Brief excerpt from my upcoming book:
A famous lecture entitled ‘The Old Siamese Conception of the Monarchy’ by Prince Dhani Nivat in 1946, with Bhumibol in the audience along with his elder brother Ananda Mahidol was a key moment in this process of reimagining royalty for the modern era. Dhani quoted the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski:
"A society which makes its tradition sacred has gained by it an inestimable advantage of power and permanence. Such beliefs and practices, therefore, which put a halo of sanctity round tradition and a supernatural stamp upon it, will have a ‘survival value’ for the type of civilization in which they have been evolved. . . . They were bought at an extravagant price, and are to be maintained at any cost" (Malinowski, 1925).
This passage had an immense impact on Thai royalists in the 20th century. H.G. Quaritch Wales, a young British scholar who served as an advisor to kings Rama VI and VII in the Lord Chamberlain’s Department of the Siamese palace in the 1920s and believed old traditions of kingship were essential for maintaining the stability of the country, was heavily influenced by Malinowski (Quaritch Wales, 1931) and Bhumibol told his biographer William Stevenson, who had unprecedented access to the king in the 1990s, that Malinowski’s words ‘made a deep impression’ on him (Stevenson, 1999). Thailand’s royalists made a very deliberate and systematic effort to construct a halo of sanctity around a social order in which they would be firmly in charge.