Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia

7. Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam

Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism, in Modern Siam 133 7 Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam Maurizio Peleggi On the evening of 2 December 1907, before an audience of noblemen and state officials who had gathered in the ruined city of Ayutthaya for a three-day festive extravaganza, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868– 1910) gave the inaugural speech to the Archaeological (or Antiquarian) Society (Borankhadi Samosom). Its objective, the sovereign explained, was the recovery of physical remains of the past as a means to compensate for the dearth of written documents and thus make possible the compilation of a history of Siam covering the last thousand years. The exhortation was put into practice the following day, which was devoted to a sightseeing tour of the local ruins.1 As the culmination of several decades of royal antiquarian pursuits and a response to the establishment of the Siam Society by a group of expatriates in 1904, the founding of the Archaeological Society signalled the intention of systematically 134 Maurizio Peleggi investigating the realm’s historical landscape in the wake of its territorial and cartographic configuration as a modern state at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is hardly surprising to see Siam’s status as the only formally independent country in Southeast Asia highlighted at the very beginning of a recent book on Thailand’s prehistory in order to distinguish the history of archaeology there from that of the rest of the region: “The colonial powers introduced their traditional methods for archaeological research. … Only Thailand stood firmly against the colonial tide, and in consequence, looked to its own resources. This came with royal inspiration.”2 Along with the three kings—Mongkut, Chulalongkorn and Vajiravudh—whose reigns spanned the period 1851 to 1925, much of this inspiration is credited to Prince Damrong Rachanubhab (1862–1943), the leading antiquarian of his time as well as the architect of the administrative centralization of the kingdom. Prince Damrong, who is memorialized in the national pantheon as the ‘father of Thai history’, wrote extensively on a variety of historical subjects, surveyed ancient sites, and played a pivotal role in the establishment of the cultural institutions (that is, the National Library and the National Museum) that were inherited by the constitutional government after the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932. The narrative of the royal inception of Siamese archaeology obscures, however, the contiguity of this domestic endeavour alongside the colonial project of surveying and mapping out, along with the geographical landscape of subjected countries, their archaeological topography.3 Similar to the way the topographical mapping of Siam was carried out by British and French surveyors and cartographers, its archaeological mapping was pioneered by European Orientalists (French, but also Germans, Italians and Scandinavians). In both cases, Western disciplines whose authority derived from institutionalized academic fields were imported and eventually domesticated for the production of national knowledge—knowledge about as much as in the service of the Siamese nation. The argument has been convincingly made that the basic condition for the creation of Siam’s ‘geo-body’ at the turn of the century lay in the epistemic shift whereby Western geography (phumisat) displaced Buddhist cosmography as a more authoritative mode of representing the earth’s surface.4 A parallel shift saw the modern, empirical concept of history Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism, in Modern Siam 135 (prawatisat) supersede indigenous modes of narrating past events such as folk and religious tales (tamnan) and court chronicles (phongsawadan).5 By translating into Thai the names of the foreign ‘sciences’ (-sat, Sanskrit sastra) of the earth and the past, the neologisms phumisat and prawatisat made possible their localization in the domain of indigenous knowledge. Likewise, the neologism borankhadi (the lexical cast of archaeo[boran]logy [khadi]) promoted a novel way of approaching, physically as well as conceptually, ancient artefacts: no longer as the foci of Hindu-Buddhist devotional practices, but as documentary evidence of the Siamese nation’s historical unfolding. Turn-of-the-century archaeology was intertwined both in the ideology of nationalism and racialist theory, which stressed biological factors as the reason for physical as well as cultural differences among peoples.6 Accordingly, archaeologists developed a methodology in which “stylistic features constituted reliable clues to the historical and often ethnic origins of the artefact in question”.7 Such a methodology had a special bearing upon the study of Siamese antiquities...