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New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute, the Griffith Asia Institute, the New York Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
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Welcome back everyone to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. We're a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Patrick Jory, I teach Southeast Asian history at the University of Queensland, Australia and I'm co host of this channel. Bangkok is one of the world's great cities and the central artery of that city is the Ja Phraya River. Michael Hurley's book Waterways of Memory, Landscape and Twilight, just published by National University of Singapore Press, is an evocative reflection on the river's place in Thai history, society and culture. The author describes the Jaopia river as, quote, the binding thread of the Thai heartland. He uses the river to examine historical legacies, the role of diverse ethnic groups that have contributed in various ways to the development of Bangkok, Bangkok and the country's fractious politics. The book is also a meditation on the important, but today barely noticed shift entire social life from a waterborne lifestyle to a land based one. A shift which is barely a century old. Flooding, water, pollution and Bangkok's notorious traffic jams are all related to this movement away from an earlier aquatic culture. Today, I'm talking to the book's author, Michael Hurley. Michael is an independent scholar who does ethnographic research in Southeast Asia. Michael, thank you so much for coming on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about your wonderful new book.
B
Thank you so much.
C
First, Michael, can I ask you how you became interested in the anthropology of Southeast Asia and of Thailand in particular?
B
Yes. So I was a rather late starter as far as entering the university. And actually when I was younger, I drove a truck for a living. I did that job for nearly five years. And during that time I started taking classes at a community college at night. And I didn't really know how far this was going to go, but I got the idea that I might continue studying at the University of California, in particular the Davis campus. And during that time I also had the idea that I wanted to travel around the world for a few months. And so I was saving money. And when I finally did get accepted into the university and I quit the job at the truck company, I had about four months of time. And so I started traveling. I visited quite a few different countries. This wasn't all over land, but traveling by plane between the places that I wanted to go. But for example, I went to Turkey, India, Nepal, and I went to Indonesia for the first time. And after that experience, memory of Indonesia was just still very strong. It wouldn't leave me, and I wanted to learn more about that country and the region. So at this point I wasn't thinking as much about Thailand yet. But as I started to read more regional history, I did become curious about the country. Well, I got into UC Davis as an anthropology student, and before that I had covered my general education. So I was really able to immerse myself in anthropology for about two years. I had some great teachers there, and it really convinced me of the potentials and power of ethnographic writing. And so along the way I did start thinking more and more about going on to graduate studies. And I skip over a lot of details here, but I got into the University of California, Irvine, that is in the south of the state, further south in Los Angeles, not far from Mexico really, and it's close to the coast. There's a beautiful coastline there. So I was accepted into a PhD program in anthropology. And at that point I was clear that I was interested in urban anthropology, Southeast Asia. That interest just got stronger and stronger. So that was settled for me that I was going to be doing research there, though at the time I still thought probably Indonesia when I got into the program. Well, during that first year, I Got the sort of crazy idea of studying the Thai language. And one day I sat down and I wrote out the script by hand. And I may even still have that piece of paper somewhere. It's a very childlike first effort. Write out the script. And it took a hold of me. I just. I wanted. I felt like I had to study that language. And within a short time, I was studying for three hours or more a day, usually early in the morning. Now, the. The aspect of studying the river that was developing at the. Slowly, at the same time, I mean, there were a few iterations, different project ideas that came up, but there was something about the waterways. As I started reading more and more specifically about Thailand, and not only the transition from the waterways to roads, but also just numerous connections, the way that water was integrated into culture traditionally and in some ways up to the present became more and more interesting. The way the river was integrated into the national history, binding together capital cities, which were not just cities, but were really kingdoms, you know, and periods of time. And so as I started thinking more and more about that, I gradually developed this project and a theoretical framing of memory and landscape, which is a story in and of itself. But that's the general outline of how it developed. Okay.
C
For listeners who may not be familiar with it, can you please describe the Chao Phraya river, where it originates, its geographical location, its length, its basic ecological features?
B
Sure. So the river begins in the. Basically in the mountainous regions of the northern part of the country. There are four main tributaries that ultimately combine. Those are the Bingwang Yom Nan rivers that combine at a city called Nakhon Sawan. And that is usually considered the actual starting point of the Jalpaya. It flows down a little bit further south from there through a city called Ayutthaya, which is generally considered the predecessor to Bangkok. Not only a city, but an ancient kingdom. And then gradually makes its way down into Bangkok and flows out to the Gulf of Thailand. The region of central Thailand is relatively flat. And so the river, historically, well, it's. It moves in these wide arcs along that plain. But it's been shortened numerous times by what are called shortcut canals. There's been quite a few instances of that, But I was working mainly within the city of Bangkok, although I did travel around the country within Bangkok. This river has been divided out into there. There are numerous canals even today that flow off from the river. Now, a lot of old canals have been filled in and they turned into roads or were. One way or another, were paved over. But there are still quite an abundance of these waterways in the city of Bangkok today. Now, the conventional story of this is that, in short, was that around the late 19th century, people started moving to land, they started building roads. And so there was this turning away from this water based way of life. And there's a lot of truth to that. But for anyone who travels to Bangkok, you can see that the river is still there and actually still quite lively. There's a lot of traffic on the river. It's still a very important artery of infrastructure.
C
One of the themes of the book is the centrality of water to everyday life in Thailand, which you call this aquatic culture. And you really vividly describe the various local communities that at one time or another have made their living along the Jaopia River. Can you describe this aquatic culture?
B
Yeah, there's so many different aspects. So for instance, perhaps we go back just a little bit in history to say that historically it made sense to live along the river, not only for transportation, but people also needed access to water. And people will tell you today that it's just more comfortable to live along the river. It's cooler there. And in the 19th century, a lot of people would have lived in raft houses or otherwise in stilt houses along the water. And as canalization proceeded, settlement would follow the canals. There would have been other paths and things for people to travel by. But it was just much easier to travel by water. It was so much smoother. And you didn't have to worry about the roads being destroyed in the rain or any. Around the late 19th century, they start building paved roads. Or the second half of the 19th century, this profusion of paved roads. And as I was saying, many of the canals actually turned into roads. But there are many other aspects. For instance, in the first numbered chapter, I talk about a festival in which these sort of banana leaf boats, these little handheld vessels, are set afloat on the water. And people say that this represents a sacrifice. Traditionally, they might have even put a lock of hair in the. In the little vessel and set it afloat. But even still, you know, you can still go and many things have changed. Now people might drop a coin in the vessel. But what was really interesting was that many people said that this was a time to apologize to the river, to express appreciation for the river, but also to apologize for polluting it, for example. Of course, as this has transitioned into a more and more industrial society, more and more waste of countless varieties is put into the river and the condition is quite polluted. Though occasionally you will still see people swimming in the river, which you know, many people might think is not a very good idea. Or even occasionally fishing in the river. You can still see fishermen along the water. So there's still a lot of people living in old houses along the waterways and using, using the water. For one reason or another, though, because of the pollution, it's become problematic, the use of the water. Just briefly, one other really prominent example of the association with water would be the New Year's festival in April. And this is something that a lot of people who go to Thailand as tourists actually have a chance to participate in. And people will say that the basic idea is to, you know, wash away the bad things from the past year. It's also just a time for people to have fun, you know, to go out and throw water on, on each other, on friends or strangers or anyone who's on the street. Yeah, this festival that takes place every year. So there are other examples, but those are two quite prominent examples. And I did have these things in mind when I arrived to begin field work. There's one thing I want to add, which is this maternal aspect of the river. This comes up again and again in the text. Now, the Thai word for river, Manham, is literally a mother of water. And so this is not just this particular river, but all of the rivers in Thailand are referred to in this way and beyond Thailand. This is the basic idea of a river traditionally. And according to some studies, this probably goes back to a pre Buddhist animist culture in which women would have had prominent roles in certain kinds of public ceremonies. So this maternal aspect is something that I try to bring out here. And I think people who read the book will notice that the river is usually referred to as she or her. I tried to be quite consistent with that in English, it's very natural and easy to refer to the river as it, but I tried to bring out that maternal aspect.
C
Another of the themes that you weave into the book is Thailand's ethnic diversity. And this has also been a theme of Edward Banroy's excellent recent history of Bangkok, which you mention in the book. So you use the Javier river to anchor your discussion of various ethnic groups that make up the people of Bangkok. Not just the Thai, but the Chinese, the Lao, the Muslims, especially those of Malay ancestry. Chapter one starts off with the theme of the ethnic Chinese. So can you tell us how the ethnic Chinese, what's their association with the Jaopia River?
B
Many ethnicities have migrated along the river and settled along the river. And this goes back beyond memory. This goes back for a long, long Time to ancient empires and peoples before, you know, before empires and so on. The empire of Angkor, for instance, the mourn people who had been settled there and were early adopters of Theravada Buddhism. But in this first chapter, I talk especially about the Chinese. A lot of the chapters in this book, they work through juxtapositions where there's some kind of interesting contrast or tension. So this one aspect where we have this traditional festival, Loy Gratong, which I just described, about the release of these banana leaf vessels on the river. And then in the same chapter, I'm talking about the migration of Chinese for hundreds and hundreds of years to not only Bangkok, but other. Other cities further upstream along the river. And part of the way that that came together was I was living in a predominantly Chinese district near the river. And so it was always coming up. I was talking to some people who, you know, they describe themselves as ties. And then one day they started talking about themselves as Chinese. And there was no apparent contradiction. On the other hand, my Thai conversation partner that I mentioned, she was always very insistent that she was Chinese and not Thai, even though she was born in Thailand. And so that contrast sort of stayed with me. And then once I got into Bangkok, I was meeting Chinese people everywhere. Now, according to observations from the 19th century, most of the inhabitants of Bangkok might have been Chinese, which was kind of startling when I first saw that. And some studies say that in the past, the Chinese character of Bangkok was even stronger than it is today. There were many things that struck me about the role of the Chinese in the development of Bangkok as a city. The way that Chinese laborers would have been involved in early construction of Bangkok before the formal beginning of the, what we might call the Bangkok period in English, the Chinese were already there in that small town, or that was there as a sort of stopping point for ships traveling upstream, but definitely played a role in the construction of the city as it began to develop quite dramatically in the late 18th century. There were many other things that were. Were striking too. So if you read about the early history of Thai nationalism, there's a lot of anti Chinese sentiment. But one of the striking things was that even some of the figures that were making those expressions were themselves people of Chinese descent and sometimes concealing that aspect of their background. So at that time, an idea of a sort of racially defined Thai identity is gradually developing and becoming more central to this concept that we call in English a nation. But there was a lot of confusion. It seems, once that word was translated into Thai, the Word chat. What does this word even mean? So it seems so obvious now, all of these associations. But at the time that these ideas were developing, people were not always clear what they or what other people meant by that word. There's a lot of history that comes through in this book, but again, it should be emphasized that I did this research as an anthropologist, and so I was interested in how history was visible in the present or sometimes invisible. And you're approaching it really from, you know, from the perspective of ethnographic fieldwork. And so looking at both just the kind of stories that people told about the past, the general way that the past was imagined or framed, but also trying to bring the past into the narrative in ways that seemed relevant to understanding the development of what we see today in Bangkok.
C
In chapter three, you develop another ethnic theme, this time about the ethnic Lao. What role had the Lao played in the development of Bangkok and what's their association with the Jaapia River?
B
This is something that might be surprising, and it was rather surprising when I first found out about it. First of all, the Lao have been in Bangkok since the beginning. They also played a very important role in the. In the construction of the city itself. But the biggest aspect that I. That I emphasize in the chapter is that a lot of these people were transferred as war captives. And this goes back to the destruction of a city that really precedes the present capital of Laos. There are different ways to pronounce the name of the city. People might pronounce it Vintian. Often when I'm reading my own work, I'll pronounce it, which is the way it's pronounced in Thai. So this city was not only a city, but a sort of city kingdom, was in a kind of, perhaps we say, colonial relationship with the Bangkok centered state of Siam. We're talking about before the transition of the name from Siam to Thailand, the city was attacked a number of times and defeated. And on each occasion, there were large transplantations from the city of the population. In the third reign of the current ruling dynasty of Thailand, the city was, from what the records show, historically completely destroyed. And all of the surviving population who had not escaped were transferred to what we would think of now as Thailand. The question of borders complicates this later on, but many of those people were actually transferred to the area around the Jaopia River. So basically what is what is now considered central Thailand. And these people would have become prai. So this gets a little bit complicated.
C
In my sort of peasants or serfs, right?
B
Yeah. So as A kind of. What they call. We usually call in English, the field power system and is often referred to as a kind of feudal system. But these would have been people subjected, in short, to cycles of conscripted labor. And there were different kinds of prey. Some of them would have done three months, some might have done longer, perhaps six months of conscripted labor every year. So that transferred population of Lao, many of them, they were, you know, they became. They became laborers. There's another aspect of this that I want to bring up, which is that people have been from those, I'm going to say, Lao regions. The words that we're using here, it gets a little bit complicated. You fully understand the Thai context, like the word Lao is sometimes used in a kind of disparaging way in Thailand. At the same time, there are a lot of people in the northeastern region that self identify as Lao and refer to their language even as Lao. Language is basically a dialect of Lao. Particularly after World War II, these people migrated in large numbers. And this has to do with the construction of roads. It became much easier to migrate to Bangkok. So today, you know, in Bangkok you can meet people who are either who are from the northeast or in one way or another, of Lao descent. But there's a scholar that I mentioned near the end of the chapter who points out that there might be a lot of people in Bangkok who don't even know that they have Lao ancestry who are actually descended from these forced migrations. So that was really fascinating to me and got me thinking to set up this sort of contrast between the memory of Weyangzhen and the memory of Ayutthaya, usually considered the ancient Thai capital, and the sort of contrast between the one which is the destruction of Wenzhong has largely been forgotten, is not celebrated anymore in tellings of history conventionally, whereas the telling of a utr is repeated again and again and again, especially its tragic destruction.
C
We tend to think of Thailand as a nation of Buddhists. But in chapter four, entitled Belonging, you write that Muslims and especially Malays have also played a major role in the development of Bangkok, especially along the famous Canal San SAP. Can you tell us about the history of Bangkok's Muslim community and its connection to the Jaapia River.
B
Yes. So this chapter starts out with a description of San SAP, which is one of the most notorious canals in the city. It's part of the canal system that breaks away from the Jalpia river, but it's very badly polluted. On the other hand, there are still passenger ships, passenger boats moving along the river every day. It's an important part of the urban infrastructure. And when I set out to do this project, I didn't actually plan to do research along that canal in particular, but I sometimes used the canal to, just to travel through the city. And one day I was passing through the canal and I heard an Islamic call to prayer. Now, as you said, ties are generally said to be Buddhists country is certainly predominantly Buddhist, very famous for Buddhist temples all over the country. But what I found was that there was this relatively small community of Muslims living along the canal. And I became more and more curious about how they got there. And part of this is because insofar as Muslims are recognized as part of Thai society, there's a very strong emphasis on them being of the southern regions adjacent to Malaysia. And so I gradually got to know this community and people were very warm and welcoming. And I was even sort of surprised as I got to know this place, how open and willing to talk people were. So of course, in ethnographic research there are people that we become very close to and I still have friends from that time that I go back to visit when I go back to Thailand. But not everyone is going to, you know, become your friend when you're out there doing this kind of research. People don't always understand what you're trying to do. And in any case, for some people it's, you know, it's just not that important to, you know, talk about their lives to somebody who's doing research. But people in this community, you know, they, I, I kept going back and they were, they were so welcoming. Now gradually as people started telling me more stories about the origins of the mosque and I started asking questions about the origins of the community. And actually there was a lot of ambiguity there. And that was sort of, sort of curious for me. People weren't really sure where the community came from. Was there any connection with the southern regions? And well, as in the case of the Lao, there have actually been large transfers from the southern region. Again, people transferred as war captives to Bangkok. This history is not something that is necessarily important to people or their identity in everyday lives. As I asked more and more people, sometimes something about this would sort of come up in its rough outlines, but many people would just say they weren't sure where the community came from. Or they would say you have to talk to the big people, you know, the people who have more status in the community. Which would mean, you know, people have a, also a greater power to explain, a greater power to know, to give a Sort of official version of, of where the community came from. Now there are other places that Muslims have lived. In ancient Siam, for instance, there were certainly communities in ancient Ayutthaya and so on. It was interesting that people started telling stories about how the canal got there in the first place. And well, it was essentially that Muslims had participated in the process of canalization and supposedly some of them were given this land and then permitted to build a mosque there by the canal. And now there's still this thriving community there, even though this, this canal has such a terrible relationship. There's this very lively, thriving community right there around this mosque along the water. And the original mosque was actually burned down. And people offer different stories about how that happened, but they, they built this new mosque there that was very clearly the center of, of the community. And I noticed this as I was, you know, doing interviews and things and people say, look, I just have to go and, and pray and then I'll come back. And we would continue our conversation if.
C
We could return to the, the ecological theme of the book. In one place you write that quote, waterways evoke the water centered way of life which has been mostly abandoned. And I think one of the interesting and I think less well understood aspects of Thai and actually Southeast Asian social life is this shift away from waterborne transport to road transport, a shift away from this aquatic culture. As you describe it, you write that before then Bangkok was a floating city. And you describe the shift in the book, it's relatively recent, late 19th, early 20th century. So I wanted to ask you, how did that shift affect this much older form of life along the waterways of Thailand, in particular in Bangkok?
B
This is roughly beginning around the second half of the 19th century. But it doesn't happen in an entirely linear, in a sense of a straightforward progression. Actually the early periods of building paved roads were also periods of very intensive canalization. However, over time there's been a definite movement toward more and more wheeled transport and other kinds of transport as well trains. And of course the BTS system, which opened in the 1990s and is steadily expanding and has offered a lot of relief for those who can afford it. To avoid the traffic on the roads of Bangkok, a lot of the old dwellings along the river have been dismantled. One very rarely we'll find there aren't very many floating houses left. There are some people more or less living on boats here and there, but the old fashioned houses that rose and fell with the seasons and the rain and the floods have been mostly dismantled. Though there are some places where those have been actually taken up onto land, have become land based structures. But yeah, there are, the stilt houses are still there, but there's a kind of nostalgia around those sorts of dwellings and a sense that, you know, this way of life, insofar as it is still there, is sort of still in the process of perishing. And most people are not very optimistic about the future of that way of life. And people are quite conscious of the severe pollution of the river. At the same time, people will sometimes say, yes, but the water flows. And so it still has this potential of being renewed. But with the proliferation of factories in Bangkok and upstream from Bangkok, countless chemicals, not to mention sewage, being poured into the river, the condition has gotten quite bad. And so this has clearly compromised the way of life along the canals. Though at the same time, there are still people who will tell you very earnestly the reasons that they like to live in that kind of environment. You know, it's cool and the, the wind blows in from the river. It's seen as a relatively comfortable part of the city to live in.
C
One other point is related to flooding. And we tend to think of floods as abnormal events. But in one of the chapters you write that before the year of road transport, floods were a regular and natural phenomenon. I think you say floods were part of the seasonal cycle, although of course some years the flooding could be particularly severe. But could you maybe say something about if flooding has, or the effects of flooding have changed over the years?
B
Yes, this is quite a crucial point in relation to the, the changing relationship to water. I talk about this especially in the second chapter on loss. Basically the loss of a way of life and this sort of paradox that ties are said to be a people who like to live with water and have some kind of natural proclivity to this way of life. But just before I started my field work, Bangkok was severely inundated. And I heard stories about, you know, water flowing into houses and offices and people even using canoes for travel along basically flooded roads from house to house. So as I mentioned a moment ago, you know, the old fashioned floating houses, the raft houses, and at least one of the informants that I mentioned in the book said that he actually grew up in one of those houses. Those were very well adapted to floods. If it rains and the river is flooded, they would just rise with the water, but people aren't living that way anymore. This is also related to big questions of climate change. The problem of subsidence, the gradual sinking of Bangkok, the weight of the city on the earth, the city is already at a rather low elevation. So flooding in the future, by all projections that I have seen, probably going to be a very serious problem. Now, when I arrived in Bangkok, the water was still receding and there were still white sandbags all over along the river. And people were just waiting, it seemed, for the next big flood. But these were also times when people talked about the importance of community efforts that people had to make to protect their communities from the flood water, which would include things like working together to stack sandbags along the water around their communities.
C
I wanted to ask another question about the issue of water pollution, which you've already discussed a little bit, and I'm not sure if you don't really develop this question in the book, but I wanted to ask it anyway. In Europe and other developed countries these days, even actually closer to home, in Singapore and the Singapore river, there have been major efforts to clean up their major rivers. So, you know, rivers which in the past had been very polluted, they are recoverable, it seems. So I was wondering, is there a similar movement in Thailand to try and clean up these waterways which have become so polluted since, I guess, since the industrialization from the 1960s?
B
Well, let me say that there's certainly a lot of talk about this and people who would like to see the river cleaned up. For example, I can recall seeing a mural on a wall, and it was a picture of people working together and cleaning up the river. Honestly speaking, this seems almost like. I mean, of course, people have participated in cleaning, and there are a lot of people who would like to see it cleaned up, but it's almost like an anticipated utopia where people really will gather together and clean up the river. My understanding is the various agencies that work directly with the river, they're well aware of the conditions of the river, but the basic goal is to keep it at the level just above where life will not be viable, to keep it from crossing over that line where basically nothing can live in the river. Which might seem like a rather modest.
C
No expectations, but if you wanted to.
B
Really see the challenges those agencies are facing in. In the process of doing that, you know, it would really require some internal research, I think, with those organizations, but there's certainly some consciousness and faint hope of cleaning up the river eventually.
C
You obviously have been working on this project, Ferguson, quite a significant amount of time now. But could I ask you, do you have a new project, and can you tell us what it might be?
B
Yes, I've been developing a project that is basically an organic development from this rather long running Project on waterways, which would essentially be an ethnography of rain, especially in the context of the monsoon. And as I was studying the river, I started thinking about, well, where do rivers come from? And basically they originate from rain or some other kind of precipitation, perhaps snow, depending on the case. So once you start thinking about the seasons of Thailand and the rainy season, this is related to the broader phenomenon of the monsoon system, which really covers massive swath of territory, goes over the Indian Ocean, and many other countries are together more or less part of this system. It could be described simply as a system of alternating winds blowing in one direction for half of the year and blowing in the other direction for the half of the year. This has enormous implications historically. So think of merchants traveling in the era of sail. You really have to follow the winds, and there's enough regularity to the system that they know that eventually the winds are going to turn around. But sometimes there's a long wait, and in the time, people might have just decided to settle where they had stopped. It's immensely important in terms of migration. But once I started working on this, I found that new areas and connections opened very quickly. So just to mention a few, for example, different kinds of rain calling the old bronze kettle drums that are found not only in Thailand, but in other neighboring countries. And one of the functions of those, they would have been used to call rain at the end of the dry season. Other things, like the ceramic jars that are found all over Thailand and other neighboring countries that are used to collect rain, Floating houses, as I mentioned. And that's something I would like to say more about. There are opportunities with this to return to the theme of rivers and waterways. You know, these. These bodies of water, the Jiao pia being one, ultimately originate from rain or other things as well. Like the seal of Bangkok has the God Indra mounted on an elephant. So Indra is basically the God of storms. And then as I started looking more deeply into this mythology, I found that one of the old associations of white elephants. Now, if people have ever seen the old flags of Siam, they went through different iterations. But in short, one of those flags was a white elephant, a red background. But if you look into the associations with white elephants, one of them is that they symbolize clouds. The cloud is a kind of white elephant floating in the sky, and so on and so on, Issues of floods and so on. So this is one project that I've been gradually developing. It's in a sort of still somewhat experimental stage, but so far so good. The materials still coming together and in this I want to write something that we structured rather differently from Waterways of Bangkok, which has relatively long chapters that are somewhat complex in their construction, especially from a writing perspective, this weaving of different things together into the chapters. I want to do something that would have a more flexible structure, more shorter chapters. So that is gradually progressing and we'll see how it goes. But like I said, so far, so good.
C
It sounds very exciting. We'll look forward to seeing that come out eventually. Sadly, we've run out of time, so Michael Hurley, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss your new book, Waterways of Memory, Landscape and Twilight. It's published by National University of Singapore press in 2025.
B
Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here and.
C
You'Ve been listening to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. We're a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Thanks everyone, as always for listening. You can download or stream these interviews and thousands more free of charge via the New Books Network website or Itun.
B
Sa.
Podcast: New Books Network – New Books in Southeast Asian Studies
Host: Patrick Jory
Guest: Michael Hurley
Episode: Waterways of Bangkok: Memory, Landscape and Twilight (NUS Press, 2025)
Date: February 1, 2026
In this episode, Patrick Jory interviews anthropologist Michael Hurley about his book, "Waterways of Bangkok: Memory, Landscape and Twilight". The conversation delves into the historical and cultural centrality of the Chao Phraya River (Ja Phraya) in Bangkok and Thailand at large. Hurley reflects on the river as a binding thread for Thai society, examining Bangkok’s transformation from an aquatic culture to a land-based, modern city. The book and discussion weave together the themes of memory, ethnic diversity, landscape, and the complexities of ecological change.
Quote:
"There was something about the waterways... the way that water was integrated into culture traditionally and in some ways up to the present became more and more interesting." — Michael Hurley [05:09]
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"The region of central Thailand is relatively flat. The river... moves in these wide arcs along that plain. But it's been shortened numerous times by what are called shortcut canals." — Michael Hurley [08:05]
Memorable Quotes:
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"According to observations from the 19th century, most of the inhabitants of Bangkok might have been Chinese, which was kind of startling when I first saw that." — Michael Hurley [16:26]
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"A lot of these people were transferred as war captives... and many of those people were actually transferred to the area around the Jaopia River." — Michael Hurley [21:09]
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"As I asked more people... many would just say they weren't sure where the community came from. Or they would say: you have to talk to the 'big people,' you know, the people who have more status in the community." — Michael Hurley [28:23]
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"Most people are not very optimistic about the future of that way of life. And people are quite conscious of the severe pollution of the river. At the same time, people will sometimes say, yes, but the water flows—and so it still has this potential of being renewed." — Michael Hurley [32:17]
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"If it rains and the river is flooded, they would just rise with the water, but people aren't living that way anymore. This is also related to big questions of climate change." — Michael Hurley [35:31]
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"Honestly speaking, this seems almost like... an anticipated utopia, where people really will gather together and clean up the river." — Michael Hurley [37:55]
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"So once you start thinking about the seasons of Thailand and the rainy season, this is related to the broader phenomenon of the monsoon system, which really covers [a] massive swath of territory." — Michael Hurley [39:30]
On Cultural Memory:
"I was interested in how history was visible in the present or sometimes invisible." — Michael Hurley [18:39]
On Identity:
"[They] describe themselves as ties. And then one day, they started talking about themselves as Chinese. And there was no apparent contradiction." — Michael Hurley [15:59]
On Community Resilience:
"These were also times when people talked about the importance of community efforts, that people had to make to protect their communities from the flood water." — Michael Hurley [36:11]
The tone is reflective, thoughtful, and accessible—Hurley balances scholarly insight with evocative, clear descriptions and regular reference to fieldwork vignettes. Jory’s questions encourage a mix of personal narrative, empirical explanation, and theoretical reflection, making the episode rich and engaging.
This episode offers a nuanced journey through the waterways of Bangkok: from their geographical birth to their enduring echoes in modern Thai society, and from histories of migration and memory to the everyday lived experiences shaped by water, loss, and environmental change. Hurley invites listeners to see the river not just as background, but as a living actor in Bangkok’s ongoing story—one whose cultural, ecological, and emotional currents run deep.