Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok by Michael Herzfeld (review)

The mountains of Doi Ang Khang in northern Thailand are gridded with rare flowers, pears, persimmons, blueberries, and strawberries. In the morning, the sun cascades down the mountainside, revealing misty, snaking rows of raised beds. In the nearby public gardens, roses, geraniums, and orchids of incomparable size bloom in all colors.

The plantings are meant for tourists, who can also commune with the local “hill people” (the Lisu tribespeople, specifically), weaving by loom and singing improvisatory stories in staged settings. Beset by instability of horticulture, many Lisu now perform, sell trinkets, or beg in addition to, or instead of, farming. This review will discuss, in the main, Michael Herzfeld’s Siege of the Spirits, which focuses on an urban community, the roughly 300 residents of Pom Mahakan fortress in central Bangkok, who face persistent threats of eviction, rather than a rural one like the Lisu in Doi Ang Khang. However, the comparison between the rural and urban examples is instructive. Both are subjects of the modern Thai state’s vexed relationship with marginal communities, and each reveals different dimensions of the state’s own internal struggles to define and implement its own vision of modernity. But understanding the urban case asks us to account for modes of exclusion that the rural case, whose parameters are more historically familiar, does not (Harms 2016).

First, the historically familiar rural case ought to be described in greater depth. The precarity of the Lisu is a vestige of decades of state-initiated agricultural experiments, which brought, at once, both new cash crops and poverty (Gillogly 2008:126). The role of the hill tribes today, as far as the Thai state is concerned, is to appear as rooted as the flowers. In their dress, their handicrafts, their ritual life, and their housing, they perform the Thai past. Or, rather, they perform what the modern state imagines its own past ought to look like, in nostalgic hindsight. The Lisu, who in fact migrated from China and Tibet, are often characterized in official Thai government language as an example of “ancient” people, who lack the resources of modernity and can only relate to it as objects of charity. The glory of the flowers is twinned with the pity of their condition. Thai tourists make merit, an important act in Buddhism, by giving them money and books; international tourists buy their berries and bracelets.

The Lisu farmed opium for about a century along the same mountain slopes where fruits and flowers now grow. Since the 1970s, a combination of Thai and international agencies, following currents of US global narcotraffic control, have interdicted crops that might help break the region’s link to the worldwide drug trade, as Gillogly (2008) explains. But massive agricultural shifts have been difficult, and incomplete. For decades, opium kept coming back furtively—it is easy to grow in such a temperate climate, and profitable to an extent that the newer crops are not. Crop redevelopment has produced economic shocks, reshaping the landscape of labor, culture, and sociality.

There may not be heroes and villains in this recounting, but there are crypto-colonial technocrats to spare, along with the millions who have suffered them. The story of what lies in the soil beneath the strawberries is one of how a nation-state produces itself chronologically and geographically, as a mythology inscribed in land and on bodies. And it is a story of how moral and strategic concerns align to cope with the living contradictions of national identity. Thailand, especially since becoming a political client of the US during the Cold War, has figured its outer provinces as a political wilderness in need of taming. From communism to drugs to unsustainable land use, rural places are regarded as pre-modern problems in need of cunning, authoritative solutions, and its people as benighted subjects waiting continually for the light of salvation.

The source of such solutions, in the official narrative, is invariably the royal palace. Thus Doi Ang Khang’s lush...