I make the following observations from the vantage point of a philologist and anthropologist. I presuppose Michael Aung-Thwin's paper, “Hierarchy and Order in Pre-Colonial Burma”, as background, and I do not propose to recapitulate his treatment of the facts.

Lucien Hanks titled this symposium a “quest” into the nature of Southeast Asian societal organization prior to the eighteenth century. This paper represents such a quest in the sense of a journey of inquiry into post-Angkorean Cambodia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to explore the basic problem posed by Hanks: whether pre-colonial society was organized into horizontal castes/classes or vertical “entourages/circles”. My attention will be directed primarily to sociopolitical organization, while David Chandler focuses more on norms and ideology.

Over the past several decades a considerable body of scholarly literature has accumulated concerning the evolution of Thai social and political patterns, behaviour, and values, and our study of Thai society now is much more solidly-based than it was only a generation ago. One might legitimately begin to wonder, however, whether we might not “have it all wrong”. The question is not entirely flippant. Much of what has been written on such subjects has little solid historical depth. Historians' study of Thailand prior to the nineteenth century remains relatively superficial, based on very scanty sources; and to the extent that social scientists and others have depended on the historians, none would argue that they have been completely well-served. Even more seriously, however, one can argue that there has been a good deal of reading contemporary and recent situations back into the past; and even historians' analyses of pre-Chakri social and political history have been all too readily the prisoner of a narrow, linear view of Thai history as the political succession of kingdoms from Sukhothai to Ayudhya to Bangkok.

Cosmology and ecology are two factors anthropologists have found valuable in investigating the social organization of historic and contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Although neither factor is explicitly prominent in the text examined here, I hope to show in my concluding remarks that both provide important contexts in which the text can be read. However, my initial task is to look at the “Judgments of King Mangrai” to see what clues it contains about early northern Thai social organization.

To analyze Vietnamese social organization, we must put aside ourimage of it as similar to that of China, with its patrilineal clans. Writings on Vietnam have portrayed a country molded by its northern neighbour in the “thousand years of Chinese domination” of the first millennium A.D. to such an extent that all things Vietnamese must needs be seen in a Chinese and indeed a Confucian light. Socially, this means domination by the male and the father, patrilineal succession, and clan organization, that is, a certain rigidity in social organization.

It is curious and probably quite significant that the nature of social organization in Southeast Asia has proven to be so elusive a quarry for several generations of academicians. Hundreds of thoughtful and scholarly books and articles have addressed this issue or some portion of it in one way or another, and yet our work remains on the whole strangely cautious. A sense of uneasiness hovers over our discussions. We reveal some discontent with both the textual and the conceptual underpinnings of our endeavors. To a greater or lesser extent we all appear to share David Wyatt's misgivings that we may “have it all wrong”. One might well ask why this should be so after all these years of effort.

In contrast to the rich historical literature on Southeast Asia's peasants, there are few studies of their urban counterparts, the proletariat of the colonial port cities. The region's rural revolts have inspired a growing literature on peasant politics and social history. But there has been little parallel research on the urban working class — stevedores, transport workers, and millhands.

My comments on the four papers here are not in any way a unified essay, but rather are some reflections as well as questions I was inspired to ask by reading the papers. The papers fall together into two pairs of related essays, one pair, comprising the papers by Lehman and Aung-Thwin, being largely concerned with “bonded” relationships in the general context of traditional societal organization in Burma and Thailand, and the other pair of papers, by Wyatt and Kirsch, focusing on a particular early northern Thai law code, the so-called “Laws of King Mangrai”, and what it suggests about the society in which and for which it was written.

The understanding of Vietnamese society and social relations remains problematic. Even for recent times there is a dearth of research on basic facets of Vietnamese social structure. Scholars remain all too indebted to Hickey's study of Khanh Hau, which, dealing with a single and in some ways unique Southern village, can hardly be taken as representative given the wide regional and class differences characteristic of Vietnamese society. Moving backwards through time, the central elements of social relations become increasingly difficult to examine. The reasons lie both in an inevitable emphasis on what can loosely be called political history (e.g., the effects of French colonial rule, the resistance against that rule, the administrative problems faced by the early Nguyễn dynasty, or the recurring issue of war—and peace—with China) and the increasing narrowness of the documents available for study (i.e., the inevitability of reliance on official documents such as dynastic histories and legal codes).