ABSTRACT
I would like to limit the scope of this article to what I call the espace social of the Thaispeaking montagnards.2 The remarkable linguistic unity of the Thai-speaking populations throughout South East Asia has always impressed linguists, just as their geographical expansion, and its rapidity, from North-East to South-West, has struck historians. This physical spread over South East Asia was all the more striking as the documentation which epigraphers and philologists had at their disposal (quite early) showed that the Thai had extended their domination over an immense territory in a relatively short space of time, from the South of China to Assam on one hand, to the North of the Malay peninsula on the other. The very type of source available to historians (Chinese annals concerning Southern barbarians, Thai epigraphic documents and Pali and Thai chronicles) imposed on them a kind of research which belongs to what we call in French histoire événementielle. This approach results in tiresome details about places and dates, biographies of kings and warriors, and the only references available about the cultural background deal with the splendour of different reigns. On this point, we may add that archaeology has provided first-class and beautiful documentation. In short, we know about the facts, deeds and customs of the ruling class, but next to nothing about the common people. They are hardly mentioned at all. Possibly they served as models for the Chinese analysts who rarely had time for anything that was not Han, and who gave very sparse and vulgar descriptions of the common herd.
