Nicholas Farrelly: Professor McCargo, thank you for taking the time to answer New Mandala’s questions.  And I assure you, we have a good few questions.  Just to start – the story of how you first became involved in Southeast Asian Studies is not one that I have actually ever heard.  As I understand it, your first degree was in English literature of all things.  Can you tell us how you originally came to study Asia and, in particular, how you first came to study Thailand?

Professor McCargo: I became interested in Asia originally because I took a course in Japanese literature while I was on an exchange year in Massachusetts as part of my undergraduate degree.  I really wanted to go to Japan in the summer of 1985, but didn’t have enough money to get there, and so ended up deciding to take a more affordable backpacking trip to Thailand and Burma.  Later I did reach Japan, taught in a high school there for two years, essentially decided that Japan wasn’t really for me, and ended up returning to Thailand. I then spent a year at the AUA Language Centre in Bangkok where I taught English and studied Thai at the same time, while living with a Thai host family of gun and car dealers – with whom I’m still in regular contact.  Through my original notions of studying Japan, I ended up studying Thailand instead.        

Nicholas Farrelly: Since then your academic career has gone in all sorts of different directions and you have published on all manner of political and social processes.  I will get to a range of these other issues in a moment but, before I do, and because I know that it is a topic many of our readers are interested in, I would like to ask you about this idea of “network monarchy”.  It’s an idea you have become quite famous for recently.  Can you tell us what the genesis of this idea was?  When did you begin to conceptualise the Thai polity, and particularly its elites, in this way? 

Professor McCargo: Actually, I never set out to do any research on monarchy, and I have never really studied monarchy in any systematic way.  It was something I didn’t think about all that much for quite a number of years.  But in preparation for the April 2005 Thai Studies Conference in Northern Illinois, I was trying to get my head around the violent conflict in the South and how it was related to national politics. While trying to write what became a long paper on the subject, I realised you couldn’t really understand the way that Thaksin sought to increase his influence in an area like the South, without locating Thaksin’s power network – which Ukrist Pathmanand and I talk about quite a lot in our co-authored book, The Thaksinization of Thailand (NIAS 2005) – in relation to a pre-existing, older power network.

That’s when I started thinking about “network monarchy”.  The idea of network monarchy actually began life simply as an introductory section to my paper on Thaksin and the South.  I wasn’t really so interested in the idea of network monarchy per se but the paper became too big, reaching about 24,000 words at one point, and so I sliced it into two journal articles: one on the introductory material, and the other on Thaksin and the South.  And to my slight disappointment, most people seem more interested in the first part of the argument, but I remain more interested in the second. 

Of course, I tend to feel that the 2006 military coup and many other recent events have vindicated the core arguments I made about “network monarchy”, but I am also conscious that what I outlined in the Pacific Review article remains a very basic and simplistic sketch that really needs further elaboration.              

Nicholas Farrelly: Moving away from that for the moment, you have interests outside Thailand.  At Leeds you have supervised PhDs on topics to do with Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Vietnam.  You have also written about Japan and Cambodia, among other countries.  Do you ever struggle to keep up with developments in all of these very diverse countries?  What techniques do you use for keeping up-to-date with the many national and local situations that this breadth implies? 

Professor McCargo: I don’t really try to keep up-to-date with things. I don’t even really keep up-to-date on a day-to-day basis with what is going on in Thailand.  I usually focus on particular issues that interest me at the time.  So I really try to resist the temptation to be constantly updating myself: I don’t read a lot of newspapers or news sources.  I try to read books and articles, and do my own fieldwork-based research.  When I am focusing on a particular period I will go back and trawl through news sources and use tools like Lexis Nexis to search for key news articles I may need.  I am very resistant to the idea that I need to be constantly tracking current events, because I don’t believe that is really my job. 

So I am actually profoundly ignorant about what is going on in most of those countries, and if you asked me what had happened in almost any of them in the past month I would really struggle to answer.  I don’t try.  I am not one of these people who spend a lot of time keeping up with news and usually, at any given moment, I am only really interested in the one issue that I’m working on: I see myself as someone whose core activity is academic research. I really ought to be following a lot more things than I am, but I have always quite deliberately screened off the day-to-day crackle on the wires.  And I don’t spend a lot of time reading people’s websites or blogs either, to be perfectly honest.    

Nicholas Farrelly: That’s all very understandable.  Many of our readers probably don’t know that you have written a student textbook called Contemporary Japan, which was first published in 2000.  In its field, I might add, it is very well regarded.  You have also edited a book entitled Rethinking Vietnam (2004).  What are the limits of your country knowledge?  Would you ever hope to, say, write more often about Chinese or Indian or Indonesian politics?   How far do you think you could spread yourself?   

Professor McCargo: Well, I’ve always said I don’t really know anything much about Japan and I’m quite upfront in the preface of the book where I write that it’s a summary of secondary sources, for the most part.  That book I developed as a result of teaching on Japan for a number of years at Leeds. 

I had a disturbing experience a few years ago when I was doing research in Indonesia and I met somebody I’d known at SOAS.  She pointed her finger at me – this was in somebody’s house, actually, where I had bumped into her by chance – and said, “Duncan McCargo, what are you doing here?  You do Thailand”.  And this comment provoked me to no end.  I really don’t want to be labelled as somebody who just does Thailand.  So I have always tried to have other stuff going on in between projects or sometimes in parallel with projects on Thailand.  I have done some work on Cambodia (having spent a year there recently), but I’m especially keen on Vietnam, I really like Indonesia, and I’m quite interested in Japan. But I would like to have a handle at some level on, or have done some work on, all the major countries of Southeast Asia.  I don’t really aspire to do anything on, say, India or China, but Bangladesh (where I have had a couple of PhD students, as you said) is a very interesting country, which I might like to learn more about. 

This is not because I ever expect to do anything ground-breakingly original on these other countries, but I do need to view the Thailand stuff through a comparative perspective, and to have a sense of wider trends and issues.  I think it’s dangerous to go down this road of branding yourself, or being branded by others, as somebody who only works on one country.  I even published a comparative book, Media and Politics in Pacific Asia (Routledge 2003), which draws on fieldwork in Japan, Indonesia and Hong Kong, as well as repackaging some of the arguments in my earlier work Politics and the Press in Thailand (Routledge 2000). That said, I may actually have spent too much time over the past ten years or so trying to prove that I could work on other countries. At the moment, there is so much happening in Thailand, and so few people doing serious research on the country’s politics, that I need to stay primarily focused on my core Thai work.

Nicholas Farrelly: In that regard do you have any interests, or is there any attraction, in studying Burma?

Professor McCargo: Well, I’ve personally boycotted Burma since 1988 because of my unhappiness with the military regime. Various people keep telling me that I should review that decision; that it’s about time I abandoned my Burma boycott. But at the moment, I’m still not going there.  And because of the way I work, a place I don’t visit is a place I can’t study.        

Nicholas Farrelly: I guess a bit like the woman you described earlier, most New Mandala readers will know you as a Thailand expert, so it makes sense to turn my questions back in that direction.  Your doctoral research, and one of your key early publications, focussed on the life and work of Chamlong Srimuang (Chamlong Srimuang and the New Thai Politics, Hurst 1997).  I would like to know if you continue to follow his progress closely, if at all.   

Professor McCargo: Well, Chamlong did, of course, stage a comeback.  I hadn’t been in touch with Chamlong for a long time but, to tell you the truth, in December 2005 I sent him a Christmas card which is rather ironic because he’s not really much of a Christmas card guy.  In the Christmas card I wrote, “Do you think Thaksin can last another year?”  At that time Chamlong had been very much pro-Thaksin. 

Greatly, to my surprise I was sitting down and having dinner in Pattani on about 6 January 2006 when my mobile phone rang, and the voice on the phone said, “Professor McCargo this is Chamlong Srimuang. About your question”.  I was quite taken aback.  And he said, “Well, I’ve been supporting him up until now”, and I said, “Yes I know you have”.  And he said, “But I’m thinking about what to do next”.  And then I said, “Well it would be a good idea if you did some more thinking on that”.  He then said, “Please send me a copy of your book about me because I’ve lost the one you gave me”. 

I haven’t been in touch with him since, but within a couple of weeks of that phone call he had come out and turned 180-degrees from supporting Thaksin to being one of the primary leaders of the movement against him – and the rest is history.  So he retains a capacity to surprise and to influence political developments.  But I’m not in daily touch with him, or anything.  I haven’t decided whether or not to send him another Christmas card this year. The PAD seems to have given him a new lease of life – he’s not the kind of guy to be satisfied with running a dogs’ home and a leadership school. His surfeit of energy is admirable in a 73 year old, whatever you think about the way he directs that energy. He never ceases to amaze.  

Nicholas Farrelly: Speaking of those historic developments, when you co-wrote The Thaksinization of Thailand, did you expect that Thaksin’s rule would end with a royalist-military coup?  In the final section of that book you offered a number of possible scenarios.  Does the September 2006 outcome fit under the various possibilities that you and Ukrist envisaged? 

Professor McCargo: I’m not saying that I expected Thaksin to be ousted by a military coup in 2006.  The book was generally criticised when it came out, by a lot of my Thai colleagues, for being too harsh on Thaksin.  The chapter, of which Ukrist was the primary author, in which we argued that the military was re-politicising and gradually asserting its role was a chapter that many Thai academics were extremely unhappy with.  It turned out to be somewhat prescient, but that prescience was more Ukrist’s than mine.  And of the four scenarios we ended with in our conclusion, ‘Thaksin Disincorporated’ turned out to be correct in several respects.  We talked about Thaksin being toppled by a monumental political crisis after antagonising ultra-conservative forces in Thai society and becoming profoundly alienated from the urban electorate – all developments that actually took place. We also mentioned May-1992 style demonstrations against him. While 2006 never saw demonstrations on the scale of May 1992, there were certainly large anti-Thaksin protests – a possibility many people thought was absolutely ridiculous when we wrote the book.

Nicholas Farrelly: This was at the height of the Thaksin juggernaut.

Professor McCargo: Right, that’s right.  But anyone who goes around predicting what is going to happen in Thailand is completely crazy.  I believe, as I’ve said before, that orthodoxy is the enemy of understanding anything seriously. 

Nicholas Farrelly: Of course, over the past couple of years, Thai politics has never been far from the international headlines.  From the coup, to Oliver Jufer, to Paul Handley and Thaksin’s footballing ambitions, there has been much to keep journalists and editors interested.  Over this time you have been regularly quoted in the international media.  Has your own understanding and analysis of the political situation changed since those hazy days of September 2006 when everyone was trying to work out had just happened and what it all meant?  Are there issues that you feel journalists and editors still need to better explain when it comes to Thai politics?  What are some of those issues?   

Professor McCargo: I don’t know where to start answering that question actually.  I have been trying, perversely, not to take too much interest in what has been going on in Thailand nationally as I have been trying to write up my research on the south.  In the immediate aftermath of the coup I gave quite a lot of interviews on essentially the same theme, saying that it’s just a matter of time before this all begins to unravel.  And I have done very few interviews and made relatively few media interventions since late 2006, because I have just been trying to concentrate on getting on with my work and I have never followed, day-to-day, all of the twists and turns of the new draft constitution, the re-born political parties, the political scrambling post-election, the PAD protests, and so on.

I don’t want to criticise journalists for their coverage of Thailand because there just isn’t enough of it and we desperately need anybody who can cover the place to write something.  The sad thing to me is how little attention, internationally, has been paid to Thailand since the coup.  We had the coup and there were people calling me up wanting to talk to me for about a week; but since then major developments like the new constitution or the banning of Thai Rak Thai, or even the December 2007 election, have received very little attention.  The only thing that has been a real news story in the UK has been a bit of the stuff on Manchester City.  So I would like to start with a plea for people just to write more, because it is just amazing how the people responsible for the coup have been able to get away with very little critical coverage or discussion of subsequent developments.  That’s my not very good answer to that question. 

Nicholas Farrelly: In September 2006, in Foreign Affairs, you wrote an article titled “Toxic Thaksin”.  There you argued that, “To date, the public stance of the United States has been far too ambiguous: a strong statement from a senior member of the administration is overdue. Thaksin deserved to go, but not in this crude, retrograde fashion, which sets a dangerous precedent both for Thailand and the wider region”.  From the perspective of today, what do you think are the regional implications of Thailand’s September 2006 coup?  Has it set back the task of political reform in countries like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma?  If so, how?

Professor McCargo: It has made military coups or de facto military coups even more legitimate in places like Turkey, Bangladesh and Pakistan.  Casting the net a bit wider, I think it sent out the message that it was still okay to have military interventions in politics.  I believe there is a new wave of military coups or alternative forms of military interventions into politics which the Thai coup formed part of, and that does have dangerous implications.  I was in Indonesia, for example, for a workshop in February 2007, and it was quite clear that a lot of people from around the region thought that the fact that the Thais had staged a coup made it incrementally more possible for the Indonesian or Philippine military to think about having a coup.  And when the Burmese had another crackdown last year, the fact that the Thais themselves had just experienced, a military coup, couldn’t claim to be a democracy, and couldn’t really claim to be against military interventions in politics undercut the position of Thailand and of ASEAN more generally in framing a response.  So it certainly did no harm from the point of view of the Burmese military regime.  In every way it’s a regressive step, and I stand by what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the coup itself.

Nicholas Farrelly: In early 2007, New Left Review provided you with the space to make a thorough appraisal of Paul Handley’s influential and important book on King Bhumibol.  You argued that, “The ever-more-vocal cult of Bhumibol, meanwhile, seems intended to drown out anxious mutterings about the succession. When millions of Thais donned yellow shirts in June 2006, their euphoria ill masked a mode of collective denial concerning the future of the monarchy, the unstable political order and the country as a whole. In a kingdom where violence lurks just below the surface-violence that the King helped quell in 1973 and 1992, but tacitly supported in October 1976-Bhumibol’s passing threatens to inaugurate a new episode of civil strife”.  Why do you think this “mode of collective denial” has become so widespread?  And are there real risks from this mode?

Professor McCargo: I do think that there is a mode of collective denial and incredible collective anxiety in Thailand now, and I see it on lots of different levels.  I saw it very clearly in the cult of Jatukham Ramathep amulets.  I have been going to Thailand for many years (not as many as some other people, of course), but I haven’t seen my Thai friends as agitated or anxious about a whole series of things.  I think it has become very difficult for people in Thailand to separate a whole set of issues.  One is anxiety about what is going on politically, one is anxiety about the king’s health, one is anxiety about what happens politically: is there going to be a succession crisis, a second coup, or another outbreak of violence? 

You’ll know that I have written in a couple of places that I believe the 1997 constitution was a preemptive strike designed to avert  political violence after a succession crisis, which I have on fairly good authority and have cited in my publications (including my edited volume Reforming Thai Politics, NIAS 2002).  Therefore, if the 1997 constitution is supposed to avert political violence after a succession crisis and the military tore it up on the night of the coup, on 19 September, then what is now supposed to avert political violence if there’s a succession crisis?  The answer is we don’t have any mechanisms left; and all attempts to reassert a mode of military, privy council-led virtuous rule of a kind that is clearly past its sell-buy date have failed. We can see that the Surayud government was unable to exert its authority, or to convince people that this is a mode of running the country that really works.  Nor has the widely-derided Samak government done much better. Therefore, if we can’t rely on political parties and institutions and we can’t rely on the virtuous people around the palace to stabilise things, then we don’t have any source of stability in the society to depend on.  And that’s quite a frightening prospect for many people in Thailand, since I believe that the whole point of the 1997 constitution was to avert this possibility of violence.           

Nicholas Farrelly: Why do you think the 2007 election failed to resolve Thailand’s ongoing political crisis?

Professor McCargo: Clearly the scenario was supposed to be that the Democrats and people sympathetic to the Surayud government project would be able to front a new administration that would carry on and, perhaps, more successfully execute, the objectives of the CNS-backed administration.  As I anticipated, this proved impossible to achieve. So it seems very much as I feared right after the September 2006 coup: the coup, the aftermath, the new constitution, the ructions within Thaksin’s party and so on, just come full circle and we’re back to a clash between network monarchy and an alternative power network still in some way influenced by or inspired by loyalty to Thaksin and/or his legacy. 

So we’re no further on; and we’re arguably in a worse situation than we were on 19 September 2006, because we haven’t got the 1997 constitution anymore, so Thailand can’t so easily go back to try and revive a liberal project that could form the basis of an alternative politics.  The liberal project has been discredited, the network monarchy and military intervention have been discredited, Samak and Thaksin are detested in many parts of the country, and Thais have nowhere to turn.  Thai society has become incredibly divided and those divisions have not been healed or addressed substantially by the coup or its aftermath. Nor is the in-your-face Samak government interested in trying to resolve those divisions. Around half the population supports Thaksin/Samak and around half the population reviles them. Neither side has made any headway in making its case to the Thai population.

Nicholas Farrelly: Clearly, these are all big issues for Thailand.  What role do you think academic researchers and, particularly, foreign researchers can play in understanding the current situation?

Professor McCargo: This works on several different levels. For my own part, I’ve always worked in close collaboration with Thai researchers. Using British government funded projects, I collaborated with a research team at Mahasarakham University for six years (1996-2002) and with another team at Prince of Songkhla University (PSU) for four years (2002-06); both links supported a constant traffic back-and-forth of Leeds and Thai colleagues. We learned an enormous amount from them, and they also benefited from the chance to step outside the fray for a while. Thai universities are very bureaucratised institutions, and academics (especially the more dynamic ones) are kept on constant treadmill of activity, much of it rather pointless. External support can really help Thai colleagues to develop their ideas and gain a more critical perspective on what is going on.

These interventions can also lead to important publications, like the volume on the South which emerged from the PSU collaboration (Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence, NUS Press 2007), and the book on Thaksin that I co-wrote with Ukrist. This also applies to PhD students: seven Thais have finished their PhDs under my supervision since 2001. Training PhD students and helping them to gain more nuanced, critical and fieldwork-based perspectives is a very important part of my work, this rather curious kind of import-export business. I’m immensely proud of the Leeds PhD graduates who are now back teaching, researching and working in various Thai universities and organisations.

But apart from the hands-on training and collaboration stuff, foreigners continue to play an important role by saying uncomfortable things that people in Thailand often don’t want to say (or sometimes even hear) themselves. I’m an awkward character from the North of England. I have another life outside Thailand, and in many ways I am not part of the Thai system. I have a permanent job in a British university. This gives me and people like me a certain license. Along with that license goes a kind of responsibility to make annoying, critical statements – whether about Thaksin, the monarchical network, the South, the coup, or whatever – in the hope of provoking some sort of reaction.

Nicholas Farrelly: As a foreign researcher, are you ever challenged for commenting on Thai society and politics?  Do people ever intimate that because you are a farang you can’t really comprehend what is going on?  In your experience, is such recourse to exceptionalism at all prevalent?

Professor McCargo: I have been incredibly lucky over the years: wherever I have gone, and whatever I have wanted to study or explore, I have met Thais who were ready to assist and support me in surprising and generous ways. There are always a few people who will come back at you with essentialist arguments that foreigners can’t understand Thailand. I am not really worried about that kind of reaction, because actually I don’t claim to know much about Thailand. I struggle to achieve a certain level of understanding on the specific topics that I try to research, but the challenge of trying to study and write about Thailand is a constant exercise in humility.

I do always remind those people who advance essentialist arguments, however, that I also know very little about my own country, Britain, because I have never studied it systematically or done any fieldwork-based research there. That response often gives them pause for thought: how much do any of us know about anything, in the end?

Nicholas Farrelly: Finally, I would like to ask you about your recent years of research in southern Thailand.  What are your conclusions? Under current conditions, how difficult is field research in that part of the country?  Do you have any advice for researchers who are hoping to explore and explain the southern provinces in the years ahead?  Is there any important research that is simply impossible to undertake?

Professor McCargo: My book on the South has just been published (Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), and three years of intensive focus on the political conflict in the region are now drawing to an end. It’s hard to summarise the arguments of the book in a few sentences, but essentially I am viewing the Southern Thai conflict as a political problem. Both the Islamic and the political elite of Malay Muslim society were largely coopted by the Thai state from the 1980s onwards; as a result, they have lost their leadership roles in society, creating a vacuum into which a resurgent militant movement has entered. Given the generally inept (occasionally brutal) response by the Thai security forces, the militants have been able to gain considerable legitimacy, while the credibility of the Thai state has been in freefall. I argue that the only solution to the crisis is to restore the legitimacy of the Thai state through new governance arrangements, which might involve some form of decentralization or ‘autonomy’ (probably called something else).

Writing the book was a challenge. I spent a year based in Pattani, interviewing more than 270 people and travelling all over the three provinces, including lots of really dodgy places. The book is based almost entirely on my own fieldwork; I’m really tired of this trend towards academic books and articles that have virtually no empirical basis, endlessly reviewing secondary sources, journalistic accounts, and material found on the internet (although I have sometimes written such pieces myself, of course). I’d urge people to get off-line and to get out there (wherever it is for you) if at all possible.

My original plan was to base myself in the Pattani town of Saiburi, in order to do a kind of political ethnography of the conflict, but my Thai and Malay-Muslim friends and colleagues encouraged me to work from the PSU Pattani campus instead, essentially for reasons of security. As a result, my book has more breadth and less depth than I first envisaged. The PSU campus is an agreeable and relatively safe place to spend a year, but part of me still wishes I had been bold enough to stick to the original plan. I would encourage others to conduct fieldwork in the South, but you have to find a way of doing this that works for you. It’s not a place where you can easily operate unsupported; you need to establish a local network, and be ready to take people’s advice. If you can do this, the rewards are enormous – there is just so much to be learned.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor McCargo, thank you for taking the time to participate in New Mandala’s interview series.  It has been wonderful having you involved.

Nicholas Farrelly: Justin, thanks for agreeing to take part in New Mandala’s interview series.  We have now undertaken a dozen or so interviews with prominent writers and academics who shape debates in Southeast Asian studies.  Can you tell us something about your background, and how you came to write about Burma?

Justin Wintle: I am flattered to be included in the New Mandala interview series. My formal background is not so entertaining. Safe and privileged — an English public school (Stowe) and Oxford University (Magdalen College).  Since then I have made out (on a good day) as a freelance author, journalist and editor. My father had haemophilia, which restricted his movements. ‘You must do my travelling for me,’ he told me when I was still in my teens. While it would be an exaggeration to say that I have been on a mission ever since, I like to think that I have fulfilled his wishes, at least in that regard. Perhaps just because there was so much security in my childhood, an unrequited boyish thirst for adventure built up. At Oxford I had a Japanese-Hawaiian girlfriend who awakened what became an enduring interest in the Far East, though my first trip out there did not occur until 1978. Before then I had to make do with Italy, and the oriental charms of Venice. But as I came to know the peoples of S.E.Asia, so I began concerning myself with their politics. Inevitable really, given that at university I read history. And perhaps it was also inevitable that sooner or later my attention would turn to Burma, though in the event that was on the rebound of a somewhat fruitless trip to Laos. In the early 1990s I published Romancing Vietnam, a travel adventure that is still in print. I thought I could repeat its success in another of Indochina’s communist countries, but when I got there Vientiane was little more than a UNDP theme park. Good for the denizens of Vientiane, but less good for an investigative author. So instead I went back to Thailand and started visiting the refugee camps along the Burmese border.

Nicholas Farrelly: And what about your informal background?

Justin Wintle: The informal background consists of friendships. I have been undeservedly fortunate in the number, variety and quality of the friends I have had — individuals from all walks who have continued my education, and added to the richness of being alive. In the past, the historic past, we attached more importance to friendships than we do now, no doubt because of the stresses of today’s globally competitive society and working environments. One of the advantages of working for oneself is that it’s easier to uphold that invaluable tradition.

Nicholas Farrelly: Over the course of your career you have taken on an eclectic range of projects.  Everything from New Makers of Modern Culture and Furious Interiors: R.S. Thomas, Wales and God to The Rough Guide History of Islam and The Vietnam Wars has been the subject of your attention.  What has been the most satisfying?  Are you moving closer towards your ideal topic?

Justin Wintle: You are not the first to comment on the eclecticism of my output. There are two aspects to this: the need to keep oneself gainfully employed, and a compulsion to follow one’s curiosity wherever it may lead. When it works the two things dovetail. Again I’ve been fortunate, though it’s not a very sound authorial strategy. The way to get rich writing books is to write the same book again and again and build up a loyal readership. Very often I’ve had to seek out a new readership for a new project.  But job satisfaction is always a primary consideration, otherwise I would have become an accountant or estate agent or bond dealer. If I had to single out one title, then it would be Romancing Vietnam. I was a young man when I wrote it. I spent three months journeying what was then (1989) still very much a closed country with an entourage of official minders who enabled me to meet the likes of Vo Nguyen Giap and Le Duc Tho. But it was the ordinary Vietnamese who won me over, my charming minders included, and nothing I have done since has given me such a sustained ‘high’. The ideal topic of course would be perpetual youth, experientially validated.

Nicholas Farrelly: Turning to your experience of writing about Burma – at the start of Perfect Hostage you clarify that ‘just how unwholesome Burma is only became apparent to me when, in 1998, I began visiting the refugee camps in Thailand.’  The ‘unwholesome’ side of life in Burma can, of course, come as a shock.  Was that your key motivation for writing the book?  What compelled you to keep going as you built up material for this very full length biography?

Justin Wintle: Yes. The sheer scale and persistence of the inhumanities perpetrated in Burma presented the challenge. As a secularist historian I believe there is a sublunary explanation for pretty well everything, so I wanted to know how such cruelties came about. I don’t believe in evil per se, but I know darned well how evil can spring into being given half a chance. We overlook the animal within us at our peril. Initially I wanted to write an account of the sufferings of the Burmese minority peoples especially, as well as the contribution to Burma’s woes made by their insurgent armies, but my then agent suggested that a substantial biography of Aung San Suu Kyi would have more impact. There was nothing heroic about its completion. Random House gave me a contract, I did the research, and the book got written.

Nicholas Farrelly: In a review published by the online news source Mizzima, Lemyao Shimray notes that your book ‘is more to do with Suu Kyi’s country rather than her personal life and more detailed narration of her father’s life than hers. But with great details of her father’s story, and, vitally, the story of the Burmese people at large, Wintle lays bare the ambiguities which nourish a tragedy that is national as well as personal.’  This is, in many ways, an interesting approach to any biography.  Was it an easy approach to take?  What other ways of telling Suu Kyi’s story did you consider before settling on the published narrative?

Justin Wintle: I never really considered any other approach. An intimate or authorised biography was out of the question for the most obvious of reasons. More than usually happens I stuck to the synopsis I gave the pubisher at the outset, though of course my take changed in detail as I learned more about Burma and Suu Kyi herself. As I said, I’m a historian, which means understanding the present by revealing the past. Suu Kyi’s remarkable story is not properly tellable without knowing what went before. One would have to say that her significance is precisely as a public figure in the Burmese context. She’s hardly an international socialite famous for destroying cocktail parties with a cut-glass dagger, the way (for instance) Dewi Sukarno is. We have, however, changed the book’s subtitle for the new, updated Arrow paperback edition, from ‘A Life of Aung Suu Kyi’ to ‘Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma and the Generals’, which is a fairer summary of its contents.

Nicholas Farrelly: Like Aung San Suu Kyi, you attended Oxford in the 1960s.  In fact, I am led to believe that you even overlapped at Oxford but that you didn’t know each other. Writing of the turbulent early period of that decade in Perfect Hostage you note, ‘Oxford might be known as the home of lost causes, but, like other universities, its political temperature was rising, spurred on by the polemics of the avowedly Marxist historian Christopher Hill.’  Your book spends a fair amount of time teasing out the intricacies of Suu Kyi’s life as an undergraduate at Oxford, and later as a housewife, employee and doctoral student in the UK.  As somebody who shared her experience of Oxford in the 1960s, how influential do you feel Aung San Suu Kyi’s years as an undergraduate were?            

Justin Wintle: My Oxford experience was quite different from Suu Kyi’s, even though, as you say, we overlapped. I liked the party scene, consumed a fair amount of alcohol and enjoyed the odd stick of marijuana. She didn’t go in for any of those things, though she did learn how to punt. Neither of us was overly involved on the political front. Christopher Hill’s methodology as a historian was by any measure suspect, so I didn’t pay much attention to his ex cathedra pronouncements. By her own admission Suu Kyi would have preferred to read literature, not PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), but as ever duty toward her country prevailed (prompted no doubt by her somewhat formidable mother, Daw Khin Kyi).  But I am sure Oxford – whether as a university, or as the city where she lived so long — was a big influence on Suu Kyi, partly because of what she learned in the lecture halls, but also because of several enduring friendships she formed there. With Ann Pasternak Slater, for instance, or Sir Robin Christopher, or Shankar Acharya, or Malevika Karlekar — all of whom offered strong support when, later, she encountered so many difficulties back home in Burma. And then there was her marriage to Michael Aris, who became an Oxford don.

Nicholas Farrelly: You dwell at some length on the class of Aung San Suu Kyi’s Oxford degree.  This is a point that at least one reviewer has criticised you for.  You tell readers that ‘Exactly how or why she did so poorly in her degree examination is a matter of more than academic curiosity.’  Given the high regard with which St. Hugh’s College holds its most famous graduate why do you feel this is an issue worthy of attention?  Do you have an as yet unspoken theory for her relatively lacklustre academic performance?

Justin Wintle: J.R.R. Tolkein got a fourth at Oxford. R.S.Thomas got a 2.2. at Bangor. And so on. You don’t have to shine at college to shine after college. That’s the basic point — to encourage young people who may be (let us say) late developers. It’s also a question of telling the truth, not fudging it. Sure, Suu Kyi is St Hugh’s most prized alumna. But she only became that once she received the Nobel Peace Prize. As for her poor degree performance, I subscribe to no particular ‘theory’. Maybe she wasn’t yet really up to it. Or maybe it was just her time of month. I remember well some Oxford undergraduettes putting themselves on the pill a couple of months before the exams just to make sure they weren’t caught out that way. Managing the female calendar, it was called. But Suu Kyi would never have done that.

Nicholas Farrelly: The discussion in Perfect Hostage of some of the major figures in “Burma studies” is particularly interesting.  Professors Robert H. Taylor and Michael Aung-Thwin, both of whom have been interviewed by New Mandala, have taken you to task.  In response to Taylor’s critical jabs at your book you have argued: ‘But when it comes to being “badly flawed”, I do seriously wonder whether Taylor arrives at that view of my book because I am not inclined to repeat parrot-fashion allegations made against Aung  San Suu Kyi in the Burmese state media.’  And then, on Aung-Thwin’s assertion that you had never contacted him, you replied that ‘what he has said about me to New Mandala is one hundred per cent disingenuous.’  Both Taylor and Aung-Thwin are widely regarded as controversial figures in the broad church of Burma studies.  And both play small cameos in Perfect Hostage.  Are there other people in the field who have also reacted strongly to the contents of your book?  Do you have any idea about how Suu Kyi herself has received news of Perfect Hostage?

Justin Wintle: Bob Taylor and Michael Aung-Thwin may think they have taken me to task, but in fact they haven’t.  Taylor called my book ‘badly flawed’, but didn’t explain why he said that. Unforgiveable, really. Normally I don’t respond to reviewers and critics — that’s the convention –  but I made an exception in Taylor’s case because I felt he was using his position to punch below the belt. But that’s water under the bridge now, and as I said to New Mandala previously, he’s a companionable enough bloke. There have been other ’strong reactions’ — more often positive than negative — but usually these have been argued. As for Suu Kyi, she most certainly knows about my book, since it’s been discussed on BBC Burma Service, which she listens to. We’ve tried to smuggle a copy to her, but I have no idea whether it got through. I fear she might not like it much, as I question her political skills (as opposed to her exemplary moral fortitude). Also, being a good Buddhist, she’s agin anything remotely resembling a personality cult.  But she would know and appreciate better than most that if you set yourself up as a leader, or permit yourself to be shoe-horned into that role, then commentaries all sorts will follow, not just mindless hagiographies. What we share is a total commitment to freedom of expression, as a means of political and social accountability. Without such licence, no other human right can be secure.

Nicholas Farrelly: On New Mandala in 2007 you also argued that ‘the field of Burmese studies and commentary is (to put it mildly) notoriously fractious. No two individuals will be found who agree on all points, just as no two individuals will disagree about everything. Too often, however, the upshot of disagreement, healthy in itself, becomes venomous in the extreme.’  Why do you think this is the case?  As something of an outsider to academic ‘Burma studies,’ how do you think the field can be improved?

Justin Wintle: Generally yes, the world of Burmese studies and Burmese commentary can be venomous — though it’s hardly unique in that respect. People become territorial about their specialist areas of interest. And it’s not just academe, it’s the activists and political refugees as well, even some journalists. I recall how, in March last year, I participated in a seminar in Bangkok, attended by, amongst others, a soi-disant Burma-hand. The guy glared at me from the moment go. Even though he had yet to read a word of what I had written I knew instantly that at least one unfavourable review would eventuate. Sure enough, a rancorous notice appeared in The Irrawaddy — having beforehand been spiked by at least one London broadsheet.  In sharp contrast, at the same symposium I struck up an immediate and lasting friendship with Larry Jagan, the most active and prolific of current Burma-watchers. More generally, where acrimony exists I think it has much to do with the failure of the Burmese democracy movement to make significant headway. It’s when things go wrong, or don’t pan out, that people bicker among themselves. What struck me during the period of my research was the marked divergence between academics and activists.  By 2005, if not before, academics were asking searching questions about the efficacy of sanctions and so forth — at least in the dozen or so seminars I attended, at SOAS and elsewhere. Not so most activists, prepared to stick to the sanctions line come hell or high water. And — at least with regard to the British political establishment — it’s the activists who still carry the day. Sanctions are a way of being seen to do something, of satiating righteous anger, even if they achieve nothing, or are counter-productive. All of which is simply to say that under adverse circumstances particularly, academics and activists have sharply differentiated agendas. It might help if there were more (and I know there are some) opportunities for the two groups to interface. I would also urge academics and activists alike to spend more time looking at the whole East Asian region and its history — Burma’s real context.

Nicholas Farrelly: And on the topic of academia, at one point in Perfect Hostage you provide an unusual counterfactual.  You write: ‘One can see it now.  The kids grown up, her doctoral thesis completed and accepted, Aung San Suu Kyi’ slowly becoming not just an authority, but the authority on all matters Burmese, perhaps at Oxford, perhaps at SOAS, perhaps at some other university, side-by-side with Dr Aris the prince of Tibetologists.’  Do you think that this is what Suu Kyi would have wanted?  As her biographer, do you think that such an academic life would have satisfied her?

Justin Wintle: I like ‘counterfactual’, though I call it ‘asking what if?’ Asking ‘what if?’ is one way of adding depth, the way draughtsmen add perspective lines to their drawings.  Eventually an academic life, especially an Oxford academic life, might have satisfied Suu Kyi. She was beginning to make good progress in that direction when she returned to Rangoon, in 1988. Perhaps if the democracy movement had succeeded without her she might have felt no need to become so politically involved. Who knows? You would have to ask her. I recall infuriating one of her staunchest admirers by saying that ideally Suu Kyi should become Rector of Rangoon University. ‘Oh no! he cried. ‘She must become president!’ But a Burma in which Suu Kyi was able to become Rector of Rangoon University would be pretty much the Burma she seeks, and maybe such a position would fulfill both those two aspects of her character.

Nicholas Farrelly: In a review of Perfect Hostage for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the prominent journalist on all things Burmese, Bertil Lintner, made the point that ‘She [Suu Kyi] may be a saint, but she is not a shrewd politician. That also seems to be the main message of this book, which is bound to create a fierce debate not only about Ms. Suu Kyi’s personality and role in Burmese politics, but also how the outside world should approach the seemingly never-ending Burmese imbroglio.’  Was your goal to actually spark such a debate about Suu Kyi’s political personality and role in Burmese politics?  From your perspective, how should the world approach her, especially in light of the popular uprising of September and October 2007?

Justin Wintle: I certainly didn’t set out to provoke, though I knew, if I addressed the actual issues involved, that a debate that had already begun would escalate. Because of the multitude of sensibilities involved, it was an unusually difficult book to write. I tried not to tread on too many toes. One exception was BCUK’s unfortunate campaign against Lonely Planet, for publishing a guide to Myanmar, which I see as an unwitting campaign against media freedom. So I allowed myself a swing at BCUK, pace all the good work it has done in keeping Burmese affairs to the fore.  More generally, and as a historian, it would simply have been irresponsible of me to brush anything under the carpet. In his summary of my conclusions, Bertil Lintner was spot on — as one would expect of someone so deeply immersed in Burmese affairs. But remember publication of my book coincided with the publication of Thant Myint-U’s River of Lost Footsteps, which reached similar conclusions, and Thant Myint-U has been far more pro-active than I in challenging the efficacy of sanctions and so forth. It’s his country, after all. As to how the world should approach Aung San Suu Kyi, the world doesn’t have too many options just now. The regime has succeeded, if it has succeeded in anything at all, in turning her into a sainted icon. How well or badly she would perform were she to come power is necessarily an imponderable. In a curious way, keeping her under house arrest may be in the Burmese peoples’ longterm interest. For generations to come they will carry an unsullied and inspirational image of her in their hearts and minds. Conversely, the failure of last year’s  ‘saffron uprising’ sadly points to the wider failure of the democracy movement itself, at least thus far. Personally I abhor violence, but as a historian I do recognize that a more forceful kind of insurrection sometimes wins the day. The velvet path of non-violence — advocated by Suu Kyi, and also by the Dalai Lama — is wholly admirable, but isn’t guaranteed to deliver the goods. Look at what’s going on in Tibet. But then my views may be coloured by what I witnessed in Vietnam. There is something about a revolutionary who has taken up arms in a just cause that reduces the rest of us to milkmen. Ironically, Bogyoke Aung San — Suu Kyi’s father — was just such a man.

Nicholas Farrelly: Before we finish up I would like you to speculate, briefly, on the future for Suu Kyi.  She is younger than most of the current batch of very senior Burmese military figures.  She also probably keeps herself in better health.  Do you expect to see her outlast them all and triumph (personally and politically) in the end?

Justin Wintle: As things stand there is scant room for such optimism, even though Senior General Than Shwe is slouching toward his grave. His subordinates are busy jockeying for position. I imagine another military strongman will take the helm, probably Maung Aye. Nor does it appear Suu Kyi is in particularly good health. Whenever she’s allowed to meet UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari she puts on a brave face, but the few photographs of their meetings tell another story. Her arms are chopstick thin. But if I’ve learned anything as a historian then I’ve learned to be economic with prediction. Just at the moment, the tensions in Burma / Myanmar are close to breaking point, stoked by horrendous economic mismanagement. Almost anything could happen. Nor should we overlook the Spanish model. Franco’s fascist regime wasn’t overthrown, but tapered out as the technocrats took over. The same could happen in Burma — as good a reason as any I suppose for us to at least contemplate policies of constructive engagement. But that would be a gradual process, and time may no longer be on Suu Kyi’s side.

Nicholas Farrelly: Thank you for your patience.  I have just two final questions: Do you have any plans to continue writing about Burma, or other Southeast Asian countries?  And what is on your agenda for the rest of 2008?

Justin Wintle: It is you who have been patient, not I.  Romancing Mandalay? I can’t see myself writing another whole book about Burma. I like to move on. Life’s short. I have yet to write something substantial about Thailand, the Southeast Asian country I know and love the best. Thaksin Shinawatra interests me –a true original.  I also have a particular take on secularism as a global phenomenon, but for that especially I’d have to find a university department to support me.  More immediately I have a China project on the boil, but what that is I am not yet ready to disclose. One way or another though I anticipate I’ll stick with East Asia, which has afforded me so much in personal terms. And of course, anything to get away from the humbug of Brownite Britain!

Nicholas Farrelly: Thank you, Justin, for taking the time to answer New Mandala’s questions.  It has been a pleasure to have you involved.

Five months after Myanmar’s bloody crackdown on anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks, international efforts to foster political change in Burma are again at an impasse.  Neither sanctions nor diplomatic engagement have succeeded in persuading the country’s long-ruling military regime to make any significant concessions, including the release of political prisoners such as Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Now, a decade after she made international headlines by publicly opposing Suu Kyi’s call for sanctions, Burmese author and painter Ma Thanegi-Suu Kyi’s former personal assistant-sat down for a rare and wide-ranging interview with Stanley A. Weiss, Founding Chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC.

The 61-year old Yangon-based author of books on Burmese culture and cuisine speaks candidly about working with Suu Kyi, her years in prison, accusations that she betrayed the democracy movement, recent anti-government protests and the prospects for political dialogue between the junta and the democratic opposition.

Stanley Weiss: How did you get involved in the democracy movement in 1988?

Ma Thanegi: As a painter, I previously had no interest in politics.  Under socialism, we were completely isolated.  The Op Art [Optical Art] movement of the 1960s passed by without us even being aware of it.  With state propaganda and censorship no one bothered to read the state newspapers, and I envied the press freedom of the West.  The only jobs were at government offices and they went to people with connections. 

I joined the movement because young people-school children-were at the forefront and I felt ashamed that I, as an adult, was sitting by the road watching them.  After all the socialist years I wanted freedom of publication.

Stanley Weiss: You worked as Aung San Suu Kyi’s assistant?

Ma Thanegi: I helped her as a personal assistant in her home office-answering the phone, taking notes at meetings, traveling with her across the country.  Those days were filled with high hopes, fun and optimism.  Even when I recall the times of danger, I have no regrets. 

Although I was a member of NLD [Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy], I was never directly connected to it; none of us were paid staff.  But I am an artist, and office work is not for me.  So I told Suu Kyi in 1989 that after the elections I would no longer work for her, but instead would be her eyes and ears in the real world.     

Still, I had no idea then that the high hopes we had were the beginnings of unrealistic hopes after the 1990 elections were won, when everyone thought it would be easy to take over power just by demanding it.  But even then I was realistic.  I knew the NLD would need a lot of political finesse to get power after they won.

Stanley Weiss: But in July 1989 Suu Kyi was put under house arrest and many of her supporters, including you, were sent to prison.  You were in Insein prison for three years?

Ma Thanegi: Living conditions were primitive, but treatment was nothing out of the ordinary-no mental or physical torture.  Things were worse in the men’s quarters, I am sure.  My guards were elderly, poorly educated women.  They were friendly, not tough, and liked to talk about their families or movies they had seen. 

Stanley Weiss: After your release you went back to work for Suu Kyi, but then parted ways?

Ma Thanegi: I was released in 1992, and after Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in 1995 I helped her with personal matters like going to the tailors and running errands.  But in late 1995 the NLD [which had won democratic elections] had been demanding the transfer of power and walked out of the national convention, saying it was a farce and refusing to give the military 25 percent of seats in parliament.  I disagreed and felt the constitution could be amended later. 

Also in 1995 Suu Kyi called for isolation, although it was not yet a call for sanctions, which came later in 1997.  I disagreed and spoke privately many times with her on this.  I never believed, not for one second, that putting pressure that falls on the people is an effective or desirable strategy.  When I told her that people will suffer, she merely said “It’s not true.”  We argued so much I stopped seeing her.  Then, in 1996, I spoke out against isolation in an interview with The New Yorker magazine.

Stanley Weiss: And after Western sanctions were imposed on Myanmar, you wrote articles in 1998 that were not only critical of sanctions, but of Suu Kyi personally, saying that her approach had “come at a real price for the rest of us.”  Any regrets?

Ma Thanegi: No, I don’t regret it, because her voice and her views are all that matters in the NLD or in the world.  She is the NLD-the one voice of the opposition.  When you are trying to make a point and trying to pierce through the fog of happy illusions and flaky hopes-that, voila!, the military government is going to topple within months through western pressure-I needed strong words or my articles would have been a wishy washy thing ignored by all.  No, I do not regret it.

Is it not a paradox that the pro-democratic movement should be asking for the people to be held economic hostage like this with sanctions-people they are supposed to help?     

Stanley Weiss: But why so much criticism of Suu Kyi and the democracy movement when it’s the military regime that’s responsible for Burma’s isolation and economic despair?

Ma Thanegi: I was talking about sanctions, addressing that one issue, and it was not the government that asked for sanctions.  By 1998 the entire world had been repeatedly condemning this government-nothing new to add by me.  As it’s a military government, it’s a given that they are very controlling and rigid, not knowing anything about the running of the economy, over which they now have a monopoly, thanks in part to sanctions. 

Stanley Weiss: How do you respond to critics who say you’re a sellout who parrots government propaganda?

Ma Thanegi: How do I respond?  I don’t.  I know I am not a traitor or a turncoat.  I came into the political movement because I wanted to do good for the people.  My loyalty lies with the people.  Anything that hurts them, I will speak out against.  I was raised by a tough mother.  Neither the generals nor the screaming hordes are anything compared to her.

In Burmese culture people never criticize each other openly; they do it behind the back and, when confronted, deny it.  They are not used to a person being straightforward like me, but I was raised to be so. 

I live in a cheaply built flat in a low-scale housing estate near China Town and drive a 22-year-old car with some parts patched with Superglue.  If I had wanted money and fame-with my connections to Suu Kyi and my fluency in English and knowledge of French and German-I would be getting a lot of funds and media exposure by working as an exiled Burmese activist.        

Stanley Weiss: During one visit to the U.S., didn’t some activists confront you, calling you a “spokesperson for the regime?”

Ma Thanegi: Yes.  But none of them addressed the issues; they just called me names or repeated that sanctions will bring down the government.  After meeting them, I realized that I was wrong thinking that they should be informed of the true facts-how sanctions hurt the people-that they didn’t know.  But they do know.  But to be politically correct is what generates their funds and what generates free public relations images for western politicians.  There have been many instances when an exiled organization or a publication-if it strays from the strict politically correct view-is warned by donors that funds will stop if they continue like this.  This righteous politically correct attitude is costing us jobs and hurting people, who need to eat on a daily basis.

Stanley Weiss: But you acknowledge being a contributor to the Myanmar Times, which has been accused by the Committee to Protect Journalists of “merely presenting government propaganda”?

Ma Thanegi: I’m a freelance contributor.  I never write about politics, only about food, culture, human interest or funny family or school stories.  I interviewed then-Prime Minister Khin Nyunt in 2001 to open up the question about the HIV problem here that needs to be addressed.  Every publication here comes under censorship, as does the Myanmar Times.  It’s easy to label, not knowing the full picture here.

Stanley Weiss: What about the recent anti-government protests, led by Buddhist monks?

Ma Thanegi: Actually, they began not as a protest even, but as a means of calling attention to inflation.  Within a day or so, political demands were made.  I have no idea if the monks were instigated or thought the demands up on their own, but it turned into a political protest in the eyes of the government, and the crackdown followed.  I feel very sad and depressed about it and wish that the situation could have been handled gently.

Stanley Weiss: Since the crackdown, the regime has met with Suu Kyi several times, allowed her to meet with NLD leaders, called for a constitutional referendum this spring and promised elections for 2010, but have barred Suu Kyi from participating.  What, in your view, are the prospects for dialogue and reconciliation?

Ma Thanegi: By now, over the long years, there is so much mistrust for each other I see no way to achieve a dialogue even if they sit facing each other for hours on end.  Many opportunities have been lost by both sides in the past.  Setting aside, for the moment, the question of fairness, there was so much concentration on unrealistic hopes for the transfer of power at a snap of the fingers-or that the government would topple at any moment-that opportunities to talk of power sharing were lost. 

If anyone is focusing on a “coming together” of the military and the NLD, it’s a pipe dream.  People think that just because a government representative, U Aung Kyi, is talking to Suu Kyi that it’s about power sharing.  But he’s only trying to get her “yes” or “no” to the four conditions for dialogue set by Senior General Than Shwe, for example, that if she renounces sanctions, etc., he would talk to her.  There are no other issues that U Aung Kyi has to discuss.     

In both the government and the opposition we have sycophants who lie to please their superiors.  Those superiors need to find out reality by many means, not just from their followers. 

Stanley Weiss: Will you vote in the upcoming referendum on the new constitution, which gives a lot of power to the military-25 percent of seats in parliament?

Ma Thanegi: I would vote “yes” because there is no alternative.  It’s a step in the right direction.  Some exiled activists say that accepting the constitution would give the regime “legitimacy.”  But this government has been in power for 20 years, the United Nations and other countries accept them, and the activists are talking about legitimacy?  If we refuse the military 25 percent of the seats, then it continues to have 100 percent power.  As I said, amendments can be made later. 

Stanley Weiss: What are your feelings today towards Suu Kyi, who has now spent a total of 12 of the past 18 year under house arrest?

Ma Thanegi: I wish with all my heart that I had been wrong, that the strategy laid down by Suu Kyi, who we love so much, was the right one.  By now, though, my views against sanctions have proven to be correct.  But it doesn’t matter that I’m vindicated.  I am one ordinary person who matters little in the big scheme of things in my country. 

People accuse me of criticizing Suu Kyi because I hate her or am jealous.  But if I did not love her I would not have served her so well for months on end.  She knows best how well I served her.  You can be furious with a person you still love.  She has high standards, high principles and a strong will.  She will remain dear to the hearts of the people, always.

Stanley Weiss: What are your hopes for Burma?

Ma Thanegi: I hope that the technocrat layer will be strengthened, that administration runs smoothly without so much red tape, that any remaining civil war will end peacefully, that schools teachers will get a good grounding in English, that more school teachers will be employed and paid well, that inflation will be controlled, that we have more infrastructure in the remote areas and that there is a better life and more voice for the ethnic races.  And more freedom of publication, that is what I hope for, always.

Earlier this week, I was amused to read about an expected outbreak of “tree ordination” in Laos (thanks to Holly for bringing this to my attention).

Phongsaly forest ordination to preserve natural resources
Vientiane Times, 22 February 2008
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The Phongsaly Women’s Union plans to ordain a section of coniferous forest near Phiengxay village in Bounneua district next month to encourage natural resource preservation. This is an objective of the Women’s Economic Empowerment Project to preserve the wildlife,  biodiversity and water resources in the area for future generations. 

“At the ceremony, there will be an alms offering in the village in the morning, followed by a baci ceremony in the forest and celebrations in the evening,” said the head of the provincial  Women’s Union , Ms Pang Or-rakhan yesterday. She said that there will also be a fair and displays of traditional art from the province’s many ethnic groups. 

This forest is important for village life as it is rich in natural resources, but these resources are being depleted due to over hunting and illegal logging, she said. 

Ms Pang claimed that the ceremony will help revitalise the forest by teaching the local people to respect the land and maintain their Buddhist respect for all forms of life. “During the ceremony we will invite all the monks, authorities and members involved with the project to participate, and afterwards organise a committee to establish guidelines for the people to better manage their forests,” she said. 

In response to this outbreak of tree worship in Laos a number of emails have been circulating seeking clarification from interested observers. Here is one response from an NGO worker in Thailand:

[The] Forest Movement in Thailand has been using ‘Forest Ordination’ for a long time as a symbol of forest protection by applying religion and belief into natural resources management.  Forest ordination is one of the tools for public campaign on Community Forest Movement that people can live in the forest, since conflict among up stream and down stream people had been happened in Thailand. Community Forest Bill has just passed last year after almost 20 years of People Movement. But still, many things have to be done after the law and policy has passed.

Many communities have their own way to conserve their forest particularly Karen which conservation is integrated with their livelihood and spirits. There are many types of traditional protected forest in their community. Most of them are Buddhist that still practise animism and some have been converted to be Christians. I just attended a Stream Ordination for fish sanctuary in a Karen village where there are Buddhists, Christians and Animist people, so all of ceremonies were practiced together. The trees along the stream were ordained as well.

Forest is protected as well as solidarity is built up among them as one of the most important things in the long run.

I can understand why state officials or pseudo-state organisations (such as the Lao Women’s Union) may want to be involved in this sort of instructional theatre. But I continue to be amazed at the willingness of NGO activists to buy into it. As Tim Forsyth and I have argued at length in our recent book, images of “forest guardianship” may seem superficially empowering but, ultimately, they end up buying into the narrowly conservationist discourse promoted by state agencies. Forest ordination is very much an NGO invention that demonstrates a limited understanding of the diverse and pragmatic ways in which villagers relate to natural resources. It is a tactic that will contribute to the ongoing exoticisation, disempowerment and marginalisation of the socially and economically vulnerable people living in Southeast Asia’s forested upland zones.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor Sturgeon, thank you for agreeing to take part in the New Mandala interview series.  It is a pleasure to have you involved.  For a bit of background: your online profile at Simon Fraser University notes that your interest in upland farmers was first ignited by 5 years living in Nepal.  It might be helpful if you told us what you were doing there? 

Professor Janet Sturgeon: I lived in Kathmandu from 1978 to 1983 and learned to speak Nepali in the first few months.  I was affiliated with the American English Language Institute (ELI), where our students were university-age Nepalis.  From 1982 to 1983 I was the director of ELI, one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve ever had.  During school breaks I made long treks to various parts of Nepal, where I often stayed with upland farmers and learned about their mountain lives.

Nicholas Farrelly: How would you compare the conditions of upland farming (and life) in Nepal with those that you have researched in Southeast Asia?  Is there any comparison?

Professor Sturgeon: I wasn’t doing research at that time, but in general upland farmers were regarded as poor and backward.  Only a few people then, such as Piers Blaikie and John Cool, did careful research on farmers’ knowledge and practices, showing that farmers devised sophisticated responses to frequent land slides and deforestation.  What strikes me now is that the Nepal government in those days didn’t feature ethnic groups in the hills as major tourist attractions.  Nepal might have changed since my day, but in the early 1980s minority villages were not turned into human zoos.  By contrast, Thailand has long heavily advertised its “hill tribes” as exotic others to bring in tourists.  At the same time, hill peoples have been considered “not Thai,” and until recently not included as citizens of Thailand.  In China, minority nationality peoples, in the socialist rubric, have been citizens since the 1950s, but they have also been used as targets for “ethnic tourism” in projects where they have to wear their “traditional dress” and live in “traditional houses.”

Nicholas Farrelly: Furthermore, since you last lived in Nepal the country has been beset by a number of crises, and has suffered the brunt of a significant Maoist rebellion.  Are there any elements of this recent history that could provide lessons for the governments of the countries you now study in depth – Thailand and China?

Professor Sturgeon: A colleague who studies Nepal informed me that a survey of Maoist rebels showed that a large proportion were from lower caste and untouchable groups.  This finding suggests that historically-oppressed groups may eventually organize and fight back.  The governments of Thailand and China might learn (though I doubt it) that categorizations of certain peoples as backward and inferior can lead to backlashes, particularly in a world with proliferating means of rapid communication and NGOs supporting disadvantaged groups.  I doubt that the Thai and Chinese governments will question these categorizations because rankings and stereotypes of various groups have become entirely naturalized in both Thailand and China.

Nicholas Farrelly: As a Professor in the Geography Department at Simon Fraser University you teach courses on Social Geography, Human Ecology, and Society and Environment in China.  The scope of each of these courses sounds huge!  I imagine that many New Mandala readers will be interested to hear how you balance your specific research in the borderlands of Southeast Asia with these more general courses.  Would you like to teach a more focused class on the borderlands?  Is there demand for such a course at SFU?   

Professor Sturgeon: That’s a good question.  When I first taught Social Geography at SFU, it was a real challenge.  I had never taken such a course: social geography is not taught in the United States.  The course focuses on how society and space shape each other at different scales.  Now the course has turned into one of my favourites.  I also now use what I’ve learned from that course in my own research.  Human Ecology, as I teach it, looks at various theories about the relations between society and environment.  I point out to students how they can see these theories at work in news articles, government projects, and even feature films.  I teach political ecology in this course and recently added one of my articles to the reading list.  Society and Environment in China is my specialty course for seniors.  I run it like a seminar and make the students do most of the work!  One problem I face now is that the literature on China’s environment suggests impending doom.  It’s hard to get my students to challenge that perspective and to appreciate that China is also a dynamic and engaging place to visit and do research.  I think I will need to focus more on the “Society” part of the course title in the future.

I would love to teach a course on the borderlands, possibly at the graduate level.  I keep assembling readings for such a course.  Maybe you are giving me the push I need to offer it at SFU.  If advertised to anthropology and development studies students as well as geographers, I think I could draw many students.

Nicholas Farrelly: Let’s now turn to your more specific research interests in Southeast Asia.  Many of our readers will already know that you have undertaken extensive research in both southwestern China (Yunnan) and northern Thailand (Chiang Rai province).  Can you, perhaps, say something about your experiences of field work in the two areas?  Is one easier than the other?  What were the major challenges that you faced? 

Professor Sturgeon: I’ve always wanted someone to ask that question!  There are two aspects that I’d like to cover.  The first has to do with the culture of doing research in China and Thailand.  The second relates to villagers’ experience with foreign researchers. 

In China I was based at the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), which has institutional links to numerous research institutes and universities as well as to the Tropical Botanic Garden in Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna), where I did my field research.  In China, once you are hosted by one institution, you have access to all that institution’s connections (guanxi in Chinese).  My host at KIB went with me to Akha villages when I was looking for a suitable research site.  When I went off on my own, he called people to arrange transportation and to set up interviews in government offices.  In Xishuangbanna, people at the Tropical Botanic Garden offered advice, relevant articles, and sometimes free transportation, just because they were linked to KIB.

In Thailand, I was based at the Social Research Institute at Chiang Mai University (CMU).  My host there made suggestions about people I might call or visit, and sometimes provided phone numbers.  When I went to the field, though, I was on my own.  People either helped me or not based on my own presentation of what I needed.  I found that very difficult, since sometimes I had no idea why people didn’t show up as promised, or failed to respond to what seemed like a simple request.  Once I had decided on a research village, my host at CMU sent a letter to the village head, asking him to facilitate my research and keep me from harm.  On balance, I think the village head in Thailand probably did keep me from harm!

The research villages in China and Thailand had quite different histories with foreign researchers.  In China, the Akha village had never had a foreign researcher live there before.  Foreign scholars had visited but not previously been allowed to stay because of its sensitive location right on the Burma border.  Villagers there responded to all my questions as if they had been waiting for someone to ask.  They were thrilled that I was interested in their history and transformations in land use over time.  When I was almost finished with my research, a group of older men came to say that they now understood things about their village that they had never thought about before.   As I was leaving, to thank villagers for all their time spent with me, I contributed several hundred dollars to a bridge that they were building themselves. 

In Thailand, by contrast, my research village had been the site of several previous anthropological and ethno-botanical studies.  Villagers told me that at first these scholars had been interesting, but informants later realized the researchers contributed nothing back to the village.  As a result, villagers in Thailand were wary of me at first.  Once they got used to me, people opened up to my questions and in fact got interested in the project.  It just took much longer than in China, but I think I got just as much information.  At the end, I contributed several hundred dollars to a village fund that anyone could apply to in times of need.  I would have done this anyway, but I wanted to ensure that they would be receptive to future field researchers, including myself!

Nicholas Farrelly: In your experience, what kind of language skills do you need to do good social research among the Akha?

Professor Sturgeon: As it turned out, I did all my field research in Mandarin Chinese.  In both villages I had someone teaching me Akha, but the language was too difficult for me to master in a short time.  I could not have interviewed villagers in Akha, although I acknowledge that it would have been better to do so.  In China, I had a research assistant from KIB, an Akha who spoke fluent standard Mandarin.  He was also doing his master’s research in the same village under my supervision.  That arrangement worked well because we were interested in the same issues.  In Thailand, I thought I could find an Akha who spoke English, but any Akha fluent in English was busy heading an NGO or development project.  I finally found an ethnic Chinese man from an adjacent village who spoke fluent Akha.  I was a little worried that his relationship with Akha villagers might influence their responses, since they all knew him.  I decided that his knowledge of local conditions made up for any bias from previous interactions.  One advantage of using Chinese for all my interviews was that I could make sure I asked questions in the same way in both places.  I don’t know if they were translated in the same way, but it seemed to me at the time that using the same language helped with the comparison.

Nicholas Farrelly: Your major work on the Akha living along the China-Burma and Thai-Burma borders was published in 2005 as Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand.  Concerning your Thai case-study area, you write that upon arriving at the village, “The village heads also carefully point out to me that no one here uses heroin, implying that this would be a safe place for me to live.  I am intrigued with this locale an hour’s walk from the Burma border, with Taiwan-funded tea plantations, large forests, and numerous villagers who speak Chinese.  There are obvious signs of wealth-people with trucks, large houses, and cell phones-as well as farmers with tiny, fragile houses and shredded clothing”.  This was your first impression.  Over the course of the book you provide detailed clarification of this fascinating social, economic and ecological milieu.  In hindsight, do you think that your two field sites (the pseudonymous settlements of “Akhapu” in Thailand and “Mengsong” in China) worked well?  Are there other villages that you hope to study in the future?

Professor Sturgeon: In hindsight, I think the two field sites worked better than I could have planned.  I was able to bring my research assistant from China with me to Akhapu in Thailand for a brief visit.  He confirmed that Akha in both sites spoke the same dialect of the Akha language.  Additionally, as I mention in the book, I picked these villages because of their long histories in these sites, closeness to the Burma border, and fairly recent inclusion in lowland markets.  All these aspects made the comparison viable.  Other aspects would have been hard to predict, such as the role of “small border chiefs” in controlling resource access through cross-border connections.  From more recent visits to Mengsong in China, I know that the current administrative village head is not nearly as smart as the one whose maneuvers I chronicle in the book, and that he doesn’t use his cross-border connections very effectively.  That doesn’t mean that my analysis of small border chiefs is invalid, but rather that it would have been harder to see if I had done the research in the past five years. 

I just visited Akhapu in Thailand for the first time in 11 years.  In both Mengsong and Akhapu the landscape is now carpeted in tea.  The processes leading to monoculture tea fields differed in the two sites, so maybe I can write a follow-up article comparing the villages 11 years later.  I have been able to visit Akha and Dai villages in Laos and would love to do the same in Burma.  Cross-border connections continue to fascinate me. 

Nicholas Farrelly: One of your major scholarly arguments has concerned “landscape plasticity” in the borderlands surrounding Burma.  You have written that “Another kind of threat to landscape plasticity came from Akha village heads, local chiefs with state appointment to keep order in border realms.  These village heads limited landscape plasticity in two ways: (1) by using their connections on both sides of the border to set themselves up as border patrons controlling local resource access and skewing the benefits to themselves; and (2) by introducing state-sponsored simplified land-use practices in way that linked these border heads to lowland planners and sources of money.  In other words, Akha village heads used the border in both senses, manipulating the border-as-line with relations across it to control resource access, and collaborating with agents to include other villagers more securely in the realm of border-as-margin of the nation-state.  Through combining their use of border in both senses, village heads colluded with elite actors on both sides of the border to enhance their own roles as border guardians and to further marginalize other Akha”.  Seeing these efforts to “further marginalise other Akha” must have been difficult.  From your perspective, how could this situation be improved?  Do you foresee the growth of Akha leaders in Thailand who have a more inclusive approach to resource distribution and access to power? 

Professor Sturgeon: In China, villagers now elect the village head, a process that might lead to village leaders who are more responsive to people’s needs.  In Mengsong, however, the two recent elections have been controlled by the township (lowest level of state administration), resulting in the election of the current rather inept village head.  This head has more education than a handful of much smarter possible contenders.  In the Chinese view, having more education gives one “more culture” than others and greater qualification for elected office.  Elections are held every three years, so that a more promising candidate may be elected in the future.  In Thailand, the same person is still the village head and still controls most of the land.  He recently set up what he calls a tea cooperative that includes people who have planted tea on his land.  My sense is that the “cooperative” is more like a public company in which people own shares, but I do think that villagers now have a more stable and secure source of income than in the past. Because of armed fighting just across the border, the village head as well as other farmers have fewer connections in Burma than before.  As predicted in my book, however, the tea, which villagers have planted throughout the understory of the village forest, has caused them to take out many of the trees to ensure that tea gets enough sunlight.  Farmers are perhaps better off than 11 years ago, but the forest is in worse condition.

Nicholas Farrelly: Towards the end of Border Landscapes you make a more specific, but equally interesting, point about the contrast between the two Akha areas that you studied.  You write that, “In China, Akha villagers were citizens and recipients of state-allocated land and trees.  Their subsistence was reasonably secure without help from the village head.  The village head’s maneuverings to control access to and distribution of resources as they became commodities were fairly successful, but encountered strong, public contention from other villagers…In Thailand, by contrast, the village head long held a regional position as an accumulator of resources and dispenser of favors.  His networks included former Nationalist soldiers, former drug lords, various kinds of traders, and government agents from many departments.  As the only Thai citizen among a sea of hill tribe ID holders…[the village head] represented the state for all those within his bailiwick who were officially ‘not Thai’”.  Do you think that Thai authorities are aware that the Akha living in China have such a different relationship with the government?  Are there lessons in China’s management of the minority groups along its southwestern frontier that could be fruitfully applied in Thailand?

Professor Sturgeon: My sense is that Thai authorities have no idea that Akha in China have such a different relationship with the government.  Even when I was doing my research, some Thai colleagues refused to believe that conditions could be better in China.  As you no doubt know, Thais have long seen “communist China” as a threat rather than as a model that might in some ways be emulated.  I think that Thai authorities could fruitfully learn that including minorities as citizens and participants in development is an effective way to diffuse possible threats and to engage minority people’s many skills.

Nicholas Farrelly: As we have now discussed at length, you have worked extensively with Akha groups in both China and Thailand.  Of course, there are also relatively large Akha populations in Burma.  Some estimate that there are up to 150,000 in the country.  Do have any experience of Akha settlements in Burma?  Do you have any comments on the different circumstances that they face?

Professor Sturgeon: I would love to do research in Burma, but I haven’t had the chance yet.  Accompanied by a village official, I did visit two nearby villages in Burma while I was in Mengsong in China.  It was remarkable how much poorer the villages were, and how little service they received from the government.  In fact, in villages close to China, people spoke Mandarin Chinese as a second language in place of Burmese.  Additionally, I attended the Hani/Akha Conference in Thailand in 1996.  Akha from Burma who attended the conference mentioned how insecure their lives were, and how often they suffered violence at the hands of either government or “rebel army” soldiers.

Nicholas Farrelly: And, finally, what are the major projects that you are working on at the moment?  Do you have any intention of branching away from your focus on the Akha in the borderlands?

Professor Sturgeon: My most recent research has been a group project to track landscape transformations as a result of the adoption of cash crops in Xishuangbanna, northern Laos, and northern Thailand.  I’m on the China team that has focused on rubber, tea, and other crops such as bananas and grain.  Since virtually all farmers in Xishuangbanna are minorities, my focus is still on non-Han people on China’s periphery.  These lowland farmers planted rubber trees beginning in the mid-1980s, and in the current rubber boom, they are getting rich. 

This project has also enabled me to visit Laos, and a colleague and I are writing an article on how Akha and Dai farmers in China are rapidly extending rubber to relatives and friends in Laos through share-cropping arrangements. Through this project, we have been tracking the rapid expansion of rubber in the Greater Mekong Region. The new research is so different from my experience in the uplands that I find it very exciting. 

My future research interests include governance, globalization, and identity in border regions in relation to land use and livelihoods.  I’m still in the same area, but my research agenda keeps evolving.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor Sturgeon, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions.  It has been great to have you involved with the New Mandala interview series.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor Keyes, thank you very much for taking the time to be involved in New Mandala’s interview series.  As one of the giants of Southeast Asian Studies, many of our readers will obviously be very familiar with your work in the region.  Can you tell us what first attracted you to the study of Southeast Asia?  Before you set out to become an anthropologist what other career paths did you consider?

Professor Charles Keyes: Giant? Very doubtful, but I am putting on weight as I get older.

I had a vague interest in China as a child when during World War II I recall hearing some returned missionaries speak about the need for aid for children in China. But this vague interest was throughout my youth overshadowed by a strong interest in science, a consequence of my father working for a contractor at a nuclear research laboratory in Idaho. When I entered college I was intent in pursuing a career in physics or mathematics. Each summer during my college days I worked at the laboratory as a physicist’s assistant. By my junior year, however, I had discovered anthropology through taking a course to fulfil a requirement. Although I continued with a major in math, I added a joint major in anthropology. By the time I reached my senior year I realized that I was more interested in people than in subatomic particles.

One of my anthropology professors moved to Cornell University and strongly encouraged me to apply for graduate work there. When I entered Cornell this professor suggested I meet with several senior faculty members who had a comparative project on modernization. I was most impressed by Professor Lauriston Sharp who had carried out work (the famous Bang Chang project) in Thailand in the late 1940s and the 1950s. He suggested a few things to read and on the basis of these and what he told me about his own work I made a rather arbitrary decision to study the Thai language (Cornell was then one of only two institutions in the US that offered instruction in Thai) and to take a minor in Southeast Asian studies. I was very fortunate in this decision because the Southeast Asian Studies Program at Cornell had already become the major centre in the English-speaking world for promotion of studies of the cultures, society, and political-economies of the countries of the region.

Nicholas Farrelly: You have, I must add, now completed field research throughout Southeast Asia over the course of many decades.  Can you tell us more about how the field research context has changed since your earliest forays into the region?  Obviously, in the 1960s the geopolitical and economic situation was quite different.  You even began your 1966 article, “Ethnic Identity and Loyalty of Villagers in Northeastern Thailand”, with the statement that “in recent years the various players on the international chessboard of Southeast Asia have come to view the northeastern region of Thailand as a crucial factor in the determination of Thailand’s future”.  How did this impact the types of research that could be undertaken?

Professor Keyes: I would like to begin in reflecting on your question by referring to a novel I have just finished reading. The novel, Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski, is about an anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, who dies in a Chiang Mai jail where she had been imprisoned for the murder of a missionary. Martiya commits the murder because she has so identified with the Dyalo (the fictitious name the author gives to the upland people Martiya worked and lived with) that she decides the missionary threatens their culture. On one of her rare visits to Berkeley where she had begun to work toward her PhD, Martiya found that neither her professors nor her fellow graduate students had any real interest in her long-term fieldwork among a preliterate people. “The winds of anthropological fashion had shifted while Martiya was in the field” (p. 251).

It is not, however, the case that by the 1970s and 1980s the type of fieldwork that had been characteristic of anthropology since Bronislaw Malinowski first carried out his famous research among the Trobriand Islanders just before and during World War I had simply fallen out of fashion. Even in the late 1950s and early 1960s when I was a graduate student at Cornell both faculty and graduate students recognized that fewer and fewer peoples in the world were leading lives that had not been influenced to some degree by the penetration of the institutions of nation-states and the expansion of global capitalist markets. While some anthropologists of my generation looked for remote peoples who could be studied as ‘primitive isolates’, a growing number of us undertook ‘community studies’ which entailed fieldwork in villages where many social and cultural patterns were shaped not only by local custom but also by state institutions and markets. Nonetheless, we followed the traditional model of fieldwork in living for extended periods in such villages and carrying out our ‘participant observation’ by acquiring competence in the language or languages used by villagers.

Although my original fieldwork was a ‘community study’, it was shaped by a theoretical question concerning the relationships of rural Lao-speaking villagers to the Thai nation-state. My wife, Jane’s and my second major research project was also problem-centred, but the ‘community’ was much more broadly conceived. In 1967-68 we carried out research based in Mae Sariang District in northwestern Thailand on the relationships between upland-dwelling Karen and Lua’ peoples and peoples in the lowlands. While we lived in the small district town of Mae Sariang, my research entailed travelling to many villages in the district and even to the provincial capital of Mae Hong Son.

In today’s terms my Mae Sariang research was ‘multi-sited’. Such research has now become the norm as Thai as well as foreign anthropologists working in Thailand now follow networks that link people in many different places. The best anthropological research still retains some of the hallmarks of the original model – namely that the anthropologist spends an extended period (at least initially) as a participant observer among those who are the interlocutors in the research and the anthropologist also acquires competence (if she/he does not already have it) in the language(s) spoken and used by these interlocutors.

Researchers today now have a large body of anthropological and other social science research to draw on that did not exist when I first carried out my fieldwork. When Tom Kirsch, Cornell professor and my close friend whose intellectual exchanges I greatly benefited from until his death in 1999, first carried out research in northeastern Thailand in the early 1960s, there was only one other person who had previously carried out extensive fieldwork in a northeastern village – William Klausner. Today, my bibliography of works on rural society in northeastern Thailand includes nearly a thousand entries of works not only by anthropologists, but also sociologists, geographers, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and even a few economists and political scientists. The same is true for every part of Thailand or for every people whose networks connect them to others outside of the country. The existence of large bodies of relevant literature is certainly a boon to the budding researcher, but it also creates a problem. It leads to the new researcher often becoming much more focused on issues that are often quite narrowly defined than was the case for my generation of researchers.

Nicholas Farrelly: It was forty years ago that you received your PhD from Cornell University.  Many New Mandala readers will know that at that time many of the major figures in Southeast Asian Studies congregated in Ithaca.  How would you characterise Cornell back in the 1960s?  What impact did your training there have on your subsequent development as an academic anthropologist?   

Professor Keyes: Cornell in the 1950s and 1960s was truly a very exciting place to be a graduate student in anthropology and Southeast Asian studies. Cornell and Yale had, in the postwar period, essentially created Southeast Asian studies in the United States. By the late 1950s, SEA studies at Yale had fallen on hard times, a consequence in part of the death of two of its founding professors. Only Cornell of all institutions in the United States continued to offer all the major SEA languages.

As I said earlier, I had not gone to Cornell with the intention of studying Southeast Asia, but after arriving there I was so impressed by Professor Lauriston Sharp that I decided to do so. I have never regretted this decision.

My primary reason for going to Cornell was to pursue graduate work in anthropology. At the time, Cornell anthropology was at the vanguard of anthropology departments in the U.S. in preparing students to study peasant communities that were undergoing ‘modernizing’ transformations rather than to study peoples who were deemed to still be ‘tribal’. I was like a number of other students whom since the early 1950s had been encouraged to combine training in anthropology with training in area studies. This meant that we all undertook intensive study of a language and we also participated in a number of interdisciplinary courses. As a consequence of combining the study of anthropology with the study of Southeast Asia I developed strong interests in the work of other social scientists and especially the work of historians.

During the 1950s and early 1960s Southeast Asian studies at Cornell was also strongly influenced by US government policies in Southeast Asia. In the immediate post World War II period, American policy had looked favourably on the anti-colonial and nationalist movements which had emerged. After the success of the Communist revolution in China in 1949, however, American policy shifted radically towards supporting governments or parties which could contribute to the containment of Communism. At the time I studied at Cornell, the emphasis of the Southeast Asian Studies Program on learning how to understand the world from the cultural, social, linguistic, and political perspectives of Southeast Asians was much more in tune with the former US policy – a consequence of the experiences that Lauriston Sharp and George Kahin, the founders of the program, had had during and immediately after World War II. By the mid-1960s, the time I finished at Cornell, the program had begun to foster significant critiques of American policies in Indochina and Indonesia. Because of the orientation I had acquired at Cornell, I was quite surprised when I became a faculty member at the University of Washington to find little support for dissent from the growing American war in Indochina.

Nicholas Farrelly: You have been a member of staff at the University of Washington since 1965.  As I understand it, your contributions there have only been interrupted by occasional visiting professorships at places like Chiang Mai University in Thailand, Göteborg University in Sweden and the University of California in Los Angeles.  It would be interesting to hear your reflections on whether the approach to the study of Southeast Asia has changed during your time at the University of Washington.  Have all the changes been for the better?

Professor Keyes: Your question seems to me to have two quite different parts. One has to do with the implications of my having had one primary institutional affiliation for over 40 years and the other concerns my approach to Southeast Asian studies.

It is relatively unusual for American academics to spend most of their career at one institution. In the mid-1960s when I was finishing my PhD job possibilities were quite numerous, a consequence of a significant expansion of universities and colleges that would continue well into the 1970s. I had a choice between several institutions which had offered me entry-level positions. I decided on the University of Washington for several reasons, perhaps the most important being that the UW had a very good department of anthropology and it was one of the few institutions in the U.S. where instruction in Thai language was offered.

The University of Washington proved to be very supportive during my early career. I was able to get leave only two years after joining the faculty to return to Thailand to carry out 18 months of field research in northern Thailand. In 1972 after being promoted to associate professor I was granted leave for another two years while I carried out additional field research in the northeast and north and served as a Fulbright lecturer at Chiang Mai University. I had also received strong support from colleagues for recruiting and training a number of graduate students. By the mid-1970s when I was into the middle part of my career, I was aware that others of my academic cohort were engaged in moving from one institution to another as a means to advance their careers. I chose not to follow this route – although I would have a number of opportunities, some of which were quite attractive, to move over the next twenty-five years. By remanning at the University of Washington, I realized I would be able to train many more graduate students than if I had moved several times. I also subsequently found strong support from the University of Washington for developing a new Southeast Asia centre.

In the 1980s, when I devoted considerable time and energy to laying the foundation for Southeast Asian studies at UW, the situation was very different from the 1950s when Southeast Asian studies was first developed at Cornell. First, the end of the war in Indochina led to Southeast Asia no longer being viewed by Americans primarily in political terms. To the contrary, as I myself found through my work with the Joint Social Science Research Council / American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Southeast Asia and the Indochina Studies Program of the Social Science Research Council, it was becoming possible to promote study of postcolonial Southeast Asia. This represented a marked shift in approach from Southeast Asian studies during its formative period in the United States.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s at the University of Washington, as at many other universities especially on the West coast of the U.S., many of the students who were becoming interested in Southeast Asian studies were those who had themselves or whose parents had come from one of the former countries of French Indochina. Their entry into the field contributed to blurring the line between those who undertook research about Southeast Asia and the Asian ‘others’ whom they studied. This ‘de-Orientalizing’ (as I call it) of Southeast Asian studies also developed because of the increasing number of students from Southeast Asia who came to study at American (and European and Australian) universities.

I have been very fortunate to count among my own students a significant number of Thai and Vietnamese (as well as a few Japanese and Chinese). Through my interactions with these students, I have sensed that a new scholarly discourse emerges, one that draws on the intellectual traditions from which the students have come as well as on the one in which I have been trained and contributed to. A short answer to your question, thus, is that Southeast Asian studies today is becoming one that entails intellectual exchange that is very much more “dialogical” rather than “us” analysing “them”.

Nicholas Farrelly: After his death on 31 December 1993, you wrote a touching obituary of Cornell’s Professor Lauriston Sharp – the “founding father” of Thai Studies in the United States.  Your tribute provides a remarkable overview of his life and of the establishment of Thai Studies as an academic specialty.  What was the impact of Lauriston Sharp on your own approach to academia?  In your obituary you noted that “As one who today often finds himself caught between competing demands of administration, scholarship, and teaching, I can now better appreciate Lauri’s accessibility to students. He always seemed able to find time to help a bewildered student rework a draft paper or a proposal or to offer insightful guidance for class assignments or research”.  Are there other parts of his approach to Thai Studies that have influenced you?

Professor Keyes: Lauri was truly the founder of “Thai studies” in the United States. He told me that he had first become interested in Thailand in the 1930s after a visit there on his way to or from Australia. He was not, however, able to pursue this interest until after WWII when he conceived of the project to study a village near Bangkok that was on the verge of major change because of modern political and economic influences. This became the Bang Chan project, the first research project undertaken in Thailand by American scholars.

He assembled a team that included agricultural economists, nutritionists, psychologists, as well as sociologists and anthropologists. One member of this team was G. William Skinner, then a PhD student at Cornell who had had to abort his research in Sichuan, China because of the revolution there. Lauri’s closest associates were Lucien (June) and Jane Hanks, a social psychologist and anthropologist. The publications of the members of the Cornell team became and remain the seminal studies on which Thai studies is based.

One influential scholar at this period who was not at Cornell was the anthropologist, John Embree, at Yale. Although Embree’s work prior to the War had been in Japan, after the war he was in Thailand as the cultural attaché at the American embassy. On the basis of his non-systematic but very insightful observations among Thai he proposed that in contrast to Japan, the Thai had a “loosely structured social system.” This characterization was picked up by some in the Cornell project – most notably the anthropologist Herbert Phillips. As a result the Thailand project at Cornell subsequently was also associated with the “loosely structured social system” notion.

Not all Cornell students of Thailand found the notion to be as valuable as others did. Those of us who undertook work outside of rural central Thailand where Bang Chan was located which turned out to have been something of a frontier area, and particularly those of us who worked among the Thai-Lao of northeastern Thailand and Khonmüang of northern Thailand (not to mention those working among upland peoples), disputed the general applicability of the concept to all elements of Thai society. Indeed, the second generation of scholars trained at Cornell (I see the first generation as emerging in the 1950s, and the second in the 1960s), took our lead from Skinner whose very significant work on the Chinese in Thailand demonstrated that the ‘Thai’ were far from being an homogenous people. Much of my own research has aimed at pursuing the ‘de-construction’ of Thailand, to provide detailed accounts of some of the significantly different regional, ethnic and religious communities in Thailand. I owe my approach to my training at Cornell under Lauri and Bill Skinner.

As I wrote in my obituary, Lauri was very pained by what became known as the “Thailand controversy” which first erupted in the Association for Asian Studies and American Anthropological Association in 1970. Lauri had been slow to realize how much the relationship between the academy and the U.S. government had changed since he had worked for the State Department immediately after World War II. Even as I sought (and still seek) to have others recognize Lauri for the truly humane person who was truly empathetic with Thai that he was, I also learned from the pain he experienced because of the Thailand controversy to be deeply distrustful of ideologues whether within government or out of it.

In August this year I was able to visit Ruth Sharp, Lauri’s widow, who is now 96 years old and living in a retirement home in Ithaca. Seeing her again reminded me of the great warmth she and Lauri extended to students at their home.

Nicholas Farrelly: Some of our readers may be unaware of your reputation as a wonderful teacher and mentor.  When it awarded you the 2003 Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award, the University of Washington wrote that you have “mentored so many graduate students that it is almost as if [you have] established [your] own brand of scholars”.  Reflecting on the 145 graduate student committees you have sat on and the 33 graduate student committees that you have chaired, you said that to “To produce a Ph.D. student is as much work as writing a book”.  What, from your perspective, are the major challenges faced by graduate students studying Southeast Asia today?  How do you think they can be helped to overcome the obstacles that confront them?

Professor Keyes: Mentoring graduate students has been the most rewarding facet of my career. While one’s writings are, in the end, mostly ephemeral or destined for dusty archives (or does dust no longer exist when archives are digitized?), those one has helped to launch on their careers are part of a lineage every bit as much as if they were biological descendants. In October 2007, the Southeast Asia Program at the University of Washington sponsored a conference and celebration in honour of my retirement, 70^th birthday, and role in creating the program 20 years earlier. It was truly a moving experience to me and Jane to hear presentations by so many former students. At the event a number of Thai scholars who had been my students presented me with a book of articles in Thai in which they (and a few others) critiqued my writings on Thailand.

As I have been reading through these articles, I find that they are what every professor could hope for. They are far from hagiographic and several take strong issue with some of my ideas. They do so from the vantage of their own innovative research and reading of other scholarly works. Thus, while I take great pleasure in the lineage I have helped to create, I also am very pleased that, like Lauri Sharp, I am not seen as being the founder of a “school.”

Many of the challenges faced by those seeking graduate work in Southeast Asian studies are much the same as they have always been – obtaining the necessary qualifications, finding funding, and gaining admittance to the institutions where they would like to study. What is different today is that the competition has become much keener as more and more qualified students seek support from what I believe is a decreasing number of non-governmental funding agencies. At the same time, more institutions within Southeast Asia are offering graduate training for students.

It is very difficult to offer general advice to students. I have found that most of the students whom I have worked with have been “hand-crafted” in that I have had to think in each case what funding agency would be appropriate and how to guide them in pursuit of their unique projects.

Nicholas Farrelly: I will pivot towards Thai issues in a moment but, before I do, I would like to ask you briefly about Vietnam.  In the case of upland areas of Vietnam you once noted that “the prospects for the survival of highlander ethnicity are bleak” (American Ethnologist, 1984).  Do you feel this is still the case?  Is the situation in Vietnam considerably worse than in Thailand or Laos?  

Professor Keyes: The article you refer to was published nearly a quarter of a century ago, a decade before I myself had the opportunity to carry out research in an upland area of northern Vietnam. My view today is much better expressed in my presidential address for the American Association for Asian Studies. In that article, “‘The Peoples of Asia’: The Science and Politics of Ethnic Classification,” I argue that in order to understand ethnic identities, it is necessary to understand the politics of ethnicity.

What has happened in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, as has been far better described by Oscar Salemink than by Gerry Hickey whose work was the subject of my earlier article, is that premodern forms of social structure (which have been romanticized by some anthropologists) have been radically undermined by policies of successive regimes – French colonial, Republic of Vietnam, and Socialist Republic of Vietnam and by decisions made by upland peoples themselves about how to adapt to such policies as well as to global economic forces (notably, in this case, the world market price of coffee). Today, pan-ethnic or religious (notably evangelical Christian) identities are often more salient than what would have been considered to be traditional ‘tribal’ identities.

At the same time, the peoples of Vietnam’s highlands share with the peoples of upland Thailand, Southern China, Burma, and, to a lesser extent, Laos, the situation of being marginalized within the nation-state frameworks in which they are situated. If we take conflict and/or poverty as the measures of whether certain peoples are worse off than others, then those in the Greater Mekong Subregion facing the most difficult circumstances would seem to be such peoples as the Karen in Burma, the Akha, Lisu, and Lahu in Thailand, as well as the Central Highlanders of Vietnam. On the other hand, the Hmong, who are found in southern China, northern Vietnam, northern Laos, and northern Thailand, seem to have made the most successful transition from a village-based people to a people who are mostly well adapted to the modern world. But to truly provide a comparative analysis of the situation of all upland or former upland peoples would require a book, not a few comments.

Nicholas Farrelly: Thailand has undergone a great economic and cultural transformation since your earliest research.  Over this time, economic inequalities have increased across the country just as incomes have increased and poverty has declined.  With your vast experience of Thailand, and particularly of some of its poorest regions, what do you find is more important to people on the ground: increasing relative poverty (compared, say, to their urban peers) or declining absolute poverty (compared to their parents’ generation)?  Do you think that Thai government policies adequately reflect the various aspirations of the country’s poor? 

Professor Keyes: To answer this question in any complete way would require a book and, as a matter of fact, my current project is just a book. As I already have noted, Jane and I carried out fieldwork in the early 1960s in the village of Ban Nông Tün in Mahasarakham province. We made a second study of the village in the early 1980s and then a more recent study in 2005; in addition we have visited the village many times in between these dates.

Through our research we have been able to trace the transformation of a relatively self-sufficient community where almost everything that was consumed was produced locally to a community whose members today are just as likely to be living and working in Bangkok, or Taiwan, or Israel than in Ban Nông Tün itself. To anticipate one of our major findings, it is clear that while villagers initially sought to improve their lives through expansion of agriculture supplemented by some circular migration, they eventually abandoned this strategy for one that entails working for extended periods in non-agricultural jobs and using the capital generated from this work to invest in local non-agricultural enterprises and in better living conditions.

What is striking is that the village still remains a viable community. Non-residents return regularly for festivals and many come back to settle permanently in the village. It remains because it provides a moral world centred on Thai-Lao Buddhism which people find meaningful. This is why in my keynote address for the International Thai Studies Conference in Bangkok in January I argue that the northeastern village economy is both a capitalist and a sufficiency economy.

The extraordinary growth of the Thai economy has not produced positive consequences for all. Although most villagers in northeastern Thailand today enjoy a much higher standard of living than their parents or grandparents, they remain very much aware that relative to people in the urban middle class they are still much less well off. Moreover, they are also acutely conscious of the costs of their higher standard of living, particularly the long separations between members of the family. There are, moreover, some within the rural areas who are very poor; the Northeast has a higher incidence of poverty than any other part of the country. But northeasterners who have been marginalized in the national economy are still able to find material as well as personal support from kinsmen and friends within the moral world of the village.

This is also true for many others from rural northern Thailand and from upland minority villages as I have observed from my other work in northern Thailand as has been is being documented in other studies.

Nicholas Farrelly: In a 1984 article, “Mother or Mistress but Never a Monk: Buddhist Notions of Female Gender in Rural Thailand”, you conclude that, “Few women…will remain prostitutes for prolonged periods of time…In one sense, prostitution is, for many who enter it, an extended period of adolescence as viewed in terms of traditional village culture.  The tolerance that Buddhist teaching inculcates into villagers in Thailand leads them to accept reformed prostitutes back into their home communities with little stigma, although they would not be so welcome if they continued within the village context to ply their trade”.  This is not an argument that one sees made very often.  Could you tell us some more about how you see this “extended period of adolescence”?  And, related to this, what have been your experiences of Thai young people in the 2000s?  Do you think they are radically different from previous generations? 

Professor Keyes: The article you refer to seems to have attracted more attention than almost anything else I have published. Unfortunately, most do not read the companion piece, “Ambiguous Gender: Male Initiation in Northern Thai Society.” I sought in these two papers to offer an analysis of gender concepts in Thailand that are rooted in Buddhist practice and understandings. It is not possible to understand the culture of gender which relates to females without understanding that which relates to males.

In the “Mother or Mistress” paper, I tried, at the end, to offer an interpretation of prostitution in Thailand that is not predicated on the usual critiques that exists in Western literature. Before the AIDS crisis, which led to a marked decline of Thai women entering prostitution, prostitution was viewed negatively, but was often seen by young village relatively uneducated women as the only option they had to make significant amounts of money which could be used to help their parental families.

The AIDS crisis came at a time when many new occupations became possible for now rather better educated women from villages. As Mary Beth Mills has shown in her work, many young village women have found working in factories in Bangkok to offer them a way to pursue their own interests (which she found could be subsumed under being thansamai or ‘modern’) before settling down to marriage. Thus, what I noted about the ‘extended adolescence’ of those who became prostitutes today is characteristic of women working in other occupations.

As many demographic studies have shown, the average of age at which all Thai marry has increased significantly over the past few decades. A growing number of urban middle class and upper class women are not marrying at all (Bangkok has the highest rate of never-married women of any city in Asia). However, most of those from villages do still marry, but usually a number of years after they have completed schooling. Thus, ‘extended adolescence’ is now very much a characteristic of most women born in villages.

Nicholas Farrelly: Turning, at last, to a more political question, I would like to ask you about a 2006 comment that was reported by Asiamedia.  You reflected that “Thai Rak Thai won because the Democrats didn’t succeed in reaching the rural people….Even if they really were being bought, they really did have a sense they were voting their interests…Sondhi and Thaksin are two of a kind… [Sondhi] has always been manipulative in the same way Thaksin is manipulative…[he] is sophisticated in his use of the media, but uses it to manipulate public opinion”.  You have, over the years, observed many ructions in Thai politics.  Are you optimistic about the future of democratic institutions in the country?  Does Thailand need to be saved from the “Sondhis” and the “Thaksins”?

Professor Keyes: I should begin by saying that I am deeply sceptical of all politicians – after all, I live in America where politics has been dominated for the past 7 years by the most disastrous president the US has had in at least a century. And Bush was elected twice! (I won’t even mention four-term Prime Minister John Howard.)

This noted, I am not at all comfortable as a farang in proposing any ‘salvation’ for the political situation in Thailand. Even for the US, I do not see any permanent solution to whatever political problems beset the society at any one time. Nonetheless, I feel it is imperative to speak out when one is aware of situations that clearly are unjust.

Because I have been so deeply engaged with Thailand for the better part of a half century, I am able to have some perspective on the trends and patterns in Thai politics, albeit, my perspective is based not on conversations or interviews with politicians I have known, but on what people in rural northeastern Thailand and upland villages in northern Thailand, and friends who are academics and workers with NGOs have told me.

In the interview you quote, I was reacting to Sondhi’s view – presented in talks in Seattle and elsewhere in the US – that rural people are stupid or venal because they vote for whomever pays them enough and not because they have made a reasoned choice. Because he has commanded a wide audience among the urban middle class through his newspaper and website, his characterization has come to be accepted by many in the class as conventional wisdom. Because of my own experience, I know this characterization is false. Those who vote in rural constituencies today – and voters include many urban working class people who retain residency in upcountry villages – make thoughtful choices based on their class interests.

Thaksin and Sondhi are similar in being very effective in using the media to advance their political views, but those views, which had originally been very similar – because they share a common class situation – were very divergent by the end of 2005.  As Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker have shown, Thaksin created a genuine populism which will continue to be an influence on Thai politics even if Thaksin himself never returns to power because rural people now know that some politicians can truly represent their interests even if they come from a very different class.

Nicholas Farrelly: Finally, can you tell us something about your current and future activities?

Professor Keyes: As to my other activities, I see as a primary obligation at this stage of my career preparing as much of my now very extensive collection of materials generated through my researches as I can to make these available for future scholars. With digitization – albeit the process is very slow since much of my research was undertaken before computers were readily available – it will be possible to have copies of much of these materials available in Thailand as well as in the United States and some of it will be made accessible on-line by the University of Washington archives.

Nicholas Farrelly: That sounds wonderful.  Professor Keyes, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.  It has been a great pleasure to have you involved!

Professor Keyes: Thank you for the opportunity to reflect some on my career.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor Aung-Thwin, thank you for taking the time to be part of New Mandala’s interview series. As many of our readers will know, you have now been a professional historian for many years. I was hoping that you could tell us about how you first decided that Southeast Asian history was your calling? What other careers did you consider?

Professor Aung-Thwin: Thank you for asking me. Actually, when I was an undergraduate at Doane College, in Crete, Nebraska, I was just a plain historian with a European background. Yaroslav the Wise, Henry the VIII, Herodotus, Edward Gibbon, and of course, Vico. When I entered graduate school, at the University of Illinois, Champaign, I wanted to do South Indian history, as I grew up in South India in an American missionary school. Tamil is a difficult language and I had forgotten what little I knew of it, and I had forgotten most of my Burmese by then too. So, when I bumped into F.K. Lehman who was teaching Burmese there, I switched to SEA, thinking I would rather do my country’s history, although at the time, my first love was still India. But Illinois had no history of Southeast Asia at the time and I was enrolled in the History department. So, I took a Masters in East Asian History with Lloyd Eastman and John Pearson as well as Crawfurd and others in South Asia. From there, I transferred to the University of Michigan for my Ph.D to study South Asia with Tom Trautman and Southeast Asia with John Whitmore. SOAS had accepted me but with no scholarship, while the CSEAS at Michigan gave me a TA. I really didn’t consider any other careers.

Nicholas Farrelly: Before I get to my questions about your historical work I thought I should ask about your somewhat controversial reputation. In 2006, a document was circulated in Rangoon and online that listed hundreds of “Enemies of the Burmese Revolution”. You were described, at number 457, as, “Prof. Michael Aung Thwin, Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, historian, wrote a contentious article in 2002 to argue against the Western imposition of democratic values on Burma, contending they were inimical to Burmese ease with military rule, in 2005 he endorsed the move of the capital to Pyinmana”. Do you consider yourself an “enemy of the Burmese revolution”? Or is this a preposterous claim?

Professor Aung-Thwin: You can’t take every written piece of paper as important (unless you want it to be). I saw that document as well and thought I was in good company with Bob Taylor, David Steinberg and others. But the title of the document itself reveals the calibre of its writers–their side and the wrong side–so to even comment on it any further would acknowledge their intelligence and importance.

Nicholas Farrelly: According to another criticism that circulated online back in 1995, you were “recognized as one of the opportunistic apologists of Ne Win’s rule by the earlier bunch of Burma activists” and were “an apologist of Ne Win’s despotic rule”. The term “apologist” is one that is often used to tar opponents in Burma studies. How do you reaction to these sorts of accusations?

Professor Aung-Thwin: They need to expand their vocabulary and move from “A” to other letters. Perhaps to the letter “O” which they also used for me but it really describes them. The easiest thing I could have done, and the most popular thing I could have done at the time, was to go with the current. So who’s the opportunist? Also, people usually use these ad hominem attacks when they run out of evidence and/or arguments. Calling someone names tells me that their case is weak. In fact, I could have made their case for them without calling anyone an apologist. And what’s the difference between calling someone an “apologist” and calling him a jerk or worse? It doesn’t require any intelligence and tells the reader nothing.

Nicholas Farrelly: Some of the most virulent and personal condemnations of your work came after your essay “Parochial Universalism, Democracy Jihad and the Orientalist Image of Burma: The New Evangelism” was published in Pacific Affairs in 2001. Those condemnations do not, from my point-of-view, really give us any opportunity to better understand the situation in Burma. In that essay you argued that, “Perhaps the most destructive aspect of democratization is that it invariably means decentralization, which, in most non-western contexts today, encourages social and political anarchy. In countries such as Burma, anarchy is feared far more than tyranny, so that if there exists a genuine desire to promote freedom from that fear, issues important to Burmese society should be addressed, not assumptions concerning the universalism of western values”.

You then went on to use the notion of “democracy jihad” to ask some penetrating questions of the push for democracy in Burma. You continued with this theme in an article in October 2007 where you wrote that “In the case of Burma, ‘good’ is labeled ‘democracy,’ and ‘evil’ is everything else, including the ruling generals”. Given your regular and critical comments on “democracy”, what do you propose is a better system for governing Burma? Is the status quo worth defending?

Professor Aung-Thwin: First, some people who wanted to, missed the point about the democracy Jihad article, and I figured, if they’re that hysterical, nothing I said further was going to change their minds. I was not about to spoon feed them either. I must have touched a nerve though, suggesting I was probably mainly right. Second, the article was less about Burma than about US foreign policy. Third, the issue is not about democracy per se, but its use and its abuse, as we see today just about everywhere. People can get away with virtually anything by invoking democracy as their stated goal: the ends justify the means as long as the end is democracy. Fourth, when you pit a situation as good and evil only, and are given one choice, which choice will most people take? Yet, human society is much more complicated and although these extremes are “true”, they are extremes, not the larger whole between those extremes where most people live and think.

To answer your question about a better system: I never said I was offering a better one, just that the way democracy was and is being used (to suit one’s political agenda) is just not going to do it. And why must its opposite be posited as the only alternative? Because I may not want American style democracy imposed on Burma doesn’t meant I must necessarily want the status quo.

Whatever is adopted for governing Burma, it can’t be done: 1) on the streets in highly emotional situations where the West is cheering on the rioters and the security forces are shooting them. 2) in the West Wing of the White House where Burma is very low priority and scarcely understood, Mrs. Bush notwithstanding. 3) between just the NLD and the Junta without including the reps of the ethnic groups who participated in the writing of the new constitution (from which the NLD walked out, but now is in a position to be left out, so have been more accommodating). 4) without including the orthodox mainstream Sangha who abides by the Vinaya (I’m not referring to the bogus monks in whose monasteries were found arms, ammunition, and pornography. I don’t care what monks or non-monks do in the privacy of their rooms. It’s not a statement about their “morality”; but about their commitment to their vows). 5) and without some other organizations which are not in the Western press’ limelight but are important in Burmese society (such as farmers organizations, teachers organizations and the like).

All these things do not necessarily imply a democratic government of the American kind. Whatever form it takes, it cannot ignore Burma’s history, culture, institutions, society. Perhaps it will turn out to be a hybrid of sorts but it’s something that Burma has to work out, not Mrs. Bush, Mr. Bush, China, India, Mr. Gambari, or any of the exile groups that have adopted an “all or nothing” stance.

You know what the real agenda of these exile groups is, don’t you? It’s not national reconciliation but regime change. For, if there’s national reconciliation, then the external dissident groups, including the NLD in exile, will be left out, along with their economic support from USAID, State, and the National Endowment for Democracy. The latter alone allocated nearly 3 million dollars in 2006 to undermine the Government, including $15,000 for “educating monks in monasteries” about democracy. (It does this with other countries too. You can see their budget, how much, where it goes, by googling their web site.) Anyway, if this happens, i.e. national reconciliation rather than regime change, Suu Kyi will be regarded as a traitor by her own people for “caving in”. There are too many crazies for me to even contemplate the repercussions. I’m sure that’s part of the reason for keeping her under house arrest.

Nicholas Farrelly: In Justin Wintle’s 2007 biography of Aung San Suu Kyi he describes you as “a traditionally minded Burman”. In a section about Burma’s democracy icon when she was still a graduate student, Wintle notes “Michael Aung Thwin could be less circumspect…She [Aung San Suu Kyi] was, in his opinion, a divisive figure, forever harping on about her dad”. What have been your dealings with Suu Kyi? Is this a fair appraisal of your attitude towards Asia’s most famous political prisoner? Do you still consider her a “divisive figure”?

Professor Aung-Thwin: “Traditionally minded Burman”? When Suu and I were once invited to Yoneo Ishii’s house for dinner, Suu said, “Ko Michael, don’t you miss Burma when you hear this [Burmese] music?” (Ishii had put it on for us) I said, “to be honest, I prefer the Beatles” (since I grew up their music). She was put out by that remark. I admit it wasn’t very polite. I’m far from being a “traditionally minded Burman.” Besides, that’s irrelevant and is another form of name-calling. Either way, maybe Wintle should have contacted me first before rushing to judgment. (Has he even met her?)

Suu and I were colleagues at Kyoto University when both of us were invited by its Center for Southeast Asian Studies in 1985-86. We had offices next to each other (hers is now a shrine, mine is probably used for storage), saw each other every day, and her younger son (Kim) played with our kids and the Andaya kids who were there at the same time. My wife would often take Kim to International School where our kids were enrolled (whereas Kim was enrolled in a Japanese school, none of whose students spoke English) just so that he could meet some kids his own age who spoke English. The point I’m making is that I knew Suu very well, for a year, in all kinds of different situations—at CSEAS seminars, at the office, eating lunch at Kyoto U cafeteria, having her and her family over for dinner (when Michael and Alexander visited for Christmas). I saw her virtually on a daily basis, and under circumstances where we could speak freely with no political pressures or public scrutiny, and before she became famous and had to worry about image. We argued about Burma almost every day and had honest disagreements. So, when I said she was divisive, that’s because she was. It’s no secret. Everyone knew it, we, as well as her Japanese hosts. But what’s the big deal? Unless you’re making her into a Joan of Arc who can do no wrong and walks on water. I took it as quite normal as I have many aunts and cousins in Burma who’s always doing that sort of stuff. And she was, indeed, always harping about her father. I would too if my father were as famous as hers. She even tried to convince my daughter how famous her father was by showing her a Burmese coin with his face on it. (My daughter was hardly 7 and couldn’t give a damn.) So, my comments about her were based on my relationship with her then; nothing more or less. This was before she became, as you say, “Asia’s most famous political prisoner”. But she wasn’t when I knew her. Are you suggesting that I should revise my story to fit the current context? I’m a historian, not a political scientist. Ha! Ha!

Nicholas Farrelly: We should now turn more directly to some of your copious historical writings. In a 1979 article published in the Journal of Asian Studies, you wrote “…the same pattern of institutional and ideological factors is present in three Theravāda Buddhist societies in South and Southeast Asia (Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand): the frequent rise and decline of dynasties, the recurrence of sasana reform, and the persistence of merit-path-to-salvation as an important feature of its belief system. The important variable may be the degree to which monastic landlordism affected the state, and thereby the dynastic cycles. To determine this, we would need to know the approximate amount of land the sangha held between the rise and decline of a dynasty, relative to the (calculable) available land”. This is an interesting historical insight. But I am wondering whether you see this kind of “monastic landlordism” have any enduring importance in the present-day? Does that “same pattern of institutional and ideological factors” hold true today? Or it is, well, too early to say?

Professor Aung-Thwin: In some ways yes, in some, no. I’ve continued the research into the Ava period (1364-1527), and it holds true there as well. But since then, land was no longer the only and/or primary basis of the economy. So maybe by the 16th-18th centuries, when trade and other economic components began to be a larger part of the economy, land’s impact became less important and less of a factor. Monastic Landlordism is still pretty strong but not as much as it used to be when the produce of land was the “GNP” of the country. The Sangha still holds considerable wealth even if, I’m told, donations have declined in recent years, part of the reason for the recent protests. (The monks’ involvement had little or nothing to do with ideology but economics.) And since Sangha land is tax exempt in perpetuity, it is still legally theirs; what has changed is its value relative to other forms of wealth of the state.

The ideological factors are also still important regardless of their wealth. I’m doing an article on the modern Sangha and don’t want to scoop myself but generally speaking, the power of the Sangha (in terms of influence and control over people’s behaviour) is still pretty strong, even if undeserved in the case of bogus and rogue monks. There’s also a difference between the Sangha during U Nu’s time and subsequent military rule: the latter had slowly turned the Sangha into what is more like Thailand’s situation (i.e. part of Government). In the Burma case, it is “under” the Ministry of Religion. The monks were far more unruly and criminal during U Nu’s regime. Just check the papers between 1949 and 1959, you won’t believe what they were arrested for, nearly every day. How their role will play out in the new constitution is too early to tell; if they are even included.

Nicholas Farrelly: In a review by Bénédicte Brac De La Perriére of your 1998 book, Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Burma: Paradigms, Primary Sources, and Prejudices, she argues that, “By deconstructing historical events as creations of myths where there were none, Aung-Thwin is actually unveiling his own bias that Burmese history demonstrated an enduring continuity. This may be a defensible argument from the perspective of cultural history, but it is not so acceptable when dealing with factual history”. Do you see an enduring continuity in Burmese history? If so, what are the key components of it?

Professor Aung-Thwin: First, I don’t quite understand what her point is since that’s not what the book was about. (She may have been thinking about the Pagan book published in 1985) Her statement is also a non-sequitur and shows she either hasn’t read the book well or has not understood it. Cultural continuity and exposing what we thought (for nearly 100 years) were historical events on which much of the interpretation of early Burma was based, are two different things. The book was about the latter, not the former.

Second, and with regard to your question, yes I do. More specifically, there is continuity of: a) the conceptual system, particularly Burmese Theravada Buddhism and Nat worship, and in general, of religious values; b) political ideas, such as conceptions of leadership, authority, and legitimacy; c) the basic social structure of society that reflects the bulk of the agrarian population; d) administrative principles found in patron-client values; e) the underlying principles of civil and criminal law; f) language and its literature; and g) the nature of the agrarian economy. This may be the “cultural history” she is talking about. But it isn’t in this book except for some remarks made in the introduction and conclusion. Maybe that’s all she read. Also, it’s not an “all or nothing” proposition, for there are changes too, particularly in terms of the (market) economy brought in by Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, and later colonial forces.

In terms of the substance of the book, there is no doubt that the events we once considered history are really myths. I showed that with original evidence in five, very detailed chapters. A review is useless if the only thing it does is make an argument about the reviewer’s own views. Even then, her argument doesn’t make any sense. You should refer the reader to more competent and established scholars in the field who reviewed Myth: Martin Stewart Fox in CSSH, Pat Pranke in Asian Perspectives, and the late Paul Wheatley’s in the AHR.

Nicholas Farrelly: Jon Fernquest, who just happens to be a regular commentator on New Mandala, has taken to criticising your research in various online forums. According to Fernquest, “Even if you have painstakingly collected all the relevant texts that Michael Aung-thwin refers to in his recent Mists of Ramanna, wading through the tortuously convoluted logical arguments is a human rights violation in-and-of-itself. If you engage in a debate with Michael Aung-Thwin using all the inaccessible texts that he cites, only you, him, and a handful of other people are going to be able to follow it, or even care”. Do you think this is a fair criticism? Is there anyway to make the many texts that found your historical analysis available to a wider audience?

Professor Aung-Thwin: It requires no credentials to put your opinions on-line, especially on your own web-site. Especially if you don’t have to go through peer review, a problem I think we as scholars should take much more seriously. The first ever contact I had with Jon was via an email which came out of the blue. He had written to ask me about graduate studies at Hawaii. So I encouraged him, especially since he was interested in Burma and appeared to be serious and I thought maybe I’ll have another graduate student working on Burma. He also sent me a valuable translation by a friend of his and I reciprocated with an mss that is also rare that he wanted. I still haven’t met him, although people have told me about his web site. I don’t read blogs as a matter of principle. But from what I hear, his invectives seem to be largely of an ad hominem nature where he seems to be “talking” directly to me. But since I don’t read blogs, he’s talking to himself really. I don’t know why he’s like that since I’ve never done him any wrong.

But your questions regarding these three “critics” raise another issue, particularly with regard to their selection for assessing my (or anyone’s) work; they are hardly representative of the best and most competent the field has to do that job. They also obviously haven’t read my works with any reflection, intellectual integrity, or knowledge of the evidence. Their criticisms also reveal a poverty of both a solid theoretical background and a broader historical knowledge in which my works should have been placed. So, I wonder if the field needs to reassess its editorial process of assigning reviewers for their journals (except for those who can assign themselves), so that the most competent and best referees are asked to do reviews. As you know, genuine academic books are not your run-of-the-mill Hollywood biographies; we work very hard on them. Mists took six years from inception of idea to completion. They deserve better and more competent evaluators.

Nicholas Farrelly: In a November 2005 Bangkok Post article you wrote: “This recent shift of the [Burmese] capital to Pyinmana on the southern edge of the Dry Zone is not surprising at all. Indeed, back in 1993, I said as much in an article (‘I will not be surprised if the capital of Burma eventually returns to the dry zone’). The reasons for moving the capital to the interior, the Dry Zone of Upper Burma are historical, cultural and strategic…The Dry Zone is also much closer to all the most important mineral deposits and other natural resources whose future development will be increasing, not decreasing. In short, it is mainly for cultural and historical reasons, but also for more current strategic ones, that the colonial capital of Rangoon is being dumped. It has nothing to do with soothsayers, paranoia, or fear of US attack. It’s not about the US or the ‘international community’! Believe it or not, most nations in the world make internal decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with us, uncomfortable as that may be to our sensitive narcissism”. For these reasons, do you think the Naypyidaw experiment will outlast the current government? Or is it destined to be scrapped as soon as any future political reforms are put in place?

Professor Aung-Thwin: I don’t think it’s “an experiment” and will probably outlast the current government. It’s not a new, whimsical wish but an old desire to return to the “heartland”, to one’s roots, something they’ve always wanted to do (and did earlier when the Pegu/Toungoo Dynasty collapsed). Only, the British reversed this trend when they appeared and resurrected the coasts as “center” when they made Yangon capital. We have long assumed that Yangon and the coasts is the “front door” of Burma; it is really the “back door”. (China and the North is the “front door”.) For most of its 2000 year history, with the exception of about 250 years, Burma has looked north to China, not south to the ocean. It is the West which assumed that where they entered must have been the “front door” since they never enter by anyone’s “back door,” right? (By the way, do you ever wonder why so much fuss was made of this move? No one criticized the Indians for moving to New Delhi from their colonial capital of Calcutta, or the Germans who went back to Berlin recently, or the Americans who moved their capital from Philadelphia to Washington, amongst many others.)

What needs further comment though is the treatment of Naypyidaw in the press, especially the AP. It is not “carved out of the jungle” or “remote.” It’s right on the main rail line between Rangoon and Mandalay. It was a major fief town during Pagan and subsequent periods, and has been an important urban area for about 800 years if not longer. It’s like calling Chicago “remote” when it lies on I-94 (?) between New York and LA. These images are actually meant to demonize and barbarianize the Government; exactly what the British did with the monarchy (and the US did with Iraq) before they were both conquered. Although I don’t think that’s the US’s intention, one never really knows for sure with the kind of personnel currently in the White House.

Nicholas Farrelly: In the paper you presented at the 2006 AAS Conference you argued that “The image of Burma’s history as one of irreconcilable, perpetual ethnic conflict is a nineteenth century colonial construct, in part created by its officials to be commensurate with its desired political consequences: namely, divide and rule. Since scholarship, like trade, also followed the flag, colonial scholars, who were more often than not its officials as well, reconstructed Burma’s early, pre-colonial, and post-colonial history to fit that image”. What do you think has been the major implication of this historical perspective? Would Burma have enjoyed an easier ride if the history it inherited from the colonial historians was different? Is that the implication of your argument?

Professor Aung-Thwin: The major implication is that we who inherited that colonial legacy have had to dissect just about everything. And it’s not so much an issue of “what if” we had inherited something else. We deal with the legacy handed down to us. At the same time, we would have had less to dissect if the colonial scholars hadn’t done what they did. In that sense, yes, perhaps it would have been “an easier ride”. However, had there not been this colonial perspective, not only on history but on ethnicity and a whole lot of other stuff being critiqued profusely today, we would not be addressing many interesting, post-modern kinds of issues either. I think their legacy has actually made doing Burma history more fun! I was not complaining, just explaining.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor Aung-Thwin, before we finish, it would be good to find out some more about current projects. What do you have planned for 2008?

Professor Aung-Thwin: I’m doing a book entitled: A Tale of Two Kingdoms: Ava and Pegu in the15th century (to fill that gap still unfilled). It’s the “in-between” story between Pagan and Toungoo. Few seem to know what went on then. And since I posed the need for looking at Ava and Pegu at the same time rather than each one individually in Mists, I have to take on the burden of my own suggestion, I guess, as I see no one else doing it. I’ve also submitted a couple of articles. One, mentioned above, on the modern Burma Sangha from Annexation to 2007, in light of what happened recently, and another called “Where Notion Meets Context” about the notion of “Burma” and/or “Mranma Pran” and how it is defined and redefined in the historical and political contexts in which it appears.

Nicholas Farrelly: Thank you, Professor Aung-Thwin, for taking the time to be involved in the New Mandala interview series. It has been great to have you involved.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor Taylor, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer New Mandala’s questions.

Professor Robert Taylor: Thank you for inviting me. It is an honour and a reminder of how time marches on. I was reading Professor John Cady’s oral history in the Truman Library (on line) the other evening. He gave it in 1974, I believe, and there were so many questions I wanted to ask him as a result of his answers. He, of course, is no longer around to ask.

Nicholas Farrelly: Many New Mandala readers will know of you and the reputation of your many books. But the story of how you first became interested in the study of Southeast Asia and Burma is not widely known. Can you tell us how it all started?

Professor Taylor: Like many things in life and history, I became interested in South East Asia largely by accident and contingency. When I left high school in 1961, I hardly knew where South East Ohio was, let alone South East Asia I wanted to be a lawyer. To do that in the USA in those days, one way was to do a pre-law degree and then do postgraduate legal studies. Most of the people I went to high school with didn’t go to university, but for those few of us who did, we looked to one of the state funded universities, as they were the cheapest and had the easiest admission standards, or at least so we thought. Most of my friends wanted to go to Miami University because it was close to Greenville, or Bowling Green University, because it had a reputation for good parties.

I wanted to get as far from Greenville as possible, and that ruled both of those out. Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, was an unknown element but it was hard to get to – it took three buses – and an entire day – and no one else from my class was going to go there. Struck me as near to an ideal result as I could find given my circumstances. So I applied and was admitted to study government and history.

When I got there, I met some wonderful teachers and had a fantastic first year. Roy Fairfield opened my eyes to how we had all been taught a lot of patriotic nonsense and unthinking hagiography in our high school courses and showed us how to begin to try to think critically. Willard Elsbree, who had done his doctorate on the political consequences of the Japanese occupation of South East Asia, taught me comparative politics of Western Europe. Richard Bald, who had grown up in Hitler’s Germany, taught international relations. And in the first year, John Cady taught a survey course on Western civilisation. All of them were great teachers and stimulated my mind no end but Cady was special.

He was older than the rest, having started teaching earlier. He was also the most established scholar. His book on the French in Indochina opened completely new worlds to me. His History of Modern Burma was then just three years old and showed me what a scholar could do. His History of South East Asia was published while I was his student and we were amongst the first persons to read it. All of these men taught me on and off for the next four years and I think I took a course with Professor Cady every year – Japanese history, Chinese history, British history, European history and two semesters of South East Asian history, as I recall. Like all of my outstanding teachers, he was always accessible and I used to go talk to him from time to time about other things, like religion and the kinds of things about which undergraduates like to argue.

The Vietnam War was always a backdrop to my undergraduate education and, indeed, to all my formal education. We used to do Mickey Mouse courses to keep our graduate points up and one was on current affairs –Newsweek one oh one – we called it. Like on our TV screens, the mainland map of South East Asia week after week, or day after day, always had an incomplete, unnamed bit on the left-hand side. Always intrigued by the unknown, I must have filed in the back of my mind that I might study that area.

But other things intervened. The draft mainly. Having abandoned the idea of becoming a lawyer in order to become a teacher, I enrolled in a Master’s programme at Antioch College which involved a year of part-time teaching in the Washington, DC, public schools combined with two summer’s worth of seminar work and evening classes and writing a thesis. My teacher Roy Fairfield had set it up. I enrolled and set off to Washington to teach in what would today be euphemistically called a challenged neighbourhood or what we called in those days a black slum school. The kid from Greenville grew up very fast and I learned a lot. I doubt whether I taught my students much, however, but it kept me from being flown to Vietnam with a one-way ticket. Also, I met my first wife and again contingency intervened. She had been in the Peace Corps in Thailand in the same batch as later scholars of South East Asia such as Craig Reynolds.

To make a longer story short, I taught in Washington two years and got married. My then wife had a job in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with Antioch College, and I took a job teaching political science at Wilberforce University as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society bonanza. After two years, my first child was born, and I was free from the threat of the draft and decided to try to do a PhD. Cornell admitted me under circumstances that would, if explained, embarrass both them and me and the rest is history, as they say.

Nicholas Farrelly: The bulk of your academic career was spent at the School of Oriental and African Studies. What were the highlights of your work there?

Professor Taylor: I was 16 years at SOAS and there were many things of great interest, so it is difficult to point to one or two particular highlights. I had a number of administrative jobs that I never found particularly onerous. I had a number of very convivial and supporting colleagues. And I suppose the most satisfying part of it all was the research and publications I did while I was there as well as the students. We had wonderful students for the most part in those days. Classes were relatively small, certainly by comparison with the USA or Australia where I had previously taught or by the standards of the UK today. The bean counters had not taken over university life and one had lots of time and space to teach and write in relative leisure, albeit in genteel poverty.

Nicholas Farrelly: Over your career, what have you found is the hardest thing about seriously studying Burma? How would you characterise scholarly, journalistic and developmental interaction with Burma today? Is it better than in previous decades?

Professor Taylor: When I started seriously studying Myanmar or Burma as it then was referred to in the Anglo-Saxon world, there were many problems one had to overcome. The field has been transformed in recent years, largely to the good in terms of scholarship and the availability of support for scholarly activities. Language teaching has improved immensely and there are many more quality teaching and learning aids available thanks largely to the splendid work of John Okell. Access was another problem. When I started my doctorate work, you could only get a 24-hour visa to visit Myanmar. Hardly worth it and I was one of the few, if not the only, PhD from Cornell in South East Asian Studies who had never been to South East Asia when I received my degree. Eventually access became easier but once in the country, finding sources and gaining access to them was very difficult. The lack of much official support from either one’s embassy, with the partial exception of the Australians when I was an Australian citizen, or from universities and institutions in Myanmar which were barred from receiving foreigners, made the work quite solitary much of the time.

Now there are a number of bright and able graduate students who are able to undertake language studies and other research in the country. There are a lot more foreigners around and life is much easier. When I used to be the only foreign student at Yangon University, it was chalk and cheese to the experience of living in Yangon today. The field has grown and there is a lot more scholarly and journalistic interest in the country; however, much of the journalism is poorly informed and repeats a number of half-truths and misconstructions rather like a catechism. Democratisation has replaced security as the central focus of attention and prevailing Western political interests tend now, as in the past, to distort scholarship for other ideological agendas. That is just an unpleasant fact we have to live with.

Nicholas Farrelly: In your final academic position you were Vice-Chancellor and Professor of International Studies at the University of Buckingham. According to the incumbent Vice-Chancellor, the University of Buckingham “was created to be Britain’s only independent university because we believed that only by being independent of government could we put the student first, second and third”. There are relatively few other Southeast Asia experts who have held such a significant University-wide appointment. In this role, did you have any opportunities to increase the profile of Southeast Asia at the University?

Professor Taylor: No, during my time at Buckingham I was mainly concerned about keeping the institution alive in the face of great odds. The government had created overnight an entirely different world with which Buckingham had to cope. The institution did survive and now thrives but it was touch and go at some points. Trying to maintain a quality educational experience for students in a world where you have 100 highly subsidised rivals ain’t easy. However, like SOAS, Buckingham really looks beyond England for its students and staff, and that made it a fascinating place to spend some years outside the state driven university sector.

Nicholas Farrelly: Now we might turn more directly to Burma. In the eyes of some of your detractors, one of the most controversial associations you forged was with Premier Oil. From 2001-2003 you worked for them as a consultant on Burma affairs. The company – which was then Britain’s biggest investor in the country – pulled out of Burma in 2002. It would be helpful if you could say more about what you did for them. Did you find the work satisfying? Do you feel that your consultancy led to any positive outcomes?

Professor Taylor: I was always been rather proud to have been affiliated with Premier Oil. It is and was then a highly ethical and principled business concern that did much good for Myanmar and some of its citizens as well as for one or two British citizens. My role was actually quite marginal in all of that. I wrote occasional memos to senior officials in the company surveying social, economic and political developments and giving occasional prognostications. I think some of the criticism of my work with Premier is derived from an underlying antagonism toward business and capitalism in many academics’ minds. Actually, some of the most enlightened, broadminded and intelligent people I have worked with during my career have not been academics who can often be quite blinkered ideologically, but business people.

Whether my consultancy work had a positive outcome is perhaps not for me to say. The Company sold its interests in Myanmar to Petronas for reasons having nothing to do with Myanmar as such and I regret their going. They were doing good work and were an influence for change and high standards which is now gone and cannot be replaced in the current atmosphere. As Western companies have left Myanmar for various reasons over the years, Western influence and Western expectations have lost out to largely Indian, Chinese and Malaysian interests. As a European who believes that the West should and could have a positive role to play in Myanmar, I think this is regrettable.

Nicholas Farrelly: Once, when I was browsing the exhibits at the Defence Services Museum in Rangoon, I came across a picture of you, as I recall, meeting with Burmese Information Minister Brig-Gen Kyaw Hsan. Over the years I understand that you have had many opportunities to meet with senior government officials. How would you characterise your interactions with the Burmese government and its senior members? Are these meetings courtesy calls or are they opportunities for serious and substantive discussion?

Professor Taylor: Varied. It depends on how well we have come to know each other, how much we trust each other, what the topics are to be discussed, how often we have met, etc. Certainly they have been more frequent since 1988. Certainly for me, after 1988 ministers and officials were much more open and accessible than before. Before 1988 I had had tea with the Minister of Education in 1978, coffee with the Chairman of the Council of People’s Attorneys in 1982 and drink in London with the Foreign Minister in I believe 1987 and that was it. After 1988, ministers wanted to talk with foreigners and if you were willing to talk to them, they wanted to talk. Many have had little opportunity to visit the West or meet with Europeans, so they seemed to be interested often in how we view the world and Myanmar in particular. But mainly they are chances for me to try to understand why the government does what it does without being drawn on my own views on such matters. Some of the meetings have proved fruitful, however, as with Mary Callahan getting access to the military archives for her thesis and eventual book. I was glad to have been able to have been of assistance.

Nicholas Farrelly: In January 2006 it was reported in Burma’s state-run media that you were in Burma to observe the plenary session of the National Convention. This session was part of a process that has been widely criticised by those who oppose the military government. As an “eyewitness” to proceedings, what can you tell us about the National Convention that is not widely known? Is it all an elaborate façade? Or is there more to it than that?

Professor Taylor: I have a great deal of curiosity about the institutions of government in Myanmar. The chance to see anything is always enlightening in some way. You never know who you will meet and what you might learn. A two hour visit to the National Convention did not provide huge insights but I felt I had at least seen it and met with some of the delegates, many of whom I had already met in their academic, political party or ceasefire group roles. I think the convention process is not just an elaborate façade. On certain bottom line issues, clearly the army is not going to give way through the convention process on its interests and its understanding of its historical role. However, on things which are not fundamental to the army leadership, and on which understandings can be reached, there has been some give and take. I think the convention has also been thought of by some as an educational experience. Myanmar has been divided and fragmented for years. Many of the Wa or Kachin or Shan or other border region leaders have never met with urban academics or lawyers or farmers or with each other. The convention gave these people a chance to discuss informally a number of things and that perhaps created some degree of community where one previously didn’t exist. I often criticised the process for being very slow, but seen in that light, the length of the process might have been part of the desired outcome in itself.

Nicholas Farrelly: In Justin Wintle’s 2007 biography, Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, he writes, “In due course Suu Kyi chose to follow [her husband] Michael [Aris’s] path and apply to SOAS, to write a doctoral thesis on Burmese political history. She wanted to write a full-scale, scholarly biography of her father, to augment the sketch she had already published. To her chagrin, her application was rejected. Her assessors, among them Professor [Robert] Taylor, doubted that her poor undergraduate degree in PPE [Politics, Philosophy and Economics] had given her sufficient grasp of political theory to become a college teacher – the endgame for most doctoral candidates. Some while later she found herself at a dinner party where Taylor was present. Such was Suu Kyi’s anger with him that she left the table and sat smouldering in a corner, leaving it to Dr Aris to continue the conversation as best he could”. Can you tell us more about this series of incidents from your perspective? Later, Aung San Suu Kyi was, of course, admitted to SOAS for doctoral study. Was she simply not good enough to be admitted on the first try? Or was the bigger concern that her proposed biographical research was too personal, too emotional?

Professor Taylor: I am afraid Justin Wintle’s book is badly flawed, not least at the points where my name occurs. He and I met on three occasions, each of which in a bar and he did not take notes or, to best of my knowledge, record our conversation. What he describes is a badly garbled account of reality. He has conflated a number of separate encounters and events. I first met with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. I went up some time in the first half of the 1980s to give a paper on Thein Pe Myint and his writings including his book that I translated as War Time Traveller. She was the discussant. Afterwards we had a cup of tea and I returned to London. A few years later she gave a paper, which was subsequently published in India, comparing the intellectual and political evolution of Indian and Burmese nationalism in a comparative perspective. She advanced a thesis about the incomplete nature of the Burmese nationalist experience in terms of its “modernisation” that I did not share. I explained my criticisms as the discussant to her paper. She did not like what I had to say and at a dinner which followed her seminar in honour of Sir Lesley Glass who had just published his memoirs on Burma, she refused to speak to me or, as I recall, anyone else all evening. Michael, her husband, seemed most embarrassed about it but I thought little of it.

Subsequently, she applied to do a PhD at SOAS in politics. As I recall, I was head of department at the time and she wanted to do a topic on Myanmar, so I would obviously have been one of her supervisors. SOAS’s Political Studies Department had a requirement at that time that if you didn’t have a first degree in politics or a cognate subject at 2.1 or better standard, you had first to do a Masters course and satisfy the requirements of that programme – three examined courses and a 10,000 word thesis – over one year prior to enrolling in the PhD programme. This she did not wish to do, perhaps because it would entail her travelling to London two or three days a week. Perhaps her family commitments would not permit her to do so.

Somewhat later, she enrolled in the PhD programme in Burmese literature in the South East Asian Language and Literature Department. They had different entrance requirements to those that prevailed in Politics.

Nicholas Farrelly: You make another appearance in the book. According to Wintle, “She [Aung San Suu Kyi] did not…take it kindly when Professor Robert Taylor, a Burma specialist, jokingly compared Aung San to Elvis Presley: both had made ‘a good career move by dying young’”. One gets the impression that, well before she became a figure of worldwide renown, you had a series of tense interactions with Aung San Suu Kyi. Is this a fair portrayal of the personal history? In your experience, was she an easy person to get along with?

Professor Taylor: While I may have made a not-so-wise-crack at some point about Elvis Presley and Bogyoke Aung San, I would not have been crass enough to say that to his daughter. I can explicitly remember telling Mr. Wintle that I did not say it to her. His book has a number of flaws of which those that concern me are only a small part.

I have met Daw Aung San Suu Kyi probably five times in my life. Most of the exchanges I would describe as professional and businesslike. Only after the seminar at which I criticised her argument did relations get rather difficult. I would say that we were never particularly chummy, but pleasant enough. She wrote a fair review of my book on the state in the TLS about which I could quibble but that is what scholars do – quibble. When I last saw her, on the day she was placed under house arrest in July 1989, she asked me to join her movement or words something to that effect. I explained to her that I did not think that her rather confrontational approach to the generals was likely to be successful and we disagreed. But clearly, with her house surrounded by troops and concerns about her supporters, she had many things on her mind that morning now more than 17 years ago.

Nicholas Farrelly: In a 2004 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, you said “I don’t think the NLD really has much of a future, and nor do I think Aung San Suu Kyi is likely to be released from house arrest in the near future. And the fact is, she may be held under house arrest for a very long time to come. And particularly after Khin Nyunt’s departure, even more so, I would argue that would be the case”. What are the prospects for the NLD now? In your view, does Aung Suu Kyi stand in the way of political change?

Professor Taylor: At the current time, early November 2007 while Professor Ibrahim Gambari is in Myanmar trying to develop some sort of modus vivendi between the SPDC and the NLD, it would look to me as if this might be one of the occasional opportunities that have occurred in the last 17 years when the NLD might be able to do a deal. However, for something to be achieved, the NLD and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will have to make concessions. She and her party’s negotiating position is now very weak, though this often does not seem so from the outside. If she were to accept the government’s conditions for talks between her and the Senior General, she would have to turn her back on her position of the past 19 years. That is asking a lot from someone in her position. If she were to do that, then she would have to be more willing to accept the government’s terms on other things like the road map and a role for the army in any future government largely on army terms. Will she? I don’t know. It is not that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is an obstacle to political change. You can just as easily argue that the Senior General is an obstacle to political change. Political change requires give and take, compromise, and eventual willingness to live and let live. All of those things are scarce commodities in Myanmar and have been for far too long.

Nicholas Farrelly: In another 2004 interview, this time with The Irrawaddy, you were asked for your reaction to the accusation that you are “an apologist for the SPDC’s policies”. You replied, “Well, I’ve never liked being accused of that, I’ve never felt it was fair, I’ve often thought people have their own motivations for these things. There’s a lot of emotion in politics, and I realize that there’s a lot of emotion, and I sometimes say things people don’t like because it doesn’t fit their own view of what they would like to see happen. When we don’t like to see things happen, we have to think about how we can make them not happen. Because I try to suggest that there might be another strategy besides sanctions and condemning the SPDC, that’s not welcome. That’s a politically incorrect, politically unpopular view these days”. Given the events of September and October 2007, what do you propose is a better strategy for dealing with the Burmese leadership? Is there any chance that the strategy you advocate will be implemented?

Professor Taylor: That was one of my more garbled utterances but I guess I know what I was trying to say. To paraphrase the Irish farmer when asked how to get to Dublin, “I won’t start from here.” Eighteen years of ever tightening ‘Western’ sanctions, and repeated condemnations, sinking to name calling and other childish stunts, have hardly created an atmosphere in which anyone in Naypyitaw expects much to come from doing things to please the outside world and change course. If it were possible, then one has to find a way to encourage structural change within the Myanmar economy and within the Myanmar governing institutions and ultimately within individuals. That would be a long-term strategy and our politicians and media do not like long-term strategies. I don’t think anyone would listen to my ideas. No one has done so for the past 18 years. I see no reason to think anything much has changed. Just as there is a shortage of trust and compromise within Myanmar, so also this is in the prevailing situation in terms of external relations. You cannot overcome years of history in a twinkling of an eye unless you are Charles Dickens or Walt Disney.

Nicholas Farrelly: Finally, it would be good to hear about your plans for the coming year. What will you be up to? Trips to Burma? New books? I’m sure many New Mandala readers would be delighted to learn about your upcoming activities.

Professor Taylor: It is starting to get cold in London and the days are drawing in. It is time to go to warmer and sunnier climes, so I am off to Yangon for four months at the end of November. I will be doing a bit of reading, some writing, some eating and some drinking. If I can find the will, I will try to complete a second edition of the now entitled State in Myanmar and I have one or two other projects on the go. I hope also to do a bit more teaching in Yangon. The devil makes work for idle hands.

Nicholas Farrelly: Professor Taylor, thank you for taking the time to answer New Mandala’s questions.

Professor Taylor: My pleasure.