Modern thai encounters with the sublime: the powerful presence of a great king of siam through his portraits

Stengs, I.L.

doi:10.2752/175183408x328280

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Modern political rule has evolved away from some of these ideas, but still carries their mark and can thus be thought of as a form of secularized theology (Schmitt's famous argument [2005 (1922): 36–52]). Examples include the worship of kingly portraits in Thailand (Stengs 2008), the lordship of political entrepreneurs in Nepal (Burghart 1996), the political potency of deities in India (Singh 2012), the posthumous idolatry of Lady Di (Watson 1997), and the political ritual around presidential performance in France (Abeles 1988).…”

Section: Conceptualizing Sovereignty: Mimicry Violence and Divine Kmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars

Klem

Maunaguru

2017

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article uses the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to make a conceptual argument about sovereignty. Despite its aura of natural order, sovereignty is ultimately self-referential and thus somewhat arbitrary and potentially unstable. At the heart of this unsteadiness, we posit, lies the paradox between the systematic tenets of rational governance and the capricious potential of sublime violence. Both are highly relevant to the LTTE case: the movement created de facto state institutions to mimic governance, but simultaneously deployed an elaborate transcendental register of sacrifice, meaning, and intractable power wielded by a mythical leader. To capture this paradox, we connect the literature on rebel governance with anthropological debates about divine kingship. We conceptualize sovereignty as a citational practice that involves the adaptation, imitation, and mutation of different idioms of authority: political and religious, modern and traditional, rational and mythical. Understanding sovereignty in this way debunks the idea that insurgent movements are merely lagging behind established states. As sites of mimicry, bricolage, and innovation, they transform the way sovereignty is practiced and understood, thus affecting the frame that sovereignty is.

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Section: Conceptualizing Sovereignty: Mimicry Violence and Divine Kmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars

Klem

Maunaguru

2017

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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“…In her work on cult portraiture of Thailand's King Chulalongkorn (r.1865–1910), Irene Stengs () echoes this sentiment as she traces the use of mass‐produced portraits of the king in homes, businesses, and other places throughout the country. She argues that the simple act of seeing cult portraits of the king—widely beloved for his role in preserving Thailand's independence—inscribes even these mass‐produced images with a sense of individual value.…”

Section: Embellishments and Other Marks Of Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She argues that the simple act of seeing cult portraits of the king—widely beloved for his role in preserving Thailand's independence—inscribes even these mass‐produced images with a sense of individual value. His worshippers can have a “direct encounter” (Stengs :162) with him through these portraits, where his spirit is said to reside. The fact that these images are mass‐produced and widely copied does not diminish their efficacy.…”

Section: Embellishments and Other Marks Of Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The fact that these images are mass‐produced and widely copied does not diminish their efficacy. Even when, at her grand opening, one restaurateur receives 11 identical copies of the same portrait as gifts, she insists on keeping them to decorate the restaurant: “being a mass product does not take anything away from the value of each single portrait, even when owning a dozen of the same” (Stengs :166). Although Asad portraits exist within a much different context (King Chulalongkorn is a widely beloved historical figure from more than a century ago), their use in shops is another example of how mass‐produced propaganda can become individually relevant even through the simple act of display.…”

Section: Embellishments and Other Marks Of Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Presidents at Work: Shop Displays of Political Portraiture in Prewar Damascus

McClellan¹

2013

Visual Anthropology Review

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In Syria, official portraiture depicting members of the Asad regime has long been used as a tool to produce and uphold authoritarian power. Following in his father's footsteps, Bashar al‐Asad generated a wide range of billboards, banners, posters, and stickers in his own image meant for both public and private consumption. Rather than treat this visual regime as a monolith of interchangeable and mass‐produced imagery, I argue in this article for the examination of Asad portraits on smaller and more intimate scales. I discuss the display of these cult images within the domain of small‐scale shops in Damascus, looking at both how these images are embedded in other visual and symbolic contexts, and how they become individually relevant as they are materially embellished and marked.

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“…(Sprague 1978, p. 54) Even some early photographs of Japanese emperors have comparable aspects (Hirayama 2009, figs 3, 8), as do Qing "imperial visage" (shengrong) portraits, which reject "bodily movement or facial expression [… and] present an emperor in a perfect frontal view" (Wu 1995, p. 27). However, early Thai royal photographic portraits (Stengs 2008) are generally quite different from Tibetan, Yoruba, Japanese, or Iranian authority images. Even if many authority portraits share a stiffness, rigid posing, impassive expressions, symmetry, and regalia, posture and gesture do not form "a universal language but [are] the product of social and cultural differences" (Pérez González 2012, p. 106).…”

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confidence: 96%

Photography, painting, and prints in Ladakh and Zangskar. Intermediality and transmediality

Linrothe¹

2020

emscat

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The central thesis of this essay is that one of the most important aspects of the pioneering use of photographic portraits of teachers in the late 19th and early 20th century in Western Himalayan Buddhist contexts is its ongoing visual relationship to and with pre-photographic media, including sculpture, printing, and especially painting. Evidence shows that the most common compositions for early portrait photographs drew closely on earlier templates already well-established by painting and sculpture.

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Modern thai encounters with the sublime: the powerful presence of a great king of siam through his portraits

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars

Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars

Presidents at Work: Shop Displays of Political Portraiture in Prewar Damascus

Photography, painting, and prints in Ladakh and Zangskar. Intermediality and transmediality

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