ABSTRACT
It is highly appropriate that this section should be started off by two historians. Thongchai offers a contribution towards 'a history of ethnographic knowledge in Siam'. He re-examines ethnographic and travel writings in elite literary journals of the 1880s and 1890s and other royal and aristocratic sources from the early twentieth century, and shows how Siamese rulers had a project of ethnographic and ethnic classification parallel to that of Western colonial enterprises. He identifies an 'ethnospatial discourse', a 'pseudo-ethnic categorization by geography and/or ecology' ofSiam's 'Others within', ofwhich the principal were the chao pa, the forest, wild people, and the chao bannok, the multi-ethnic, 'docile' villagers under the supremacy of Bangkok.
