Tracks and Traces: Thailand and the Work of Andrew Turton

Abstract

A final aspect of tracing the legacy of critical scholarship is to examine how it set the intellectual and political agenda for subsequent debates, and to examine its heuristic significance for the present. The discussion in the chapters that follow on participation, on power, ideology and hegemony suggests a persistence and contemporary relevance of Turton's ideas, notwithstanding a continuing awkwardness in the present-day application of intellectual categories and seemingly naive political optimism that marked the earlier era. And yet, with the reference to Thaksin's Thailand in so many of these essays (Keyes, Cohen, Tapp, Glassman, Jamaree), with discussion of power in a country as divided nowalbeit along different linesas it was during the 1970s, and where scholarship and politics continue to shape each other, where historiographies collide and debates over allowable discourse rage as never before, the salience of Andrew Turton's work remains much more than merely apparent.