Sports in Pre-Modern and Early Modern Siam: Aggressive and Civilised Masculinities

Abstract

This thesis is a contribution to two bodies of scholarship: first, the historical understanding of the modernisation process in Siam; second, one of the central bodies of scholarship used to analyse sport sociologically – Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning’s study. Previous studies of the emergence of a more civilised form of manner in modern Siam highlight the imitation of Western civilised conducts, overlooking the continued role of violence in this change in Siamese behaviour from the pre-modern to modern periods. According to evidence, from around the 1900s, Siamese elites engaged in deliberate projects to civilise prevalent non-elites’ aggressive conducts. This, in turn, has implications for the Eliasian understanding of sports and civilising process, which emphasises their unplanned development in Europe, at the expense of grasping the deliberate interventions of the Siamese elites. To fill this gap, I apply the concept of the “civilising offensive” to underline the planned process of civilisation. The thesis discusses how aggressive masculinity was expressed legitimately during the pre-modern age, and how this violent behaviour was transformed by the elites’ promotions of civilising plans and sports under contexts of colonisation and nation-state building processes. I examine how civilised self-images were produced from interactions between Siamese elites, non-elites and Westerners. I use autobiographies, government documents, newspapers, match reports, chronicles, poems, travel writings and so on to explore first-hand accounts of behaviours, identities and values related to the presence of violence in sports and politics. From the 1820s onward, Westerners used what they perceived to be their higher civilisation standards as an excuse to interfere in Asia. In response to the Westerners’ perceptions of the Siamese as barbarous, Siamese elites promoted civilised identities through sports and education. In the 1900s, to avoid being shamed, the non-elites learned to act in a civilised manner temporarily when interacting with elites and Westerners in sports fields. The civilising effect of interdependence between these actors showed that planned and unplanned processes of civilisation coexisted in Siam.