Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

234 CREATING THE THAI MIDDLE CLASS
DISCARDING THE MIDDLE CLASS
For the above period of Thai history, the academic literature recognises a middle
class conceptualised as a combination of independent entrepreneurs and whitecollar
bureaucrats. Yet this middle class is disaggregated, and then eliminated, in
academic literature describing the 1950s and 1960s. This was done in a two-part
process. In the 1950s, G.William Skinner (1957a, 1957b) analysed Chinese
communities in Thailand. He argued:
There are what appear to be two middle classes, or at least two major
middle-class groupings–the Chinese and the Thai. They overlap for the
most part in stratification, but the mean status of the Chinese middle class is
appreciably higher. The latter consists of most ethnic Chinese in occupations
of highest and mid-high status, i.e., occupations of relatively high income
which involve no manual labor… The Thai middle class consisting mainly of
those in mid-high status occupations (government employees, small
entrepreneurs, teachers, newspapermen, clerks, secretaries, and so on), is
strongly white collar in flavor.
(1957a:307—8)
Skinner here makes the primary division ethnicity, rather than class, and then ties
that ethnic division to ‘old’ and ‘white-collar’ middle classes. Thus we have an old
middle class of independent entrepreneurs, the Chinese, and a white-collar middle
class, the Thais. That the Chinese described by Skinner might more accurately be
called Sino-Thai becomes lost in the constant reference to ‘the Chinese’. That there
are entrepreneurs who are Thai, and bureaucrats who are Sino-Thai, is also
obscured. And the shared middle-class culture described in Jiraporn’s analysis of
theatre disappears from the analysis.
While Skinner had turned ‘the old middle class’ into ‘the Chinese’, it remained for
Fred Riggs (1966) and William Siffin (1966) to turn the (Thai) white-collar middle
class into the bureaucracy. Wrote Siffin (1966:134): ‘the emerging middle class was
a bureaucratic class’. Riggs and Siffin thus made the conceptual shift from whitecollar
middle class to ‘the (Thai) bureaucracy’. There remained but one minor
problem, that of the large number of Sino-Thai in the bureaucracy. This longignored
problem was addressed by Chai-anan Samudavanija (1991), who argued
that due to the socialisation process of the bureaucracy ‘a son of a Chinese
immigrant will remain Chinese if he chooses to be a businessman, but once he
enters the bureaucracy his ethnic identity disappears and he becomes a
kharatchakan or civil servant’ (1991:65).
The elimination of the middle class from academic discourse is central to the
analysis of David Wilson (1962), who explained the apparent stability of Thai society
by pointing to the absence of a middle class. He argued that: ‘the society of the
Thai is characterized by a gross two-class structure, …in which the classes are
physically as well as economically separated and differential status is satisfactorily