Especially during the reigns of King Chulalongkorn or Rama V (1868–1910), King
Vajiravudh or Rama VI (1910–1925), and the regime of Colonel Pibul (1938–1945),
the Thai were strongly“advised,”not to say“forced,”to assimilate through“fash-
ion,”language, and etiquette, the forms and symbols of a so-called Western civi-
lization:“Material progress, technical advancement, and high standard of living
characteristic of the West make the Thai think that Western culture must be better
than ours and that it is our duty to follow suit and adopt it as ours.”This statement is
made by the late Kukrit Pramoj, who, as a former Prime Minister, founder and
president of the Social Action Party, actor in thefilm“The Ugly American”(with
Marlon Brando), newspaper columnist, author of several historic novels, and expert
in the traditionalKhonpantomime art, can be considered one of the outstanding
representatives of Thai culture. He concluded that“it must be admitted that Thai
culture is in a state of utter confusion, and probably it has reached the highest degree
of confusion ever known in our history”(Pramoj, in Van Beek 1983 :93–94).
How to research or comprehend this complexity? Obviously, wefirst of all have
to come to grips with our past. Said’s( 1985 ) captivating overview of the way in
which Asian societies and philosophies throughout the ages were perceived by the
West starts from the thesis:
That the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis (from which present-day
Orientalism derives) can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge
about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed,
and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modern-
ized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism. In the form of
new texts and ideas, the East was accommodated to these structures
(Said 1985 : 122).
Therefore, academics and the people they study“construct stylized images of the
Occident and orient in the context of complex social, political, and economic
conflicts and relationships...These stylized images are not inert products. Rather,
they have social, political, and economic uses of their own, for they shape people’s
perceptions, justify policies, and so influence people’s actions”(Carrier 1995 : 11).
In other words, Europeans look at Asian values with Western eyes, while Asians
view Western values with Asian eyes. Being an outsider is partly an advantage,
partly a disadvantage, when investigating the values of others. As Levi-Strauss
rightly stated,“It is from inside that we can apprehend the ruptures but from outside
that some effects of coherence appear”(Levi-Strauss 1966 : 125). While the insider
has access to the details, the outsider has to rely on limitedfirst-hand experience
and secondary sources. However, the horizon can be wider with a more distant
view. The task for a researcher is to reveal these distinctive structures of meaning.
An attempt should be made to analyze a culture on the basis of its own“logical”
structure. In each culture, one must therefore focus on the so-calledarchetypes
rather than on the formal and often officially propagated manifestations of a culture
(further elaborated in Servaes 1999 ). Along with other anthropological research
methods, the study of cultural expressions, such as art, folktales,film, video, or
literature (see, e.g., Harrison 1994 ; Harrison and Jackson 2010 ; Servaes and
Malikhao 1989 ) can assist to understand this“logical”structure.
50 4 A Village in the Jungle: Culture and Communication in Thailand