Farang (a rant)

So, I have this source for my project: The King Never Smiles: An [Unauthorized] Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, by Paul Handley, who is, you will note, not Thai. I must offer the disclaimer that I have not yet been able to read this book, but I feel like ranting about it anyway. Apparently Mr. Handley seeks to show His Majesty (and the monarchy) in a rather different light than is normally accepted in Thailand, because he reputedly paints the King as a rather Machiavellian figure of intrigue and corruption. This is where my rant comes in. I just wonder, given the apparent acclaim this book was met with in Western circles, if this is an example of Western scholars thinking of themselves as unbiased and able to help those strange people with different monarchies and governments and customs SEE themselves because obviously, they wouldn’t be able to do so any other way.

 

Now, as a confused farang (foreigner) myself, I don’t really have the expertise to debunk Mr. Handley (yet), and there is a side of me that says, “but you should be a scholar! And read it with an open mind! After all, outsiders do have insights!” But that side is in direct conflict with my adopted-Thai side that screams about all the good that His Majesty has manifestly done for the people of Thailand, and despite what Machiavellian things the people supporting the monarchy and probably even some members of it have done, (because I’m not stupid), I don’t want to give up my belief in His Majesty. Living in Thailand you learn that the respect and love for Him is palpable; and I don’t think that can be easily dismissed by a farang scholar with a radically outside perspective.

 

I’m going to give Mr. Handley a go, however, because the book was recommended, albeit with reservations, by an uncle of mine who has lived in Thailand for many years and has ties to the royal household. He said, “The recent book about HM not smiling does have some interesting things on how HM’s image was updated and crafted using Madison Avenue techniques during the 1990s and forward, which you might find helpful  (I should pause to say that I was not  impressed with that book.   Many of the things the author portrays as great revelations are in fact rumors that have been around, in various forms, for years.  And the author definitely seems to have a major “axe to grind.”).”

 

So we’ll see. Maybe I’m doing Mr. Handley a great wrong. And I am interested in what he has to say about the public image of the monarchy. The book is banned in Thailand, which is due to the strict lese majeste laws that are in place there. I find this somewhat problematic, from my “free speech” American side, but Thailand is not the States.  I guess that sometimes, my selves just collide.

Random

So I was talking to my dad about the picture I posted in my last entry, and he didn’t know where it origninally was taken either, but he said that the bead of sweat dripping from His Majesty’s nose is taken to signify how hard he works on the behalf of the Thai people. I think that’s pretty neat, actually. And it really summarizes the sort of role the king plays in Thai society.

So, I had this article I wanted to link to regarding the representation of minorities in film, but I cannot remember where I found it. So sad.Basically, the main question of the article was whether or not the notion that success drives the market, and successful films are ones that make a lot of money and thus lead to more of the same kind of films holds true in the cases of films about minorities or if support by minorities of such films deepen the divide between “mainstream” entertainment and niche entertainment. I thought I read it on the angry asian man blog (http://www.angryasianman.com/angry.html) but I’ve been searching the archives and haven’t found it so I might be mistaken. (It’s an interesting blog, anyway, with a strong focus on issues in representations of Asians in Western Media.)

The readings for this class and my Strat Com class have me thinking a lot about the creation of the Other in media, particularly in never allowing those marked as “different” to be anything but abnormal or exceptional or OBVIOUSLY strange. As Larry Gross points out in his article “The Ethics of (Mis)representation” about media treatment of homosexuals: “The rules of the mass media game have a double impact on gay people: not only do they pick and use weak and silly, or evil and corrupt, cliched characterizations, but they exclude and deny the existence of normal, unexceptional as well as exceptional lesbians and gay men” (p. 196). If you are different in any way, media and society at large seems to say, you’d better be COMPLETELY different because there is no room for anything else.

Hopefully coherent

Midterms kill brains. Just so you know.

Anyway, this thought stems from a my Strategic Communication Class. We just discussed rhetorical theories of communication. Raymie Mckerrow, in his article ‘Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis” discusses the idea that “The ‘people’ are both real and fictive;” they exist as biological creatures but are also symbolized in certain ways in discourse, particularly in terms of consolidating and keeping hold of power (p. 95). I have to confess, all I could think of when I read that article and during class was this quote from Terry Pratchett’s novel Night Watch regarding revolutionary agitation:

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward thinking or obedient. … And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people (p. 250).

The fictive notions of People last only so long as actual people cooperate.

Moving on to Visual Communication… This connects only in that this article ALSO has the word “rhetoric” in the title. “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture” (Luciates & Hariman) examines the way “iconic” photographs contribute to the discourse and perpetuation of American democracy and culture. They discuss how iconic photos capture individuals who then come to represent something about the collective. (For example, the photograph of the soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima.) This article made me think about my own tentative research interests in this class, and particularly the use of images in Thailand of the royal family and the iconic images that I remember.

This photo appears a lot. Billboards, collages, general representation. I’ve seen it painted in different ways, sometimes flipped, but still recognizable. I’m also having a hard time finding out where the original photo was taken… If I can find out I’ll edit this post.

Links and musings

I saw this article today on BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8309050.stm

Apparently the King of Thailand has been very ill for the past month. I was surprised because the last I heard, several weeks ago, that His Majesty was recovering and would be out of the hospital soon.

So I compared it to this front page article from the Bangkok Post, which says that His Majesty is still in the hospital, but yes, is recovering and should be home soon:

http://bangkokpost.com/news/local/25764/princess-says-king-doing-well

I must admit, I am not completely heartened by the BKK Post article. His Majesty is scrupulously protected by the Thai press. If the BBC is commenting, it must be a big deal, and I’m inclined to think that His Majesty is much sicker than the Bangkok Post allows. This is partly what I want to do my research project for this class on, if it works: examining His Majesty’s role in Thai society and culture and examining how fears about change due to his health have contributed to the current political unrest. I hope he recovers soon. (I could go on and on about this subject; for example, I thought it was fascinating how the montage for the King’s Song that plays before each movie was changed following an uprising in the southern provinces to include Muslim citizens waving Thai flags. That montage had been the same for as long as I can recall before that.)

In other homework related news, watching The Matrix was an odd experience. I learned that even though I had not watched the whole thing before, I had seen many, many clips from the film. It made for an interesting viewing experience, probably similar to someone who hears quotes from a famous work and when finally reading the quotes in context finds that some of the ways the quotes had been used were… not quite correct.

Finally, I came across this blog the other day: http://contexts.org/socimages/

It’s call Sociological Images and it examines advertisements and other media from a primarily (as far as I can tell) feminist perspective.

Snapshots from a Faraway Place

The article “Photo Albums: Images of Time and Reflections of Self” made me think of all the scrapbooks and photo albums I have made over the years. In high school, I went all out. Fancy scissors, special borders, pretty albums made of Thai saw paper, which sometimes has flower petals trapped within the paper. I made these albums to capture a time period I knew was coming to an end, as graduation got closer and friends came and went. These albums were for myself alone. I didn’t often show them to others, even if they were in the pictures.

I didn’t really plan to keep on making scrapbooks when I went to college, but after my freshmen year my parents moved back to Thailand and I was confronted with the enormous reality that they would not be part of my day to day life, while I was familiar with the community and place they were returning to (this is no longer as true after six years away). So I decided to make my mom a scrapbook for each year of my life. These pictures were of the mundane: my bed, the view from my room, my roommates, my roommates. They were not spontaneous and they were, if you didn’t know why I was including those particular photos, very boring.

I only made one album for my mother due to receiving a digital camera for my birthday after sophomore year. Until then I had used only disposable cameras to record my existence, and once I didn’t HAVE to print the photos out and had the option of the more immediate and easy way of sharing photos via email, I just didn’t bother to make albums anymore.

Which makes me wonder how online social networks like Facebook effect this idea of album making; it is at once personal and public, altho a person still has control over who sees their photos, it is harder to control. It’s no longer an issue of putting an album away where it can’t be seen.

A few thoughts on Firstness

To be honest, I was kind of scared to write anything about Peirce because I honestly wasn’t sure I understood the readings. I did have an interesting conversation with a math friend about Peirce’s use of algebraic equations as an example of an icon (in response to math friend’s discussion from maths philosophy of whether 1 + 1 is different from 1 apple + 1 apple. We’re still not sure).

But what really made sense to me about Peirce’s semiotics was his notion of “Firstness.” (And granted, this came together more clearly in my mind during and after our class discussion.) Firstness is, according to my meticulous notes, “present and immediate, cannot be articulated, …, pre-reflection.” Basic human experience unexamined but felt.

I over analyze everything. I can’t just let things be felt or experienced. I must break life down into its smallest quotient of meaning and figure out all the connections to everything else ever. So this idea of “Firstness” reminded me of nothing so much as poetry. Poetry evokes the basic human emotions through the use of words, true, but it’s also true that the way poems evoke these feelings is not easily discernible. And I wonder about poets themselves. How do they remain in touch with those First things and translate them into words?

The problem of words

My flatmate tells me that there are words and concepts in her language that she cannot translate into English, and therefore she doesn’t even know if what she wants to describe would exist for me. I thought of this as I read this quote from Paul Coleby’s “Introduction” to Saussurean Linguistics:

Linguistics provides the foundations and touchstone for communication theory, often demonstrating how the ‘micro’ is enshrined in the ‘macro’ and vice versa, and how language is the central institution of any society. Approaching communication by way of linguistic theory also raises the philosophical question of language’s relation to other processes of mind: does language act as a vehicle for thought or does it determine the nature of thought?

In some ways it’s like the age old question of the chicken and the egg. Can you have one without the other? Does it matter which came first? Because my flatmate has a different first language, does that mean she thinks differently from me? Does she experience things that I cannot because I don’t have words for them? If I learn the definitions of the words she wants to share with me, will it mean I know what she is talking about? I don’t know that I would, because what she wants to describe is inextricably tied to a specific place that I have never been, in a culture I have not participated in. Language and experience cannot be separated. I think they shape and reinforce each other.

I’d like this post to be brilliant…

But I’m afraid it will just be me stumbling over what I’d like to say. Which is that I’ve never blogged before, so I feel a bit nervous and excited about this assignment for my Visual Communication and Culture class. Stay tuned for my (hopefully) deep thoughts on our course readings and everything else that catches my attention.