Peter Arnell, the "Branding Guru"
I was intrigued to read a story in today’s edition of The Nation online newspaper about the American advertising executive, Peter Arnell, the so-called “brand guru” of Madison Ave, who is offering to “rebrand” Thailand. Arnell is the brains behind the rebranding campaigns of several high profile global companies including Pepsi and he believes that Thailand would benefit from his creative genius. Thailand, he asserts, is “is not the place of wacky bars or crazy nightlife that most people think” but rather “a sensible, harmonious, calm, peaceful and respectful country driven by humanity and a soulfulness, unlike any other place in the world.” Amazingly, Arnell was able to come to this realization in record speed. Prior to December last year he had never even set foot in the country but, after a whirlwind 12-day tour –in which he came, he saw, he took 7,000 pictures– he fell in love with the place. So now he’s back, ensconced in a suite at the Oriental Hotel, and is making a magnanimous offer to the Thai government to help save the nation from its image problem of gogo bars and hedonism by giving it a new “unique, easily recognisable symbol, based on the distinctive temple spires of its classic architecture.” It is a heartwarming gesture of extraordinary charity and all Arnell is seeking in return is a mere US$10 million. Hmmm, yeah right….
Bangkok: a "place of wacky bars and crazy nightlife"?
Anyhoo, it’s interesting that Arnell should identify the very same two images — temples and prostitution — that we also discussed as major parts of Bangkok’s representational profile in tutorials this week. While Arnell’s assessment would seem to suggest that the two are basically incompatible, there is another way of thinking about them.
Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim, whom you will recall from this week’s lecture as one of the pioneering figures of European sociology, argued that most, if not all, cultures possess a central binary opposition between what he termed the sacred and the profane and that they use this opposition to organize their ideological worldview and, by extension, their social relations . As its name might suggest the sacred is that which a society deems to be holy or special. In most societies, it is the province of religion but in secular societies the role of the sacred can arguably be assumed by other institutions that obtain a religious-like status (government, monarchy, science, medicine). The profane, on the other hand, is basically the sacred’s opposite: the mundane and the ordinary. The world of the sacred and the world of the profane exclude each other, Durkheim argues, and are mutually antagonistic. However, they also need each other in order to define themselves and assume cultural value. Thus, for example, the sacred only makes sense in terms of what it is not (i.e the profane) and vice versa.
The "other" side of Bangkok
In Thai culture, temples or วัด are obviously sites of the sacred and they are marked clearly as such in terms of their spatial organization. When we enter a วัด we effectively make a physical and psychological movement from a spatial register of the profane (the everyday life of the city and the street) into a separate space of the sacred: we enter through the gated walls of the วัด, remove our shoes and pass through a door or even series of doors into the interior of the temple where we modify our normal (profane) behaviour: we talk in whispers, get onto the floor, bow, etc. Moreover, there are certain spaces and/or objects of the วัด that are prohibited to laypeople and can only be accessed by monks who are of course people who have taken vows to renounce the world of the profane (sex, money, power, possessions) and live entirely in the word of the sacred…well, at least in theory if not always practice! 
But the spatial sacredness of the วัด still depends on the spatial profanity of the world outside its walls in order to have meaning and value. If there was no profane world then the วัด wouldn’t be sacred or even special. In this way, the two images popularly associated with Bangkok — temples and gogo bars — are possibly more complementary than they might at first seem. Indeed, one could say they depend on each other, at least in terms of definitional logic, and so might be seen as twin icons of Thailand’s representational construction in the popular imaginary.
In the late-60s, 
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I’d meant to post about this earlier but the 
Visage is his latest work and it was made in collaboration with the 
