Power, protection and magic in Thailand tells the fascinating story of a well-known Thai policeman, Khun Phan. Through the story, the book covers a number of topics including rural masculinity, risk-taking, police violence, sovereignty, and historiography. These themes are set up as and explored through a number of tensions: local versus national history, magical versus rational thinking, physical violence versus legal procedure. In writing Khun Phan's tale, Craig Reynolds attempts to break down distinctions like these that ‘bedevil’ the writing of Thai history (p. 151).
The book comprises an introduction, four substantive chapters, and a sixth chapter that synthesises the diverse themes of chapters 2 through 5. It is illustrated with several colour photographs and maps that help the reader see not only an image of the policeman under study, but the region and the magical objects he is associated with.
Chapter 2 covers the life of the book's main character. Khun Phan, born Butr Phantarak (1898–2006), is commonly remembered in association with the Thai south, but he is more than merely a local figure in that he made his name through a national institution, the police. And despite being an agent of a modernising state, he practised law according to a code that had little to do with internationally accepted procedures. He took part in occult practices, had a predilection for enchanted objects, for example his sword and kris, and was quick to use deadly force. For his first kill, Khun Phan is said to have squeezed a man to death with his bare hands. Anecdotes like these provide more than colour to the tale. They offer a counterpoint to official histories that describe the kingdom expertly escaping colonialism and of an inexorable, if troubled, transition to modern nation-state. This is the point. Reynolds uses Khun Phan's life story, his travels from south to north to centre, and his reliance on magic and violence, to highlight the contradictions between lived experience and official history.
Chapter 3 gives the reader a detailed description of the geography of the mid-southern region of Thailand. It is a frontier of rugged mountains with caves, forests, and lakes and a social and political borderland between the Malay states on the peninsula and Bangkok to the north. It would be easy to see the landscape as explaining the character and purchase of a man like Khun Phan. Reynolds points out, however, that the region's geography alone does not produce him, or the banditry he fought. Instead the south, as a concept, provides another foil for understanding the country's national history.
Chapter 4 presents a historical overview of the police and places Khun Phan in that context. The police force is a relatively new institution, emerging in the late nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth, it becomes a true national force with the aid of US money and expertise. In this ‘American era’, it adopted new technologies and practices as it tried to keep up with the times. It would seem that Khun Phan might become an anachronism, relying on increasingly outmoded methods. Yet, as Reynolds shows, Khun Phan shared characteristics with other ‘modern’ policemen like Phao Sriyanond, and even Thaksin Shinawatra. They are risk-taking men, nak leng, unafraid to employ violence, either directly or through others. Thaksin, citing Phao, reminded everyone that ‘there is nothing under the sun that the Thai police cannot do’ (p. 101). This evidently includes the use of deadly force to protect the nation's ‘geo-body’. In this light, Khun Phan's story again reminds the reader of official Thai history's incongruities.
Chapter 5 discusses ‘magical thinking’ in Khun Phan's career and in Thai society more broadly. Influenced by anthropologist Andrew Turton's work on forms of knowledge in Thailand, Reynolds evaluates the ways in which people have conceptualised, passed on, and deployed knowledge in the region. For Khun Phan, like many other Thai men, knowledge takes bodily and material forms. His skin is covered with protective tattoos and that skin itself is hard and leathery, the result of having soaked in a bath of 108 special herbs. His magically toughened body is complemented by mystically charged amulets and weapons. Knowledge comes in material form and is meant for action in combat. Thus, as Reynolds rightly argues, modernisation did not push aside magical beliefs (p. 135). Instead, new technologies and practices transform knowledge by providing people additional techniques, material, and machines to work with. Modern versus magical logic is therefore a misleading dichotomy, just as local and national are. If anything, the life of Khun Phan shows that amulets are modern, capitalist, and magical all at once.
Chapter 6 brings together the diverse topics of the first few chapters and this is where the book shines brightest, highlighting not just the issues facing Thai historiography but presenting a way forward. If royal, national histories are the state's intellectual ‘armour of coercion’ (p. 26), histories like that of Khun Phan, full of magical thinking and violent deaths, might be ‘disturbing’ (p. 158) enough to put a dent in that armour. The duty of a historian, then, is in part to bring these dissonant histories into view and this is what Reynolds has done in describing the world of Khun Phan, the Lion Lawman.
