Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand by Samson W. Lim (review)

Samson Lim argues that his book “should not be read as a tale of how science or some other branch of Western rationality has come to supplant local epistemologies.” Rather, in this story of “the development of modern forms of knowledge in the field of criminal detection” (p. 154), modern sciences are introduced and modified to fit local beliefs and practices. In short, “this is a history of the visual evidence and the techniques for their production that an array of agents . . . generate and use in Thailand to picture the past and shape legal outcomes” (p. 2).

Lim sets the framework of his story in the context of the spread of crime after Siam (later Thailand) opened itself to freer trade and thus shifted its basic mode of production from sufficiency to the market economy in the middle of the nineteenth century, notably since the signing of the Bowring Treaty with England in 1855. While private access to the machinery of violence was enhanced and its frequency was rising, crime investigation was significantly reformed. Torturing the suspect for confession was no longer the norm, though never has it disappeared from routine practice. By combing through crime fiction, newspapers, magazines, and polices manuals, Lim provides a fine portrayal of the development of crime investigation since its first introduction into Siam in the form of detective fiction, vernacularized from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. Thereafter, photographs, fingerprints, and statistics became new types of information in administering the truth of crime. Likewise, crime attracted the public attention and hit the newspapers. Surely Lim would agree that one of the most popular crimes ever published was the mysterious death of King Ananda on 9 June 1946 (pp. 112–14). Its narrative and crime scene were published and reemerged time and again in Thailand’s political history.

The landscape of crime in the kingdom, he notes, remarkably changed its terrain again after World War II, in part due to “the sudden availability of small arms.” Automatic pistols, machine guns, and grenades “were almost freely circulating around the country” (p. 120). In the 1950s, in Christopher Goscha’s words, “Buying arms in Thailand was as easy as buying beer” (p. 120). A more systematic and scientific crime scene investigation came with police reform after the war, and with the huge amounts of U.S. foreign aid pumping into Thailand’s police department as part of its campaign against the communist movement during the cold war. In this reform process, the crime scene was re-articulated and mapped out as an epistemological space in which a hunt for truth was enacted.

Together with the creation of the crime scene space came the reenactment of crime, a procedure that evolved from a projection of the criminal’s modus operandi to a factual reproduction of the past, or a confirmation of the truth that “the police used to solve the crime and to produce evidence for the court” (p. 2). However, the meanings of the reenactment varied for different groups—police, suspect, media, and public audience. The police might take it as proof of a confession, the suspect might use it for attracting the media’s attention and preventing police abuse.

Students of police and judicial history in Siam/Thailand will find this work invaluable, including those who are interested in visual culture. Even more, anyone with interest in the kingdom’s justice system and its interpretation of justice in this brittle transition period will find much to engage them. In short, with his meditation on the crime scene investigation as a technology of power in the judicial system, the author has tackled how its operation relates to the question of justice and the state’s interpretation of justice, particularly in dealing with an opposition that is resistant to the ruling elite’s prerogative. Is it simply another machinery the Thai state employed to justify its colonial consolidation and its...