Hybrid Lecture (online and in-site): "Gendered Memory and Regional Modernity: Cremation Volumes as Cultural Archives …"

Topic:
    "Gendered Memory and Regional Modernity: Cremation Volumes as Cultural Archives in Early Twentieth-Century Siam"

Speaker:
    Karandeep Singh (MA)

Affiliation:
    Asia-Africa Institute, University of Hamburg

Date/Time:
    November 15th, 2025 (Saturday), 14:30 – 16:30 (CET/MEZ)

Language:
    English

Place:
   University of Hamburg
   Asia-Africa-Institute (AAI)
   Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Ostflügel ("East Wing"), room O-122
   20146 Hamburg

Zoom Link:
    https://uni-hamburg.zoom.us/j/64563521222?pwd=OEdSbENCOUV2Ynl5ZUdnNG5mM1pwQT09

Zoom Meeting-ID:
    645 6352 1222

Zoom Passcode:
    hgtlecture

About this lecture:

This lecture explores early twentieth-century Thai cremation volumes or funeral books (Thai: nangsü ngan sop) as dynamic spaces where memory, gender, and cultural geography converge to shape modern Siamese identity. Produced by elite families to commemorate the deceased and distributed as gifts at funerals, cremation volumes evolved – under the editorial influence of figures like Prince Damrong Rajanubhab – into richly layered texts that blended biography, Buddhist teachings, literature and regional ethnographies. Focusing on cremation volumes, this lecture also interrogates how gender hierarchies and elite ideologies were encoded in commemorative print culture.

Alongside these gendered narratives, the lecture examines how cremation volumes operated as cultural nexuses, fostering intra-regional connectivity and reimagining "siwilai" as a transcultural consolidation of local and global knowledge. Biographies that emphasize elite cosmopolitanism, and regional essays that celebrate Siam’s internal diversity, reveal how cremation volumes circulated ideas of modernity, linking Bangkok to its provinces and to global imaginaries.

By integrating gendered memory with spatial and cultural cartographies, this lecture positions cremation volumes as tools for negotiating power between genders, between center – periphery, and between Siam – the world while contributing to scholarship on intra-Asian modernities and memory studies.

Brief profile:

Karandeep Singh is a PhD candidate in the field of Thai and Lao Studies (Thaiistik) at the Asia-Africa Institute, University of Hamburg. After earning a BA from Thammasat University and an MA from the University of Hamburg – both in Thai Studies – his research has focused on gender, memory and elite funerary culture in Thailand. He is also interested in Thai manuscript traditions and temple murals, particularly the depiction of women, and engages with broader questions of historical agency and cultural memory in Southeast Asia. As classically trained Kathak and Khon dancer, he is deeply involved with performance and musical heritage in Southeast Asia.

We would like to thank the Hamburg Society for Thai Studies for the cooperation. 

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