Reading Bangkok

Chapter 5. Landscapes of the Mind and the Fifth Level of Colonisation: The Universities

166 Reading Bangkok Chapter 5 Landscapes of the Mind and the Fifth Level of Colonisation The Universities The fifth level of the (neo-)colonisation of Thailand and of Asia more widely is that of the mind — of the ways that knowledge is socially constructed. The language wars of the 20th century saw the emergence of English as the one medium of global communication, although the “fatality of human linguistic diversity” — the way that a language takes on different regional characteristics (Anderson, 1991: 42–3) — would seem to ensure its subsequent fragmentation. Thailand, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, is caught in the new linguistic colonisation. Linguistic colonisation facilitates discursive colonisation — my knowledge is better than yours, so you had better listen to me! — although the two are distinct. At the level of discourse, there is always the question: colonisation by whom? It is ultimately the question of invasive epistemologies: one way of constructing knowledge invades another. It is a colonisation, however, that may also be seen positively: whenever one sphere of thought invades another, both can gain. While this chapter is still concerned with space, it is also more concerned with ideas and ways of thinking than has been the case with the chapters preceding. As in previous chapters, the first section is about production; in this case, it is the production of knowledge about space. The second is unequivocally about space and its reading — more specifically about the language of architecture that endows meaning to the space of the city. How is one to read the architecture of the city — what does it tell us about the ongoing (re-)construction of a Thai identity? 166 Landscapes of the Mind and the Fifth Level of Colonisation 167 1. Epistemic Colonisation Epistemologies: The Discursive Constructions of Reality Edward Said suggests that the most direct way to understand different constructions of reality in the (Asian) colonised world is via a comparison of the English versus the French experiences of “the Orient”. In Orientalism, Said traces the genealogy of the distinctively different discursive formations of “the Orient” for the British and French in the 19th century, the era of their confrontation with Ramas IV and V. So for the English speaking traveller, … the Orient was India, of course, an actual British possession; to pass through the Near Orient was therefore to pass en route to a major colony. Already, then, the room available for imaginative play was limited by the realities of administration, territorial legality, and executive power. Thus, for English writers, “the Orient was defined by material possession, by a material imagination, as it were.” The English, however, had defeated Napoleon and evicted France; so in consequence and in contrast, … the French pilgrim was imbued with a sense of acute loss in the Orient. He came there to a place in which France, unlike Britain, had no sovereign presence. The Mediterranean echoed with the sound of French defeats, from the Crusades to Napoleon. What was to become known as “la mission civilisatrice” began in the nineteenth century as a political second best to Britain’s presence (1979: 169). In the case of the French, we have “the literary pilgrims, beginning with Chateaubriand [1768–1848], who found in the Orient a locale sympathetic to their private myths, obsessions, and requirements” (1979: 170). For the French, the Orient was about themselves. For the English, there is a detachment — objects of analysis and ultimately management. While the Said distinction can be seen as somewhat reductionist, it has value as a sensitising device in one’s questioning the conditions enabling discourse on the city and its spaces. The French presence in Siam in the 17th and 18th centuries (the Ayutthaya period) was far more vigorous than that of the English, albeit intermittent and usually shortlived, and more directed towards the advancement, ambivalently, of the Enlightenment project (Van Der Cruysse, 2002).1 Significantly, the French Bishop Garnault, in 1796, established a small printing press in Santa Cruz Church to print teaching 168 Reading Bangkok books in the Thai language but in Romanised letters (Committee of 80 Years of Santa Cruz Church, n.d.: 89). The balance began to tilt in the 19th century: the Bowring Treaty of 1855 opened the country to European trade (and hence the “third space” of Charoen Krung) and the mind of King Mongkut to Britain as the world’s dominant power and engine of modernisation...