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Cosmology and Ecology as Factors in Interpreting Early Thai Social Organization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

A. Thomas Kirsch
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Extract

Cosmology and ecology are two factors anthropologists have found valuable in investigating the social organization of historic and contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Although neither factor is explicitly prominent in the text examined here, I hope to show in my concluding remarks that both provide important contexts in which the text can be read. However, my initial task is to look at the “Judgments of King Mangrai” to see what clues it contains about early northern Thai social organization.

Type
Symposium on Societal Organization in Mainland Southeast Asia Prior to the Eighteenth Century
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 1984 , pp. 253 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1984

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References

1 Heine-Geldern, R. von, Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Data Paper # 18, 1956)Google Scholar is the classic statement on relationships between cosmology and the social order in Southeast Asia. Hanks, L.M., Rice and Man: Agricultural Ecology in Southeast Asia (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972) provides an ecological perspectiveGoogle Scholar.

2 Griswold, A.B. and Nagara, Prasert na, “Epigraphic and Historical Studies No. 17: The ‘Judgements of King Mang Ray’”, Journal of the Siam Society 65, part 1 (01 1977): 137–60.Google ScholarNagara, Prasert na, ed., Mangraisat (Bangkok: Cremation of Luang Hotrakittayanuphat, 1971), a rendering of the Lan Na Thai text into modern Thai was also consulted. Numerical references in parentheses refer to the numbers of the various articles found in the Griswold and Prasert translationGoogle Scholar.

3 David Wyatt, “Laws and Social Order in Early Thailand”, in this volume. Wyatt also refers to other versions of the Mangraisat that he sees as simpler in form and perhaps earlier than the version translated by Griswold and Prasert.

4 Griswold, A.B. and Nagara, Prasert na, “On Kingship and Society at Sukhodaya”, in Change and Persistence in Thai Society, ed. Skinner, G.W. and Kirsch, A.T. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 29–92Google Scholar.

5 The notion that Mangrai is speaking is meant rtjore metaphorically than literally. Still, the text says he decreed the laws and the various articles have a didactic quality that make it easy to imagine the king speaking.

6 Wolters, O.W., History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), pp. 101–104,Google Scholar highlights the importance of personal prowess in early Southeast Asian societies.

7 Prasert, Griswold and, “Epigraphic and Historical Notes No. 17”, p. 147, translate the Thai luk, Ian, lain, as “sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons”, though my rendering is more literalGoogle Scholar.

8 See discussion of the Mara Lords below.

9 Although article 17 indicates that monks and other Buddhist elements are present and valued in the kingdom, they are not formally included in the text as a part of its social order.

10 The change from nai to caw in these ranks suggests that the upper ranks were reserved for those having noble or lordly status.

11 In a personal communication, Uraivan Tan-Kim Yong reports that contemporary northern Thai farmers use an ad hoc ten person unit (la) in repairing irrigation works.

12 See Nimmanahaeminda, Kraisiri, “Irrigation Laws of King Mengrai”, in Ethnographic Notes on Northern Thailand, ed. Hanks, L., Hanks, J., and Sharp, L. (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Data Paper #58, 1965), pp. 1–5Google Scholar.

13 If this was the case then the decimal organization of Mangrai's kingdom might be viewed as one among several “structural poses” similar to those described in Gearing, F., “Structural Poses in 18th Century Cherokee Villages”, American Anthropologist 60 (12 1958): 1148–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Among those who might assert a counter claim to authority against Mangrai's are traditional Thai chiefs. See discussion of the Mara Lords below.

15 Wyatt, “Laws and Social Order in Early Thailand”, argues that a comparison of several versions of the Mangraisat suggests the social organization was complexifying vertically, from the top down. This process may also have operated from the bottom up as more ranked positions were created to recognize and reward achievements as the laws promise.

16 The absence of explicit cosmological references might be contrasted with the situation in Sukhothai where Prince (later King) Lithai composed the cosmological treatise known as the traiphiim, or “Three Worlds”, in 1345. See Coedes, G., “The Traibhumikatha: Buddhist Cosmology and Treaty on Ethics”, East and West 7 (1957): 349–52Google Scholar.

17 Article 4 refers to the difficulty of being born a human, the most explicit reference to the popular notion of multiple rebirth and, implicitly, of karma.

18 Wyatt, “Laws and Social Order in Early Thailand”, supposes a northern Thai society evolved from relatively rude, simple, democratic, semi-tribal village communities into more sophisticated, complex, hierarchical, bureaucratic societies. Mangrai's social order can be seen within such an evolutionar perspective. However, my speculation is that the pre-Buddhist Thai social order Mangrai is moving away from more closely approximated that of the “autocratic” Kachin chiefs described by Leach, E.R., Political Systems of Highland Burma (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), pp. 63-195Google Scholar.

19 Thus, Mangrai distinguishes between “offenses” (4,8), which may be redeemed, in contrast to “evil” (11,15, perhaps 13), which cannot.

20 Nimmanahaeminda, Kraisiri, “Put Vegetables into Baskets, People into Towns”, in Ethnographic Notes on Northern Thailand, ed. Hanks, , Hanks, , and Sharp, , pp. 6–9.Google Scholar See also , Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, pp. 1–61Google Scholar, for a characterization of ethnic and social complexity in the Shan Hills of Burma, perhaps evocative of the situation Mangrai faced.

21 Rabibhadana, Akin, The Organization of Thai Society in the Early Bangkok Period: 1782-1873 (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Data Paper #74, 1969)Google Scholar.