C ulture (watanatham) and heritage (moradok) are w ords w hich have definitely acquired great currency in Thailand during the past fifteen years or so. Part of this popularity is certainly due to the resiliency of these two w ords, a resiliency which, in Thailand as everyw here else, turns out to be v ery u sefu l for d ig n ify in g the m ost d isp a rate featu res. Still, this developm ent in the language signals also a specific phenom enon in Thai society: the appearance of a generalised consciousness of national heritage, w hich is now in cu lcated even in the y o u n g est stu d e n ts. C ertainly, education about one's cultural patrim ony is a principle which can hardly be questioned. H ow ever, the m agnitude of the national m obilisation around the them e of cultural heritage in Thailand suggested a critical scrutiny.
This study has looked at the particular case of Thai heritage through a w ider critical lens w hich has magnified that aspect of every cultural heritage usually concealed by its enshrinem ent amongst the m ost valued assets of a country and ultim ately, by virtue of the concept of "world heritage," of the w hole of m ankind. This concealed aspect is the political relevance of the cultural heritage of a nation, and its specific association w ith the foundation m yth$ legitim ising every polity. The contents of p o litical m yths are p resen ted , just like those of the m yths studied by an th ro p o lo g ists and classicists, as an in d isp u ta b le trad itio n w hich asserts reliab ility and com m ands respect. Their characteristic form is th at of the nationali&T narrative, a m ythology consisting of selected historical tales relating to a
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heroic past, which comes to be perceived by the national com m unity as its collective past.
D espite these prem ises, a political m yth can be challenged and, eventually, replaced. The occasion for this is a crisis of legitim acy of the political o rd er or, in G ram scian terms, a crisis of hegem ony of the ruling bloc. The reso lu tio n of a legitim acy crisis ach iev ed th ro u g h the estab lish m en t of a new political system necessarily brin g s about the replacem ent of the foundation m yth of the obsolete polity w ith a m yth legitim ising the new order. The solution of the crisis of legitim acy w hich occurred in Thailand in the early 1970s was not, how ever, a change in the political set-up, b u t the reim position of the ancien regime. Such a political restoration required nonetheless a regeneration of the foundation m yth of the polity, a "face-lift" enabling that m yth to be still significant after the rejection by a p art of the Thai population of the sym bols and the criteria of legitim ation of the m ilitary-bureaucratic state-system.
A lthough violent repression and coercion - w hich the Thai ruling elite has never hesitated to use ruthlessly to defend its ow n position - can result in apparent order, even the generals who w ere once m ore in pow er from 1977 understood that, in order to achieve the more substantial political pacification required by the gravity of that crisis, a new consensus w as necessary. And there is no stronger consensus than that prem ised upon a com m unity of history and destiny which identifies people as m em bers of the sam e polity and m akes them participants in the m yth of its foundation. Consequently, Thai state cultural policy im plem ented thereafter has fostered by every m eans the individual's identification w ith the nation, its glorious past and its prom ising future. Now, whilst no tim e-m achine has yet been
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invented to m aterialise a peoples’ future in front of them , heritage does offer this possibility with regard to the past.
The salvaging of ruins which, with few exceptions, had been left for centuries at the mercy of the passing of time, has become in the second half of the 1970s the focus of governm ent policy, international sponsorship, and national pride. The bureaucratisation of heritage, through the registration of ancient cities as national properties, has been the first step tow ards this aim. The im plem entation of effective restoration and conservation plans, w hich h ad previously proven to be problem atic, has n atu rally been the essential pillar of the new heritage policy, as confirm ed by the im portance attached to the "historical parks" projects. In this regard, this essay has show n the extent to which, for better or for worse, the Fine Arts D epartm ent has influenced the final outcom e. The selection of w hich heritage to recuperate and give centrality to at the national level has un d erp in n ed the w hole o p eratio n . The resto ratio n of national h eritag e has th u s been p erhaps the least im m ediately evident am ongst the several forms taken by nationalist rhetoric in the late 1970s and 1980s to propagate the m yth which form ed the ideological basis for another fifteen years of conservative order, until the retu rn of the Thai people to the front-stage of politics w ith the dem onstrations of April-M ay 1992.
As an exercise in "de-mythification," I have tried to gloss the sub-text of the nationalist narrative told by means of those heritage sites w hich I have defined as topoi, m on u m en ts chosen to sym bolise the stages of d ev elo p m en t of the Thai nation-state according to the official historical perspective. It will probably be clear to the reader that this exercise has focused alm ost exclusively on the implications of the "visual transm ission" of nationalist discourse through heritage, while neglecting the aspects, and
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the possible consequences, of the "reception" and decodification of its messages. However, the data and inferences presented allow us to conclude that, at least in quantitative term s, heritage is an im portant m edium to shape knowledge and ideas about the past in contem porary Thai society.
Because of the institutionalisation of Thai national heritage as the response of the dom inant elite to the threat to its hegem ony, the lack of a m onum ent or m em orial gravestone to honour the m artyrs of October 1973 and O ctober 1976, and those so rapidly forgotten of May 1992, is not su rp risin g . I had looked in vain for any possible evidence for such a m onum ent, or at least a project for it, w hen finally, in an issue of the
Bangkok Post about the tw entieth anniversary of the 1973 student uprising, I read a revealing story w ritten by a reporter about a m onum ent which was never built (M cDonhell 1993). After the u p risin g of O ctober 1973, the N ational Student Council of Thailand, which had been the m ain prom oter of the popular protest, collected four million Baht for the construction of a m o n u m e n t c o m m e m o ra tin g the victim s of th e rio t. The Sanya governm ent (1973-74) prom ised to pay half the cost, and a piece of land on the corner of R atchadam noen Avenue and Tanao Road, w ith the rem ains of a governm ent building burned dow n during the dem onstrations, was set aside for that aim. After the coup of October 6, 1976, eight million Baht were reportedly confiscated from the student organisations. In 1989, a tem porary m o n u m en t w as erected on the sp o t originally reserv ed to b u ild the m em orial and which is now occupied by lottery kiosks. The two-m eter high m onum ent, m ade of cem ent and portraying five youths intertw ined around a flag, was realised by the artist as an unfinished piece of w ork to rem ind the p eo p le of the occultation of the m oney they d o n ated to b u ild a real m o n u m e n t.
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It is thus that the young Thais killed in their hom ecountry in the nam e of national security do not yet have a place bearing witness to their sacrifice, w here the loss of their lives can be publicly honoured and adm ired as the highest exam ple of true patriotism . Yet the absence of such a m onum ent is as eloquent as a presence. It clearly show s how m uch Thai civil society has still to endure in order to transform the painful m em ory of those events into the foundation m yth of a new, m ore legitim ate, political o rd e r, in w hich p ro g ressiv e th o u g h t and qu est for change can be internalised as p art of the collective civic patrim ony. At sem inars and conferences about the future directions in Thai politics, there are alw ays some speakers asserting the irreversibility of the process of dem ocratisation, and others w arning about the threat of the resurgence of authoritarianism . Perhaps the day that the m onum ent to the victims of repression is built will be the day the G ordian knot of Thai politics will have been undone forever.
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