 For all of those, all of you joining us now, we're going to begin right on the hour with Dan's talk. So I'll give my brief introduction to Dan right now. Dan Whitehouse is Dan Whitehouse's ESRC postdoctoral fellow, based here at SOAS in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. His research is concerned with the cultural legacy of informal colonialism in Thailand, the anthropology of elites and institutional ethnography. He's currently learning to govern an historical ethnography of Suan Kulab Wityalai, the so-called Eden of Thailand. Before studying his PhD at Durham University, Daniel is a broadcast journalist at Voice TV, a Thai language news channel based in Bangkok. These seminars, to give our own plug, these seminars come from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at SOAS and we do, we often have afternoon, evening seminars, but we do these other seminars at noon so that we can reach, hopefully, as much of an audience in Asia as well as we possibly can because of the time difference. Now, we have just reached noon, so I'm going to invite Dan to begin his talk. Thank you, Dan. Well, thank you very much, Michael, and thank you to everyone that's zoomed in today to listen to me talk for an hour or so about elite networks in Thailand. I'm so glad that so many of you could make it, including, I think, quite a number of people from Thailand, so that's wonderful. Thank you so much for coming. The title of my talk today is The Good Men of Suan Kulab, Network Politics at an Elite Thai School, and this is based on principally my PhD thesis, which I submitted last year to the University of Durham, and it draws from fieldwork that I conducted from 2019 to 2020 in central Bangkok. And I'd like to begin the presentation today, if I may, by relaying a story that occurred during fieldwork, as anthropologists who want to do. And specifically, I want to relay a story that when it happened, it first got me interested in looking at this extraordinary school, Suan Kulab, with Yolay, particularly, it drew my attention to the fact that this might be a significant and perhaps overlooked institution within the wider political infrastructure of modern Thailand. So the incident in question took place when I was attending a charitable gala in Bangkok a few years ago, and it was a sort of black Thai rather stuffy affair in a very smart hotel. And I found myself sat at a very large dining room table surrounded by older men, all of whom were unfamiliar to me, but who were sort of chatting animatedly amongst themselves. And I was sort of, I sat there and nodded, not really understanding what they were talking about. And then the diner to my left broke away from this group discussion. And he explained that all the men around the table were old school friends, that they were the alumni of a prestigious old boys' school based in the old town of Bangkok called Suon Kula, with Yolay. And I sort of nodded and smiled and I made some comment that it was quite remarkable these men seemed so intimate with one another after what must be many decades since they graduated, they were all beyond the age of retirement, well beyond the age of retirement. And the man sort of narrowed his eyes and started to nod vigorously. And he said, at Suon Kulap, our school friends are our brothers, Robin Penang Gan. And we rely on our brothers to show loyalty. And then he asked me the question that you see on the slide in front of you. He said, my old headmaster used to tell us a story. A Suon Kulap man finds himself alone on a dark and unknown road. It's raining and his vehicle is dead. He needs help. What should he do? Now, I didn't know the answer to this question. So the man told me and he said, he must sing the Suon Kulap song and then a brother will appear and his car will be fixed and his belly will be filled because Suon Kulap brothers are bound to help one another. And this comment sort of really intrigued me as an anthropologist. And we pretty much spent the rest of the evening talking about this very extraordinary community of alumni. And at one point, one of the men around the table took out his phone and he showed me on his screen this very distinct pink and blue symbol that you see before you. And he said, this is the emblem of my school. This is where I studied and this is where my brother studied and this is where my son studied. This is the golden ticket. So what I want to do in this presentation today is I want to give you a brief impression of why the alumni of Suon Kulap believe that attendance to their school represents a golden ticket to public life and why we as scholars of the region should be looking at institutions like Suon Kulap with more care if we are to understand with more nuance how power and resources are distributed in contemporary Thailand. So considering that we've got not too long today I'm going to restrict my presentation to just quite a small section of my wider research project and I'm going to focus primarily on the history of this school and the history of its alumni community, particularly the emergence of the alumni community as a network institution. And this is a term that I'm going to come back to later on. So I'm going to begin with a brief introduction to Suon Kulap and where is it? How did it come to be? What is it? And then I want to introduce, excuse me, the concept of the network institution. And what I want to do here is try to convince you that this concept might be a useful theoretical and methodological mechanism for helping us understand the infrastructure of political and the political infrastructure of contemporary Thailand. And I also want to nominate Suon Kulap as a sort of quintessential idea of what the network institution is and how it operates. And finally today, I want to end by suggesting that the considerable influence of places like Suon Kulap are not necessarily a sort of modern expression of deep-rooted pre-modern political cosmologies and that in fact, at Suon Kulap, these networks are based at least in part on a highly charismatic institutional culture that has developed at the school over the last 100 years or so. And this charismatic culture is steeped in the cultural apparatus that were developed in England. In the top flight schools of England, the Eaton's, Harrow's and Winchester's, at a time of high colonization, at the time of the height of the British Empire, and that they were then imported into Siam where they accrued new local meanings which managed to exert these really powerful fraternal bonds over the alumni community. So what is Suon Kulap, what do you like? So Suon Kulap was founded in 1881 by Prince Dameron. At this time, Prince Dameron was only 25 and he been put in command of the royal pages. And this was a very prestigious regiment that attended to the personal needs of the monarch. It was for the younger sons of the nobility, essentially. And he established the school specifically for this regiment. He established it within the walls of the royal palace itself. And it was to teach this regiment basic literacy and numeracy. Because these were not skills that traditionally the nobility deemed it necessary to acquire. This was for clerks and for pen pushers. But at this time, Prince Dameron's brother, older half brother, King Chulongkorn, was making very big bureaucratic changes to the structure of the administrative system in Thailand. And now he needed administrators who could read and write documents. The school was very successful, so much so that in the second year, there were more applications to the school than there were vacancies in the royal pages. So Prince Dameron and the king made the decision to transform the school into a civilian school in 1882, albeit one that was still restricted to the nobility. Mon la Chawong, Mon Luang. And the school kind of grew exponentially from this point, so much so that by 1911, it sort of outgrown the royal palace and moved to its current location at the Ratchaburna Temple, which is about a 10 minute walk from the royal palace just next to the Jarapriya River. It currently teaches about 3,000 boys, aged 12 to 17. And this is grade Matty on one to seven. And perhaps one of the most salient and recognizable features of Sun Gulab is its ability to churn out highly successful alumni. So one of the things that all alumni of Sun Gulab will tell you with some pride is that the school has produced eight prime ministers, which is no small feat considering the first prime minister only came to office in 1932 in Thailand. But beyond prime ministers, we see Sun Gulab members in sort of every area of Thai public life. So for example, the school has produced three previous council presidents, five attorney generals, nine Supreme Court justices, 13 education ministers, two Fortune 500 global CEOs. So we're talking here really about a community that is at the very heart of the Thai state. And when I talk about Sun Gulab to a lot of my English friends who are not familiar with the school, they often say, oh, well, it's like the Eaton of Thailand. And in many ways, this is a very apt comparison. And we're gonna look a little bit at that later on, why that might be the case. But actually, there are some very important differences between Sun Gulab and the sort of great public schools of Britain. First of all, unlike Eaton, for example, Sun Gulab is and always has been state administered. It is not independent of the state. It is also not fee paying. So it is selective. Entrance is granted to students who pass a very highly competitive examination. And most of these successful students will have done some kind of private preparation at a private school, most of which are actually run by Sun Gulab graduates. Some parents are invited to be donors at the school and if they are successful, their children don't have to pass the exam. But by and large, this is a selective state non-fee paying day school. Another salient aspect of the OSK community, OSK standing for Old Sun Gulab or the alumni of Sun Gulab is that they are very well known to be highly devoted to their alma mater. And for some people, this can border on almost cultish behavior. I remember that one of my very first interviews in Bangkok was with a retired military officer. He was an Air Chief Marshal in his day. And he arrived for our interview wearing a Sun Gulab t-shirt, think of bloom, a Sun Gulab cap, two Sun Gulab silicone bracelets around his wrists and a belt whose buckle had welded to it OSK in giant metallic letters. And I thought that he was wearing this outfit in sort of different to our interview. He knew we were going to be talking about the school and so he wore this outfit. And I mentioned this to him and he looked at me quite confused. And he said, with total seriousness, I wear pink and blue every single day. In fact, the only time I don't wear pink and blue is when I go into a funeral. Unless it's an OSK funeral, in which case I'll wear pink and blue. And after meeting many OSK, I have to say this isn't that extreme. A lot of alumni to the school have a very close emotional and even material connection to the school. So, for example, there's a really thriving market for OSK branded products. You can see in the top right-hand corner there, this is a registration car plate, number plate that has the letters OSK. And there are so many items like this that you can wear on your body or on objects that sort of allow alumni to identify one another within the public realm. On the top right-hand corner as well is a Sun Gulab Amulet, pink and blue, obviously. And this is impressed with the guardian spirit of the school, Sun Pa, Sun Gulab. And the wearer of this would not only be identifiable as Sun Gulab alumni, but he's also would deem the amulet capable of imbuing him with some kind of personal cosmic protection from the guardian spirit of the school. And a lot of the Sun Gulab materials are seen to be invested with this sort of sacrity, this idea of sanctity. Also, you can see a picture of a sort of cowboy in profile. This is the emblem of the Sun Gulab Gun Club. And this is just one of hundreds of gun clubs, excuse me, Sun Gulab clubs that existed within the wider network. And these can be based on hobbies like golf or guns. They could be based on the year that you graduated or they could be based on your professions or careers. So for example, every arm of the military will have its own Sun Gulab group. And many alumni are members of several of these groups. It's not unusual for alumni to spend a large portion of their social lives interacting exclusively with members who also attended the same school as them. And these funds are also kind of regularly strengthened by a very busy ritual calendar that takes part at the school. I won't have time to talk about these really fascinating rituals today, but you can see just on the left hand side here at the bottom left, this is an interesting ritual that takes place at the beginning of the academic year in which old alumni who graduated from the school 50 years prior returned to the school. They dress in school uniform and they ritually initiate the first years who were entering the school that year. So all of these things make up this wider sense of what an OSK is. Now, this intense identification with the school has been noted by many commentators. So the historian Chanwit Geset Suri who himself attended Sun Gulab and who is a very proud OSK refers to this intense affiliation with the school as the Sun Gulab disease, Rog Sun Gulab, which I really like this term because it has this sort of pathological connotation to it. And he writes in some of his more personal writings, Chanwit writes that his own father had the Sun Gulab disease. He attended the school in the 1930s. And Chanwit writes that one day his childhood home was damaged by fire and he came back to find that his father had repainted the walls pink and blue. Such was the depth of his affiliation with the school. And Chanwit also says that his father would often take him to the school when he was young to quote, soak up Sun Gulabness. And this concept of Sun Gulabness is really important because it represents a sort of shared values of the community. It's sort of moral nucleus. And the properties of Sun Gulabness are known to everyone in the community and they can be reeled off almost like a mantra. So to translate them, it is that Sun Gulab gentlemen are leaders, they love their friends, respect their elders, honour their teachers, are grateful to their parents and look after their juniors. And in the next section, I want to look at how this collective identification, this Sun Gulab disease and its attendant morality translates to real political patronage and how the study of Sun Gulab might help us understand something about Thailand's Byzantine political state. So before I do that, I just wanna give a sort of brief theoretical outline of the current state of the Thai political theorization. So nowadays, Macargo's theory of network monarchy is sort of, it sort of rings supreme in the study of the Thai state. Many of you are probably quite familiar with it. But just to very briefly summarise it, this is a theory that supposes that King Bhumibhan, the former King Adulide, here pictured on the right, constructed for himself an ingenious web of patronage that allowed him to directly intervene in domestic politics, despite being a constitutional monarch, ostensibly. Now for our purposes, what is interesting is this man on the left. This is Brem Din Sul Anon. And Duncan Macargo identifies Brem as the sort of lynchpin, as the manager of this network monarchy. Brem at various times in his career was prime minister. He was head of the army. And laterally, he was the president of the Privy Council. And according to Macargo, it was Brem's job to ensure that men loyal to the network monarchy were placed in strategic positions in the military, in the bureaucracy, in the legislature. And through his careful management of these disparate actors, network monarchy was able to oust several unelected prime ministers, at least three, who were deemed to be a threat to the political monopoly or the resources of network monarchy. Now, I think network monarchy is a very useful theoretical tool. But even by Macargo's admission, it remains a very basic and simplistic sketch. More recently, Nishisaki, who is an analyst in Singapore, has observed that network monarchy really fails to show what kinds of people make up this rather amorphous network and how they're connected to each other. And his own analysis, Nishisaki's, in his latest book, Dynastic Democracies, shows that network monarchy was not built from scratch and that in fact, it is founded on very highly convoluted kinship patterns that have emerged through generations of intermarriage between elite families. And this is really important empirical evidence that helps us augment Macargo's theory. But even so, we're still kind of left to wonder about the quality of these social relations that structure this network. And importantly, we don't really get a sense of the important social and cultural work that goes into maintaining this network. And I think that the study of Sun Gulap is really helpful for this because it links the rather abstract theory of network monarchy with specific network monarchy, network institutions, it links it to specific identities, sites and embodied practices. And I'm gonna look now at why Sun Gulap, might, the study of Sun Gulap might help us understand something about network monarchy. So, Brentin Sulanar, I'm pictured here on the left in his Sun Gulap jersey, is perhaps one of the most celebrated OSK in the school's history. He even has his own room dedicated to him in the school's museum. But interestingly, Brent only attended Sun Gulap for two years, between 1936 and 1938, between the ages of 16 and 18. And this time he's enrolled in the 54th class and that will be important for later on. Now, whenever Brent writes about Sun Gulap in his personal writings, he's always very effusive. And he notes that a lot of his personal morality was sort of permanently shaped by his time at Sun Gulap. So for example, he writes that Sun Gulap offered me love and unity and taught me how to know love for the group and protect the school's honor. In 1937, Brent went through something quite traumatic. His mother, beloved mother died very suddenly. And because Brent was in the middle of his examinations in Bangkok, he couldn't return home to the Deep South for her funeral. And he describes his time as sort of a colossal loss, time of colossal loss in his life. But at the same time, he fangrates solace in the Sun Gulap community around him. He says that Sun Gulap became his third parent. Now, Sun Gulap in the 1930s was famously strict. Pupils were flogged on a near daily basis. But Brent sort of found solace in this discipline and it helped somewhat with his bereavement. And perhaps because Sun Gulap was so austere at this time, Brent writes that the experiences that him and his friends went through imbued all of them at all alumni of Sun Gulap with these sort of moral attributes, these personal characteristics of morality that would make them ideal candidates for public office. So for example, he says that Sun Gulap took great pains to ensure pupils are disciplined, punctual and honest. He also writes that every teacher, both time for rank, was serious in teaching us to be good people. Kondi, for those of you familiar with modern type politics, you'll know that the phrase good people has very specific connotations, and particularly when uttered by someone like Brent, because it's become a sort of rhetorical device much used to legitimate the rule of an unelected faction, of an unelected but supposedly morally superior group of men, good men. So perhaps unsurprisingly considering his belief in the morality of his fellow alumni, Brent was very good at maneuvering his members of his class, the 54th class, into positions of power. So Brent entered the prime minister's office, non-elected, Brent never stood for election, in March, 1980. And at this point, he made several of his school friends, he gave them quite, some of them quite important offices of state. I don't have time to go through all of them now, but they are all in pink, the men from the 54th class. And bear in mind, the school is very small at this point. So his class would have only had 100 people or so. So quite a few of them made their way into public office. But he also nurtured a lot of OSK who were outside of his immediate cohort, either younger or older. And I've pictured these in blue. Now, as I said, I don't have time to go through all of these, but I'd like to draw your attention to just three of these men who became really integral agents of network monarchy. So the first of them in blue is a man called Gramon Tongtamachar. And he was Brem's junior at OSK by 15 years. So they never studied together. But in 1980, when he became Prime Minister, Brem made Gramon his aide. And then three years later, he is a minister attached to Prime Minister's office. This was a position that he favored a lot to give to his OSK friends. And many years later, Gramon went on to become a political science professor at Longcorn and a Supreme Court judge. According to Hadley, in 2001, Brem was lobbying the Constitutional Court to acquit Prime Minister Taksin for concealing assets. At this time, it was thought Brem wanted to kind of show good will to Taksin to kind of bring him to heel, which clearly didn't work. So he needed Taksin to be acquitted. And according to Hadley, who wrote the King's biography, this acquittal was only secured after a last-minute vote change by Gramon, who was sitting on the Constitutional Court. Another man that I want to draw your attention to is Surayut Dulanon. And he was Brem's aide to camp during his premiership. And many years later in 2006, when the network monarchy decisively moved against Taksin and staged a coup, Surayut was pretty much one of the main players in the coup. He rallied the troops to execute the military push. And a few days later, he was also announced as Prime Minister. He's also kind of Brem's successor. Brem died in 2019, and it was Surayut who was mentored very intensively by Brem, who then took his place as President of the Privy Council. And he's still a very influential figure in Thai politics. And finally, another member of the 54th class is Siti Svesila, who was Brem's lifelong ally. When Brem became Prime Minister, he made Siti a foreign minister, a senator, and a deputy prime minister. And then when Brem left office, Siti followed him to the Privy Council. So according to documents published by Wikileaks from the American Embassy, it was Siti who was behind the legal coup that ousted the pro-taxing Prime Minister, Samak Suntowair in 2008. So we see that all three of these men, all from the Sungulat network, played important and high-level roles in network monarchy. So we can see the relationship forward to Sungulat became the kind of building blocks of network monarchy. I'm just gonna briefly go through his here. I also wanna make the point that this network was not limited to the men that I just mentioned. On the same month that Brem became Prime Minister, he also announced the construction of a grand headquarters of the alumni, which was gonna be built near his home on a plot bestowed by the Crown Property Bureau. And this was gonna be a place very large and ostentatious, a new physical space where alumni could relax and socialize and network. And yet by the time Brem left office, the sort of national reputation as Sungulat was very high. So in 1988, during the school's 105th anniversary, it was actually broadcast live on television. The event was so large. So at this time we can see during the Brem era, Sungulat was undeniably an institution whose alumni enjoyed a sort of pipeline into power. And in this sense, I want to propose that Sungulat is a network institution for which I currently have the following working definition. So for me, a network institution would be an elite educational entity that invests significant material and symbolic resources to secure homosocial relationships characterized by moral obligation, emotional intimacy, and the mutual exchange of benefits in later life. Now, Thai politics is sort of characterized by the push and pull of various networks. And Sungulat is certainly not the only network institution that operates in Thailand, far from it. So I would include in the list are network institutions, a handful of other elite boys schools in Bangkok. So for example, Bangkok Christian, Tep Surin, Assumption, and a few others, and almost certainly the Dula Dunglao Military Academy and the Police Academy. We see throughout history of modern Thailand the cohorts who studied together in some of these institutions took with them very important relationships which had a very significant influence on the wider national politics of Thailand. What I want to do now is sort of shift gear a little bit. And I want to talk about some of the cultural underpinnings of network politics. And specifically, I want to explore the idea that the close homosocial bonds that are forged at Sungulat and which by extension helped to maintain the structural integrity of network politics that they are actually an important part of Thailand's semi-colonial legacy. Now, in my thesis, I describe in separate chapters the way in which colonial structures became incorporated into Sungulat's institutional culture. And I break these down into three separate periods, formalization, anglicization and militarization. But today, I'm just going to briefly outline one of these periods, which is a period of anglicization which occurred between 1894 and 1938. And my argument is this. I want to complicate the popular notion that Thailand's elite network politics are solely ascribable to traditional ideas of kinship like the Demiraja or the accumulation of barony or moral charisma, or indeed that it is simply a modern reassertion of satin of feudalism. Rather, Thailand's network institutions operate through distinct cultural mechanisms which were imported by a succession of six British headmasters who administered Sungulat between 1984 and 1938. And this is an era I call anglicization. Just for your interest here, and Brem is situated in the final row at the extreme left. And this was his graduating class, the 54th class. So during the period of anglicization at Sungulat, the school was dominated by the graduates of a single British teacher training college which was called Borough Road, which is located in Isleworth in North London. And these educators, who I'm going to call the Borough Rodians, fundamentally transformed the institutional culture at Sungulat. And you can see on the left here, the Borough Rodians are the one, two, three, four, five, six headmasters who administered Sungulat, who were all graduates of the school. Below that are teachers who weren't headmasters at Sungulat, who also studied at Borough Road. So before I get into the changes made at Sungulat, I want to just give you a very brief portrait of Borough Road itself, because I believe that understanding this institution is actually key to understanding what happened at Sungulat in the 1930s and the decades since. So Borough Road is a direct descendant of Joseph Lancaster's 18th century free school. And this was a single room institution that taught literacy and numeracy to the very poorest boys of South London. Now, by 1888, the first Sungulat headmaster, well, to be, arrived at Borough Road. His name was Ernest Young. He was from Middlesbrough. And he would have been 18 at the time. And when he arrived at Borough Road, the college was at a moment of critical change. So that year at Borough Road, an ex pupil, well, the principal had died. And he was an ex pupil called John Curtis. Now, Curtis was a bully and he was a brute. And the trainee teachers who were studying at the school at the time, said that under Curtis, Borough Road was an unspeakably forbidding prison. Mealtimes were kept in silence. You couldn't leave the grounds and there was no intellectual stimulation. One contemporary remarked that Borough Road starved the minds of some of the cleverest men in England. But Curtis' replacement was the polar opposite of the former headmaster. His name was P.A. Burnett and he was a young Oxford classicist who had studied at Oxford University. And Burnett believed that education must concern itself with the development of mind and appreciation of leisure. And one of his first initiatives was to take Borough Road out of the slums of South London and relocate it to Isleworth, to these big open fields. And here, Young and his peers were encouraged to engage in character building team sports. And a new esprit de corps emerged within the student body. So from February, 1899, we see that Borough Road began to produce a monthly student paper called The Bee's Hums that talked about the activities of students in Lomblay. The following year, the college adopted house colours, chocolate and white, and a new scholastic motto, unamente or one mind. And then it got a new emblem. And finally, old boy institutions started to crop up in some of the major cities of the UK, like Leeds, Birmingham and London. And this is a picture of Borough Road in Isleworth on your left. Now, what's important to note here is that Burnett's reforms and his preoccupation with like esprit de corps and communal spirit were part of a much broader pedagogic shift that were taking place in Victorian London. So if we compare Victorian College to the Georgian College, the Georgian College, Eaton Arrow, were very brutal places and they were characterized by frequent student uprisings. One scholar remarks that the Georgian College was a world of hard drinking, horse racing, gambling, blood sports, prize fighting, and sexual indulgence. But by the 19th century, this was beginning to change. New disciplinary procedures were coming in. These schools had a dedicated game schedule, new rituals started to be introduced. And this is specifically because these new schools now had to function as the sorting house of empire. They had to produce the future administrators of this new British empire. And to this end, they had to create a new model of the boarding school boy. And he was a sort of the gentleman. He was a man of blameless character, reliable judgment and consistent behavior. He must be able to project an image of moral authority over vast populations. And unlike the Georgian school boy, this new ideal type had a great unwavering fidelity to their alma mater in a way that would have shocked previous generations. So for example, we have the cult of Harrow start to emerge, Harrow being a famous boys school in North London. And they were expected to quote love and worship the school. Or to also rugby Winchester Charter House started to become much richer because alumni were certainly donating so much money to their old schools. And these elite school networks started to reshape Britain's political landscape. So recruitment to London's male only members clubs began to be largely determined by where one went to school. Between 1886 and 1916, graduates of Eaton and Harrow, just two small schools, accounted for 48% of cabinet ministers and top civil servants. And to date, Eaton and Harrow have produced 27 prime ministers between them, just two small schools. Now, this might sound familiar to you if you are accustomed to the Thai political landscape. So Ernest Young and his fellow Bororodians, they were the beneficiaries of this very specific form of colonial education. And when they came to Sue and Gulab in 1894, Young started to reformulate the school using Bororod, it's his sort of ideological blueprint. And he really wanted to build an Esprit de Corp. At this time, there was a lot of absenteeism at the school, a lot of bullying and students would drop out willy-nilly. There was no sense of community at the school. So they started, first of all, to introduce games. So the Bororodians created Siam's first ever gym on campus, created the first ever Queensby Boxing Ring and Siam's first international sized football pitch. And they also established an interschool football tournament between Sue and Gulab and other elite boys. They had a very big game last Saturday, which was a 10-year-by-thousands of people that's still going. And this sort of gave the school an idea of friendly rivalry, but also a distinct identity. And this was helped by the symbolic language the school, Bororodians began to craft. They replaced the school's original insignia with a new design, which was closer to the heraldic crest of the British school. They had a new motto. They introduced the pink and blue colours. They also introduced the Sue and Gulab, which was a school newspaper. And as observed by Benedict Anderson, these kind of communal literary spaces of exchange and interaction are really essential for constructing an imagined community. So for example, in the magazine, students were encouraged to identify with students who had studied many years prior, even in the palace school. So in 1931, when an OSK died in England at an REF base during a routine flying training, the students were told to line up at Hualampong train station when he is actually to be repatriated. And they started to feature obituaries of old Su Tsung Gulab. This kind of extended the idea of the community back through time, which was really helped by printed Dan Rong's article in 1926 called Dam Nan Su Gulab, which documents the process that he went through to found the school. And this kind of serves as the school, the community's foundation story. And it's often reprinted, especially in the cremation volumes of Tsung Gulab alumni. Also this affected the school's curriculum. The school started to have subjects that introduced by the Borodians that wouldn't have looked out of place for an imperial functionary. They started to be tested on, in 1920, the test featured advanced calculus, French translation, ancient Egypt, the merits of Zoroastrianism, the bad luck marathon, Japanese culture, and the teachings of Confucius. So not surprisingly, Tsung Gulab began to dominate the school's results boards. And every year when Tsung Gulab did very well, the Borodians sent the students out dressed as British gentlemen to announce to the passersby how well the school had done. And this invested the school and its community with a sense of being the best of the best, that they were, my wrong cry, they weren't second to anyone. This is something that Tsung Gulab still say to this day, Tsung Gulab is number one. It gave the school a real sense of identity. Let me just go back. I'm gonna finish up soon. I'm gonna have to miss some things because I'm running out of time. But you can see that successive Borodian administrators consciously cultivated specifically colonial configuration of communal sentiments. And they did so through the pair of team sports, communal literary spaces, glorifying community success, and constructing an institutional symbology that dates back through time. I'm gonna have to leave it there because I've overrun my time. I really wanna hear your question. So thank you very much for listening. Well, thank you very much for a very interesting presentation to you. So we have two comments. Usually I would open up the thing with a question, but I see that Kong Sacha has asked basically the same thing I was going to ask, which we'll get to in a second. So first of all, we have BC who's made a comment that they're an alumni of this school and they can give you insight or opinion. That's probably something for your future research to make counter of them. Thank you very much. Please get into it to me. For Kong Sacha's comment, I would question, I break it into two parts. First of all, are there rival network institutions with us that get into conflict with this network? And if so, how do they resolve that network in such a way that helps to keep the, maintain the integrity of the entire structure? Another way to put that is, does this make Thailand stronger actually? Does it make Thailand stronger? That's an interesting point. I would say that, yes, there are absolutely, I think with the time limit here, I've perhaps over-emphasized the solidarity with a sort of network institution and soon Gulab. Soon Gulab actually has produced alumni of an extraordinary ideological breadth and they have also been political rivals. If we, for example, go back to Bram in 1980s, Sir Nanakon, who was his deputy prime minister, I don't know, he was his head of the army, actually betrayed Bram very badly. And this was because he had aligned himself to the young Turks who were a rival network coming out of the Jula Junklao Military Academy. They were part of the seventh class. So these networks are kind of clashing against each other all the time. And frankly, one of the ways that they get resolved is often by coup, whether military, legal, through manipulation of legislation. But yes, certainly there is a lot of division in the Soon Gulab community and that has been exacerbated by the rise of the internet. And one of the things I talk about more in my research is how the school has really stepped up and the alumni, the amount of rituals that have, the amount of rituals that have emerged during this time, particularly since the fall of taxing when Thailand in general has become much more divisive has been exponential. So primarily these are papered over, these differences with ritual and rhetoric. And that's something I talk about in my book a little bit. We have two more questions, but I'm gonna take the last one first because the next one is quite lengthy. So the quicker question is from Wasini. Hi, may I know the number of people participating today? And if you mean the number of people in the seminar, it's 104 people in the audience, but I suspected how many people are in this network? Oh, in this network? Well, what I did in the presentation is I just took out the top players of Brem's network. But the Soon Gulab network didn't die with Brem or indeed with Monic. So just here is a picture of before the last general election. This was a plenary that the school hosted. So you can see sat here, they're all OSK, the CEO of the energy conglomerate, Bank Jack, a former deputy prime minister, the incumbent deputy prime minister, a former election minister, public intellectual, a Thai TV host. And after the election, at least one of these men and several of the OSK became part of the new administration. So it's always changing, it's always moving and it is realigning. It's hard to put a figure on it, but I would say that the feeling of brotherhood of the sense of a shared destiny and morality is shared by an extraordinary amount of OSK members. Even OSK who don't necessarily join in with many alumni events, I didn't meet a single participant who said they weren't proud to have attended the school or to be an OSK. So to put a number on it would be very difficult, but certainly they are spread throughout public life. The question we have from Eric White, I presume that homosocial socialization and habitats has been central to not only elite high schools, military academies and police academies, but other exclusive elite educational institutions in Thailand, such as, for example, Shanghai University's law schools and secondary universities. I have two questions. Despite these similar institutional logics, do we find distinct repertoires of cultural values, social skills and behavioral dispositions cultivated within these different settings? And two, how has rising gender equality and elite education impacted, if at all the reproduction of this homosocial habitus and its networked elaboration? Okay, so I'll take the first part. First, that's a good idea. Okay, so essentially we're saying we could probably extend network institutions to include elite universities. I would say, yes, you're probably right. However, one of the things that I got a sense of during all my research, which is perhaps quite different from, let's say, the British or Anglo sphere, is that Thai people in general, particularly ones who went to elite school, tend to stay, have very strong social relationships with the people they attended high school with. And they're already set. And by the time they get funneled into an elite university, they don't tend to change that much. You don't see, as in England, really strong bonds being made at university in the same way. My caveat for that would be these military academies, which are sort of like universities, where because of the intensity of the experience, you do get, and probably some rituals that I'm not aware of, you do that very intense bonding. I would say that, well, one of the ways that gender, let's say, equality has its grown in Thailand, has affected the school, is that now, as differently to before, the vast majority of faculty at the school are female. The school has even had its own headmistress, who is a very influential headmistress, a Jansmai Wenata city. And, but generally, I would say that it probably hasn't affected the Sun Gulap Brotherhood itself too much because it is a very homosocial space, albeit one now, which has many female members, honorary members who are teachers or retired teachers, but may not necessarily, there might not be this, there isn't the same kind of horizontal idea of peer-to-peer relations as there would be between OSK graduates. It's much more hierarchical and relationship between students and teachers. But it is definitely something to think about and something that I would like to explore in future research. The gendered aspect of it is something that's very interesting. So thank you for the question. We've had a rush of questions, so I'm gonna try to take three of them at a time. We have a comment for Rachel Harrison. Thanks for a really interesting presentation to comment here, that the experience of the early Thai novelist, Kru Leam, is very interesting here. He left Borough Road as a result of a nervous breakdown caused by bullying. If I recall correctly, he then went to teach at Suan Kalap at a very young age. I'm still struggling to accept that the Suan Kalap experience is different from that of other institutions. Then Vichar asks, is there a female counterpart of Suan Kalap in OSK? And then Anna asks, how is the construction of masculinity in Suan Kalap play into the network institutions and Thai politics at large? How does this construction affect queer students there? What kind of ideologies about gender are being promoted at elite or all-boys schools like Suan Kalap? Okay, very good. Let me go back to the first question. Which one, can you remind me why I could quickly have the first question, sorry. Okay, the first one is about the bullying of the author, Kru Leam. Yes, Kru Leam. Oh, yes, he was hardly buried in born school. Was it Borough Road? Yeah, Borough Road. Was it Borough Road? Okay, I think he had a blanket thrown over him by some bullies and yeah, he had no respect to him. Yes, I would say that there are, what I didn't have time to, there's a lot of more connections between Borough Road and Suan Kalap, including students who were at Suan Kalap who then went to study at Borough Road. I would say that I unfortunately haven't been able to in this presentation give a flavor of why the experience of Suan Kalap is so singular. But I would think a lot of OSK would say that it is and that is primarily because of these very singular rituals that they go through. So for example, before you even become an OSK before you're 12 and you've been accepted, you have to go through a three-day initiation in the jungle of Chumburi where you go through various rituals and activities. And there's just such a level of rhetoric there that it feeds into other ideas of the good people so much so that, you know, Suan Kalap people, students do kind of set themselves aside from the students of other institutions. I think it's a really interesting point made about queer students' experiences. I did talk to quite a few Gatoi or transgender students at Suan Kalap and they had quite different experiences. So for example, I talked to one couple who met at Suan Kalap and since one of them has transitioned and they've been happily married for 15 years and they said they never experienced any problems when they were students. A lot of the boys have semi-secret homosexual relationships when they're at the school. It's not that unusual as it is I imagine for quite a few old boys' schools. But then I also met some people who said it was horrible. And for example, one transgender student I talked to, she was a member of lots of group chats on the message boards of Line, which is a popular application in Thailand. And there was a lot of chats that were recommending massage parlors and there was a level of misogyny that she sort of withdrew from and it then stopped her going and becoming part of the continuity part of the alumni community. But then again, at these big alumni events, you will see beautiful women there and they were all old students who've since transitioned and it's still very comfortable going back to the school and joining these communal activities. We have probably too many, the number of questions we have or probably I'll allow you the time you have left, but some of the quick ones. Do you think the network like this will last among the under generation and is the access equal to everybody? Is it comes from all social backgrounds, geographic and social, or is access limited? Well, this is a very important question that I'm gonna be addressing in the last chapter. The internet really has changed the game quite a lot. And you'll see now for example, there's a really popular Facebook page called Nakryansun Gulab. And this is set up anonymously by members of the school community who love the school, but are quite critical of its extremism sometimes and its political conservatism. And that page has 250,000 members. And you'll see now in the 2001 protests, a lot of the, some of the protests were actually sort of linking together through these networks. So the networks were being used to kind of take down established and political structures. So it will be very interesting, I think, to see if these networks do cling on and how they evolve and emerge with new practices. Certainly a core of older alumni are very adamant that these networks should continue. Yeah, almost. Can you just remind me again, Michael, of one of the other questions? Other one was, do you think of last folks? Which one did you answer? Because they're both related to the same thing. Do you think it's gonna last and is this access open to everybody? I think it answers, yeah. Well, yeah, so the access is interesting. Like when I was last at the school, so it is open to everyone essentially as long as you pass the test to get in. And I remember when I was at one of the camps last year and they said, put your hand up if you were privately educated and probably 99% of the students put their hands up. And that's because I think the test is quite hard and it would be perhaps challenging for some students who didn't have that extra academic help to get in to the school. But that being said, there is very little snobbery within the school. When it was in the palace and early on, we talked about students give testimonies of being victim to huge amounts of snobbery and social exclusion. But what's happened now is, I think that the school successfully strips students of their pre-existing social class and sort of rebuild its own meritocracy which some of the other schools do in Thailand using these sort of rituals and rhetorics and symbols. So in some ways it is kind of egalitarian, in some ways not. We have Natha. I have two questions. Just a concept of Ratchasawat which emphasizes the principle of serving the king and monarchy feature prominently in the narrative of SK. And then in light of the recent backlash surrounding the, excuse my reading of this, Jadu Ramidong. Is that right? Because they only have it in Thai. Football match in Thailand. Oh, yeah, yeah. They're just trying to beat that up. Do you believe that the OSK network want to go transformation or experience a decline in popularity among the other generation? Okay, interesting. I think definitely this idea that Sugu Lap was founded essentially to educate people to serve the king or the monarchy is something that has, is very important to the sort of collective psychology of the school. So actually, if you look at the 1930s, the graduates of the palace school didn't want anything to do with the new school outside the palace. They thought the two were completely separate. They had nothing to do with this modern school. And that's why they are pretty much absent when the alumni association was founded in the 1930s by the Bororodians. And but what we see later on as the rise of monarchy got more and more pronounced from the 1970s, that this idea that the school is absolutely linked to King Charles Longhorn and to the monarchy, that it is the sort of survival of the bureaucratic state is dependent on Sugu Lap churning out moral men, is a really deep rooted and deeply felt sentiment in the school. And it is often repeated in different ways, not least through this sort of massive sort of almost worship of Bram as the ultimate embodiment of this notion. And within having his own exhibit in the school, I think students are sort of very much encouraged to emulate Bram as the sort of ultimate royal subject. Yeah, so to answer the question, it is very important, I think. The down to admit thing actually, I have to admit I haven't really been paying too much attention to it because it's only very recently happened, but it is something that I'm gonna look into and ask some people about, but I do know there's been a lot of controversy about what goes on there in terms of political messaging. So that's something that I'm gonna look into. Thank you for pointing that out to me. The questions are still continuing, but maybe I think because of time, we should only take one more. So I got a question from Tomas. Larsen, thanks for a fabulous presentation. I wonder if you could elaborate on the religious dimensions of Suwan Kalab educational philosophy and sociality. Can one be a good person of the Suwan Kalab kind if one lacks religiosity? It's so interesting, a very good question. I mean, what historians have pointed to traditionally is that your morality in sort of pre-modern times, let's say your morality is sort of bound up by your accumulation of karma, which was sort of accumulated through your adherence to sort of Buddhist values. What we have in the 1930s is sort of a slight secularization of this idea of morality and goodness. And it was very much actually promoted by OSK graduates. Probably the most significant would be Sonbapuri, which was a pamphlet created by Bia Malagun, who was a student at the school. And essentially they sort of secularized morality. So while it still retained a Buddhist sort of component to it, all of a sudden it was quite interested in how you spoke, how you presented yourself in public, how you interacted with superiors and inferiors. And it sort of soaked up a lot of Victorian morality that was circulating in Britain at the time. So while certainly the ties will say, yes, it is fundamentally rooted in Buddhism. And I think that's true. That doesn't mean that this notion of morality hasn't shifted over time until now. And actually, interestingly, the architects of those shifting morals were often graduates of soon-golapsed. They sort of, in many ways, they're kind of... They have constructed a lot of the moral landscape of modern Thailand. Well, thank you very much. This has been a very good... And thanks to all of you who have questions and I apologize for those weekend comedy. Yeah, can I just say actually, if I go back to this page here, it has my email address on it's dw30atsoas.ac.uk. And I would just love to hear any of your thoughts and ideas and questions and be really greatly appreciated. So thank you for that. So thank you, Daniel, for your talk. We're malt, so we can't really give a clap ovation but I think you would get a certainly very strong ovation for this. Well, thank you again for giving your talk and this will be recorded and put onto YouTube for those of you who would like to refer to it in the future. And we will call this to a close. Thank you. Thank you very much and thank you for attending. Bye.