[Anthropgrad] Wednesday seminar by Michael Herzfeld, 15 Ausgust

[Alan Rumsey]

Wednesday seminar for August 15:

Becoming Historical: Strategic Identity and Heritage in a Bangkok Microcosm
By Michael Herzfeld, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University

The speaker will describe his ethnographic research at Pom Mahakan, a 
small community in the heart of the Krung Rattanakosin historic 
reconstruction project in metropolitan Bangkok.  Starting from the 
residents' struggle against eviction, he will argue that state and 
municipal pressures to conform to specific historical models have helped 
the community to coalesce in ways than run counter to the bureaucrats' 
predictions and desires.  This small community has in fact become a 
microcosm that reflects some of the major preoccupations and fault-lines 
of modern Thai politics at the national level, and the speaker's close 
involvement in the residents' struggle against eviction has made it 
possible to understand some of the residents' doubts and fears about the 
road taken as well as the difficulties they are likely to face in the 
future.  The speaker will also draw on his experience of gentrification 
and historic recontruction projects in southern Europe in order to 
develop a more general, theoretical critique of the notion of "heritage."

Inquiries to Alan Rumsey
alan.rumsey at anu.edu.au