Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to students who are interested in philosophy, culture, anthropology, history, education, and related subjects.

Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology is shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library.

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian philosopher who wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He was imprisoned during a Fascist dictatorship, and notebooks which he kept in prison have been published. They have proven very influential in 20th century political theory. Gramsci was inspired by such writers from the past as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel and Benedetto Croce. The TU Library owns several books by and about these thinkers. Gramsci’s notebooks discuss many different topics, including Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, civil society, folklore, religion and high and popular culture.

The English critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks was edited by Professor Joseph A. Buttigieg, a Maltese-American literary scholar and translator who was a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Professor Buttigieg , who died in 2019, was the father of Pete Buttigieg, the American politician who is a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election.

The TU Library owns a copy of this three volume edition. It is shelved in the General Stacks of the Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit campus.

Among the many ideas discussed by Gramsci was the need for popular workers’ education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class. Some celebrated quotes from the writings of Gramsci follow:

• History teaches, but it has no pupils.

Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh University Student Publications.

• The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.

Cited in Davidson’s (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press., p. 77.

• I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Letter from Prison (19 December 1929); also attributed to Romain Rolland.

• All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

• History is at once freedom and necessity.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

Things Gramsci did not write

Because Gramsci was widely influential philosopher, a number of things he did not write are sometimes quoted as if they were said or written by him. These include:

• To tell the truth is revolutionary.

The first number of L’Ordine Nuovo, edited by Gramsci, appeared in 1921 with this motto of Ferdinand Lassalle on the first page. It is often misattributed to Gramsci.

• The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek.

The TU Library has several books by and about Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher who is a researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts and International director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London as well as Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea.

Thailand and educational mobility

Gramsci’s ideas about educating workers are related to the subject of social mobility through education.

In January 2016, a conference paper was delivered at the Hawaii University International Conference of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education, at Honolulu.

Higher Education and Social Mobility Among Thai Peasants was written by Ajarn Siroj Sorajjakool, President of Asia Pacific International University.

Ajarn Siroj’s abstract reads:

This paper explores the role of higher education in relation to social mobility among Thai peasants in the northern and northeastern regions of Thailand. The primary question raised are, how has higher education in Thailand impacted the lives of local farmers in relation to economic and social standing within the community, what are the current situation of Thai farmers and how do farmers view higher education. This research employs historical texts, documents, policies and qualitative data based on interviews with 70 farmers in the northern and northeastern parts of Thailand. It shows while Thailand has done much to promote development through higher education, farmers remain poor and uneducated for the most part. Interestingly, farmers do not see higher education as the tool that can improve their life circumstances but as a mean to help integrate their children into the unavoidable expansion of the industrial world.

Further in-depth investigations of education and social mobility in the Kingdom include a paper from June 2018, Thailand’s Vocational Training and Upward Mobility: Impact Heterogeneity and Policy Implications.

It was co-authored by Patima Chongcharoentanawat, a PhD candidate in Economics and Governance at UNU-MERIT, Maastricht University, the Netherlands.

Its abstract is as follows:

This paper provides the first impact evaluation of vocational training in Thailand using various treatment effect methods with unique longitudinal survey data, covering seven years, to evaluate the impact of vocational training on economic and social mobility in the short, medium and long term. We find that vocational training fails to move participants upward both in terms of earning and employment. However, training participation is found to increase expenditures in the short and medium term but these positive impacts vanish when we strictly confine counterfactuals or allow for the endogeneity of the decision to attend the program. We also examine the heterogeneity of effects with respect to individual and program characteristics to answer the questions for whom the training works and which type of training works best. The results suggest that women, rural residents, youth (aged 15-24) and elderly (aged 60 and above), low-educated workers, and economically inactive people, benefit less from the program. With regard to heterogeneity by type of training, we find that computer training courses, training offered by private institutions and a cooperation of government and private agencies, and training financed by employers are associated with better outcomes.

In September 2019, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) hosted an Inclusion, Mobility, and Multilingual Education Conference in Bangkok. Practitioners, non-governmental organization (NGO) staff, researchers, and government representatives studied issues of language, inclusion, and mobility in education and development. One goal was to raise awareness of language issues affecting achievement of Sustainable Development Goals globally in the context of global mobility. As the conference website noted:

The Conference aimed to:

• Explore how an open and inclusive multilingual approach, especially in the context of education and wider society, can maximise outcomes and well-being for different groups and for an increasingly mobile population;
• Create linkages between policy, practice and research on how multilingual approaches can be used to advance (civic) participation, access, and learning for children and adults from marginalised and mobile communities;
• Investigate the role of, and balance between, different languages – local, national, and international – in the context of diverse and mobile populations, and social and educational practice;
• Identify policy priorities for advancing multilingual approaches to social and educational policy-making, learning and development;
• Raise awareness among participants in key thematic areas.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)