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3 THE PRODUCTION OF BORDERS Sites for the Accumulation and Distribution of Resources Remarkably, while asserting Siam’s sovereignty over Chiang Saen, Chulalongkorn . . . did not claim that it belonged to Siam exclusively. He suggested that Chiangmai should allow the Shan to settle there if Burma and Kengtung allowed Chiang Saen to submit to both sides (Burma/Kengtung versus Siam/Chiangmai). THONGCHAI WINICHAKUL, Siam Mapped Although Mengding and Gengma had paid tribute to both China and Burma in the past, Qing o‹cials considered the two Tai areas to be imperial territory. C. PATTERSON GIERSCH, Qing China’s Reluctant Subjects FORMAL THEORIES ABOUT POWER IN PREMODERN SOUTHEAST ASIAN kingdoms have presented the view from the center, assuming that all power emanates from the king (Tambiah 1976:108; Lucien Hanks 1962). While these theories have acknowledged small principalities on the fringes of kingdoms, the power of these small entities has been described as weak. In explaining how power and politics work, theorists have focused on the king, his entourage, and his appointees; tiny principalities distant from the king have been considered unimportant. During the nineteenth century, the state of Sipsongpanna (renamed Xishuangbanna by the Chinese in the 1950s), the Shan States of Burma, and the Lanna States north of Siam (later part of Thailand) were all small Tai border polities participating in some form of what scholars have called galac- tic polities. In this conceptual understanding, the king’s power radiates from a center and diminishes with distance from the monarch, like the light of a candle (Steinberg 1987:60; Tambiah 1976:123). The capital city of the kingdom , such as Bangkok in Siam, is the center, where the king resides. Circling the capital are provinces under princes or governors appointed by the king. Beyond the provinces, at a greater distance from the king, are “independent ‘tributary’ polities” over whom the king holds “indirect overlordship ” (Tambiah 1976:112–13). The image is not of a bureaucracy with descending ranks; rather, each succeeding ring outside the capital replicates tributary relations with smaller entities. Not only princes, but also independent tributary polities, might be surrounded by chiefs paying them tribute . Sipsongpanna, the Shan States, and the Lanna States would qualify as independent tributary polities. To keep hold of the center, the king needs to accumulate resources and distribute them to those dependent on him. His power rests on this exchange of people and goods. The king could enhance his wealth and influence by increasing the available labor of serfs and slaves (Steinberg 1987:64; Reid 1988:122; Leach 1960:59). Kings would lead armies to raid other polities, including mountain peripheries, to bring back captives. The king could then allocate serfs and slaves to nobles, a gesture that both distributed resources and kept that labor power on tap. When needed, the king could demand corvée labor and troops from among the captives he had acquired and allocated (Kemp 1992; Reid 1988:132; Wyatt 1984:71). The impulse to increase his arena of influence also pushes the king to claim new tributary states, often demanding submission from small states and chiefdoms that are already paying tribute to other overlords (Thongchai 1994:81–88). In practice , power relations are highly mutable and contingent, with overlapping claims on tributary states, and clients on the fringes proclaiming loyalty to multiple overlords. In this hierarchical system, if the king is at the top, with the greatest resources, the one on the bottom is in the forest, “an uncouth hunter, desertedbyhiswifeandchildren,”apersonnoone would depend on(Lucien Hanks 1962:250). In this depiction, the hunter in the forest is at the remotest edge of the galactic polity, but is still configured in relation to it. In another formulation, again gazing from the center, “the tribal people wandering in the mountain forests [are] subjects of no power” (Thongchai 1994:73). Here the tribal people are envisaged as outside the limits of the galactic polity, and also beyond the king’s reach. Another set of people linked in central imaginations with peripheral PRODUCTION OF BORDERS 66 forests has been Buddhist monks, who renounce the world to live as forest recluses. Certain monks, through spiritual prowess and endurance, take on some of the wildness of woods and beasts in an alternate form of power: “the monk not only subdues the tiger by the nonviolent power of his Dhamma and metta, he also demonstrates thereby that he has incorporated, subordinated, and encompassed within him the powers of the wild beast” (Tambiah...

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