8 - Retrospect: Contextualizing Some Contentious Concepts

Summary

Ethnohistory unites ethnography and history. As ethnography, this book is the product of several decades of on-site interactive observation of local communities, is based on inductive methods of data gathering and analysis, and adopts a holistic, multifaceted approach to an account of Old Bangkok's spatial, political, and social order. As history, it is retrospective in outlook, takes a narrative form, and relies on a diversity of time-worn data sources, including unstructured oral histories, surviving primary-source documentation, and the scattered physical remnants of the Old Bangkok cityscape. In both its ethnographic and historical guises, the book seeks to place its subject in broad perspective by ranging somewhat more widely, now and again, across space and time than the urban landscape of Old Bangkok per se.

Beyond ethnography, the book ventures into the rather more rarified reaches of ethnology. As interpretation naturally follows observation, so is ethnology the child of ethnography. While ethnography is conventionally defined as rigorously objective single-society observation, description, and explication, ethnology delves more profoundly and expansively into the mysteries of the cultural landscape “to reconstitute the deeper structures out of which [the surface patterns] are built, and to classify those structures, once reconstituted, into an analytical scheme” (Geertz 1973, p. 351). Thus, ethnographic research is by inclination empirically small-scale and expository, whereas ethnology tends to take on conceptually large-scale and interpretive dimensions, emphasizing generalization, abstraction, and comparative analysis, exploring broad cross-cultural themes and theories.

The ethnography–ethnology distinction is useful here as an opportunity to explore briefly several ethnological themes that infuse the book' ethnographic discussion: Ethnicity, a means of identifying and differentiating socio-cultural groups; feudalism, the political form of premodern, ethnically diverse, emerging states; the plural society, which historically served as the organizational mode of Southeast Asia's port-cities; and the mandala, the spatial template upon which that world region's traditional political systems, and particularly its urban social orders, were imprinted. Each of those themes is itself a contentious concept, subject to long-standing scholarly, ideologically tinted debate. Yet, their conceptual plausibility is enhanced by the fact that they are closely linked, and mutually reinforcing. Jointly, they hold considerable explanatory power.