The Locality within the Nation State - the Nation State within Locality: Coordination and Connection between Local Consciousness and State Ambition in the Southern Cremation Volumes, 1910s-1940s

Abstract

The article studies how local Siamese cremation volumes represented the emotional bond that linked between nationalist and local consciousness over the period from the 1910s to the 1940s. Rather than studying cremation volumes focusing generally on their publications in Bangkok, it examines those printed in the southern region of Siam, which has still been received little attention. Employing historical analysis, it argues that the cremation volumes can be not merely biographical information of people, but, more significantly, intellectual, emotional, and dreams of hope, which were highly related to social, economy, political, and cultural contexts. More specifically, the cremation volumes in this period were printed for those who were among elites and then expand to commoners, for example, monks, lineage groups, and local bourgeois. The printed stories asserted in the cremation volumes were mostly comprised Buddhist practices, didactics, and manuals, local literature, myth, chronicle, as well as various sets of knowledge (e.g., astrology, ancient medicine or cabbala textbooks), all of which represented the relationship between the locality and the nation-state. Hence, the cremation volumes revealed the worldview perceived from their life determined by religion and nation, the changing sets of knowledge, and the common historical consciousness. The locality thus could be within the nation-state, and vice versa.