History I am sure, does not repeat itself, but some Thai scholars have a history of repeating themselves. Two articles published in the Bangkok Post recently reveal their obsession with the idea of a “Thai race”.
The first article is titled “Bones tell story of Thai origin” (Bangkok Post 5/11/06). In short, it explains that the scholars of the Fine Arts Department have deduced the ethnic identity of several thousand year old skeletons. DNA tests on these skeletons and on different tai-speaking populations currently living in China and Thailand show very similar results. They allow the researcher to say that Thai people have been settled in what is today Thailand for much longer than previously thought. This research then obviously backs up a nationalist rewriting of early Southeast Asia. Did these skeletons belong to people who named themselves thai, who shared the same rituals, the same social organization, who speak the same language as the Thai today? These questions are not raised, of course… They would undermine the pathetic but nonetheless worrying efforts of these Thai academics to give to the concept of a “Thai race” a genetic justification as well as an historical depth which social sciences are unable (and for good reasons!) to provide them with.
The second article, published a few days ago (Bangkok Post 13/12/06), concerns more specifically medical sciences. It proclaims that “Gene sequence of Thai has been identified” by a research team from Chulalongkorn and Mahidol Universities and that this discovery will allow the scientists to adjust the creation of new medicines to the Thai DNA for greater efficiency. The research was based on a collection and analysis of blood samples among people living in the same area for at least three generations. But if a “true Thai” is someone living in the same place as his grand parents, then many Karen or Lawa villagers (or Chinese descendants) are more Thai than many thai-speaking urban dwellers! This could be good news for the rights of the so-called “ethnic people” of Thailand but indeed the main idea underlying this research is (once again) the quest and the promotion of a “pure” Thai genotype. Interestingly, the research has eventually shown close affinities with Chinese and Japanese DNA – which represent the “noble white Asian stock” – while nothing is said about Lao or Khmer DNA…
Such an obsession for a “pure and old Thai race” is not new, nor is it isolated. It comes along with other obsessions, such as pride of the national flag. Eventually this produces a conceptual framework which reminds me, relatively speaking, of European racist and evolutionist theories at the end of the nineteen century.
Olivier Evrard, Anthropologist, IRD-Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University
12 responses so far ↓
1 Cosmopolitan // Dec 18, 2006 at 4:11 pm
This is hardly a peculiarly Thai obsession, as Olivier Evrard points out. The ultimately hopeless quest for authenticity is at the heart of the national project. Race and history are key cultural battlefields upon which people compete to define themselves as authentic and ‘others within and without’ as less authentic in belonging to the national place. That contemporary Thai nationalism takes this form is no surprise. What is surprising is the lack of critique from Thais themselves. Surely there are Thai academics who would agree with Olivier Evrard. Where are their voices being heard? Why does the Bangkok Post have a special place for the new eugenics?
2 Andrew Walker // Dec 18, 2006 at 7:49 pm
I am sure there are many Thai academics and other observers that agree with Olivier Evrard’s comments. But, at the same time, I do think there is a persistent streak of primordialism in a lot of Thai social science, especially when it comes to the Thai/Tai world.
3 Andrew Walker // Dec 18, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Another version of the second article Olivier refers to is available here:
http://nationmultimedia.com/2006/12/13/headlines/headlines_30021433.php
Interesting, as Patiwat pointed out to me, that there was no DNA sampling in the northeast of Thailand (a bit too Lao for comfort?). Perhaps there is sufficient northeastern DNA floating around in Bangkok already.
4 Jon Fernquest // Dec 18, 2006 at 10:22 pm
For a contrasting rhetoric, compare attempts to show that the Turkish Khazar gene pool had in some way diluted the genes of Eastern European Jews. Such attempts were labeled “anti-semite” despite Zionist Arthur Koestler being a major source of these ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars#Alleged_Khazar_ancestry_of_Ashkenazim
(I found Arthur Koestler’s book on The Khazars at a used bookstore on Sukhumvit this weekend. That’s why this example is fresh in my mind.)
My point is, that this undercurrent exists in most societies. I was always shocked when people talked of the importance of the purity of their familys’ blood in South Korea when I lived and worked there. I believe that the horrible experiences of World War II led to a western revulsion to this sentiment, but I wouldn’t naturally assume that this revulsion exists in other cultures.
I’ve seen Asian youth use things for the purposes of “rebelling against the status quo” that probably no one in the west would expect to be used for such purposes, such as evangelical christianity or wearing nazi decorations. Of course, as a western teacher, I would get upset with swastika’s on everything, but that’s exactly why they put there in the first place, to get me upset.
5 patiwat // Dec 18, 2006 at 10:31 pm
The bone sampling is interesting, but I’m not sure I buy the conclusions.
1) Contamination. Work like this always has the risk of contamination with modern DNA, even when run in the best of labs.
2) The article doesn’t really tell us anything. They compared the bone-derived mtDNA with that from DNA of people from Southeast Asia and eastern China, and found that they were similar. But that doesn’t really tell us anything. The DNA could have been “similar” to bones found in European sites; heck, it could have been
similar” to chimps – the key is how similar, and how similar compared to what other racial group.
We know little about the language used by people of that era, making liguistic analysis difficult. Genetic studies are critical in opening a window into the past.
It also helps put a date to the various waves of migration that hae occured in Sundaland/Southeast Asia. The vast diversity of language and race within Southeast Asia gives a hint at the complex migration of people into the region over the past million years. First came Java Man (H. erectus), then came Perak Man and the Indonesian Hobbits (H. floresiensis), then came the Sakai/Melanesian/Negrito/Orang Asli/Borneo humans, then came the Malay, then came the Chinese. Each with their own technology, language, culture, and genes. Where did the Baan Chiang bronze-age people fit in?
I’m suspicious of how the Thai are going to spin it, that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is fascinating work. Ignore the fact that the scientists doing the work are framing their conclusions on the intellectual legacy of the Thai fascists of the 1930’s. Today, scientists have tools that they couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago. This enables a whole new frontier in scientific work.
6 Bystander // Dec 19, 2006 at 7:08 am
I don’t think there’s anything suspicious about bone sampling, at least from the level of looking at second hand reporting in the popular press anyway. I doubt you can really comment on the technicality without reading the actual scientific manuscript. In any case, it’s not a good practice to talk about preliminary results especially to the press before the work has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. This is not strictly adhered to in Thailand, regrettably. We tend to hear a lot of sensational “discoveries” first in the local press.
That said, the result of the bone mtDNA is not at all surprising. In all likelihood, the myth that Thais migrated from China 700 years ago is bogus. 700 years may be a long time in Thai history, but it’s relatively recent in Chinese history. Plenty of records from that era are available. I don’t recall any that support these theories.
Talking about 1930 Thai fascists, I recently ran into a republished work of vijit-vadakan on phrenology in local bookstore. Very fascinating. In the bio sketch, quite a few decorations from the fuhrer and il duce are proudly listed. Someone should put this in the wikipedia article.
7 patiwat // Dec 19, 2006 at 7:49 am
You go the name and publication details of that book?
8 Olivier // Dec 19, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Thanks all of you for your comments.
Basically, I see two main arguments here :
-a relativist/culturalist one (Jon): discourses on purity are “socially-constructed essentialisms” (and sometimes politically motivated) which can be found everywhere in the world, using different symbols. Western sensitivity to these kinds of discourses is related to what happened in Europe in the XXth century. I take this argument but what still worries me here is that this Thai discourse about race is not coming from students or from people I know in a private sphere for instance, but from well-known academics interviewed by on of the major international newspaper or Southeast Asia…
-a technological one (Patiwat): I do agree with the fact that scientists today have tools that they could not have imagined twenty years ago. The point here is that the new “differences” and the new “regularities” they find with their new tools need to be interpreted with precise words (and surely with new categories, not with a conceptual frame inherited from the 30’s !).
It is now crucial that such researchers learn to speak with social anthropologists (and the reverse) in order to avoid misleading and potentially dangerous associations between genetic categories and cultural/social ones.
Moreover, I do not believe the history of a these waves migrations of people with each its specific genes and tools and language. Sorry patiwat, but these are 19th century diffusionist theories which have been revisited many times already ! Anthropology show that tools and languages travel much more quicker than men. They have also shown that all the current “ethnic” categories in Southeast Asia are “products” of political and social history and relationships. They do not come “naturally” and “genetically” from the past.
9 patiwat // Dec 19, 2006 at 10:07 pm
I wasn’t aware that diffusionism was so outdated.
My views came from Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (especially his section on the Austronesian migration and the makeup of Indonesia) as well as the personal experience of living as a Thai-Chinese trader in Malay-dominated Yala (where it was obvious that migration was the major factor behind genetic, economic, and language differences).
10 Johpa // Dec 20, 2006 at 4:19 pm
I don’t see any issue of dispersion here, only issues of logic. D’em old bones showed close DNA matches to current residents. This would indicate that there is a core genetic group with a long history in present day Thailand. This should come as no surprise to anyone. This in no way indicates that “Thais” or even Tai people were in the area long ago. It does indicate that some of the earlier people of the region assimilated or were absorbed into “Thai” culture and may even genetically represent a majority of the population.
Assimilation is still occurring. In my wife’s native village, any visitor would assume it is a Kham Muang village. But the eldest generation all grew up in families where the mother tongue was K’mu. The second eldest generation, my peer group, is dominated by Kham Muang men (who speak no K’mu apart from some juicy slang terms they are too embarrassed to translate for me) married to Karen women as a result of a large Karen village being established nearby. The youngest generation are assimilating towards a Thai identity where they tend to speak either Central Thai or Kham Muang amongst their peers. The K’mu identity is long gone and the Karen identity is also slowly slipping away. This shifting of ethnic identity towards the local elite has been shown in many other situations.
One must also look at other evidence. The linguistic evidence tends to show a Tai language homeland in present day southern China. Other historical sources tend to confirm several southward migrations of Tai people southwards and westwards. This does not mean that these were migrations into a population vacuum. Clearly there was a diffusion of Tai people into Southeast Asia as represented by language. It will be very interesting over the coming years to see the how the genetic map correlates with the lingustic map.
And although I can see how tools can travel quicker than people, it is a bit hard to fathom how a language, apart from perhaps an emerging Creole or pidgin trade language, can travel faster than its speakers.
11 Olivier // Dec 22, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Thanks for your comment Johpa, I defintely agree with your way of considering both linguistic evidences and genetic ones. My aim was not to challenge the idea that indeed, Thai langage seems to have originated in Southern China and that migrations obviously have occurred from this are as well. I was just saying that I see no reason why some genetic data concerning a “core” population in nowdays Thailand should be named “Thai DNA”.
I am very interested by the example you gave of a “Thai” village with Khmu (or Lwa ?) ancestors. Could you please get into contact with me by e-mail ? (olivier.ev@free.fr). I’d like to discuss that matter with you.
12 Amateur // Feb 23, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Sorry for joining to late to the debate. I just have come across this very interesting blog site today.
There is a very interesting article from a research group from Stanford University with regards to the persistence of Dravidian gene pool among Indo-Aryan speakers in India (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/5/26). Therefore, the linguistig evidence does not have to convey the real composition of the population. I believe we can be pretty sure that the Tai migration has never occured in a scale as it might have been in Europe during the Migration Period. I see many parallels to the Indo-Aryan migration into the Indian sub-continent. As it was the case with the Indo-Aryan speaker, the Tai migration occured as a strata, i.e. the invading Tai formed an aristrocracy which over time assimilated the resident population (infact, it was a mutual assimilation as we can see many Khmer elements in the present Thai culture today). Contrary to Assam, where the Ahom finally got Aryan-ised as a consequence of the Indo-Aryan pressure, history took a different turn in Southeast Asia.
Nevertheless, I dare to argue that, genetically, the majority of the Thai polulation is Khmer, Mon, K’mu or whatever group existed prior to the “Tai-isation”. An exception could be the Thai aristrocracy if they resisted any intermarriages with the local population.
I definitely will not make friends among the Thai academic circle and I reckon that it is difficult for anyone coming forward with this idea in Thailand. I would really encourage an international research group to come up with a interdisciplinary study about the genetic distribution in Southeast Asia including South China and Northeast India. I would start it myself if I was not forced to follow a different professional career after my studies.
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