Genealogies of Nurture: Of Pots and Professors

Abstract

Genealogies of Nurture: Of Pots and Professors Penny Van Esterik (bio) Kris Lehman loves puzzles, be they linguistic, historical, mathematical, religious, or ecological. He instilled this love of puzzles in his students. In honor of his retirement, this paper builds on his enduring interest in cultural historical puzzles in Southeast Asia. One day in 1970, while planning a thesis on the relationship between Brahmanic and Buddhist ritual in Thailand, I saw a pot with a red-on-buff painted design in an antique store in Bangkok. It probably came from one of the many looted collections of late-period Ban Chiang painted pottery; the complexity of the designs fascinated me. When my daughter Chandra was born three months before my doctoral exams, I took the opportunity to shift my focus of study somewhat. Inspired by Kris Lehman’s work with mathematical modeling and cognitive anthropology, I worked with symmetry theory to produce my PhD thesis on late-period Ban Chiang painted pottery under his direction. In the early 1970s, little was known about the context of the pottery because most was lodged in the illegal private collections of powerful Thai elites; I was limited in what I could do with the information from the collections. Today we know more. To anticipate my argument, we now know that Ban Chiang and many sites in the region elaborated infant burials; fetuses, newborns, and infants were often buried inside ceramic jars or with jars as grave goods. Ban Chiang is a mixed-use mortuary and occupation site in northeast Thailand in mainland Southeast Asia occupied for over two thousand years from about 2100 BCE to 200 CE [End Page 21] Bronze was in use at least by 1500 BCE and iron, by 500 BCE. Here, settled villagers cultivated yams and rice and raised domestic cattle, pigs, and dogs. The mound site was partially excavated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the detailed site report is nearing completion. Speculations: Men of Prowess The site with its beautiful pottery, and the potential for early and indigenous bronze and iron development in the region, encouraged much speculation among Thai and foreign analysts. Were these Thailand’s first rice farmers? Do we have evidence for bronze complexes that were not used for weapons but for personal adornment? Since intensive wet rice agriculture favors rapid population increase, did this result in expansion into formerly unoccupied lands of the Khorat plateau, northeast Thailand? Could these sedentary rice-farming communities be considered chiefdoms led by ‘men of prowess’ or ‘big men’ in the centuries before Indianization? Extensive trade networks provided luxury goods such as marine shell, exotic stone, and leather in the communities of the Khorat plateau. Speculations about the distribution of bronze objects from sites such as Non Nok Tha and Ban Chiang raised questions about social ranking systems, and whether there was direct evidence of organized warfare or only sporadic raiding in the first millennium BCE. Some speculated that there were high levels of conflict in the area, but since almost half the traumatic injuries were on women (Pietrusewsky and Douglas 2002, 171) and are not compatible with war wounds, this is unlikely. Are the sites in the region evidence of a transition from a model where exchange of valuables and the establishment of affinal ties promote alliances with minimal social ranking, to a model where rank was fixed through unequal production and exchange, facilitated by a shift from managed swamps to increasing reliance on fixed rice fields (White 1995)? Wet rice cultivation with a diversified subsistence base can support [End Page 22] large populations necessary for the development of state systems. Arguments abound over the earliest dates for rice, bronze, and iron, and the major transitions in the region — from the Neolithic to Bronze Age to Iron Age and finally to the Indianized states of Southeast Asia. It is also possible that the models we use to make sense of Southeast Asia’s past are biased toward the idea of structure as hierarchical rather than heterarchical structures where each element is either unranked relative to other elements or possesses the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways (Crumley 1987, 158; White 1995...