Sovereign Necropolis: The Politics of Death in Semi-Colonial Siam by Trais Pearson

Author:Trais Pearson [Pearson, Trais]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781501740152
Google: eLYUxgEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 50208043
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T13:57:59+00:00

Bureaucratizing Death Investigations

The social and political realities of late nineteenth-century Siam—including extraterritoriality, foreign consular courts, and the growing ranks of Asiatic protégés—all conspired to make forensic medicine a significant form of authoritative knowledge. On the one hand, the standards of medicolegal evidence upheld by foreign consular courts became the last line of defense for foreign residents accused of harming Siamese subjects. On the other hand, Siamese state officials realized that forensic investigative procedures might be utilized in order to challenge and overcome the obstacles that prevented Siam from obtaining justice in foreign consular courts. But while forensic medicine was touted as the answer to some of the inequities instituted by extraterritorial law, the question of how to actually implement this new form of expertise remained. To understand how forensic medicine was implemented in this period, we must look to Naret and his role within the rapidly changing state bureaucracy. These conditions helped to determine both the extent to which forensic medicine was implemented by the Siamese state and likewise the nature of elite interest in dead and injured Siamese subjects.

Prince Naret’s letter (December 7, 1892) to Jao Phraya Phasakorawong, which lays out the contentious matter of political subjectivity under extraterritorial law and provides evidence of a consolidation of notions of political belonging in Siam, also points to the potential solution to the problem. According to Naret, the solution lay in reforming the standards of forensic evidence in Siamese courts and introducing forensic medicine as part of the Siamese police inquest. He called for “royal permission to have the [Metropolitan] Police Division summon a physician along with the district official in order to inspect [and] conduct a surgical autopsy of corpses that bore evidence of foul play where a foreign subject [is suspected of having] harmed a Siamese subject.”38 Not wanting to burden the state with the added expense of dealing with the remains, Naret suggested that once the autopsy was completed, the relatives of the deceased (literally, the “corpse’s owners,” jao khong sop) could come and take the body away for burial or cremation. The evidence produced by these procedures would be preserved by police in the event of a legal inquiry into the death (presumably requested by the Siamese state in a foreign consular court). The crux of Prince Naret’s letter, however, is the question of who could be called on to conduct autopsies for the Siamese police in cases of unnatural death that would meet the evidentiary standards of foreign consular courts.

The fact that Naret’s letter was addressed to Phasakorawong, head of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, suggests that he had already come up with a solution. In December 1892—in the wake of the recent reformation of the government ministries in April of the same year—the Hospital Department (krom phayaban), which was responsible for overseeing physicians who were hired by the Siamese state, was still an administrative division under the Ministry of Religious Affairs.39 Foreign physicians employed by the Hospital Department served as doctors and hospital inspectors, but

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