Siam mapped thongchai winichakul siam
Siam mapped thongchai winichakul siam city.
Thongchai Winichakul.
Siam mapped thongchai winichakul siam
Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.
In Thongchai Winichakul’s innovative mongraph Siam Mapped, the discourse of geography and the modern map directly produce the political territoriality, values, practices, and geobody that would later become the modern Thai nation.
Thongchai demonstrates how indigenous concepts of space are displaced by modern geographic and mapping science. At the same time, local and indigenous concepts of space should not be evaluated through Western understandings of ‘scientific merit’ but understood to serve different purposes (such as traiphum cosmology).
The nation’s ‘geo-body’—its territory, practices, values—are discursively created through a two-way positive and negative identification.
Thongchai argues that Siam actively tried to carve out a “we-self” space in light of European expansion and neighboring polities. “The creation of otherness, the enemy in particular,