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8 The Conceptual Allure of the West: Dilemmas and Ambiguities of Crypto-Colonialism in Thailand Michael Herzfeld1 Values, Concepts and the Dynamics of Crypto-Colonialism Any discussion of alleged Western influence in Thailand must start from the premise that the signifiers of globalization neither necessarily originate in the West nor automatically imply acceptance of Western values. Globalization does not always originate in Western countries; the definition of the “West” is itself problematic; and the assumption that adoption of multinational logos and designer goods must mean adoption of their ideological implications simply reproduces the cultural imperialism that these items so often represent.2 In this chapter, I explore instead the indeterminacy of cultural influence, arguing that—in matters as apparently discrete as the use of space, dress and eating habits and the language of popular science—a peculiarly local idiom of governmentality in Thailand rests on precisely that perduring ambiguity about origins and attitudes. Even the tourist, unsure whether taxi stickers announcing “I ♥ farang [white-skinned foreigner]” are sincere, ironic, or simply opportunistic, experiences this resistance to a clear definition of Thailand’s affective relationship with a nebulously defined “West”. For a country that has long claimed to be the uniquely non-postcolonial state in Southeast Asia but that has also been inextricably constrained by Western-dominated geopolitics (see Jackson in this volume), a country where a European-derived term (farang) hints obliquely at the racial semiotics of postcolonial relations, this semantic indeterminacy has been a source of symbolic capital of no small importance.3 The argument is situated in the framework of a larger attempt to explore, through comparisons of Thailand with Greece and other countries, the dynamics of what I have called “crypto-colonialism”: the condition in which the very claim of independence marks a symbolic as well as material dependence on intrusive colonial power. In broaching this concept, which has strong echoes with similar concepts already under development in the Thai context (e.g. Jackson 2005; Kasian 2002; Loos 2006; Thongchai 2000b),4 I remarked that it was the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this 174 Michael Herzfeld relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models. Such countries were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence. (Herzfeld 2002, 900–1) Under British and French pressure in the nineteenth century, Thailand—as Siam— was forced not only to cede territory but also to reform its administrative institutions in order to win grudging acceptance of its right to self-administration within newly constricted borders.5 Crypto-colonialism is a heuristic rather than a typological concept. We should therefore sail very carefully between the Scylla of exceptionalism (to which both Thailand and Greece are diagnostically prone) and the Charybdis of taxonomic reductionism. Claims to uniqueness are themselves part of the rhetoric whereby nationstates assert their independence from the very forces on which they depend to maintain an appearance of free agency. In fact, however, such phenomena can be seen, if often in more opaque or less complete ways, in the economic and political dependence of erstwhile colonies on their former rulers; there is thus nothing to be gained by arid arguments about which countries might be classified as crypto-colonial. Indeed, it is the processes rather than the countries themselves that should properly be so labelled. The concept will serve us better as a provocation rather than as a solution. It should prompt questions about whose interests are served by the constant reiteration of national claims of independence by countries whose continuing dependency on more powerful states is manifest and enduring. That reiteration is itself the key symptom of the political condition that it seeks to deny. I leave for what I hope will be another occasion a more exhaustive exploration of the entire range of civilizational discourses—from civiltà in Italy (Silverman 1975) to the French imperial mission civilisatrice and the condition of siwilai in the emergent modernity of Siam—that index the varied realizations of the crypto-colonial condition, etymologically injecting into diverse bodies politic around the world a Eurocentric ideology that has bound its recipients to its sources in a complex nexus of entailments and cultural hierarchies. (See also the afterword in this volume.) Thailand has a privileged position...

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