ABSTRACT
This section offers two complementary and contrasting studies of the SalTI Sanl 'Thai-speaking Muslims' who live on either side of the ThaiMalaysian border. Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian, a historian, provides a detailed history from documentary sources of a power-laden discourse on race, culture and nationality. She contributes her own critical commentary and evaluation of three major hypotheses as to the 'origin' of the SalTI Sanl and the defining characteristics of their identity, largely as this has been constructed by others. Despite differences as to whether the Sam Sam were 'originally' Thai or Malay most European views in the nineteenth century and up to the mid-twentieth century were based on a racial-genetic model in which 'mixture', 'mixed-blood' etc. was usually seen as culturally inferior contributing to low intelligence, propensity to crinlinality, addiction, untrustworthiness, and so on. The predominant Malay view was that the combination of Thai language (and some other custonlary practices) with Islam was 'a prohibited infidel mingling' (Nishii). Although nlost early sources are Western, it is interesting to see senior Thai and Malay rulers and administrators (Prince Damrong and Tunku Abdul Rahman) participating in the same discourse, each to claim these people on the peripheries of new nations as their own, if not fully equal.
