A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Thailand, Inspired by Craig J. Reynolds ed. by Maurizio Peleggi (review)

The serious student of Thai history will do well to read A Sarong for Clio from cover to cover, rather than dipping selectively into the nine essays and an introduction that it brings together. For it is — despite its title and the uneven quality of its constituent chapters — a volume meriting careful consideration for what it indicates about the state of and prospects for historical scholarship on Thailand. In that sense the book represents an admirable and entirely fitting Festschrift for Craig Reynolds.

The approach of this review is to take the contributions to this book on their own terms, rather than systematically to consider the specific ways in which each of those contributions is or is not in dialogue with Reynolds’s work. The latter exercise is far beyond the scope of this review, and perhaps also beyond the competence of this reviewer. The review approaches A Sarong for Clio as a conclave of scholars who share Reynolds’s seriousness about the study of Thailand at a time when trends both in the country and in academic life put that study at risk of trivialization and superficiality.

Editor Maurizio Peleggi’s brief, not uncritical, introduction to the volume explores Reynolds’s early work with intelligence and perceptiveness; its treatment of later stages in Reynolds’s work is less thoughtful. Further, while Peleggi finds time for a rather cliché swipe at the “typical 1950s American diet” (p. 12), his discussion of American “neocolonial scholarship” (p. 5) on Thailand during the Cold War and of Reynolds’s transition away from participation in such scholarship feels truncated. His introduction notes Oliver Wolters’s success in giving Reynolds “a taste for cross-disciplinary inquiry and conceptual sophistication” (p. 5) during the course of Reynolds’s studies at Cornell, and it alludes to the prominence of Wolters’s work on Reynolds’s syllabi at the Australian National University in the early 1990s. But it eschews more specific treatment of the two men’s influence on one another during the period in which each increasingly incorporated approaches drawn from literary theory into his work. In contrast, Peleggi does touch, briefly, on Reynolds’s interest in Thai and Thai-Chinese identities and in globalization, “the other side of the coin of national identity” (p. 9), during the middle phase of his career. An emphasis on Thai identities also stands at the centre of Federico Ferrara’s recent book on Thailand’s “political development” (Ferrara 2015). As scholars set out further to explore and to build on that monumental volume, this section of Peleggi’s introduction to A Sarong for Clio serves as a useful reminder to revisit Reynolds’s work from the 1990s.

In turning to the tensions and divisions that have characterized Thai political life during the past decade, Peleggi’s introduction calls out, without naming names, “some (regrettable) intellectual posturing” on the part of “some in Thai Studies” (p. 10). Peleggi notes Reynolds’s focus during most of the past two decades on “a long-term analysis of Thai intellectuals as the trait d’union between civil society and the body politic” (ibid.) rather than on Thailand’s long and ongoing crisis. But his summary treatment of the issues at stake in that crisis makes no reference to the value of a body of historical scholarship as large and diverse as Reynolds’s as a source of perspective. This lapse is mystifying, not least for what it suggests about the role of the historian. One wonders whether Peleggi has concluded that history may not be a source of useful perspective on Thailand in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Whatever the case, several of the subsequent chapters in this volume — including, one must note, Peleggi’s own — challenge such a conclusion.

Peleggi has organized the nine chapters...