herbswanson.com

Hartzell, Jessie MacKinnon. Mission to Siam: the Memoirs of Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell. Edited by Joan Acocella. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.

As historical fields go, the study of northern Thai church history up to 1941 is an exceedingly modest field documented by a relatively limited number of sources. While those sources still run to many, many thousands of pages of documents, books, and articles, the amount is not overwhelming. That may be good in the sense that it is a field one can "master" to an extent. The problem with a limited historical record is, of course, that we are left with many holes in the story. This is especially true for the period between the Wars when missionary records are much less helpful than is the case for before World War I but Thai-language sources are still almost non-existent.

One greets this book, thus, with a sense of gratitude. Here, miracle of miracles, is a missionary biography published by a major university press that provides new historical data from precisely that inter-War period. Of equal importance, the book is about and the data is from a missionary wife. Missionary wives, as a group, have left far fewer records than their husbands or unmarried missionary women, who had to write their own reports and conduct their own correspondence. Without opening so much as a page, these facts commend Jessie Hartzell's now published memoirs to those who are interested in missionary history, the history of missions in Thailand, and northern Thai history generally.

Hartzell's memoirs are presented as a contribution to feminist historiography, a primary document for feminist historiographical reflection if you will. The editor, however, does not overplay this approach to the memoirs, an approach that is useful so long as it is understood that Hartzell herself was not a feminist. She was simply a woman who happened to become a missionary and go to northern Siam. The importance of her memoirs is not that they are fodder for a particular ideological estimation of the past but rather that they give voice, as stated above, to a woman who has otherwise remained largely voiceless—ignored by and unknown to even students of northern Thai church and missions history. She was a woman whose voice deserves being heard, which may be the point of the whole book.

The contents of the memoirs themselves confirm their importance to the study of northern Thai missionary and general history. They provide a much fuller picture of the work and ministry of the Hartzells, Presbyterian missionaries, in comparison with anything previously available. Since they worked at Lampang, Nan, and Phrae in the course of their career (for her, from 1912 to 1928), we receive improved insights into the workings of those three smaller stations. These memoirs also contain many details of missionary life that add further texture to our understanding of daily life as a missionary in the North. These include the long, yet interesting trip out to northern Siam, the challenges of learning northern Thai, shopping in Bangkok, working with servants, and the various aspects of daily life and work. Hartzell became deeply involved in the medical work of the mission, and her memoirs contain descriptions of the diseases she had to treat and the conditions in which she worked. One of the few drawbacks to Hartzell's memoirs is that in the published text it is often difficult to tell in what year events take place. Sometimes the reader has to work back ten for fifteen pages to find a date that might be relevant to an event or description.

Joan Acocella, the editor, is Jessie Hartzell's granddaughter, and it is clear that the editing and publication of this volume was a labor of love of and respect for her grandmother. Her portrait of her grandmother (pages xxvi-xliii) is an important addition to the book and a helpful contribution to the study of Presbyterian missionary history in Siam. It explains the provenance of Hartzell's memoirs and provides important insights into her life before and after Siam, areas that historians frequently do not have access to in the study of missionary history. The portrait she gives is that of an essentially sad woman, who met with many trials in her life and made important sacrifices to remain on the mission field. If Acocella is correct, Jessie Hartzell was a considerably stronger person than her husband and seems to have made a more substantial contribution to missionary work than he did. Acocella also highlights Hartzell's increasing love for the northern Thai and her commitment to them, without patching over the sometimes patronizing (matronizing?) attitudes Jessie had towards them.

One of Acocella's most important insights into her grandmother from a missionary history point of view is her claim, based on information gleaned from Hartzell's daughters, that Jessie Hartzell was not an especially religious woman

although she did believe in God. (page xxxix); she almost seems to have fallen into missionary work inadvertently. This family insight seems confirmed by the general lack of religious rhetoric that graces so many pages of the general missionary record in northern Siam. Acocella, ever seeking a balanced portrait of Hartzell, however, also makes the important observation that, "Religion is often accused of keeping women down; here is a case of the church's enabling a woman to go forward." (page xxix). The history of women on the mission field in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries repeatedly confirms this insight.

One wishes that the academic introduction (pages xi-xxiv) was as well managed as the familial portrait of Jessie Hartzell. The general descriptions of the historical backdrop to Hartzell's ministry in northern Siam are fine, but Morris' grasp of the finer points of northern Thai missions history is constantly, almost consistently plagued by bloopers, large and small. She has, for example, the Revs. Daniel McGilvary and Jonathan Wilson, important figures in the founding of northern Thai missions, arriving in Bangkok 1858 with their "families" to "start another new mission" which became, she states, "the Siam Presbytery." In fact, McGilvary was single. They arrived to join the Siam Mission, which was founded in 1847, and the Siam Presbytery was an organization composed of Thai churches, which in no way could be classified as a mission (page xii). It should be noted that Morris herself later states correctly in a footnote that McGilvary and Wilson came to join the Siam Mission, thus contradicting her earlier statement. (page 42 note) In that same footnote, however, she again makes several misstatements. She claims, first, that McGilvary and Wilson graduated from Princeton University instead of Princeton Theological Seminary (Class of 1856), the correct institution. She states they shared plans for "an evangelical mission" from the time they were classmates. There is nothing in any extant records that indicates that this is true or even that they were particularly close while in seminary. She states that after their arrival in Bangkok in 1858, they established the Siam Presbytery; that is almost correct. They did participate in its founding, but did not take the lead as she implies. Finally, Morris claims that Wilson and McGilvary founded "the Northern mission in 1866." The truth is that the McGilvarys, Daniel and Sophia, along with their two children arrived in Chiang Mai in April 1867, and that date is usually taken as the foundation of the "Laos Mission." Wilson was not involved. He and his wife, Kate, did not reach Chiang Mai until

February 1868. The rest of Morris' Introduction is riddled with wrong facts and misleading interpretations (on pages xvi, xviii, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiv), although at times she does get her interpretation straight, such as her insight that the missionaries of Hartzell's generation were still reluctant to turn over work and authority to the northern Thai (page xvi).

The Introduction not withstanding, this is an important and invaluable book in terms of the study of Presbyterian missionary history in northern Siam. It takes its place on a shelf of missionary biographies and books that is altogether too bare of comparable studies. Those who are going to study northern Thai church history in the missionary era up to the late 1920s will need to use this book.

Thongchai Winichakul. "Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Post-National Histories in Southeast Asia." A Paper presented to the 8th International Conference on Thai Studies, 9-12 January 2002.

On first glance, the subject of this patently academic paper appears irrelevant to the life and history of the churches of Thailand. Thongchai's call for new historigraphical theories in the writing of Southeast Asian history, however, offers important insights for that life and history. I begin here with a review of the paper itself and then offer a few thoughts on how it can help us reflect on Thai church history and on our understanding of Thai theologies.

Thongchai, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, has become an important figure in the study of Thai history. In this paper, he steps back to reflect on the theories widely assumed in writing Thai history and history in Southeast Asia generally, and he explores the possibility of new theories and a changed focus. Avoiding trendy references to "post-modernism," Tongchai devotes his attention to the influence of the concept of "nation" on the study of Southeast Asian history. He begins the paper by observing that historians have been debating for some time the impact of focusing on the nation as the primary category for studying the past. National history has until recently amounted to "official" history, but historians now argue that looking at the past through the lens of the nation state distorts or ignores many important aspects of that past. National history in Southeast Asia fails to honor local identities and the unique stories (histories) of local communities and sub-

national regions. It also fails to give due place to those histories that straddle national boundaries or that involve the whole of Southeast Asia. Given the limitations of national history, Thongchai notes that many historians are moving beyond it; they are seeking new ways of imaging the past and of writing history. He challenges other historians to get on the bandwagon and to begin to contribute to the development of new historigraphical theories and topics of study. This paper is his personal contribution to meeting that challenge.

Thongchai places his theoretical considerations in the context of globalization, taking a surprisingly upbeat, positive attitude about it that rejects the bad press it receives in many quarters. He argues that globalization is inevitably accompanied by "localization," a process that he apparently feels is increasingly destroying the very foundations of nation-state legitimacy. Throughout the paper, Thongchai displays a somewhat subtle but clearly articulated antipathy to the nation state and national histories. He celebrates, therefore, the opportunities presented to historians by the globalization-localization process. The paper argues that globalization is not a grave danger to local culture because of the fact that local conditions always reshape and transform global forces. Globalization fosters and encourages local "translations" of global themes, a process that Thongchai also calls, "hybridization." He observes that Southeast Asia has experienced two prior waves of globalization, namely "Indianization" in more ancient times and colonialism more recently. Neither of these movements, he contends, resulted in a loss of Southeast Asian identity.

(A comment. Thongchai lives in the United States, and in that context, this happy interpretation of globalization as a largely benign process makes a good deal of sense. I would argue that marginalized peoples in Thailand, such as the Karen and Lahu, however, do not experience globalization in this rosy fashion. It is killing their cultures, destroying their environments, and causing serious dislocation in their lives. Globalization is not just a cultural process. It has economic and political aspects that are frequently demonic, and local people are hard-pressed to resist the exploitive aspects that accompany globalization.)

The author offers an alternative to national historiography, which he calls, "history at the interstices" (my computer dictionary defines "interstices" as being "A space, especially a small or narrow one, between things or parts."). He sees two

advantages to this new type of history. First, it directs the historian's attention to the boundaries of a nation and to those places and peoples considered marginal to national history. Second, "history at the interstices" encourages the study of local histories. Subjects this type of history might study include not only local histories, but also histories of border regions and border communities, sub-national regional histories, tribal histories, the history of travel and communications, and studies covering the whole or parts of Southeast Asia.

Finally, Thongchai raises the question of who is qualified to undertake "interstitial history" (my term, not his). This seems to be a very personal question for him, as he reflects on his being both Thai-Chinese and an expatriate scholar living in the United States. He rejects the notion that only indigenous scholars are qualified to write history at the interstices and proposes a new category, "home" historians, in its place. "Home" historians are historians who are writing about the place where they live; they may be foreigners living in Southeast Asia as well as indigenous scholars. They need not be native speakers of the "home" language. While not denying the obvious advantages of native language speakers in the study of home histories, Thongchai insists that sometimes non-native language speakers are as or more sensitive to the meaning of home words and the home language than are native language speakers. He concludes that interstitial history is a collective process, one that will be engaged in by many scholars of many stripes.

Thongchai's paper on history at the interstices illuminates issues relevant to the study of Thai church history in at least three ways. First, it puts questions of indigenization, contextualization, and inculturation in a new light. It can be argued that a great deal of the concern expressed by Western church scholars and missionaries concerning these issues has more to do with their needs to adapt themselves to Thai situations than it does with the needs of the Thai churches themselves. I am convinced that the Christianities of Thailand are already far more "Thai" (or Karen, or Lahu, or Isan) than most Westerners associated with Thailand's churches understand or are willing to admit. Just as Thongchai claims, translation and hybridization has taken place and continues to take place. We are still waiting for the churches of Thailand to reflect on that process in a more self-aware way and in print than it has so far, but the relative lack of (published, formal) reflection on the process

does not mean the process is not taking place. Thongchai also helps us to see that the localization of the Christian faith is an inevitable consequence of the foreign missionary movement's work in Thailand. The missionary movement may be viewed as one aspect of colonialism (formerly) and globalization (currently), which means that once people in Thailand accepted the Christian faith they immediately began to go to work on it with the cognitive and religious tools of their own cultures.

A happy, minor instance of the translation of American Presbyterian forms by the Church of Christ in Thailand is the recent decision that ordained clergy should be members of both a local church and a district ("presbytery"). In the United States, this dual membership would be seen as a confusion of clergy roles and of the powers of the local church as over against the presbytery. Clergy can be members only of presbytery because only presbytery can oversee their work and exercise judicial discipline over them. Local churches, on the other hand, exercise disciplinary authority over their members. If a cleric belongs to both a church and a presbytery, who is finally responsible for her discipline? Which membership takes precedence? The CCT happily ignores all of these legalities. In its context(s), the issue is one of belonging, and the CCT wants its clergy to belong to a local Christian community. "Membership" is not a legal or organizational category so much as a communal one. That which violates ecclesiastical sensibilities in the United States makes perfect ecclesiastical sense in Thailand. Translation has taken place. The result is a global-local hybrid.

Second, the reconceptualization of history as being done at the interstices sheds light on the concept of the "Thai Church." On the basis of Thongchai's paper, it can be argued that either there is no such thing at all as the "Thai Church" or that, if there is, there shouldn't be. We need to discard the concept. Where, one wonders, is the Thai church? It certainly is not found in Chiang Mai or the other northern provinces. Properly speaking, the people of the North are not even ethnically Thai; they are Thai Yuan or, again, "khon muang," the People of the Muang. Are the Thai-Chinese churches of Bangkok "Thai" churches? Karen. Hmong. Ahka. Lahu. Isan. Are the churches in the southern province of Trang "Thai" churches? Is Second Church, Bangkok, a "Thai" church, when a significant portion of its members are transplanted Northerners? If one adheres to a strict ethnographical definition of Thai-ness, it turns

out that a mere handful of CCT churches are "really Thai." The huge majority is something else-either entirely or in part. It is all but impossible, in any event, to even arrive at "a strict ethnographical definition of Thai-ness." In this light, a standard history of the churches in Thailand should be entitled just that, "A History of the Churches in Thailand," rather than "A History of the Thai Church." Could one include a chapter on Karen church histories in Thailand, for example, in a book on the history of the "Thai" church?

Third, interstitial history encourages church historians to look to the margins of the church in Thailand for their subjects. It encourages the writing of tribal church histories. It encourages an emphasis on local church history. That history also directs our attention to rethinking the boundaries of church history. It would be an exciting enterprise, for example, to write a history of the culturally related ethnic Tai churches of Laos and Isan, largely ignoring the national boundary that runs between them.

Thongchai Winichakul's presentation to the 8th International Conference on Thai Studies, in sum, offers a stimulating, potentially productive re-thinking of how we conceptualize the writing of church history in Thailand. It offers new subjects for study and new avenues for reflection. That presentation, in particular, puts the relationship between Western missions and the churches of Thailand in a new light. One could wish that the author would write in somewhat less dense academic-ese, but even so this is an important paper; no word fits it better than "stimulating."