Thammasat University students interested in ASEAN studies, Thai history, political science, comparative religion, Buddhism, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 25 August Zoom webinar, Amnat and Barami.
The speaker will be Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, former rector of Thammasat University.
TU students may participate in the lecture, which will be given at Ajarn Charnvit’s alma mater of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the United States of America, on Thursday, 25 August 2022 at 11:30pm Bangkok time.
The event is cosponsored by the Southeast Asia Program and Department of History of Cornell University.
For further information or with any questions, students are invited to write to seapgatty@cornell.edu.
To register for the event, just go to this link:
https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMtc-yvrjIpHNZUWxsPBs-smOwbi3hW8Rf6
On the concept of barami, in a review of The Way Thais Lead: Face as Social Capital by Larry S. Persons, a book in the collection of the TU Library, among other information about barami, The Mekong Review explained,
Barami accrued over time through selfless behavior and numerous acts of generosity and kindness. By definition, barami implies a disinterest in reward or recognition, yet, while leaders with barami have no interest in face, they have the capacity to attract enormous and long-lasting reserves of it. Writes Persons, “This approach to face gain is winsome in the eyes of followers. They respond with true devotion and an inside-out motivation to comply and meet the needs of the leader. They grant him or her generous amounts of face in increasing measure.”
Of all the terms in this book, the one most often used to explain the widespread and enduring allure of King Bhumibol is barami. Throughout his reign and in the immediate aftermath of his death, images projected online and on television show him as a physical embodiment of barami leadership. He is often depicted in casual dress, working without fanfare on development projects he has instigated in the countryside: striding across paddy fields, examining maps in flooded areas and consulting with farmers. The most popular images show the king leaning down towards a subject who is either kneeling at his feet or looking up at him with adoration. In Thailand’s fiercely hierarchical landscape, the appeal of such images is perhaps best elucidated by the Thai proverb, “When the sky is adjacent to the earth, the earth supports the sky.” As a district police chief tells Persons, “If the sky successfully stoops down — in other words, if that leader comes down and spends time with the lowest levels of society — those common people will ascribe virtuous benevolence and barami to him for the rest of their lives, wholeheartedly.”
But this analysis raises a fundamental conundrum: although barami is upheld as the ultimate form of Thai leadership, it is, in actuality, seldom practised. Persons has no satisfying explanation for this discrepancy. He writes, “In Thai leadership circles far and wide, this selfless approach is very much the road less travelled. It is risky because it is less competitive. At times, virtuous leaders simply cannot keep pace with the beguiling manoeuvres of the power-hungry.” The implication is that, in the cutthroat world of Thai leadership, it is hard if not impossible for good men to thrive. Persons and some of his interviewees concede that responsibility for this does not rest with leaders alone and must also be shared by their followers, who, while admiring the giddy heights of barami, are willing to settle for far less. Persons himself settles on the hope that studies such as his — which shed more light on methods of obtaining and wielding power in Thailand — will filter back into the body politic to generate more transparency, dialogue and, ultimately, demand for virtue and accountability in leaders.
The book’s reviewer was Emma Larkin, a pseudonymous American novelist and journalist working in Thailand and Myanmar.
On the concept of amnat, an article from 1991 in Southeast Asian Studies by Professor Yoshifumi Tamada of Kyoto University, whose special areas of expertise are Thai studies and comparative politics, argued:
Bureaucratic polity theorists, especially Thai scholars, seem to make too much of the institutional or formal aspects of Thai politics, perhaps because they overestimate the idea of amnat, which usually means power. However amnat also means authority which derives from any official position or is sanctioned by law. More important is that the Thai usually use this word without clearly discriminating between power and legal authority. They often think of power as something derived from official authority. The word of “power” invokes among the Thai the image of those who hold an official position and are given a certain authority by law. Thus, for the Thai, a man of power is man of amnat. Government officials (civil bureaucrats and military officers) head the ranking, followed by politicians (cabinet ministers, members of parliament, provincial assemblymen, and municipal councilors), with kamnan (commune chiefs) and village headmen in the third place. On the other hand, the power which a man in authority exerts beyond his authority or which a man without an official position exerts is called itthiphon rather than amnat. For example, the top military brass often intervene in politics, even under a civilian government. Insofar as their intervention is not based on law, they use itthiphon rather than amnat. A businessman who gives financial support to a political party or military leader in order to influence the decision-making of the government is not a phu-mi-amnat (a man of amnat) but a phu-miitthiphon (a man of itthiphon) because he has no official position. Power has a strong connotation of amnat or legal authority. While it is not easy to discriminate strictly between amnat and itthiphon, they are not identical. In a sense, amnat is formal power and itthiphon is informal power. This distinction has implications for the study of Thai politics. It must be quite easy for the Thai to accept the bureaucratic polity theory just because, according to Thai idea of amnat, bureaucrats have power a priori. The simple dichotomy of the model that government officials are politically powerful and the.nonofficial are powerless coincides with the Thai conception of power. A man with an official position has amnat but a man with no position can have only itthiphon.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)