Man-on-the-Spotism, Territoriality, and the Materiality of the 19th-Century Thai State: The Case of Thai Forestry

• In Event: 348 - Section on Sociology of Culture Paper Session. The Materiality of Culture?

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from Max Weber’s enduring concept of the state as a “human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” three significant aspects of the concept—social organization, geopolitics and war, and culture of authority—have become the privileged focuses of scholarship on the state. This paper contends that another equally important aspect of the same concept, territory and territoriality, has surprisingly been overlooked by the same scholarship. This paper lays a foundation for systematic historical inquiry into the territorial aspect of the state. Informed by the cultural turn and the material turn in the social sciences, as exemplified by the works of a sociologist, Chandra Mukerji, it introduces an analytical framework for research on how the state is made, unmade, and remade through symbolic material practice and demonstration of territorial power. This framework is deployed to analyze how a formation of scientific forest management or forestry in Thailand in the late-19th century could be understood as a paradigmatic case of the materiality of modern states in which territoriality and the demonstration of state power occupy the central spotlight. The conclusion considers broad implications of this analysis for students of modern state formation and suggests the need for comparative historical analyses that historicize the naturalization of state territory.

Author

• Keerati Chenpitayaton, New School University