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

248 CREATING THE THAI MIDDLE CLASS
parliamentary rule. By 1992, the perceived enemies of democracy were the military
and the bureaucracy, which had formerly been getting the credit.
7 Wilson’s work appeared before that of Riggs and Siffin, indicating that the pieces
were already in place for this elimination of the middle class by the early 1960s.
Wilson was perhaps thinking of Thai society as a whole, and meant that the
rural area so dominated the urban area that the urban middle class was insignificant.
Riggs and Siffin argued that the relevant polity was the bureaucracy, so the rural
areas could be safely ignored.
8 This elimination of the middle class from academic discourse during the 1950s and
1960s occurs in both the writings of the time and retrospective writings. Thompson
(1941) writes of the middle class, and Udom (1950, cited in Reynolds and Lysa 1938:
81—2) of the petty capitalist class. Blanchard (1957:411—14) claims that some 70 per
cent of the population of Bangkok was ‘middle-class’, before quoting Skinner almost
verbatim. Ten years later there were only ‘the Chinese’ and ‘the bureaucracy’, and
references to the middle class disappeared. Retrospective writings are remarkably
similar with, for example, Jiraporn (1992) discovering a middle class at the turn of the
century, while other writers claim that the development of the middle class took place
in the 1960s (see below). This leads to the odd situation in Keyes (1989), where the
‘new middle class’ is credited with the 1932 event (p. 63), yet just 14 pages later (p. 77)
Keyes discusses ‘the rise of a middle class’ during the Sarit era (beginning in 1957).
This may also reflect a tendency to see the middle class not as a class but as a
generation (run) as Thirayut (1994) does.
9 See Reynolds and Hong (1983) and the special issue of Pajarayasan, 8 (June-July
1981).
10 Contrast this to what is surely a more accurate description of the non-student
participants in the 1973 uprising: ‘government servants, shopkeepers, samlor drivers,
workers, and the dispossessed of the city’ (Flood 1975:61).
11 Somkiat gained considerable popularity in the 1980s. In 1992, he sided with the
military government against the uprising and lost his popularity among the
demonstrators.
12 The success of advertising in shaping opinion has been aptly described by Dr
Boonrak Boonyaketmala, Dean of the Faculty of Journalism and Mass
Communications at Thammasat University: ‘After TV our society has turned into an
oral society, whereby a common culture is born. Consumerism is the common
denominator, everyone feels he has to consume. Look, farmers now are wearing
jeans and University of Chicago T-shirts. They see that in television [sic]. People now
have similar frames of reference, the same views, the same tastes’ (Bangkok Post, 4
August 1989:7).
13 Given especially the ethnicising of the middle class prior to 1973, it may have been
necessary to de-emphasise these differences in order to construct a class
consciousness. With the middle class constructed, it then becomes possible to break
it down by gender and ethnicity. One fascinating example of the way that ethnicity,
gender and the middle class come together, is the rise of the cult of the goddess Kuan
Yin (see Bangkok Post, 9 January 1995:31f.). For an example of breaking the middle
class back down ethnically, see Kasian (1994).
14 This survey is discussed in Sungsidh and Pasuk (1993b: passim. According to the
survey some 52 per cent of demonstrators claimed an income of over 10,000 baht (US
$400). This statistic is cited regularly. I have yet to see anyone write that some 48 per