Thongchai Winichakul

Bio: Thongchai Winichakul is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 1056 citations.

Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation

Abstract: This study of nationhood explores the 19th-century confrontation of ideas that transformed the kingdom of Siam into the modern conception of a nation. Siam Mapped challenges much that has been written on Thai history because it demonstrates that the physical and political definition of Thailand on which other works are based is anachronistic.

New frontiers of land control: Introduction

Abstract: Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this col...

Land, terrain, territory

Abstract: This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the...

African modes of self-writing

Abstract: L’auteur essaie de demontrer qu’il n’existe pas d’identite africaine que l’on peut designer par un seul terme ou ranger sous une seule rubrique. L’identite africaine n’existe que comme substance. Elle se constitue, a travers une serie de pratiques, notamment de pratiques de pouvoir et du soi, ce que Michel Foucault, appelle les jeux de verite, Ni les formes de cette identite, ni ses idiomes ne sont toujours semblables a eux meme. Ces formes sont mobiles, reversibles et instables. Par consequent, elles ne peuvent etre reduites a un ordre purement biologique base sur le sang, la race, ou la geographie. Elles ne peuvent non plus etre reduites a la tradition, dans la mesure ou celle-ci est constamment reinventee.

The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

Abstract: List of Maps Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction Culture, Power, (Pre)modernity The Cosmopolitan in Theory and Practice The Vernacular in Theory and Practice Theory, Metatheory, Practice, Metapractice PART 1. THE SANSKRIT COSMOPOLIS Chapter 1. The Language of the Gods Enters the World 1.1 Precosmopolitan Sanskrit: Monopolization and Ritualization 1.2 From Resistance to Appropriation 1.3. Expanding the Prestige Economy of Sanskrit Chapter 2. Literature and the Cosmopolitan Language of Literature 2.1. From Liturgy to Literature 2.2. Literary Language as a Closed Set 2.3. The Final Theory of Literary Language: Bhoja's Poetics Chapter 3. The World Conquest and Regime of the Cosmopolitan Style 3.1. Inscribing Political Will in Sanskrit 3.2. The Semantics of Inscriptional Discourse: The Poetics of Power, Malava, 1141 3.3. The Pragmatics of Inscriptional Discourse: Making History, Kalyana, 1008 Chapter 4. Sanskrit Culture as Courtly Practice 4.1. Grammatical and Political Correctness: The Politics of Grammar 4.2. Grammatical and Political Correctness: Grammar Envy 4.3. Literature and Kingly Virtuosity Chapter 5. The Map of Sanskrit Knowledge and the Discourse on the Ways of Literature 5.1. The Geocultural Matrix of Sanskrit Knowledge 5.2. Poetry Man, Poetics Woman, and the Birth-Space of Literature 5.3. The Ways of Literature: Tradition, Method, and Stylistic Regions Chapter 6. Political Formations and Cultural Ethos 6.1. Production and Reproduction of Epic Space 6.2. Power and Culture in a Cosmos Chapter 7. A European Countercosmopolis 7.1. Latinitas 7.2. Imperium Romanum PART 2. THE VERNACULAR MILLENIUM Chapter 8. Beginnings, Textualization, Superposition 8.1. Literary Newness Enters the World 8.2. From Language to Text 8.3. There Is No Parthenogenesis in Culture Chapter 9. Creating a Regional World: The Case of Kannada 9.1. Vernacularization and Political Inscription 9.2. The Way of the King of Poets and the Places of Poetry 9.3. Localizing the Universal Political: Pampa Bharatam 9.4. A New Philology: From Norm-Bound Practice to Practice-Bound Norm Chapter 10. Vernacular Poetries and Polities in Southern Asia 10.1. The Cosmopolitan Vernacularization of South and Southeast Asia 10.2. Region and Reason 10.3. Vernacular Polities 10.4. Religion and Vernacularization Chapter 11. Europe Vernacularized 11.1. Literacy and Literature 11.2. Vernacular Anxiety 11.3. A New Cultural Politics Chapter 12. Comparative and Connective Vernacularization 12.1. European Particularism and Indian Difference 12.2. A Hard History of the Vernacular Millennium PART 3. THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CULTURE AND POWER Chapter 13. Actually Existing Theory and Its Discontents 13.1. Natural Histories of Culture-Power 13.2. Primordialism, Linguism, Ethnicity, and Other Unwarranted Generalizations 13.3. Legitimation, Ideology, and Related Functionalisms Chapter 14. Indigenism and Other Culture-Power Concepts of Modernity 14.1. Civilizationalism, or Indigenism with Too Little History 14.2. Nationalism, or Indigenism with Too Much History Epilogue. From Cosmopolitan-or-Vernacular to Cosmopolitan-and-Vernacular Appendix A A.1 Bhoja's Theory of Literary Language (from the Srngaraprakasa) A. 2 Bhoja's Theory of Ornamentation (from the Sarasvatikanthabharana) A.3 Sripala's Bilpank Prasasti of King Jayasimha Siddharaja A.4 The Origins of Hemacandra's Grammar (from Prabhacandra's Prabhavakacarita) A.5 The Invention of Kavya (from Rjaekhara's Kavyamimamsa) Appendix B B.1 Approximate Dates of Principal Dynasties B.2 Names of Important Peoples and Places with Their Approximate Modern Equivalents or Locations Publication History Bibliography Index

Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand

Abstract: How have national and state governments the world over come to “own” huge expanses of territory under the rubric of “national forest,” “national parks,” or “wastelands”? The two contradictory statements in the above epigraph illustrate that not all colonial administrators agreed that forests should be taken away from local people and “protected” by the state. The assumption of state authority over forests is based on a relatively recent convergence of historical circumstances. These circumstances have enabled certain state authorities to supersede the rights, claims, and practices of people resident in what the world now calls “forests.”