Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies http://journals.cambridge.org/SEA Additional services for Journal of Southeast Asian Studies: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia Richard A. O'connor Journal of Southeast Asian Studies / Volume 26 / 25th Anniversary Special Issue 01 / March 1995, pp 30 - 45 DOI: 10.1017/S0022463400010468, Published online: 07 April 2011 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022463400010468 How to cite this article: Richard A. O'connor (1995). Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 26, pp 30-45 doi:10.1017/S0022463400010468 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/SEA, IP address: 138.251.14.35 on 14 Mar 2015 Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, 1 (March 1995): 30-45 ® 1995 by National University of Singapore Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in Southeast Asia RICHARD A. O'CONNOR University of the South While Southeast Asia revolves around its cities, scholarship spins off into disciplines that ignore this fact. In a region that has known cities for two millennia, where even remote peoples have shaped themselves to or against urban rule, research goes on as if the city were an alien entity, easily factored out and best forgotten. So village studies represent these city-centred nations, and few wonder if the entrepreneurs and middle class who now explain so much might themselves be explained as urban. Our disciplines divide so deeply that no one addresses how the city organizes society and shapes the region. My paper takes the city's centrality as a given and focuses on how urbanism works and what it means as a social and cultural order. Urbanism, Louis Wirth tells us, is "a way of life".1 His now classic phrase suggests an inherited form but to him urbanism was less what the past bequeathed than what the present dictated. Urbanism was a response to urban conditions. Such conditions might be historical or cultural but to Wirth, an urban ecologist, the determining conditions were economic or functional. Today, a half century later, urban research has reduced itself to detailing material conditions — the demographic, economic or political facts — as if urbanism were a reflex of the market. Against this naive reductionism, I assume that urbanites are just as cultural and social as any group. Their pattern, urbanism, has a life of its own. Understanding urbanism's privileged place requires a conceptual shift from our rural/urban dichotomy to Southeast Asia's city/society dyad. Splitting rural from urban distorts how the Southeast Asian city is at once a centre and the whole. In effect, city and society function as what Louis Dumont calls a hierarchical opposition.2 Just as right and left are at once opposed (right vs. left), ranked (right is culturally superior to left) and presume a larger whole (the body) that the superior part represents (the right hand betokens the person), so too is the Southeast Asian city distinct from, superior to and yet representative of society.3 My paper starts broadly and works inward in three steps. The first section argues that urbanism is only one of several indigenous structural arrangements that "organize life". In this light the city is not an alien imposition but an indigenous construction. The second section takes up how this one arrangement has come to dominate the region. Urbanism, I argue, is a historical and cultural complex that grows by elaborating I have benefited from comments by Leif Jonsson, Tom Kirsch, Mike Montesano and Nikki Tannenbaum. I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation, and the University of the South for funding; and to the Southeast Asia programs at Cornell, Michigan, Northern Illinois, Wisconsin and Yale who have welcomed my summer research. 'Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life", The American Journal of Sociology 44,1 (1938): 1-24. Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 223-33. 3 For example, the Tki city (muang) is culturally distinct from and superior to the village (muang vs. ban) in a larger whole (muang as both city and village) that the city epitomizes. 2 30 Class, City and Society 31 status distinctions that create meaning and structure society. As city life generates the distinctions that govern society, an urban autocracy arises. The final section looks at the modern era where today's new nations ideally supersede the city's well institutionalized dominance. Three complexes — the nation, the state and the middle class — illustrate how earlier ideologies and institutions constrain present arrangements. My larger conclusion is that to understand the region we must study urbanism culturally, historically and comparatively. Urbanism and Society Southeast Asia's cities have always brought diverse peoples and societies together. Urbanism is neither the sum of this diversity nor its common denominator but a society of societies, a culture of cultures. It encapsulates difference much as written Chinese encompasses spoken diversity. By encapsulating, urbanism reifies lesser wholes — a people or village, an entourage or occupation — so that they become fixed parts of a still higher city-centred whole. In its simplest sense urbanism is just one of many indigenous relations of parts, and the fact of its great success does not change its nature. Urbanism's nature - its function and meaning - arises from how it relates to society. As we shall see, urbanism is neither alien to society nor the antithesis of rural life but the essence of societal ordering. What gives urbanism its distinctive character is how it fits amid the region's other indigenous orders. All of these are "relations of parts" that assume the still more fundamental process whereby groups first constitute themselves as wholes. One consequence of this self-conscious "society-making" is a localism that pervades Southeast Asia. Localism: Scholars divide Southeast Asia into hundreds of ethnic groups or a handful of national cultures, but the older and firmer reality is localism. To describe, say, Indonesia, people by people4 imposes a higher order grouping on villages and even households that are already ritually complete, each a whole unto itself. Such intense localism typifies the region's prehistory5 and history6 as well as its present where the uplands can fragment into "village-level ethnicity"7 and lowland states have localities doting on difference.8 4 For example, R.M. Koentjarangrat, Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of Indonesia and Malaysia (Menlo Park: Cummings Publishing Company, 1975), p. 53. 5 R.B. Smith and W. Watson, "Introduction", in Early South East Asia, ed. R.B. Smith and W. Watson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 3-14; Joyce C. White, "Prehistoric Roots for Hierarchy in Early Southeast Asian States" (Paper presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Pittsburgh, 1992). 6 O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), p. 53. 7 Frank L. Lebar, Gerald C. Hickey and John K. Musgrave, Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia (New Haven: HRAF, 1964), p. 3; F.M. and M. Keesing, Taming Philippine Headhunters: A Study of Government and of Culture Change in North Luzon (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), pp. 38-39. 8 Louis Golomb, Brokers of Morality: Thai Ethnic Adaptation in a Rural Malaysian Setting (Hawaii: University Press of Hawaii, 1978), p. 6; Lucien M. Hanks, "Comment", in The Study of Thailand, ed. E.B. Ayal (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1978), p. 62; Alexander Woodside, "Conceptions of Change and of Human Responsibility for Change in Late Traditional Vietnam", in Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought, ed. David K. Wyatt and A. Woodside (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1982), pp. 136-37. 32 Richard A. O'Connor Localism is not just the diversity that accumulates from drift and isolation, but an active principle of symbolic differentiation. Consider, for example, how the Vietnamese colonized rice plains. A people who expanded from a common core onto accessible and undifferentiated land should create a homogenous countryside, but because each Vietnamese village sought its own craft or skill monopoly, they created an intricate specialized web.9 While Vietnamese differentiated by village and craft, other groups manufacture diversity on ethnic or moral lines, by culinary nuance or ceremonial style. The idioms vary from place to place but everywhere nearby groups align their differences. Indeed, on the Malay Peninsula each group changes not just on its own but with a "tacit understanding" of its neighbours,10 while for Balinese villages "no two do things exactly alike; [and] if they find that they do, one of them changes something".11 None of this is new. Going back three or four millennia nearby mainland sites differ so greatly in pottery and ritual culture that archaeologists would assume isolation were it not that metallurgical techniques and materials show wide linkages.'2 Here localism suggests not isolation but interacting societies, and the larger symbolic differentiation suggests a Durkheimian organic solidarity between societies.13 "Society-Making" Rules: The region's localism arises from how its societies selfconsciously represent themselves by rites, rules and customs. While these societymaking sets are diverse — ethnicity,14 etiquette, ritual language,15 ritual interdictions16 as well as local customs and royal rites - our interest lies in their similarity in societal function and cultural meaning. All such sets are taken to be consequential, orderimposing and pragmatic strictures. We may state these characteristics as three indigenous principles. First, society-making rules are directly consequential. A body of custom does not merely represent a group that already exists but its discipline creates that group. It is not as if "the People . . . " create a constitution that creates a nation, but rather that such rules create not just a polity but a people. Such rule-making has the radical and 'Neil L. Jamieson, "Multiple Models of Economics and Morality in Vietnam" (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, 1987), p. 17. '"Golomb, Brokers of Morality, p. 6 "Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books), p. 176. 12 Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 209; White, "Prehistoric Roots". 13 Its Southeast Asian twist is that solidarity arises not just within a society as it specializes but between societies as they adapt to each other. See Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964). 14 Michael Moerman, "Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization: Who are the Lue?", American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1215-30. 15 James J. Fox, "Southeast Asian Religions: Insular Culture", in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade (New York: Macmillian, 1987), vol. 13, p. 524. 16 P.B. Lafont, Genies, anges et demons en Asie du Sud-est (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), pp. 345-32; A.W. Macdonald, "Notes sur la Claustration Villageoise dans L'Asie du Sud-Est", Journal Asiatique 245 (1957): 185-210. Class, City and Society 33 direct effectiveness often attributed to ritual but need imply no religious belief and may be as mundane as an agricultural practice.17 Second, society-making rules impose order lest chaos reign. Chaos is so readily imagined that rules are justifiably rigid.18 Even if such rules arise openly from practice, once established their authority comes from outside of everyday life. This "outside" need only be the wisdom of elders or the legacy of ancestors but it is never just what people do. Southeast Asian society, it seems, is better than the people in it, better even than its own practice. Conceived as exogenous strictures, such discipline appears as good-to-have19 but hard-to-keep rules whose very rigidity leaves the rest of life rather loose.20 It not only creates "systems in which the 'individual' has a notable measure of autonomy vis-a-vis the 'social structure'"21, but as A. W. Macdonald says, society can be so generally open because its specific points of closure are so clear and uncontested.22 Third, society-making rules are formulated openly and changed pragmatically. Southeast Asians adjust inherited forms almost as freely as democracies write and revise laws. So society is neither god-given laws nor ancestral custom, but rather working arrangements wherein gods, ancestors and humans adjust their unfolding interests.23 In the islands this consensual arrangement, adat, may constitute a group literally out of words whereas on the mainland chthonic cults do the same symbolically out of ancestors, but both act as working sets that adapt an inheritance pragmatically by treating the ancestors as mentors, not law-givers. In effect the dead guide the living just as any elder guides the young.24 17 Susan D. Russell and Clark E. Cunningham, "Introduction: Social Change, Cultural Identity, and Ritual Response", in Changing Lives, Changing Rites Ritual and Social Dynamics in Philippine and Indonesian Uplands, ed. S.D. Russell and C.E. Cunningham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), p. 3; G. Condominas, "Ritual Technology in Mnong Gar Swidden Agriculture", in Rice Societies: Asian Problems and Prospects, ed. I. Norlund, S. Cederroth and I. Gerdin (Riverdale, MD: The Riverdale Company, 1986), pp. 28-46. 18 On chaos see Michael Aung-Thwin, "Divinity, Spirit, and Human: Conceptions of Classical Burmese Kingship", in Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast Asia Studies, ed. L. Gesick (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1983), p. 74; 1 Drakard, A Malay Frontier: Unity and Duality in a Sumatran Kingdom (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1990), pp. 16-18; Karl G. Heider, Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp. 28-30. "Overt enthusiasm for such rules - how "good" they are to have - varies culturally. See Hildred Geertz, "The Balinese Village", in Local, Ethnic, and National Loyalties in Village Indonesia: A Symposium, ed. G. William Skinner (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1959), pp. 24-33, for a distinction between how custom attracts Balinese and repels Minangkabau. On the mainland this would distinguish Akha from Lisu, and Lawa from Karen. 20 Even in Bali, where everything seems prescribed, Boon observes that the fixity of temples allows flexibility to social groups. See James A. Boon, The Anthropological Romance of Bali 1597-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 113. 2I A. Thomas Kirsch, "Loose Structure: Theory or Description?", Loosely Structured Social Systems: Thailand in Comparative Perspective, ed. Hans-Dieter Evers (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1969), p. 59. ^Macdonald, "Notes sur la Claustration", p. 206. 23 In effect, as "society" stands above time, "custom" becomes how groups unfold. In contrast, modern thought treats "custom" as a past that is kept or lost and "society" as a present equilibrium of acts. M On adat see Geertz, Local Knowledge, pp. 207-214; on chthonic cults see Paul Mus, India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa, trans. I.W. Mabbett (Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1975). 34 Richard A. O'Connor Negotiable customs let Southeast Asians live pragmatically and localize freely. How can a group openly adjust the customs that create the group? "Changeable customs", a seeming oxymoron, are perfectly consistent wherever practical rituals constitute a group. As the group or its needs change, so must custom. In effect, authority is anchored locally in an ongoing group and not displaced categorically from the living to the dead, humans to gods, or present needs to eternal truths. In this rule-making, where "society seems sedimented . . . out of the pragmatic interests of its acting subjects", the region joins what Marshall Sahlins calls an entire "family of cultures" that organize life by performative rather than prescriptive structures.25 Such unfolding structures are how localism prospers and how urbanism arises within the conditions that localism creates. "Higher" Orders: As each group makes rules to create itself and keep distinct from neighbours, a great variety of higher order arrangements arise. Such arrangements may be as self-conscious as the ritual that organizes polyethnic Lao states26 or as consciousness-deciding as the ethnic differentiation wherein Malay, Senoi, and Semai construct each other out of their differences.27 State coercion may create some orders as a collectivity of local cults28 while others such as the marriage systems29 and competitive feasting30 arise spontaneously. Varied as they are, what these arrangements share is that they not only preserve but require diversity.31 All encapsulate selfconsciously distinct groups that thereby function as parts of larger wholes. Urbanism: Urbanism is one such larger whole. It appears to be a radical break, thanks to its foreign symbols and how thoroughly it has displaced rival wholes, but Southeast Asian urbanism functions as a supra-local and supra-ethnic order just as upland feasting or coastal trading do. Its symbols are foreign - Indie, Sinitic, Arabic or Western — but their indigenous role requires this "outside" origin. Were the urban not conspicuously foreign, it could not stand categorically above the ethnic and the local; and yet were it not effectively indigenous it could not dominate these lesser orders deeply. Indeed, the city's dominance is so deep precisely because it is a grander version 25 MarshalI Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 26-28. As Gibson puts it, "in many parts of Southeast Asia social action is thought of as being continuously constructed on the basis of certain shared rules, and not as being defined in advance by a rigid code of conduct prescribing correct behavior " Thomas Gibson, Sacrifice and Sharing in the Philippine Highlands Religion and Society Among the Buid in Mindoro (London: Athlone Press, 1986), p. 65. 26 Charles Archaimbault, "Religious Structures in Laos", Journal of the Siam Society 52,1 (1964): 57-74. "Geoffrey Benjamin, "In the Long Term: Three Themes in Malayan Cultural Ecology", in Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia, ed. K.L. Hutterer, A.T. Rambo and G. Lovelace (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1985), pp. 219-78. ^H.L. Shorto, "The Dewatau Sotapan: A Mon Prototype of the 37 Nats", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 30 (1967): 127-41. 29 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 30 A. Thomas Kirsch, Feasting and Social Oscillation: Religion and Society in Upland Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1973). 31 See for example G.C. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Gibson, Sacrifice and Sharing; V. Wee, "Material Dependence and Symbolic Independence: Constructions of Melayu Ethnicity in Island Riau, Indonesia", in Ethnic Diversity and the Control of Natural Resources in Southeast Asia, ed. A.T. Rambo, K. Gillogly and K.L. Hutterer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1988), pp. 197-226. Class, City and Society 35 of whatever localism might oppose it. After all, an alter ego is far harder to resist than an alien imposition. Urbanism, we must conclude, is a typically indigenous response to localism as a distinctively regional condition. Southeast Asian urbanism's distinguishing features are urban rule and foreign idioms. All society-making imposes order but urbanism's regime presumes a ruling centre — a king, palace, capital or government — whose power institutes higher rites and rules that order a realm of lesser peoples and places. Just as fifteenth century Pegu brought the Mon realm's local chthonic cults together in the capital's Buddhist cult,32 the current Indonesian government represents its realm's once remote peoples as ethnic pieces of a national whole. Urbanism requires conspicuously foreign idioms. Society-making rules always come from outside of everyday life, but for localism this exogeny need be no more than the ancestors or the past. For urbanism or indeed any higher order this will not do. If they are to order localism as it orders everyday life, then these higher orders require a still more distant idiom. Once begun, pursuing the outside culminates in either asceticism or foreign borrowings. Asceticism, the ultimate trump, plays off of society's representations to stand beyond not just localism but urbanism too.33 Crucial as it is to current politics, asceticism cannot create a polity and thus it is the other "outside", foreign borrowings, that best explains how urban rule works. Where India abhorred the outside as polluting and China disdained it as barbaric, Southeast Asia appropriated foreign borrowings as the idiom of urban rule. Examples abound but consider how Manila's elite has favoured foreign tongues — once Malay, then Spanish and lately English34 — just as Siamese rulers have followed Khmer, Western and now international styles. Speaking broadly, the idiom is always changing — Indie, Arabic, Sinitic, modern — but there is continuity in the way foreign symbols set the city and its elites above the countryside and commoners. In effect, what begins as a foreign fad becomes an indigenous hierarchy; and what appears as exogenous change — Indianization, Sinicization, modernization — functions as an indigenous urbanization that breaks down the local only to build up the urban. Where society's structure arises performatively, the outside is a perpetually valuable resource. Whatever its origins,35 the outside's ongoing function is that it meets a structural need created by localism. Here, in its own ideology, urbanism averts the chaos that localism creates. Where groups live together and each represents its motives by localism, internecine struggle always seems only a moment away. Set against this incipient 32 Shorto, "The Dewatau Sotapan", p. 127. James A. Boon, "Incest Recaptured: Some Contraries of Karma in Balinese Symbology", in Karma: An Anthropological Inquiry, ed. C.F. Keyes and E.V. Daniel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 185-222. 34 John U. Wolff, "The Character of Borrowings from Spanish and English in Languages of the Philippines", Philippine Journal of Linguistics 4,5 (1973-74): 72-81; and "Malay Borrowings in Tagalog", in Southeast Asian History and Historiography: Essays Presented to D.G.E. Hall, ed. C D . Cowan and O.W. Wolters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 345-67. 35 If localism divided early Southeast Asia, it would be like Melanesia where big-men use outside borrowings to outdo rivals. If higher polities first arose by alien idioms, borrowing from the outside might become a built-in need. See Michael Allen, "Elders, Chiefs, and Big Men: Authority Legitimation and Political Evolution in Melanesia", American Ethnologist 11,1 (1984): 20-41; and Richard A. O'Connor, A Theory of Indigenous Southeast Asian Urbanism (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1983), p. 29. 33 36 Richard A. O'Connor anarchy, urbanism represents itself as the cool reason and objectivity that only the outside offers. The fact that such dramas sometimes play themselves out for real should not disguise the abiding symbolic interdependence whereby localism's supposedly parochial claims on the person strengthen urbanism's "civilizing" authority over society. Urbanism's ostensibly exogenous order requires a chaos that comes from within the society it rules. In this section we have seen how urbanism is not an alien imposition but an indigenous arrangement whose structural equivalence to localism lets the city epitomize society. Were the urban opposed to the rural or equated with the market, then its dominance would be circumscribed. Yet Southeast Asia lacks — or lacked - these limits. Constructed as a hierarchical opposition, the city becomes that part whose superiority lets it represent the whole. In this setup urban authority reaches deeply into social life. It is to this cultural dominance that we turn now. Urbanism as a Historical and Cultural Complex While urbanism is just one way Southeast Asian societies arrange themselves structurally, it is the dominant arrangement in most of the region. Today's urban behemoths are primate cities whose wealth and power dwarf other towns and dominate their societies.36 The sheer size of Bangkok or Jakarta may be new but such centrality is as old as Angkor or Srivajaya. We might as easily imagine the United States without capitalism as think of Southeast Asia without urban dominance. Urban Dominance: So obvious and decisive a feature would seem to demand some explanation and yet urban dominance is left largely unexplained. True, some scholars measure population flow or material conditions as if today's balance must abide by timeless laws of economic efficiency, but they are assuming conditions of intense and continual competition that hardly exist. Any selective pressure operates slowly if at all because a primate city creates monopoly conditions. It forces society to adapt to it. Like any monopoly, it can be inefficient or even self-destructive and yet survive for centuries. To assume the city's size, wealth or power represents some higher economic logic or hegemonic reason merely imposes an adaptationist teleology on the data.37 Such tautologies aside, we are left to explain urban dominance as either purely historical or "rational" within cultural conditions that require their own explanation. Either way history and culture require examination. If history holds the answer, then the region's early cities established patterns that structured later events. In this explanation urbanism's sheer self-interested mass would perpetuate itself by creating the conditions that decide what is economically viable and politically effective. While this is plausible for the Tai as well as the region,38 the 36 Jonathan Rigg, Southeast Asia: A Region in Transition — A Thematic Human Geography of the ASEAN Region (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), pp. 133-35. "Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, or Why History Matters", American Scientist 74 (1986): 60-69. 38 On the Tai see Richard A. O'Connor, "Cultural Notes on Trade and the Tai", in Ritual, Power and Economy: Upland-Lowland Contrasts in Mainland Southeast Asia, ed. Susan D. Russell (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), pp. 27-65; and "From 'Fertility' to 'Order', Paternalism to Profits: The Thai City's Impact on the Culture-Environment Interface", in Culture and the Environment in Thailand- A Symposium of the Siam Society (Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1989), pp. 393-414; on the region see O'Connor, Indigenous Urbanism. Class, City and Society 37 historical evidence is not strong enough to stand alone and thus we must consider the cultural pattern this history presumes. A cultural explanation for urban dominance focuses on how society represents itself in symbols that presume a centre. A culture can have what Sahlins calls "a privileged institutional locus . . . whence emanates a classificatory grid imposed upon the total culture".39 In the West, he argues, that locus is the economy. In Southeast Asia it is the city.40 A locus rules its region by creating conditions that colour experience and •divide function and meaning into pieces that presume the dominant locus. In effect, then, Southeast Asia's pieces presume a ruling centre. The city is built into culture and society. Elaborating these symbolic distinctions thus constitutes urbanization in its widest sense. Indigenous Urbanization: Narrowly defined, urbanization is the rising percentage of a nation's population who live in urban areas. Useful as it is to know how many people are drawn physically into the city, this number does not reveal how deeply they are drawn into urban forms or how significant these forms are. As a physical place the city has a varied and limited impact but it is as social distinctions that urbanism imposes itself strictly and deeply on how people live. In urbanization new and finer status distinctions appear within older and broader ones in a process of symbolic differentiation.41 Starting with localism, the first centrecreating step distinguishes lord from commoner as it makes the ruler's settlement into a "city" above what become "villages". Once accepted, this distinction settles if a centre will rule and starts a struggle over which centre will rule. Out of this struggle come further social distinctions that establish one city as the capital and its line as "royal" while the rest become provincial towns ruled by nobles. And so it goes. As one hierarchical distinction arises within another, the capital's elite and urban life get set above the larger society these distinctions create. Each step presumes prior ones and creates categories of people or place that then perpetuate themselves as the conditions out of which new distinctions arise. How do distinctions arise? Urbanism's always foreign idiom creates a scarcity that inevitably breeds social distinctions. When only a few possess the outside's emblems, their value is high; as more people get these symbols their value falls; and finally some new distinctions come in at the top to start the cycle again. All who play politics manipulate this flow. In the traditional Balinese state rulers conferred status down from the top while lesser folk ceded power up from the bottom.42 In this interplay we see how the region urbanizes, how the countryside comes under its urban courts. In nineteenth-century Siam, for example, archival records show the monarchy carefully awarding distinctions to align a royal temple hierarchy with the shifting politics of popular monks and powerful nobles.43 Across the region sovereignty empowered a 39 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 211. ^Insofar as other regions have loci, likely candidates are the state in China, religious purity in India, exchange in Melanesia, and kinship in Africa. 41 O'Connor, Indigenous Urbanism. 42 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 62-63. 43 Richard A, O'Connor, "Urbanism and Religion: Community, Hierarchy and Sanctity in Urban Thai Buddhist Temples" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1978). 38 Richard A . O'Connor ruling centre to manufacture status distinctions - titles, honours, privileges, rights to reward allies and co-opt rivals, giving lesser leaders and local groups a stake in the centre. This century's bureaucratization hardly differs.44 In effect, ruling groups create the nations they rule. Where the Western economy elaborates the product distinctions that create its culture,45 Southeast Asian cities elaborate the status distinctions that urbanize society. Overall, then, indigenous urbanization is the elaboration of status distinctions that presume a centre and organize society hierarchically.46 It is these distinctions that explain urban dominance and build the city into society. They establish an urban autocracy — meaning not "absolute power" but rather more literally "self empowered" — wherein urban life generates the status distinctions that govern the city and the larger society. Once this closure comes, the city rules a countryside it need never know. Urbane yet insular, elites can imagine peasantries and nations to suit themselves. Urbanism Today: Nation, State and Class While urbanism shows great continuity, it is also true that Indianization, world religions and modernity have revolutionized the region in turn. Each epochal shift creates what Robert McKinley calls an era. Each era's socially constructed meanings constitute a "system of knowledge" that enters into a dialogue with still earlier systems.47 As the new subordinates the old, later eras encapsulate earlier ones. In consequence, as McKinley shows for the Malay, an animist rite can exist within an Islamic explanation within a modern framework. Now if we go by dominance, then as the higher defines the lower's niche, modernity shapes the functions and meaning of all lesser systems. On the other hand, if we go by precedence, then as the lower comes earlier, Islam and still earlier systems restrict what modernity can be. I do not doubt modernity's dominance changes the rest, but my concern here is how precedence enforces continuity. History — merely what came before - explains urban behemoths better than present function or meaning ever will. To study modernity's built in urban bias we shall focus on the inherited social forms whereby earlier institutions and ideologies condition the present. We touch on three contemporary complexes — the nation, the state and the middle class — to show how each embodies an earlier urbanism. The Nation: A nation, Benedict Anderson suggests, is not only an imagined community but also an easily borrowed idea.48 Once borrowed, this import adjusts to indigenous context and historical sequence. In Southeast Asia the result is nations that are new in principle but old in pattern. The egalitarianism of citizenship is a new and powerful ideology, but status distinctions and localism still decide which citizen gets ^Hans-Dieter Evers, "The Bureaucratization of Southeast Asia", Comparative Studies in Society and History 29,4 (1987): 666-85. 45 Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason. ^O'Connor, Indigenous Urbanism. 47 Robert McKinley, "Zaman dan Masa, Eras and Periods: Religious Evolution and the Permanence of Epistemological Ages in Malay Culture", in The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems, ed. A. Becker and A. Yengoyan (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1979), p. 306. 48 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Rev. ed.; London: Verso, 1991). Class, City and Society 39 what. To become a nation Thailand became a geopolitical body,49 but this conspicuously modern construction is also an analog of emboxment, an indigenous construct.50 Ideally the nation supersedes the city, but these new nations succumb readily to urban interests and remain heavily mortgaged to urban forms. Consider two major continuities. First, the nation operates by the same self-conscious society-making process as urbanism and localism. All three readily impose rules lest chaos and corruption reign.51 The fact that the region's new nations have seen chaos may indeed exert "a subtly addictive and a profoundly rigidifying force",52 and yet a fascination with order and its collapse is too old and pervasive to attribute solely to recent politics. In imagining not just community but anarchy, the nation invests its rules with a moral authority that pits discipline against democracy, makes corruption a perennial issue, and stifles open debate.53 If democracy presumes that a nation's rules come from its people, that they arise "within", then this clashes with the indigenous assumption that order comes from "without", that rules descend from elders, ancestors and kings. While the nation, urbanism and localism are alike in their society-making rules, they differ in the arena where the rules are actually made. In localism it is the community with deference to the elders; in urbanism it was the court with deference to the king; and in the nation it is the city with deference to the people. Who are "the people"? A rich politics arises on this issue. While prebendal bureaucrats argue with foreign-funded Non-Governmental Organizations and the media swing from social science to sob stories, the one constant is that these are all urban voices articulating modern values on behalf of others or indeed an "other". In the end this cacophony is an acephelous urban autocracy that imagines a "people" to suit itself. The second continuity is how the new subsumes the old. Just as urbanism is an order above localism and ethnicity, the nation now constitutes itself as a community above all lesser communities. Here social theorists once wrongly assumed that civil society itself was new and that its modern identity could succeed only at the expense of earlier traditional ones and their primordial sentiments.54 What actually happened 49 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). 50 Georges Condominas, L'espace social apropos de VAsie de Sud-Est (Paris: Flammarion, 1980); Macdonald, "Notes sur la Claustration". 51 For an ethnographic illustration see J. Joseph Errington, "Self and Self-conduct among the Javanese Priyayi Elite", American Ethnologist 11,2 (1984): 275-90. "Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 324. 53 On exploiting the threat of ethnic chaos, see David Brown, The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 1994). On the continuity, see James Cotton, "The Limits to Liberalization in Industrializing Asia: Three Views of the State", Pacific Affairs 64,3 (1991): 311-27. On the "emphasis on rules" in Indonesia's New Order, see Ruth T. McVey, "The Beamtenstaat in Indonesia", in Interpreting Indonesian Politics: Thirteen Contributions to the Debate, ed. B. Anderson and A. Kahin (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1982), p. 87. McVey attributes this pattern to a legacy of the colonial state reinforced by the "rule-mindedness of the military" but in uncolonized Thailand even civilian officials pride themselves on their rule-determined "discipline" (rabiap). The larger issue is that the imagined alternative to such rule-mindedness is first corruption and finally chaos. Here corruption, as violating a specifically national trust, is clearly new. 54 Clifford Geertz, "The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States", in Old Societies and New Societies: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. C. Geertz (New York: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 105-157. 40 Richard A. O'Connor is that a new civil society subsumed an older one. A crucial step, and the epitome of the process, was the formation of new national languages. In Thailand, for example, Standard Thai is now spoken almost everywhere but most local languages continue to prosper.55 Similarly, in Indonesia a lingua franca used by the Dutch and spoken in Jakarta became the new language for the new reality of the nation.56 For most it remains the language of citizenship and education whose formality sets it apart from mother tongues that mark home and neighbors by their intimacy.57 Adding a new national identity at the top institutes a hierarchy that subordinates other identities. No nation shows this better than Indonesia where local groups invent religions, edit customs and discover dances that accommodate national categories and tourist sensibilities.58 In Indonesia fundamentalists and recent history raise the stakes, but this interplay pervades the region. On one side is the nation whose agents are urban in attitude, training and often background. On the other side are local groups who may resist or accommodate but can hardly deny the national order. In early modernizing, governments insisted on changing these supposedly backward folks for everyone's good, but elites have yet to decide if the nation is a cultural or political community59 and lately sentimentalizing urbanites have targeted folk traditions for preservation. In Malay novels the once obstructionist village is now a reservoir of national virtue60 while Bangkok's middle classes find the "true Thai" off in the countryside,61 never mind that many peasants have Lao or even Mon ancestry. Indonesia's policies not only imply that national citizenship can accommodate ethnic and religious diversity, but officials actively encourage minorities to mark their differences.62 Why do officials and other urbanites now insist on diversity? If our perspective is not decades but centuries, then society has reverted to type after a brief homogenizing interim. Yet this is not to say that the nation's self-conscious modernizing was a trend that did not take. To the contrary, these higher rules are now so well established that local diversity threatens little. But why do customs that once got sneers now get an official nod or even an indulgent smile? It is not local groups who decide this. What we are seeing is neither disdain63 nor paternalism nor even the "managerial and tutorial 55 William A. Smalley, Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 56 John Hoffman, "A Foreign Investment: Indies Malay to 1901", Indonesia 27 (1979): 65-92; Ben Anderson, "The Languages of Indonesian Politics", Indonesia 1 (1966): 89-116. 57 John U. Wolff, "The Functions of Indonesian in Central Java", in South-East Asian Linguistic Studies, ed. Nguyen Dang Liem (Pacific Linguistics, Series C, no. 42, 1976), pp. 219-35. 58 Greg Acciaioli, "Culture as Art: From Practice to Spectacle in Indonesia", Canberra Anthropology 8, 1-2 (1985): 148-72; Janet Hoskins, "Entering the Bitter House: Spirit Worship and Conversion in West Sumba", in Indonesian Religions in Transition, ed. Rita Smith Kipp and Susan Rodgers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), pp. 136-60; Susan Rodgers, "Batak Tape Cassette Kinship: Constructive Kinship Through the Indonesian National Mass Media", American Ethnologist 13,1 (1986): 23-42. 59 Brown, The State, p. 261. ^David J. Banks, From Class to Culture: Social Conscience in Malay Novels Since Independence (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1987). 6i O'Connor, "From Fertility to Profits". 62 Acciaioli, "Culture as Art"; John R. Bowen, "Communications to the Editor", Journal of Asian Studies 49,3 (1990): 609-611; Rita Smith Kipp, "The Secularization of an Ethnic Identity" (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, New Orleans, 1991). 63 Heather Sutherland, The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese Priyayi (Singapore: Heinemann, 1979), p. 30. Class, City and Society 41 air" of bureaucrats,64 but rather urbanites and nationals eager to establish their identity by who they are not. A touristic encounter collapses intricate status distinctions into juxtaposed kinds, into "us" and "them". Who does this serve? As this urban trope domesticates difference for the nation, it reassures the middle class of their place in urban society. It declares the city one, saying top and bottom differ only by degree. Difference in kind is not in the city but off in the countryside. Where national tropes meet urban needs, the city still rules society. The State: Although easily conflated, a nation and a state are not the same.65 A state may serve a nation by implementing popular will or a nation may serve a state by supporting its administrators' particular interests. A nation is an entire country but the character of a state is often urban because of the facilities it inherits, the customs it carries and the status its personnel hold. In Southeast Asia when the interests of the state and nation differ, the state usually wins because it is older and better institutionalized. While the nation began only with independence, states took over personnel, offices and procedures from colonial or royal administrations. Such continuity may explain why Indonesia's national government sometimes acts as the Dutch colonial state once did,66 and why Singapore's government has a sense of superior virtue that oddly resembles a British colonial administration. It is Thailand, however, where the continuity seems greatest. Here the absolute monarchy's fall left its one-time servant, the civil and military bureaucracy, the master of the nation. As the best established strategic group, the bureaucracy's often independent institutions have set the national agenda ever since.67 Even at the other extreme, where the state is weak, the nation is hardly strong. In the Philippines landed interests hold sway while in Malaysia and Indonesia the government party decides what is good for the nation as well as the state. Whether it is a continuity or a change, the modern state has secured its dominance by expanding enormously and co-opting the educated into its ranks. From 1940 to 1968 Indonesia's administration grew perhaps ten fold while during the 1970s the number of government employees grew 50 per cent in Thailand, 90 per cent in Malaysia and almost 400 per cent in Indonesia.68 In this "runaway bureaucratization", Hans-Dieter Evers sees the offspring of the "historical marriage of a patrimonial and a modern bureaucracy under colonial auspices".69 Just as courts once elaborated status distinctions, states now manufacture jobs to consolidate control; and as these positions accumulate, their distinctions elaborate a national culture and create a middle class. "McVey, "The Beamtenstaat", p. 85. *5Benedict Anderson, "Old State, New Society: Indonesia's New Order in Comparative Historical Perspective", Journal of Asian Studies 42,3 (1983): 477-96; and Imagined Communities. ^Anderson, "Old State"; Ruth McVey, "Faith as Outsider: Islam in Indonesian Politics", in Islam in the Political Process, ed. J. Piscatori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 199-225. *7On strategic groups, see Hans-Dieter Evers, "Sequential Patterns of Strategic Group Formation and Political Change in Southeast Asia" (University of Bielefeld, Sociology of Development Research Centre, 1982); on institutions, see William H. Overhold, "Thailand: A Moving Equilibrium", Pacific Review 1,1 (1988): 7-23. 68 Anderson, "Old State", p. 483; Evers, "Bureaucratization". 69 Evers, "Bureaucratization", pp. 666, 678. 42 Richard A. O'Connor The Middle Class: It is not easy to be middle class where the niche is new. Urbanites who are above the poor but beneath the powerful have only a merchant's heritage to claim. In fact some are merchants or their offspring, but this minority niche hardly suits the growing number who fill the middle positions created by government expansion and economic growth. Their new condition requires new social forms. The middle falls between conflicting conditions. On the one hand, if class arises from parental background and present occupation, then the middle still splits into two groups: a petty bourgeoisie who prosper as a minority, and a professional middle class whose education, identity and prospects are all national.™ On the other hand, if the schools and bureaucracies that fostered today's generation have had their way, then the nation is a single whole whose core is those with the requisite education and income. Here consumerism's many ephemeral distinctions erode the few enduring lines that mark class and ethnicity, but whether this ends as atomization, life style pluralism, or a single middle remains to be seen. Caught in this flux, urbanites seek social forms to place themselves. While some fads may stick, the emerging middle appears to rely heavily on social forms inherited from earlier and especially founding groups.71 The middle is already too large and dispersed to renegotiate these customs, and it may well be too diverse ever to agree again. So this new group relies on social forms that replicate the ways of founding groups. Consider Indonesia and Thailand. In the 1920s a "metropolitan superculture" emerged among modern educated Indonesians in the colony's cities.72 Combining "a colonial-derived Western style" with the outlook of the traditional elite ipriyayi), this new culture "dominated the independence movement" that created the nation.73 By the mid-1960s this mestizo culture was already into its second native-born generation and assimilating newcomers as biculturals.74 Under Suharto it claimed the state whose New Order policies favour a middle class that now dominates the nation.75 In roughly a half century the social forms created by "an extremely small"76 urban group have come to shape the way an extremely large nation imagines and constructs itself. In Thailand a middle class is only now emerging out of the proclivities of petty merchants, modern-day "courtiers" and a handful of ascetic bureaucrats. While the first two groups delight in a status competition that has dominated the Thai capital since Ayutthaya, these bureaucrats are relative newcomers who disdain the conspicuous 70 Richard Robinson and David S.G. Goodman, "The New Rich in Asia: Affluence, Mobility, and Power", Pacific Review 5,4 (1992): 321-27. 71 Our theory combines Evers' strategic groups with Foster's cultural crystallization to argue that the first group to dominate a niche generates the social forms that constrain all who come later. See Evers, "Sequential Patterns", and George M. Foster, Culture and Conquest: America's Spanish Heritage (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960). 72 Hildred Geertz, "Indonesian Cultures and Communities", in Indonesia, ed. Ruth McVey (New Haven: HRAF, 1967), pp. 35-37; McVey, "Faith as Outsider"; Sutherland, Bureaucratic Elite, p. 43. 73 McVey, "Faith as Outsider", pp. 203-205. 74 Benedict Anderson, "Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication Under the New Order", in Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, ed. K.D. Jackson and L.W. Pye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 319; Geertz, "Indonesian Cultures", pp. 35-36. "McVey, "Faith as Outsider", p. 219. 76 Ibid., p. 204. Class, City and Society 43 consumption that drives the other two. I call these officials "ascetic" to mark the austere and self-denying discipline that orders their lives, but their other distinctive traits are an assertively modern insistence on reason and a decidedly conservative faith in expertise and institutions. Perhaps only a few officials continue this line but the real legacy of these ascetic bureaucrats is a civil and military service built around their values. Any bureaucracy dotes on rules but this particular ascetic style has affinities with Buddhist monasticism and testifies to the social position of its founders. The closest Buddhist link is with the royally favoured Thammayut Order. Founded in the nineteenth century, this sect put reason above custom and discipline above all. It sought to reform Buddhism as the modern bureaucracy would later seek to reform government. Early in this century Thammayut reformers were at the height of their influence just when an impressionable first generation of modern educated commoners were beginning careers in the then emerging bureaucracy. As newcomers their vulnerable social position made asceticism an attractive stance. Coming into a court society of the well born and wealthy, these new civil servants were mostly commoners from farming or merchant families.77 Their willing subordination to discipline is a stance we might expect from newcomers among the well connected. Whether they presented themselves humbly as dutiful servants of the king or claimed the high ground by refusing to play an old-boy game they could not win, adherence to discipline was their natural refuge. Their subordination to modernity — reason, efficiency, progress — was all the greater because it was all they had. Later, once these officials were well established, modernity and discipline would come to justify bureaucratic rule. As the best educated found government positions, Thailand failed to develop the kind of strong independent professional class that elsewhere in the region casts informed doubt on the bureaucracy's right to rule or the neutrality of its reason.78 Today, secure in a discipline all revere and some follow, the civil and military service has values that are best explained by the bureaucracy's beginnings. Turning from the bureaucracy to the middle class more generally, Nithi Aewsriwong notes their dependence on borrowed royal forms and attitudes.79 Religion illustrates this nicely. Overall the middle class has largely copied a style of Buddhism whose gift-giving is better suited to court politics than bourgeois practicality.80 While such ceremonies are still popular, their very success at enriching the Sangha has now encouraged new religious movements that decry corruption and insist on a conspicuously 77 Surveying the most successful early civil servants, Evers found a remarkable 43 per cent were the children of farmers and 33 per cent were from merchant families. Only 19 per cent had a father in government service, the bastion of the traditional elite. See Hans-Dieter Evers, "The Formation of a Social Class Structure: Urbanization, Bureaucratization and Social Mobility in Thailand", American Sociological Review 31,4 (1966); 480-88. 78 A crucial juncture came early in this century when the rapidly expanding royal service coopted the newly educated into the monarchy's competition against traditional elites. In Indonesia, on the other hand, the colonial administration's failure to absorb many modern education Indonesians created an independent professional class that would later trouble the Dutch. On Indonesia see Sutherland, Bureaucratic Elite, p. 54. 79 Nithi Aewsriwong, "Watthanatham khong khonchanklang thai" [Culture of the Thai Middle Class], in The Middle Class and Thai Democracy, ed. Sungsidh Piriyarangsan and Pasuk Phongpaichit (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University, 1993), pp. 49-65. 8(> rhe Siamese elite's Buddhism has long served their status competition. See O'Connor, "Cultural Notes", p. 46. Continuing these customs, the middle class emphasizes temple construction, end-of-lent offerings (kathiri) and other conspicuous gift-giving ceremonies (e.g. "forest robes" or phapa). 44 Richard A. O'Connor strict discipline. These movements are controversial but their admiration for discipline is as old as the Thammayut sect and as conservative as the bureaucracy. On one religious extreme the Santi Asok group has an austere asceticism that upholds the early bureaucrats' values, while on the other extreme the Thammakai movement's delight in wealth and authority updates the conspicuous displays that merchants and courtiers have always favoured.81 In doctrine these two contemporary movements clash just as deeply as modernizing and traditional elites ever did, but their implicit agreement on discipline suggests the inherited trait that may come to distinguish bourgeois religion. These politics are Thai but the dilemma is regional. Nowhere does income or education make people "middle class" spontaneously, but in Southeast Asia competing forms make the transition especially uncertain. As the middle expands rapidly, newcomers eager to validate their standing seem to prefer either to copy elite practices or adopt their predecessors' customs. Conclusion Southeast Asia's cities are indigenous in origin, function and meaning and yet research treats them as alien impositions. Cities are ancient to the region and home to almost a third of its people82 but somehow scholars assume the "real" Southeast Asia is off in the countryside and back in the past. This myth misrepresents the region, all of its nations, and most of its cultures, and yet is the bedrock where research begins. Our era romanticizes the countryside, but the deeper bias against the city is in how disciplines constitute themselves. It is not just that academic lines divide urban life arbitrarily, but that studying a city holistically upsets the accepted methods — the procedural rules and shortcuts — that define disciplines. It is these methods that reduce or deny the city. To make their subjects easier to study, it is commonplace for anthropology to isolate the countryside from the city, wrongly making "part societies" into autonomous wholes;83 for geography to factor out indigenous meanings, naively making the city into an alien economic absolute; and for political science to focus on competing interests, forgetting how urbanism constructs the competition and biases the outcome. In these fields and others, as disciplines define reality, the city disappears. Today's hot topic, the region's booming economies, shows how little scholars appreciate the city's significance. Research focuses on the drama's stars only to forget the urban stage. Chinese entrepreneurs and state officials are well worth studying in themselves, but these two groups did not arise independently or recently.84 The activities and identity of each party are sensible not in themselves but only in relation to the symbolic differentiation that constructs urban life and relates these two groups to each other. Whether or not entrepreneurs and officials coalesce into a middle class, physically and culturally they already form part of an urban class that shares insider understandings and social advantages. It is not just that business alliances and bureaucratic careers benefit from urban social connections, but that these groups and their 81 Apinya Fuengfusakul, "Empire of Crystal and Utopian Commune: 1\vo Types of Contemporary Theravada Reform in Thailand", Sojourn 8,1 (1993): 153-83. 82 Jonathan Rigg, Southeast Asia, p. 133. "Robert Redfield, "The Social Organization of Tradition", The Far Eastern Quarterly 15,1 (1955). ^Ruth McVey, "The Materialization of the Southeast Asian Entrepreneur", in Southeast Asian Capitalists, ed. Ruth McVey (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1992), pp. 7-33. Class, City and Society 45 socializing rely on cultural forms and social conditions that require urban explanations.85 To imagine that Thai bureaucrats and Sino-Thai merchants suddenly get along because it now suits their interests misunderstands how interests are culturally constructed.86 Their solidarity arises from the way urban society has adapted traditional social forms (cremations, end-of-lent [kathiri] and forest robes \phapa] gifts) to modern uses and authenticated modern forms (old school ties, a king above politics, birthday parties) as traditional. This city-made "social infrastructure" supports the booming Thai economy. To credit this economic success to foreign investment forgets that capital flows to whatever works. As the Thai economy flourishes, that of the Philippines languishes and Ferdinard Marcos takes the blame. Yet is this the work of one man or were Filipino social forms especially vulnerable to his style of domination?87 All across the region distinctive social forms decide what groups win and lose, where resources flow, and how economies actually work. To understand Southeast Asia we must study its cities holistically. Urbanism is a start but to get far we must shed a myth and avoid two earlier errors. The myth is that the city is just what practicality demands and not what a culture constructs. The errors arise from studying a social entity as if it were like a language that could be understood in itself and apart from time. The first mistakes heuristic fictions for literal truths. Easily made, this error is easily corrected now that we all know the "village" is neither self-contained nor timeless nor sometimes even a village. The second error accepts a single synchronic case as completed scholarship. Studying a culture or any whole "in itself is vital as a rule of method but self-defeating as a principle for scholarship. Rigour requires regional comparison. If rescuing the city from reductive oblivion only reifies it into an all-or-none cultural whole, then perhaps it was best forgotten in the first place. My hope is that seeing the city regionally will allow historical generalizations that combine context and rigour. 85 On connections see Kevin Hewison, Bankers and Bureaucrats: Capital and the Role of the State in Thailand (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1989), 86 Richard A. O'Connor, "Merit and the Market: Thai Symbolizations of Self-interest", Journal of the Siam Society, 74 (1986): 62-82. 87 Turner analyzes how Marcos gained legitimacy by tapping middle class discontent over corruption and exploiting a legalism established in Spanish and American eras. See Mark M. Turner, "Authoritarian Rule and the Dilemma of Legitimacy: The Case of President Marcos of the Philippines", Pacific Review 3,4 (1990): 349-62. Overhold observes that the relative autonomy of Thai institutions has impeded the centralizing control exercised by Marcos and evident in Indonesia's Golkar. See Overhold, "Thailand".