The speaker will discuss the status of Thailand as an example of “crypto-colonialism” – a phenomenon in which declarations of independence and of high civilization conceal elite arrangements with colonial powers whereby the alleged freedom turns out to be highly conditional, and in which the colonial powers’ “civilizational discourse” reproduces locally the humiliation of the nation-state by the colonial powers. Using examples drawn from ethnographic as well as historical sources, Herzfeld will also place Thailand’s current dilemmas in a global context, with specific reference to the political evolution of Greece and Nepal.
This event was recorded and the video can be watched here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, IIAS Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus, Leiden University; and a member of the doctoral program in Beni Culturali, Formazione e Territorio, University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” He is Senior Advisor on Critical Heritage Studies to the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden. Author of thirteen books (most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, 2022, and Lo Stato nazione e i suoi mali, forthcoming in 2024) and numerous articles and reviews, and producer of two ethnographic films, he has served as editor of American Ethnologist (1995-98) and Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2023-24). He is currently editor-at-large (responsible for “Polyglot Perspectives”) at Anthropological Quarterly, co-editor of “Asian Heritages” (Amsterdam University Press) and “New Anthropologies of Europe” (Berghahn), and editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. He holds honorary doctorates from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and the Universities of Crete, Macedonia, and St Andrews. In 2021 he was made an honorary citizen of Greece for his services to social-science research there. His research (primarily in Greece, Italy, and Thailand) has addressed historic conservation and gentrification, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, crypto-colonialism, and the ethnography of knowledge.
Dr Hans Steinmüller is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE and a specialist in the anthropology of China. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Hubei Province (central China) and in the Wa hills of the China-Myanmar border. Publications include the monograph Communities of Complicity (Berghahn 2013), and more recently special issues on Governing Opacity (Ethnos 2023) and Crises of Care in China Today (China Quarterly 2023). He is editor of Social Analysis and convenor of the MSc programme 'China in Comparative Perspective'.
This event is co-hosted with the Department of Anthropology.