The Good Men of Suan Kularb: Network politics at an elite Thai school

Play video

Scholars posit that Thai power is dominated by opaque political networks that conspire to frustrate democracy and maintain control of a ‘parallel’ or ‘deep state’.

In this presentation, I show that many of these powerful cliques are clustered around a handful of understudied ‘network institutions’—elite secondary schools and military academies that prepare young men for power via induction into a close-knit fraternal community.

I take as a case study Suan Kularb Wittayalai, Thailand’s oldest state-administered secondary school and alma mater to eight prime ministers. Drawing on extensive archival analysis, life histories, and twelve months fieldwork at Suan Kularb, I explore the processes by which the school maintains elite netowrks that operate across the military, bureaucracy, and commerce. Specifically, I propose that Suan Kularb’s network politics are not merely an expression of traditional patronage models.

Rather, such relations are consciously facilitated by the school through the elaboration of an idiosyncratic and unusually ritualized institutional culture, much of which utilizes colonial pedagogic practices introduced by a succession of former British headmasters. Such technologies—which include novel mechanisms of surveillance, invented tradition, and disciplinary practices— integrate with local epistemic practices to generate life-long sentiments of obligation and collective exceptionalism. This, in turn, underpins the political culture and distribution of power in contemporary Thailand.

About the speaker

Daniel Whitehouse is a ERSC postdoctoral fellow based at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS. His research is concerned with the cultural legacy of informal colonialism in Thailand, the anthropology of elites, and institutional ethnography.

His is currently writing Learning to Govern, an historical ethnography of Suan Kularb Wittiyalai, the so-called ‘Eton of Thailand’. Before studying his PhD at Durham University, Daniel was a broadcast journalist at Voice TV, a Thai language news channel based in Bangkok.

• Organiser: SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies
• Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk