Charles "Biff" Keyes is exceptional. Among the foreign researchers who first came to study Thailand over half-a-century ago, few are now regularly read and cited today. Their works have aged. Academic fashions have changed. Their names have slowly faded. But anyone wanting to understand Thailand's Northeast today will still read Isan: Regionalism In Northeastern Thailand, first published in 1967 as a modest "data paper". This can partly be attributed to Keyes' staying power. He continued to teach, write and regularly visit Thailand until a handful of years ago. But it's also due to the book's quality, Biff's engaging personality, and his major role in the development of the study of Southeast Asia.
Impermanence: An Anthropologist Of Thailand And Asia
By Charles Keyes
Chiang Mai,
Silkworm Books 2018
He was born in Nebraska, son of an animal-feed salesman turned turkey farmer, and grew up in deepest middle America in a devout Presbyterian family. He coursed through school and into the University of Nebraska dreaming of becoming a physicist. His journey from this background to his Asian career seems accidental. Discovering that he had more interest in people than things, he switched to anthropology. He decided to pursue graduate studies at Cornell University, just when it was becoming a centre for the study of Southeast Asia. He chose to focus on Thailand, and started learning Thai without having visited the country, probably under the influence of Lauriston Sharp. His journey in 1962 to Bangkok and on to his study village in remote Maha Sarakham, accompanied by his new wife and assistant, Jane, took him away from middle America to a very different world.
Keyes tells us that he kept a journal, and this clearly enables him to give a detailed account of his life and career with names named, dates specified, and events described. In the village, he struggled with the language, culture and environment, but gives a very warm picture of the villages adjusting to having these strangers in their midst, and to themselves becoming the subjects of academic study.
Anthropology, with its ambition to know humankind better, was very much the star social science of the second half of the 20th century. Many researchers chose to study peoples in remote islands and hills simply because they were most different from the modern, the present-day. Keyes joined a newer trend to focus on peoples being swept into modernity. His thesis described the semi-subsistent lifestyle and distinctive beliefs of the Maha Sarakham village, and then placed these in the context of history and politics: a peasant economy being dragged into capitalism; a village enclosed by a nation; and ethnic Lao forced to negotiate with the culture of a Thai nation-state. His resurveys of the village and updates of the story in recent years show that the material base has changed completely, but the politics have extraordinary continuities.
Keyes developed a second research site among the Karen near the Thai-Myanmar border, where the themes were much the same. He settled at the University of Washington in Seattle for the length of his career. He discovered that his strengths were teaching graduates and writing fieldwork-based articles. He penned over a hundred articles, and guided 56 students to a doctoral degree. He also wrote two widely used introductory texts for the study of Thailand and the region, and edited several academic collections. He was gradually drawn into the administration and networking that underpin teaching and research, and became a leading figure in the development of Southeast Asian studies in the US. He began an association with Chiang Mai University and is proud to have been accepted as ajarn rather than farang. As the Cold War wound down in the 1980s, he became involved in building academic links with Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.
He used his growing status as an academic entrepreneur to draw Americans into studying Southeast Asia but, even more, to bring Asians to study in the US and return home to build the academic capability in the region. His corpus of graduate students includes 10 Thais, six Vietnamese, two Japanese, a Hong Kong Chinese, two Filipino-Americans and an Afghani. He clearly sees this as his most important legacy.
Keyes includes pen portraits of the studies and careers of most of these students, and also of many of his American colleagues and acquaintances around the region. He seems to have led by example rather than diktat. He helped his students to secure funding and claw their way through the administration, but left them free to choose their own research topics and to pursue their own ideas. Still, many of their works recapitulate Keyes' own interests in modernity, culture, religion and being peripheral. There is no Keyesian school of anthropology. The only social-science theorist he mentions is Max Weber (twice). The post-modern, post-everything eruption that rocked social science in his mid-career does not rate a single mention.
Academic memoirs are a scarce genre. Biff Keyes states at the outset that "I have written this primarily for my family", but his family is much larger than this suggests, including large numbers of fictive kin including luk-sit (child-learners, the Thai term for a student) as well as brother and sister colleagues.
The author's journey from middle America to Southeast Asia, from turkey-farm to campus, from Presbyterianism to Buddhism, is a microcosm of the development of knowledge, and especially social science, over the last near-century. In this book, Biff has archived himself as part of this global process.
