So what's hot?
Cartography. Or more precisely, cartographers.
It's a rare occurrence - maybe it hasn't happened since the time of Mason and Dixon in the mid-18th century - that cartographic experts have acquired the status of celebrities. And certainly it's the first time in history, our short history, that map-makers, or map-readers, or map-interpreters, have become television personalities, hounded by star-struck press, booked for interviews and begged for photo-ops. One of them even got to kiss the prime minister, on camera.
Alain Pellet, Alina Miron and Donald McRae must have been surprised at the incessant flashbulbs. The foreign lawyers did an articulate job defending Thailand in our border tussle with dear Cambodia, and suddenly maps are on everyone's lips (if not on our bedroom walls). Ms Miron, particularly, has made maps sexy, or at least attractive, to the nation whose most common cartographic fantasy is to compare the outline of our boundaries to an axe, a golden axe to boot, with its sharp edge, not surprisingly, aimed directly at Cambodia.
A map makes a nation. Symbol, scale, zone, and my favourite, legend: these terms define the anatomy of a map and also the imagination of a country. Geography is ideology, longitude is attitude, and the sudden surge of interest in maps - or only in the map-reading that will make us win the case against Cambodia - shows how nationalism can be roused so easily by a televised image of maps and what maps construe. The International Court of Justice's ruling is months away, but that hasn't stopped some of us from chest-thumping.
That's the case of a geographic map. Then on Tuesday, the same day the map-muse Ms Miron appeared on a hit television interview in the late afternoon, the Thai censors banned a documentary that proposes another kind of map. Boundary, or Fah Tam Pandin Soong in Thai, is a probing movie about the same Thai-Cambodian border conflicts; the film's director, Nontawat Numbenchapol, surveys another implication of cartography when he goes out to talk to border residents, both Thai and Cambodian, and shows us how each of us has our own mental map about our countries. Demarcation, or what the villagers from each side believe to be demarcation, keeps shifting in the film, because the only maps they know are the ones in their memories - the ultimate sovereignty that can fend off all external contests. No GPS needed, the co-ordinates are imprinted in their heads.
The ban was a shock. But on Thursday, the lifting of the ban, almost out of the blue, was even more shocking. Citing a technical error - that's priceless - the censors apologised to the filmmaker and cleared Boundary for screening, though it requested two seconds of background voice that mentions His Majesty the King's birthday to be removed. Conspiracy theorists are having a field day speculating about this change of heart, but that's another story. For now, let's hope cinemas will accept Boundary for release, and we'll see if its proposition of mind maps will be a hit like Ms Miron's judicial one (I don't think it will).
I'm merely attempting a blind man's version of this analysis. The most influential, respected and significant study on the power of physical and invisible maps has already been executed. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (University of Hawaii Press, 1994), by the eminent Thongchai Winichakul, is something close to a canonical work. The book has always been an essential read, and its relevance has become immediate in our present phase of map fascination. In lucid prose, academic yet accessible, Thongchai traces how the Thai identity, nationhood, ideological formation and geographical history have evolved in tandem with different forms of maps - from Buddhist pictograms to imaginary boundaries of space and to the notion of geo-borders charted by colonial Westerners of the 19th century. That the Siamese perceived the definition of "border" differently from European cartographers is one of the main issues in the book, and one that has an uncanny resonance for our current dispute with Cambodia - this time with European map specialists aiding us.
Translating symbols into arguments, indices into statistics, hieroglyphics into legal defence, Ms Miron, along with her mentor Mr Pellet, unravel maps and make the imaginary physical, which is something we Thais hardly have a knack for (our knack is the reverse). What they did was necessary, and yet the invisible lines, the imagined boundaries, the intangible frontiers, will never go away, for Thais and Cambodians. Mind over matter? Yes, I'm afraid that will remain true.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.