Settlement in Thailand : patterns of development

Abstract

The traditional lack of communication between the Bast and the West has always exposed Eastern man to the measure of his Western counterpart. To be sure, where learning has impressed us with its own integrity, as in nations like China or India, a certain diffidence is evident; but in Southeast Asia there is little accumulated indigenous scholarship available to counsel caution or provide a salutary respect in the contemporary Western observer. This lack of indigenous material - the more distressing for Thailand because of an unexpected meagreness - poses even more basic problems for the researcher. For, though well—aware that the glib transfer of Western experience to the Eastern situation can return little more than sterile description and that the classification 'East - West' or 'developed - un-, under-, lesser-developed' is a necessarily pedantic ordering, he is forced into simulating a basis for comparison if he would attempt the first hesitant step toward understanding. And, however inescapable and carefully qualified this approach may be it must depend on those generalizations which have been evolved in the West possessing some axiomatic qualities. Show more