SOAS Research Online

Abstract

David Wyatt's rhetorical strategy aims to meet a double objective. First, it should enable the reader, whom Wyatt assumes to identify with Judeo-Christian culture, to access his Thai Buddhist material. Second, the supposed functional equivalence of imagery across a diversity of cultural traditions and historical periods grounds Wyatt's subsequent argument for equivalence in value. One of Wyatt's chief objectives in Reading Thai Murals is to identify the "Thai artist". Wyatt makes a nearly theoretical claim in seeking to demonstrate the applicability of the term "artist" to the category of the traditional Thai mural painter. Wyatt's research does allow us to affirm that in the late twentieth century local residents identified self-portraits of nineteenth-century mural painter Thit Buaphan at Wat Nong Bua. This chapter highlights the danger of eliding "different" and "inferior" when one's own cultural values are presumed universal, and points up the value, precisely, of other cultural values.