A rugby tour sparked Patrick Jory FAHA’s fascination with Southeast Asian history

King Chulalongkorn in Russia 1897 (seated, second from the left) with the Tsar Nicholas II and family, at the Alexander Palace. Source: Wikipedia.

A cultural and intellectual historian of Thailand and mainland Southeast Asia more broadly, Associate Professor Patrick Jory FAHA has closely examined the internal dynamics of Thai thinking about modernity in the modern period. He challenges existing historiography by avoiding the traditional dichotomy between Thai tradition and Western modernity. His work focuses especially on puzzles surrounding the re-emergence of royal authority and the widespread adoption of a complex code of manners to govern public and private life. Jory also has expertise in the politics and history of the Malay-Muslim region of southern Thailand, where he lived and worked for ten years.

Elected to the Academy in 2024, Patrick Jory joins us to talk about how an unexpected rugby tour of Thailand shaped his interest in Southeast Asian history, and why Australia needs to understand Southeast Asia, on its own terms, through its own languages.

What inspired you to pursue your field of study?

It was an accident and good luck, actually! My undergraduate degree at UWA was in history and languages. I was very interested in European history, literature, and to a lesser extent, philosophy. I had travelled and lived in Europe quite a lot when I was younger and loved European literature. At that time the university rugby club that I played for was organising a tour to Bangkok, Thailand. When the half-back got injured, they asked me if I would fill in his position. So, I went on a two-week rugby tour to Bangkok.

Associate Professor Patrick Jory FAHA spent two years coaching rugby in Thailand before returning to Australia to pursue a PhD.

From the moment I stepped off the plane until I returned, I was captivated by the entire experience, the sights, smells, climate, food, and especially the people who were, without exception, polite, warm, and friendly. It felt like a parallel universe that had been kept hidden from me. The whole time I was there was like  a two-week permanent ‘high’. I kept in touch with the Thai university demonstration school that had organised the tour, and they invited me back to work as a rugby coach.

So, my first real job was as a rugby coach in Bangkok for two years.

During that time, I learned the language and tried to figure out what I would do next. By coincidence, at that time the Australian government was offering PhD scholarships in Asian Studies. I was lucky enough to get one.

Not only that, but my proposed supervisor was also the top scholar in the world in Thai history, Craig Reynolds, and the scholarship was to be taken up at the Australian National University which, in the early 1990s, was arguably the best place in the world to study Southeast Asian history. Intellectually I was inspired by the problem of how to understand the difference and ‘otherness’ of Southeast Asian history. My fascination with Thai and Southeast Asian history more generally remains as passionate now as it did when I stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac on a humid Bangkok evening back in the late 1980s.

Can you tell us about your current project / research?

When I was working on A History of Manners and Civility in Thailand, it became clear to me that the way manners and proper behaviour were written and thought about changed over time from a religious framework to a secular one. That sparked my interest in the subject of secularisation. It’s one of the ‘grand narratives’ of history. It frames how we think about historical change. But of course, the concept of secularisation comes out of the Western, Christian historical experience.

So, the obvious question is, can this Western, Christian secularisation framework be applied to non-Western, non-Christian societies? Or is there another narrative that makes better sense?

My current project is to write a history of the secularisation of Buddhist Southeast Asia with a focus on Thailand. I am using a large corpus of Thai language works written by monks and lay Buddhist intellectuals which has been largely untouched in the existing scholarship.

How does your research address the challenges we’re facing as a society?

A central challenge that Australia faces as a newly multicultural society in the Indo-Pacific region is to understand its true place in the world. Southeast Asia is a region of almost 700 million people on Australia’s doorstep and the origin of many of its migrants. It encompasses all the world’s great religions and is the most ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse region in the world. Yet despite a rich intellectual tradition, the Southeast Asian humanities — history, religion, philosophy, literature, language, and the arts — are virtually ignored in Australia.

My research has a simple aim: to understand one of these societies, Thailand, on its own terms, through its own language. My work engages with current scholarly debate in history in Thailand. Many of my works are translated and published in Thai and are taught in history courses in Thai universities.

Why are the humanities important?

For the humanities to be important they need to be truly human. At present the study of the humanities, encompassing the fields of history, philosophy, religion, morality, literature, and the arts, remains stubbornly Eurocentric, despite the globalisation of higher education of recent decades. Our understanding of the humanities, at least in Western countries, is largely mediated by a single language, English. The result is that our knowledge of the human condition, which should properly be the subject of the humanities, is impoverished. To regain their importance the study of the humanities needs to fully embrace the experiences, and especially the languages in which those experiences are articulated, beyond the Western world.

What excites you in your field right now?

I’m excited by the growing number of scholars who are proficient in one or more of the Southeast Asian languages as well as English and sometimes also Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic. On top of that they are trained in the latest scholarly methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Their scholarship has the potential to remake the field of Southeast Asian history and perhaps even move it closer to mainstream historical scholarship globally.

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