Swearer, Donald K.

English

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 Swarthmore College
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Religion Faculty Works 
 
 
4-1-1987 
 
Review Of "A Peasant Community In 
Changing Thailand" By S. Piker 
 
Donald K. Swearer 
Swarthmore College, dsweare1@swarthmore.edu  
 
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 Part of the Religion Commons 
 
 
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Donald K. Swearer. (1987). "Review Of "A Peasant Community In Changing Thailand" By S. Piker". 
Journal Of The American Oriental Society. Volume 107, Issue 2. 373-374. 
http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-religion/138 
 
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Review
Reviewed Work(s): A Peasant Community in Changing Thailand by Steven Piker
Review by: Donald K. Swearer
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1987), pp.
373-374
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602876
Accessed: 25-08-2017 17:59 UTC
 
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 Reviews of Books 373
 ennobled and the first Indian Governor of a province. Jinnah
 rose even higher in one lifetime than Lord Sinha, but then
 his starting point in the imperial life cycle came close to a
 century after the Sinhas of Raipur first began to meet the
 textile labor needs of the East India Company. Among the
 first prey of these climbing Sinhas was the local Muslim Raja
 whose zemindari they took over for unpaid debts. N. K.
 Bose's Modern India is relevant to this discussion between
 pages 20-30.
 MORRIS DEMBO
 PHILADELPHIA
 A Peasant Community in Changing Thailand. By STEVEN
 PIKER. Pp. 157 + ix (Anthropological Research Papers
 No. 30). Tempe, Arizona: ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY.
 1983.
 During the past forty years Thailand, of all the countries
 of Southeast Asia, has been the most studied by American
 Anthropologists. The great majority have been trained at
 Cornell, attracted by the Cornell-Thailand project established
 under the leadership of Lauriston Sharp and Lucien
 M. Hanks. The Cornell-Thailand Project bibliography of
 nearly 500 items includes more than fifty doctoral disserta-
 tions. To be sure, Anthropological studies of Thai society
 and culture have not been the exclusive domain of the
 Cornell-Thailand project, however. Stanley J. Tambiah, for
 example, trained under Edmund Leach at Cambridge, has
 made a major contribution to this field. Steven Piker of
 Swarthmore College, although a student of Melford Spiro at
 the University of Washington (now at the University of
 California, Santa Cruz), has been so highly regarded by the
 Cornell "mafia" that his work has been included in the
 festschrift for Lauriston Sharp ("The Post-Peasant Village in
 Central Plain Thai Society," in Change and Persistence in
 Thai Society, eds. G. W. Skinner and A. T. Kirsch, 1975),
 and papers in honor of Lucien Hanks read at the 1986
 Association of Asian Studies meeting. Piker's fieldwork in the
 village of Banoi, Ayuthaya Province, Thailand, in the 1960's
 produced several highly regarded articles, e.g., "Sources of
 Stability and Instability in Rural Thai Society, Journal of
 Asian Studies, 1968"; "Friendship to the Death in Rural
 Thai Society, Human Organization, 1968"), but has only
 now been published as a monograph with the appearance of
 A Peasant Community in Changing Thailand.
 Piker's enthnographic study of a village in the Central
 plains of Thailand constitutes his most substantive contribu-
 tion to the anthropological study of Thai society. Although
 the fieldwork on which this study is based was done 20 years
 ago, Piker's monograph on the demography, economy, and
 social organization of Banoi provides not a time-bound
 picture of a rural Thai community, but a descriptive analysis
 of a village in transition under the impact of the social,
 political and economic changes shaping Thailand into a
 nation-state within a modern global economy. Piker's "micro"
 or village study, therefore, can be seen as an instance of a
 post-peasant society, but a unique instance, to be sure. While
 Piker sees general characteristics of post-peasant societies, he
 also argues for the unique history and transformations of a
 particular community subject to the forces of modernization.
 The author describes, albeit all too briefly, the historical
 background to Banoi's emergence as part of the Central
 Plain region of the Thai nation-state. He contends that
 Banoi's 300 year history makes the village distinctive relative
 to the earlier famed Cornell studies of Bang Chan and
 Bangkhuad because these communities were not founded
 until the end of the 19th century when Thailand was already
 beginning to modernize.
 As a social anthropologist with a special interest in psycho-
 logical anthropology, Piker emphasizes social organization
 and interpersonal relationships, measuring the deeper signifi-
 cance of the economic changes from a subsistence to a
 market economy less in material than in social terms. The
 author sees a breakdown of the local networks of informal
 social alliance and economic exchange in the face of an
 emerging society in which landowners rely increasingly on
 mechanization and wage labor with production aimed prim-
 arily for national markets and landless villagers increasingly
 becoming part of a national labor force, a "rural proletariat."
 The twenty years since Piker's study lend further confirma-
 tion, to his observation, one which can be applied beyond
 the Central Plains to other parts of Thailand and other
 developing countries, as well.
 Piker's discussion of kinship and social relationships, in
 particular, marriage and courting customs and types of
 friendships deserves special mention, as well as his analysis
 of the much-studied patron-client relationship. He describes
 the last in terms of various political and economic contexts,
 placing informal, village patron-client relationships within
 the more formal structure of the national government. Piker
 sees his study of the Banoi domestic cycle, furthermore, as
 representative of studies of other rural Thai communities,
 e.g., Brian Foster, "Continuity and Change in Rural Thai
 Family Structure," Journal of Anthropological Research,
 1975), and his cultural analysis of Thai society as indebted to
 the work of Lucien Hanks, ("Merit and Power in the Thai
 Social Order," American Anthropologist, 1962). Thus, while,
 on the one hand, Piker contends that Thai society reflects a
 fluidity of social position (the so-called "loose-structure")
 relative to caste-defined societies, there is also an extensive,
 highly culturally codified system of social stratification and
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:59:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 374 Journal of the American Oriental Society 107.2 (1987)
 hierarchy rooted in Buddhist beliefs regarding karma and
 merit. Here the author reveals his Weberian bias.
 Professor Piker's study of Banoi, a village in the Central
 Plains of Thailand, makes a welcomed addition to our
 understanding of the social anthropology of Thailand, in
 particular, and the nature of post-peasant societies in general.
 DONALD K. SWEARER
 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
 Kings of Love. The History and Poetry of the Ni'matullahi
 Sufi Order of Iran. By NASROLLAH POURJAVADY AND
 PETER LAMBORN WILSON. Preface by SEYYED HOSSEIN
 NASR. Pp. xii + 226, tables. Teheran: IMPERIAL IRANIAN
 ACADEMY OF PHILOSOPHY. 1978. $16.50.
 The authors Pourjavady, an outstanding scholar, and
 Wilson, a successful poet as well, present Kings of Love as a
 first attempt in a European language to tell the history of a
 Sufi order from that order's point of view, while at the same
 time using the critical tools of the historian. They address the
 reader who already has some knowledge of Sufism, Sufi
 history, and the Islamicate world, referring the uninitiated to
 the bibliography, and begin with certain axioms regarding
 the reality of the events they describe. Accompanying the
 history are selected translations of poetry written by mem-
 bers of the order which are, at the very least in their fresh,
 jargon-free style, no doubt quite in the spirit of the originals,
 a contribution to translations from the Persian.
 The biographical portions of the volume, with their careful
 and detailed footnotes, have a straightforward value. They
 offer an insider's history of the Ni'matullahi Sufi order,
 narrated in a format blending the structure of a tradi-
 tional biographical history with brief digressions enl
 the reader on points a contemporary mentality might find
 obscure. The tendency for such digressions to take an apolo-
 getic tone is counteracted by the authors' firmly assertive
 stance. This same stance however, may leave the scholar with
 knowledge of Sufism finding their retreat from theoretical
 analysis and comparative evaluation in the introductory
 chapters abrupt. Halfway through the chapter on "The Sufism
 of Shah Ni'matullah WalT" I wondered: "All these things 
 and have been explicated so simply before .., why then
 these hokey appeals to the rule of ineffability?" The authors
 are careful to demonstrate at the outset that they can very
 well manage the bright, sober tone of a top-quality orien-
 talist treatment; perhaps it is in the name of their approach
 "from the order's point of view" that they blithely abando
 and rely upon shock effects to magnetize the reader. The
 technique worked on me to a certain extent, for by the time I
 reached the biography of Bushaq At'imah my connoisseur's
ig
ca
n 
h
n
i
te
t
ning
 taste was aroused, and the more the logic of the narrative
 broke down, the more I enjoyed reading it. But I fear the
 lack of a more solicitous conception in approach may unnec-
 essarily limit the number of readers who might enjoy Kings
 of Love.
 This is especially true for the fine translations; will anyone
 read them but the members of the order, whose present head
 has disciples here in New York City? I believe there should
 be more of an attempt on the part of authors of books on
 subjects such as this to address the forum of contemporary
 intellectual debate, simply because what they have to con-
 tribute is valuable. The few historical issues touched upon-
 spiritual and temporal authority, Isma'ili connections-are
 not sufficiently developed to be of interest in themselves, and
 literary questions are not addressed at all. But here I criticize
 the authors' stated aim, not their achievement in fulfilling it.
 Kings of Love does what it sets out to do; I wish it had set
 out to do more.
 VICTORIA ROWE HOLBROOK
 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
 The Arabic Materia Medica of Dioscorides. By MAHMOUD
 M. SADEK. Pp. 229, 54 illustrations. Quebec: LES EDITIONS
 DU SPHINX. 1983.
 Arabic Dioscorides is perhaps the most interesting chapter
 in the history of Arabic medicine and pharmacology. The
 medieval sources themselves speak of the problem of the
 transmission of the Greek text into Arabic in a language
 reminiscent of folk tales and legends. For modern historians
 of science, the problems surrounding the study of this trans-
 mission are only beginning to be identified, and with every
 new attempt more of the same kind of problems are raised.
 Students of Arabic Dioscorides are today primarily con-
 cerned with the establishment of the text, and with the study
 of the accompanying illustrations. The text itself seems to
 have undergone several translations and revisions, and it is
 difficult to decide which of the many versions should be used
 as the basis for a critical edition. We are told that the text
 was first translated from Greek into Arabic by Istifdn b.
 Basil during the reign of al-Mutawakkil (847-861). This
 translation was then revised by Hunain b. Ishaq (808-873),
 the famous translator of the Galenic Corpus, who had earlier
 produced a Syriac translation of the text for Bakht-shu' b.
 Jibrad'l, the chief physician of al-Mutawakkil. We also know
 from a later translation of the text that Hunain did not
 like the version of Istifan and himself translated at least
 the first four books, this time into Arabic. We are not
 sure whether these four books were ultimately incorporated
 in the Hunain-Istifan version, which was used as the basis of
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:59:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms


Review Of  A Peasant Community In Changing Thailand  By S. Piker

 Swarthmore CollegeWorks   Religion Faculty Works   4-1-1987  Review Of "A Peasant Community In Changing Thailand" By S. Piker  Donald K. Swearer Swarthmore College, dsweare1@swarthmore.edu   Let us know how access to this work benefits you.  Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-religion   Part of the Religion Commons   Recommended Citation Donald K. Swearer. (1987). "Review Of "A Peasant Community In Changing Thailand" By S. Piker". Journal Of The American Oriental Society. Volume 107, Issue 2. 373-374. http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-religion/138  This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religion Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu.   ReviewReviewed Work(s): A Peasant Community in Changing Thailand by Steven PikerReview by: Donald K. SwearerSource: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1987), pp.373-374Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602876Accessed: 25-08-2017 17:59 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a widerange of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity andfacilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available athttp://about.jstor.org/termsAmerican Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Journal of the American Oriental SocietyThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:59:13 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Reviews of Books 373 ennobled and the first Indian Governor of a province. Jinnah rose even higher in one lifetime than Lord Sinha, but then his starting point in the imperial life cycle came close to a century after the Sinhas of Raipur first began to meet the textile labor needs of the East India Company. Among the first prey of these climbing Sinhas was the local Muslim Raja whose zemindari they took over for unpaid debts. N. K. Bose's Modern India is relevant to this discussion between pages 20-30. MORRIS DEMBO PHILADELPHIA A Peasant Community in Changing Thailand. By STEVEN PIKER. Pp. 157 + ix (Anthropological Research Papers No. 30). Tempe, Arizona: ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY. 1983. During the past forty years Thailand, of all the countries of Southeast Asia, has been the most studied by American Anthropologists. The great majority have been trained at Cornell, attracted by the Cornell-Thailand project established under the leadership of Lauriston Sharp and Lucien M. Hanks. The Cornell-Thailand Project bibliography of nearly 500 items includes more than fifty doctoral disserta- tions. To be sure, Anthropological studies of Thai society and culture have not been the exclusive domain of the Cornell-Thailand project, however. Stanley J. Tambiah, for example, trained under Edmund Leach at Cambridge, has made a major contribution to this field. Steven Piker of Swarthmore College, although a student of Melford Spiro at the University of Washington (now at the University of California, Santa Cruz), has been so highly regarded by the Cornell "mafia" that his work has been included in the festschrift for Lauriston Sharp ("The Post-Peasant Village in Central Plain Thai Society," in Change and Persistence in Thai Society, eds. G. W. Skinner and A. T. Kirsch, 1975), and papers in honor of Lucien Hanks read at the 1986 Association of Asian Studies meeting. Piker's fieldwork in the village of Banoi, Ayuthaya Province, Thailand, in the 1960's produced several highly regarded articles, e.g., "Sources of Stability and Instability in Rural Thai Society, Journal of Asian Studies, 1968"; "Friendship to the Death in Rural Thai Society, Human Organization, 1968"), but has only now been published as a monograph with the appearance of A Peasant Community in Changing Thailand. Piker's enthnographic study of a village in the Central plains of Thailand constitutes his most substantive contribu- tion to the anthropological study of Thai society. Although the fieldwork on which this study is based was done 20 years ago, Piker's monograph on the demography, economy, and social organization of Banoi provides not a time-bound picture of a rural Thai community, but a descriptive analysis of a village in transition under the impact of the social, political and economic changes shaping Thailand into a nation-state within a modern global economy. Piker's "micro" or village study, therefore, can be seen as an instance of a post-peasant society, but a unique instance, to be sure. While Piker sees general characteristics of post-peasant societies, he also argues for the unique history and transformations of a particular community subject to the forces of modernization. The author describes, albeit all too briefly, the historical background to Banoi's emergence as part of the Central Plain region of the Thai nation-state. He contends that Banoi's 300 year history makes the village distinctive relative to the earlier famed Cornell studies of Bang Chan and Bangkhuad because these communities were not founded until the end of the 19th century when Thailand was already beginning to modernize. As a social anthropologist with a special interest in psycho- logical anthropology, Piker emphasizes social organization and interpersonal relationships, measuring the deeper signifi- cance of the economic changes from a subsistence to a market economy less in material than in social terms. The author sees a breakdown of the local networks of informal social alliance and economic exchange in the face of an emerging society in which landowners rely increasingly on mechanization and wage labor with production aimed prim- arily for national markets and landless villagers increasingly becoming part of a national labor force, a "rural proletariat." The twenty years since Piker's study lend further confirma- tion, to his observation, one which can be applied beyond the Central Plains to other parts of Thailand and other developing countries, as well. Piker's discussion of kinship and social relationships, in particular, marriage and courting customs and types of friendships deserves special mention, as well as his analysis of the much-studied patron-client relationship. He describes the last in terms of various political and economic contexts, placing informal, village patron-client relationships within the more formal structure of the national government. Piker sees his study of the Banoi domestic cycle, furthermore, as representative of studies of other rural Thai communities, e.g., Brian Foster, "Continuity and Change in Rural Thai Family Structure," Journal of Anthropological Research, 1975), and his cultural analysis of Thai society as indebted to the work of Lucien Hanks, ("Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order," American Anthropologist, 1962). Thus, while, on the one hand, Piker contends that Thai society reflects a fluidity of social position (the so-called "loose-structure") relative to caste-defined societies, there is also an extensive, highly culturally codified system of social stratification andThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:59:13 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 374 Journal of the American Oriental Society 107.2 (1987) hierarchy rooted in Buddhist beliefs regarding karma and merit. Here the author reveals his Weberian bias. Professor Piker's study of Banoi, a village in the Central Plains of Thailand, makes a welcomed addition to our understanding of the social anthropology of Thailand, in particular, and the nature of post-peasant societies in general. DONALD K. SWEARER SWARTHMORE COLLEGE Kings of Love. The History and Poetry of the Ni'matullahi Sufi Order of Iran. By NASROLLAH POURJAVADY AND PETER LAMBORN WILSON. Preface by SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR. Pp. xii + 226, tables. Teheran: IMPERIAL IRANIAN ACADEMY OF PHILOSOPHY. 1978. $16.50. The authors Pourjavady, an outstanding scholar, and Wilson, a successful poet as well, present Kings of Love as a first attempt in a European language to tell the history of a Sufi order from that order's point of view, while at the same time using the critical tools of the historian. They address the reader who already has some knowledge of Sufism, Sufi history, and the Islamicate world, referring the uninitiated to the bibliography, and begin with certain axioms regarding the reality of the events they describe. Accompanying the history are selected translations of poetry written by mem- bers of the order which are, at the very least in their fresh, jargon-free style, no doubt quite in the spirit of the originals, a contribution to translations from the Persian. The biographical portions of the volume, with their careful and detailed footnotes, have a straightforward value. They offer an insider's history of the Ni'matullahi Sufi order, narrated in a format blending the structure of a tradi- tional biographical history with brief digressions enl the reader on points a contemporary mentality might find obscure. The tendency for such digressions to take an apolo- getic tone is counteracted by the authors' firmly assertive stance. This same stance however, may leave the scholar with knowledge of Sufism finding their retreat from theoretical analysis and comparative evaluation in the introductory chapters abrupt. Halfway through the chapter on "The Sufism of Shah Ni'matullah WalT" I wondered: "All these things  and have been explicated so simply before .., why then these hokey appeals to the rule of ineffability?" The authors are careful to demonstrate at the outset that they can very well manage the bright, sober tone of a top-quality orien- talist treatment; perhaps it is in the name of their approach "from the order's point of view" that they blithely abando and rely upon shock effects to magnetize the reader. The technique worked on me to a certain extent, for by the time I reached the biography of Bushaq At'imah my connoisseur'sigcan hnitetning taste was aroused, and the more the logic of the narrative broke down, the more I enjoyed reading it. But I fear the lack of a more solicitous conception in approach may unnec- essarily limit the number of readers who might enjoy Kings of Love. This is especially true for the fine translations; will anyone read them but the members of the order, whose present head has disciples here in New York City? I believe there should be more of an attempt on the part of authors of books on subjects such as this to address the forum of contemporary intellectual debate, simply because what they have to con- tribute is valuable. The few historical issues touched upon- spiritual and temporal authority, Isma'ili connections-are not sufficiently developed to be of interest in themselves, and literary questions are not addressed at all. But here I criticize the authors' stated aim, not their achievement in fulfilling it. Kings of Love does what it sets out to do; I wish it had set out to do more. VICTORIA ROWE HOLBROOK COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY The Arabic Materia Medica of Dioscorides. By MAHMOUD M. SADEK. Pp. 229, 54 illustrations. Quebec: LES EDITIONS DU SPHINX. 1983. Arabic Dioscorides is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the history of Arabic medicine and pharmacology. The medieval sources themselves speak of the problem of the transmission of the Greek text into Arabic in a language reminiscent of folk tales and legends. For modern historians of science, the problems surrounding the study of this trans- mission are only beginning to be identified, and with every new attempt more of the same kind of problems are raised. Students of Arabic Dioscorides are today primarily con- cerned with the establishment of the text, and with the study of the accompanying illustrations. The text itself seems to have undergone several translations and revisions, and it is difficult to decide which of the many versions should be used as the basis for a critical edition. We are told that the text was first translated from Greek into Arabic by Istifdn b. Basil during the reign of al-Mutawakkil (847-861). This translation was then revised by Hunain b. Ishaq (808-873), the famous translator of the Galenic Corpus, who had earlier produced a Syriac translation of the text for Bakht-shu' b. Jibrad'l, the chief physician of al-Mutawakkil. We also know from a later translation of the text that Hunain did not like the version of Istifan and himself translated at least the first four books, this time into Arabic. We are not sure whether these four books were ultimately incorporated in the Hunain-Istifan version, which was used as the basis ofThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:59:13 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Review Of  A Peasant Community In Changing Thailand  By Steven Piker

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Review Of A Peasant Community In Changing Thailand By S. Piker

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