Picturing "Siwilai": Representations of Ethnic Difference in Siamese Elite Photography of the Fifth Reign (1868-1910)

• In Event: Southeast Asian Elite Photographies in an Era of Colonial Anxiety

Abstract

Scholars of Asian art and history have undertaken a critical examination of how photography has historically been deployed by various Western colonial powers to reinforce a “hierarchy of
civilizations” with themselves at the top. Thailand’s royal elites have long been known for their adoption of “modern” techniques to represent their civilization, such as mapping (Thongchai 1999),collecting and photography (Peleggi 2002). As my paper will discuss, photography could also be enlisted in non-colonial contexts to create notions of ethnic difference that replicated and reinforced
the ethnic power hierarchy promoted by Western colonizers – even in countries which were never
formally colonized, such as Siam (today Thailand).
In this paper, I explain how colonial anxieties were expressed in Siam’s elite photography, even
while Siam remained uncolonized by Western powers. As a mode of elaborating a localized notion of civilization called “siwilai,” photography visually conveyed how the Siamese adapted Western colonial-style ethnic hierarchy to the local context. I explore how Siam’s elite photographers created images of court figures who represented ethnic “Other-ness” to construct siwilai in Siam. As case studies, I will focus on two particular figures, including “Ngo Ba,” a young boy of the Semang tribe adopted by King Chulalongkorn and raised within the court, and Princess Dara Rasami, an ethnically Lao consort who practiced distinct customs of dress, eating and deportment. Photographic images of both these figures, I will argue, played an important part in embodying the ethnic hierarchy of Siamese siwilai and complicating our notions of colonial photographies.

Author

• Leslie A. Woodhouse, University of San Francisco