The Roots of Comparative Alterity in Siam: Depicting, describing, and defining the peoples of the world, 1830s–1850s

Matthew Reeder

doi:10.1017/s0026749x20000207

Abstract

AbstractThis article identifies a moment of conceptual innovation—the 1830s to the 1850s—in which everyday artists and writers in Siam were tasked with creating comparative representations of the peoples of the world. Although their compositions took a variety of formats, they departed from earlier representations of alterity by devoting equal attention to each ‘type’, including the Thai themselves. This approach is best exemplified in three mid-nineteenth-century works: (1) a set of archetypal portraits of about 20 peoples painted on the shutters of a major Buddhist monastery, (2) sculptures of 32 peoples at the same monastery with a short poem describing each one, and (3) entries defining terms for peoples in an early Thai–Thai dictionary. The systematic formatting of these works drew on similar compositions circulating across the nineteenth-century globe. Yet, despite the presence in Bangkok of foreign interlocutors and imported books and prints, the mid-nineteenth-century compositions preserve ethnic tropes and practices of expression specific to Siam. In addition, the agents of intellectual innovation were not restricted to the usual princely or missionary protagonists. It was a motley cast of anonymous artists, local scholars, and middling officials who tapped traditional genres of composition and local markers of differentiation to render the peoples of the world as comparable, generic, and fixed.

Highlights

In the mid-nineteenth century, which here refers to the years or so between the early s and the mid- s, a growing number of Siam’s artists and writers endeavoured to represent the peoples of the world in a systematic fashion.[1]
In compositional forms ranging from paintings and sculptures to poetry and reference works, they depicted, described, and defined a panoply of peoples as discrete social types
Not unlike early reference works on comparative religion in Europe—which subordinated Christian beliefs to an objective structure of presentation that encouraged critics to compare and contrast religious practices across the globe—the systematic formatting of Siam’s mid-century compositions made categories of peoples seem essentially equivalent.[3]

Summary

Introduction

In the mid-nineteenth century, which here refers to the years or so between the early s and the mid- s, a growing number of Siam’s artists and writers endeavoured to represent the peoples of the world in a systematic fashion.[1] In compositional forms ranging from paintings and sculptures to poetry and reference works, they depicted, described, and defined a panoply of peoples as discrete social types. Not unlike early reference works on comparative religion in Europe—which subordinated Christian beliefs to an objective structure of presentation that encouraged critics to compare and contrast religious practices across the globe—the systematic formatting of Siam’s mid-century compositions made categories of peoples seem essentially equivalent.[3] The literati of Bangkok had begun to imagine that the peoples of the world could be fitted into a ‘totalizing classificatory grid’.4. See Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Buddhist Apologetics and a Genealogy of Comparative Religion in Siam’, Numen ( ): –

COMPARATIVE ALTERITY IN SIAM

Wat Pho and the agents of intellectual change

Portraits of peoples on the shutters of Wat Pho

The statues and the stanzas