sure to slip through. The challenge for creative artists remains how to craft their work so that people come to get it, but nobody comes to get them.

In 1983 Charles Keyes wrote “the evidence from monastery libraries in Laos and Thailand reveals that what constitutes the Theravādin dhamma for people in these areas includes only a small portion of the total Tipiṭaka…Moreover, the collection of texts available to the people in the associated community are not exactly the same as those found in another temple.” What Charles Keyes observed in 1983 can be confirmed today with even the most cursory inventory of the major monastic, royal and governmental manuscript libraries of Laos and Thailand. Generally, the most popular texts were the ānisam’sa (Lao/Thai: anisong) which are blessings used in ritual and magical ceremonies, paritta (incantations for protection), xalong (ceremonial instructions for both lay and religious ceremonies), apocryphal jātaka (non-canonical birth-stories of the Buddha), stories drawn from the Dhammapada-atthakathā, kammavācā (ritual instructions and rules), local epics (including the Xieng Mieng cycle of stories, Thao Hung Thao Juang, Xin Sai, Om Lom Daeng Kiao), excerpts from the Visuddhimagga and Maṅgaladīpanī, grammatica (excerpts from the Padarūpasiddhi, Kaccāyanavyākaran’a, and local grammatical handbooks), and tamnan (relic, image and temple histories).

As a graduate student I was trained in Indic philology and grammar –- in reading Sanskrit and Pali canonical and commentarial texts to supplement my vernacular skills. However, working in monasteries in Southeast Asia, I realized that my study of the semantics of Pali texts was only partially useful. In studying Pali and Sanskrit I had been studying “language” not “languaging.” The difference is great. As Becker writes, “a language is a system of rules or structures, which…relates meanings and sounds, both of which are outside of it. A language is essentially a dictionary and a grammar. Languaging, on the other hand, is context shaping. Languaging both shapes and is shaped by context. It is a kind of attunement between a person and a context. Languaging can be understood as taking old texts from memory and reshaping them into present contexts…It is done at the level of particularity.” This is what the students and the teachers in Southeast Asia are often doing; they were languaging Pali. They were not learning the Pali language. Certainly Pali has been an important language in the study of Theravada Buddhism (let’s put aside the major problems with the term “Theravada” for now) for 2,500 years, but it should not be seen as more important than local vernaculars.

Most books on Buddhism state that Pali is the signature language of the Theravada lineage of Buddhism. However, it is important to observe that Pali canonical texts are most often in the minority in Southeast manuscript collections not only in Laos and Thailand, but also in Cambodia and Burma. There is little evidence that Pali was widely used as a language of composition in Southeast Asia except for a few exceptions. The general impression that Pali is essential for the study of Theravada Buddhism started in the mid-nineteenth century. Western scholars of Theravada Buddhism, as well as royal and Sangha reformers in Thailand and Sri Lanka emphasized the importance of Pali. There certainly has been an increase in the study of Pali especially due the reforms of King Mongkut and Prince Wachirayan in Thailand which have had some ramifications in Cambodia and Laos. However, despite these reforms, even now less than five percent of monks in Thailand and less in Laos and Cambodia (there are no confirmed statistics for Burma) take higher Pali examinations. Therefore, the signature language of Theravada Buddhism, remains largely unstudied.

This should not, however, be seen as a sign of loss. Pali is alive and well ritually in Southeast Asian liturgical and magical practices. It is used in the blessing of water, houses, water buffaloes, children, and amulets. Short Pali incantations are composed anew for shrines and dedications. Pali is heard chanted in several different styles (22 major styles) throughout the region. For a student of Buddhism then, learning Pali is extremely important even if it isn’t for reading texts for semantic understanding. Without understanding the importance of Pali ritually, we miss why Pali stays relevant in Southeast Asia. When thinking about language and religion therefore, it would be wise to ask ourselves what we mean when we say Pali. Do we mean a living language that is used conversationally? A language used for composition of texts and correspondence? A language of jurisprudence? A ritual language for invoking protection, blessing objects and people, and cursing?

Justin McDaniel is an Associate Professor at the University of California - Riverside.  He is also the author of Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Intertextuality and Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Northern Thailand (2008) and the moderator of the Thailand-Laos-Cambodia listserv.