by Faun Rice
The capital of the exemplary fourteenth-century kingdom of Sukhotai was
something of a mandala in itself: the royal palace and principal wat at the center,
set within three concentric ramparts with gates situated at the cardinal direc-
tions (Kasetsiri 1976; Tambiah 1976). Surrounding the capital, which was un-
der the king’s direct control, was a zone of four major provinces ( muang) ruled
by sons of the galactic sovereign from secondary centers aligned with the capital
by their location in the cardinal directions. In structure and courtly practice,
these semiautonomous princely establishments replicated the galactic center in
reduced form. Beyond lay an outer ring of more or less independent principali-
ties, populated by diverse ethnic groups, and governed by their own traditional
rulers. Some of these rulers acknowledged the overlordship of the Sukhotal king
and rendered him tribute; whereas the inclusion of others ranging as far off as
the Malay Peninsula in the Sukhotai domain was evidently more nominal than
political. The successor Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya had essentially the same
structure during its early history, with sons of the rulers in charge in the four
5. Indeed, the sacred palladia of the Bugis and Makassar kingdoms of Sulawesi
were nourished and maintained by their own rice fields, forests, fish ponds, and
slaves (Andaya 2006). And as will be seen presently, these were not the only
animistic powers available to galactic potentates, who characteristically knew
how to appropriate the potent subjective forces embodied in nature—in the wild
peripheries of their realms—as well as in culture.
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major domains east, west, north, and south of the capital, and an outer zone
of sovereignty extending eventually into cosmocratic ideology—but also effec-
tively encompassing Sukhotai among the tributary “vassal states” in 1385, and
its satellites in 1438. Not incidentally, this galactic pattern of three circles and
four directions is a common one—and not only in Southeast Asia (cf. Lincoln
2007).6
CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF GALACTIC POLITIES
Galactic polities are never alone. Constitutionally inspired by hegemonic pre-
tensions of indefinite extent, each is engaged in a wider competitive field of
galactic and would-be galactic powers whose rulers were ever prepared to de-
fend their own claims of world superiority. “Whoever he may be, he shall be
my enemy in the world if he is an equal on earth,” is a statement attributed
to Hayam Wuruk, ruler of the Javanese empire of Madjapahit at the acme of
its power in the fourteenth century (Wolters 1986: 37n). At about the same
time, Sukhotai on the mainland was surrounded by just such “world conquerors”
contending with each other for the lesser kingdoms and principalities between
them. Besides Ayutthaya to the south, there was the other Thai realm of Lan Na
(Chiangmai) to the north, the Burmese power of Pagan to the southwest, and
the famous Khmer empire of Angkor to the southeast—from which Sukhotai
had won its independence in the late thirteenth century and which Ayutthaya
would invade and defeat in 1431–32. This competition engaged a characteristic
dialectics of theocratic regimes, in the course of which Sukhotai made a state
cult of Theravada Buddhism (derived largely from Sri Lanka), thereby opposing
its singularly empowered chakkavatin kings to the primarily Brahmanic rul-
ers of first its Angkor overlords, and then its Ayutthayan successors. Not only
6. In a comprehensive work on mainland Southeast Asian history from the ninth
to the nineteenth centuries, Victor Lieberman (2003: 33) prefers the term “solar
polity” to Tambiah’s “galactic polity,” while describing the system in the same general
terms—if according to a more sustained celestial metaphor. He also provides many
excellent summaries of historic galactic systems: including those of Pagan, Ava, and
Pegu in Burma; Funan and Angkor Wat in Cambodia; and Ayutthaya (Ayudhya) in
Thailand. Lieberman is careful to note variations between those more (“Pattern A”)
or less (“Pattern B”) effectively ruled from the center, He is also notably attentive to
the structural and conjunctural sources of instability in these kingdoms.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 359
is there god in these details but a general politics of cultural order, endemic
in core–periphery systems, with the effect of bringing a transcendent series of
encompassing cosmopolitical authorities into the regional conflicts between
galactic sovereigns. Reading from this same Southeast Asian context, James
C. Scott took some note also of the wider distribution of the phenomenon:
“Much as the Romans used Greek, the early French court used Latin, and the
Vietnamese court used Chinese script and Confucianism, so the rise of San-
skritic forms staked a claim to participation in a trans-ethnic, trans-regional,
trans-historical civilization” (2009: 112).
O. W. Wolters (1999: 110) talks of a process of “self-Hinduization,” by
which the early Khmer courts of Cambodia, the Malay kingdoms known as
Srivijaya, and the Javanese powers of Kendari and Madjapahit, among others,
took on the gods, cosmology, protocol, ritual, art, architecture, and Sanskrit vo-
cabulary of southern Indian states of grand repute. In his magisterial work on
the Sanskrit cosmopolis, Sheldon Pollock (2009) emphasizes the historic sin-
gularity of this process by which, beginning in central India early in the first
millennium ad, such regimes spread in a few centuries through Southeast Asia
as far as Java—without the benefit of outside political impositions of any kind.
There is no evidence of the colonization of Southeast Asian regions from India,
Pollock observes; nor of ties of political subservience to the South Asian sub-
continent; nor of forms of material exploitation or dependency relations; nor
of large-scale settlement by Indian peoples, or anything resembling military
conquest and occupation (ibid.: 123). And yet,
All across mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, people who spoke radically
different languages, such as Mon-Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian, and lived in
vastly different cultural worlds, adopted suddenly, widely, and long-lastingly a
new language—along with the new political vision and literary aesthetic that
were inseparable from it and unthinkable without it—for the production of what
were often defining forms of political culture. In itself this was a remarkable
development, but given the manner in which it occurred—without the enforce-
ment of military power, the pressure of an imperial administrative or legal ap-
paratus, or the promptings of religious evangelism—it is one without obvious
parallel in history, except indeed for South Asia itself. (2009: 124–25)
Subsumed thus in realms of universal power, the Southeast galactic regimes
would assert their superiority to any and all worldly rivals. Moreover, this is only
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one of many examples in these pages of why the famous “determination by the
economic basis”—or for that matter any such internal functional dynamic—is
an inadequate explanation of the cultural order, inasmuch as the cosmopolitical
“superstructure” is of historically distinct and structurally surpassing attributes
relative to the “infrastructure.” We see the like at every level of core–periphery
systems.
When the Biak Islanders of Western New Guinea returned from their long
voyages carrying tribute to the sultan of Tidore (in the Malukus), they passed
the barak— the life-giving potency they had absorbed from the sultan’s pres-
ence—to their relatives by shaking their hands, upon which the latter promptly
rubbed their faces with it. As Danilyn Rutherford has documented in rich eth-
nographic works on Biak, these same powers, indwelling in the titles, silver
jewels, fine cloth, and other wealth bestowed by the sultan, amounted in Biak to
a “currency of value, in both its functions: in the form of objects that reflected
a person’s past achievements, and in the form of an invisible substance that
conveyed the capacity to act” (2003: 16). Passed on locally—notably in affinal
exchanges in which human reproduction appeared as the sequitur to foreign
wealth—these things from a great and distant realm bestowed the honorable
status of “foreigner” on the donors as well as productive and reproductive talents
on the recipients—the children so empowered becoming ardent lovers as well
as exceptional fishers, hunters, smiths, or singers.
There is a considerable history to this traffic in Malukan goods, titles, and
power along the western New Guinea coasts: a network of exchange relations
also involving islands in-between, altogether comprising a provincial galactic
polity of its own (Elmberg 1968; Ellen 1986).7 It has been speculated that the
tributes to sultans were set up in the wake of an Islamic holy war in which the
local peoples purchased exemption from the depredations of the Maluku fleets
at the price of an annual tribute in Papuan goods. Biak apparently was involved
in some such arrangement by the end of the fifteenth century, receiving among
the other returns for its tributes certain Tidore titles that suggested actual ad-
ministrative authority: the Malay radja for the head of an independent domain,
and others for district chief and village chief. Alternatively, and more likely,
7. It appears that Chinese goods had already reached Western New Guinea in Han
times. When Chinese traders themselves appeared is uncertain, but some coming out
of Manila were active in the area during the seventeenth century. As early as 1616,
the Dutch found Chinese porcelain and Indian coral beads in Biak Island. In the
eighteenth century, Chinese traders were still active on the shores of Geelvink Bay.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 361
the titles referred particularly to tribute-collecting functions in these places. In
time the titles became “incorporeal property which, like the various forms of
esoteric knowledge and personal names constituted part of the status of the
individual and his descendants” (Ellen 1986: 59). But in still another use, Biak
Islanders themselves bestowed these Malukan titles on trading partners on the
New Guinea coast in return for exotic goods obtained by the latter from in-
terior peoples—goods that could then be conveyed to Tidore on Biak canoes.
A similar tributary and status system reached the western New Guinea shores
from Tidore via the intermediate Radja Anpat Islands and eastern Ceram. At
least some Ceramese people settled as rulers ( radja) of local Papuan groups;
and it was reported as late as 1902 that some still spoke their ancestral Ceram
language. In a classic competitive move, however, one of their stranger-chiefs
reckoned his lineage from a Javanese ship’s captain who had married a local
woman (Elmberg 1968: 129).
Meanwhile back in the Malukus, the sultans of the clove islands of Tidore
and Ternate had been taking on the trappings of the renowned rulers of distant
realms whose presence in the form of impressive commercial and naval vessels
had long reached their shores. European realms were not excluded: toward the
end of the sixteenth century, “Sultan Hairun of Ternate dressed like a Portu-
guese, spoke their language fluently, and governed his kingdom with the as-
surance of long familiarity and friendship with Portuguese officials” (Andaya
1993: 58). Whereas in the seventeenth century, a Ternate sultan who owed his
power rather to Dutch support named two of his sons “Amsterdam” and “Rot-
terdam” (ibid.: 177; cf. ibid.: 208). But as is obvious from the title of “sultan,”
this was not the first time the Malukan rulers had assumed foreign identities.
Indeed, their European imports adorned an Islamized royalty that for its part
had long been fitted out with Chinese attributes.
Call it “the real-politics of the marvelous.” Not only because, in line with our
own sense of the political, it is motivated by competitive ambitions of domina-
tion, but because in the local anthropologies these exotic forms of power are
effective means thereof: transcendent sources of human prosperity and victory,
whose human agents are thus worthy of the deference of others. When the
sultans of the flourishing fifteenth-century commercial empire of Melaka in
the Malay Peninsula claimed descent from Alexander the Great—that is, in
his Koranic manifestation as Iskandar D’zul Karnain—it made an invidious
contrast to the important rival state of Melayu-Jambi in Sumatra (C. C. E.
Brown 1952). For Melaka thereby laid claim to the legacy of the fabled ancient
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kingdom of Srivijaya, where the prince, Sri Tri Buana, who was the sultan’s
Alexandrian ancestor, first appeared, and along with two of his brothers turned
the rice fields into silver and gold. A few generations later, Sri Tri Buana’s de-
scendants converted to Islam and metaphorically repeated the miracle by the
commercial enrichment of Melaka. Malayu Jambi, however, may have gained
the last word, according to an edict issued in the eighteenth century by the
sultan of its successor state of Minangkabau. On it were three seals representing
three descendants of Alexander: the sultan of Rum (Constantinople); the sultan
of China; and, himself, the sultan of Minangkabau. As the youngest, the Mi-
nangkabau ruler was the privileged successor, fulsomely described in the edict as
“king of kings . . . lord of the air and clouds . . . possessor of the crown of heaven
brought by the prophet Adam” (Marsden 1811: 339). In the same connection
it is notable that during the T’ang dynasty Srivijaya sent multiple missions to
the Chinese emperor, which apparently were intended to legitimate that realm’s
successful subordination of Melayu (Wolters 1986: 38).
Likewise in the Sung dynasty, the Srivijaya dispatched several missions to
China, which, according to Wolters,
were certainly occasions when the rulers could trade with China, but I believe
the rulers had another and more important intention . . . . Foreign rulers in Sung
times were anxious for imperial favors which signified their superiority vis-à-vis
other Chinese vassals and especially those that were
their neighbors and political
rivals. Distinctions of rank were part of the political culture of Southeast Asia,
and, when granted by the [Chinese] emperors, helped to establish status among
Southeast Asian rulers whose spheres of influence overlapped. (1986: 37)
“Status,” yes, but should we not add that the indwelling aura of the Celestial
Emperor transmitted in these “imperial favors” not only differentiates the re-
cipient from his rivals but also commands the loyalty of his followers?
Clearly we have to do with a longstanding Greater East Asian Galactic Pol-
ity centered in the Middle Kingdom. China was similarly the high-stakes, soft-
power arbiter of political legitimacy in Ayutthaya and other distant kingdoms
which it neither reached nor feared militarily. Still, China was present com-
mercially and politically: by the common tradition, Ayutthaya was founded by a
local Chinese merchant prince who strategically married the royal daughters of
two important kingdom centers in the region. His descendants by these women
would then compete bitterly for the encompassing kingship of Ayutthaya for
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 363
decades—as by means of tributary submissions to the Chinese court. Between
1369 and 1433, Ayutthaya royals sent fifty-eight such embassies to the emperor
or members of his family, mainly in the interest of promoting their chances
of succession in Ayutthaya. In the period 1370–1482, the Chinese court dis-
patched eunuch officials on seventeen celestial embassies to Ayutthaya, not all
of them friendly. Among their functions: conveying condolence on the death of
the Ayutthaya king; investing the new king; presenting royal gifts; and declaring
imperial edicts, including instructions on conduct toward other states (Kasetsiri
1976). This kind of diplomacy was not that unusual, considering that the strate-
gic demand for soft power in high places is common in galactic settings.
Marked by the civilizing mission of the Celestial Emperor and manifest
in the petitions and tributes of distant peoples, a huge East Asian force field
of Chinese influence was created, extending even to the island kingdoms and
principalities of Java, Borneo, and beyond, where “Sina” was a political identity
to conjure with. Chinese commerce has been long and widely spread beyond