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This chapter examines travellers' tales through the ages, from the accounts of the first Siamese diplomatic missions to Europe in the seventeenth century, to the novels inspired by visits to the West by Thailand's twentieth-century novelists. It then describes Thai encounters with the world beyond its borders from the perspective of films either set in the West, or more broadly produced in the space of negotiation between the construction of Thai identities and the acknowledgement of “Otherness.” Focusing on the notion of travel to the West in the Thai popular imagination, the chapter analyzes popular films from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, including romantic melodramas such as Rao sorng (We Two, 1988) and Phiang rao...mi rao (We Have Only Each Other, 1992). These films are the first examples of filming in overseas settings, capitalizing on the cachet of the foreign locale.

This chapter examines the historical constructions of farang (Westerners) in Thai thought and outlines the influence of this notion on the historical project of the making and remaking of Thai national and cultural identities. It considers the etymological origins of the term farang and then traces its changing meanings through history, from the Ayutthaya period to the colonial era, and through the era of twentieth-century modernity to the contemporary period of globalization-induced postmodernity. The chapter also traces the emergence of farang as a privileged “Other” in the Thai imagination and the way that this notion became central to state-based projects of self-civilization and self-modernization. It also shows the historically intensifying forms of cultural intimacy between farang and Thai, such that it is now no longer possible to conceptualize Thai identity separately from farang.

This chapter examines how the dynamics of nationalism affect the nature of archaeological research in Southeast Asia, focusing on Thailand. It argues that the Thai state was caught between expanding French and English empires and maintained its independence through the careful nurturing of national unity. This chapter also argues that the concerted effort to present a strong and fluid Thai identity in the face of Western imperial power came at the expense of denying Thailand's diverse ethnic and cultural pasts.

Conversion to Christianity means different things to different peoples and entails divergent social consequences. The Christianity that conversion produces in different human communities is complexly diverse. Christianity has worked to the moral improvement of civilizations. Conversion to Christianity can proceed successfully even if the converts have only a vague grasp of the symbolic and cosmological content of their new religion. African Christianities have been employed like other religious cults and have been modified or dispensed with as suggested by circumstances. The close association of Buddhism with the Thai national identity would seem to present few conceptual openings for Christianity except among those marginal populations that have little invested in the Thai polity. Christianity remains an intellectual horizon that may make the human macrocosm more visible and more accessible to people who seek to join it.