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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Waterways of Bangkok: Memory and Landscape DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Anthropology by Michael Hurley Dissertation Committee: Professor Tom Boellstorff, Chair Professor Leo Chavez Associate Professor Keith Murphy 2015 © 2015 Michael Hurley DEDICATION แด กรงเทพมหานคร To Bangkok ii Moment after moment, life, gloriously improbable, advances. Michel Serres iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Origins 20 CHAPTER 2: Loss 50 CHAPTER 3: Forgetting 75 CHAPTER 4: Trajectories 102 CHAPTER 5: Belonging 134 CONCLUSION 163 BIBLIOGRAPHY 172 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank all of my informants and friends in Bangkok. When I think of Bangkok, and the people who live there, I sometimes feel an almost dizzying nostalgia. I would like to thank professor Tom Boellstorff, who has given me so much guidance and support over the years, and who continues to amaze me. I am honored to be his student. I am also grateful to the other members of my oral exam committee: Gabriele (Gaby) Schwab, Leo Chavez, Kris Peterson, and Keith Murphy. I have learned so much from all of them. I would like to give special recognition to Gaby, an incredible teacher with an unusual radiance. I am grateful to professor Robert Garfias. I was his assistant for four quarters and I really enjoyed these journeys in ethnomusicology. He inspired me, and our students, with his stories. Ather Zia has been one of my closest friends in graduate school. Writing, life, Kashmir . Our discussion goes on. Thanks also to my good friend Khaldun Bshara, who I hope to someday visit in Palestine. I miss our unhurried conversations over coffee. Thanks to Lee Ngo for all the trips to Little Saigon and the Nubia Cafe, and also for introducing me to some excellent martial arts films. And thanks to Matt Lane, who gave me words of encouragement in difficult times. UC Davis changed me forever. Marisol de la Cadena and Carol Smith helped me find my way into graduate school. I also received lots of support and encouragement from Fabiana Li. I must also acknowledge my geography professor at community college, Jerry White. In those days, I drove a pickup truck for a living and took night classes. Jerry changed my worldview. He also gave me the confidence to do the unthinkable: apply to the University of California. My project was partially funded by the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine. The National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT) helped me secure a visa for research. Thanks especially to Chontida—talking to Chontida was always the highlight of my visits to the NRCT. v CURRICULUM VITAE Michael Hurley EDUCATION 2007 B.A. in Anthropology, University of California, Davis 2012 M.A. in Anthropology, University of California, Irvine 2015 Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, Irvine TEACHING 2009-2015 Teaching Assistant at UC Irvine (14 quarters) AWARDS 2008 Social Science Merit Fellowship (3 quarters) 2009 Anthro UCI Summer Research Grant 2010 Anthro UCI Summer Research Grant 2011 Anthro UCI Summer Research Grant 2013 Associate Dean's Fellowship 2014 Associate Dean's Fellowship vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Waterways of Bangkok: Memory and Landscape By Michael Hurley Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Irvine, 2015 Professor Tom Boellstorff, Chair This is an ethnography of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand. It is about life along the river and its canals, the culture of water in a modern metropolis. More broadly, this is a study of the relationship between memory and landscape. Waterways, at the time of writing, are still an important part of Bangkok's urban infrastructure. I use waterways to explore collective memory. What meanings are found in waterways? How do waterways connect people and places? How do waterways connect past, present, and future? I examine stories, images, and senses of a collective past. Memory and landscape are often entangled with national myths and ideologies, but Bangkok's waterways can also allow us to see the nation in new perspectives. Some of the prominent themes discussed in this ethnography are: stories of national origin; continuity, change, and the landscape of loss; forgotten violence and the experience of landscape; heart-spirit and notions of collective trajectory; and the place of Islam in Bangkok and the Thai nation. This ethnography is based on 16 months of fieldwork in Thailand, mostly during 2012 and 2013. vii INTRODUCTION This is an ethnography of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand.1 I take waterways as an empirical starting point to explore and try to better understand people's lives. More broadly, this is a study of memory and landscape, and the relationships between the two. My hope is that this work will have enough area-focus to contribute to communities of scholarship formed by specialists, those who study Thailand or other countries in Southeast Asia. At the same time, I hope that my theoretical work on memory and landscape is expansive enough to be of interest to scholars who do research on other parts of the world. In what follows, I often discuss associations, the meanings and connections that people make by way of waterways. This is one of the things that makes waterways so interesting—we begin with water, but end up talking about something else: ghosts, royalty, ancient cities, the rural hinterland, ASEAN, and so on. In the opening pages of Pai Daeng, Kukrit Pramoj guides us along the waterways from Bangkok to Red Bamboo, the village where the story will unfold. We go up the Chao Phraya, some 90 kilometers, turn off into a canal, travel some additional distance along the water, and finally arrive at a quiet village with a rundown monastery (คกฤทธ 2009:7). Waterways take us places, connecting city and country. Of rivers, Bachelard observes, “water flows and leads life elsewhere” (1983:8). We will also see some of the ways that water gathers other times and places, bringing, so to speak, elsewhere to here. The past can become present and the faraway can arrive in Bangkok. In the course of fieldwork, material began to generate from the moment people discovered that I was studying the Chao Phraya River. And, crucially, there were patterns—my interlocutors raised certain questions and observations, certain themes, again and again. Such repetition is significant, even if perspectives do not converge on a single point of 1 The Thai pronunciation of the river's name can be approximated as jow [rhymes with cow] p'ya. 1 view. Culture may be weird, multiple, or fragmented, but patterns do emerge. Taking inspiration from Benedict (1934), some of these patterns might be called patterns of memory. Let me begin with one prominent association. Many in Bangkok see a link between waterways and a certain “way of life.” This holds true for those who live along the waterways, as well as for those who do not. It is said to be an old or original way of life. It is said to be authentically Thai. What are the features of this way of life? Houses on stilts, for example; boats as a primary means of transportation; floating markets; itinerant merchants, paddling through the canals, calling out the names of their fruit, wares, or other goods; fishing; the use of canal-water for cooking and cleaning; an annual festival in which people set afloat banana-leaf boats, make offerings, and apologize to the spirit of the water-mother; canoe races; dramatizations of royal power, such as the royal barge procession; and so on. This is all part of collective memory, which I will discuss in a moment. I often focus on how Thais see or imagine the Thai past and present, how the collective is imagined by its members. Thais are are often said (by themselves) to have a special relationship with water. For example, many said, “We (Thais) have long been tied (puk pun) to waterways.” But this way of life is also perhaps outdated, in a state of decline. Some said it has, for the most part, already vanished. So it seems that what one sees today is merely a decayed remnant of the past. Some informants interpreted my project as salvage. These matters come into focus in Chapter 2, which concerns cultural loss and decay. I do not comment on the empirical validity of loss, but rather consider loss as a cultural idea. The waterways of Bangkok connect past and present, and I explore some of the situated and culturally-specific ways that they do so. In the aftermath of World War II, Benda (1969) raised the question of continuity and change in Southeast Asia. Colonial regimes were being broken, nations were emerging, peasants were taking up arms in Vietnam and elsewhere. I do not try to measure continuity and change. I begin with the landscape, the river and its canals, and ask: where do people see continuity and change? 2 The Chao Phraya River is also part of a national timeline, what I call the progression-of- centers narrative. Since the 1930s, the Thai past has been periodized as a series of city-kingdoms: Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Thonburi, Bangkok. This, to some extent, suggests an ancient cultural logic, widespread in Southeast Asia, in which polities are named after their urban centers, but this particular configuration is closely tied to a more recent process of nation-building. Sukhothai is a city, but also a time period, the Age of Sukhothai. Ayutthaya is a city, but also a time period, the Age of Ayutthaya. And so on.

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