On-site Update

Sufie and I are in charming Lamphun after a nine hour bus ride from Bangkok. The pronvince’s located in northern Thailand and is a 45 minutes drive from Chiang Mai. We are rapporteurs for the SAC/UNESCO Field School on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museums. The first few lectures and discussion sessions did stir up memories of Dr Miksic’s cultural resource management class.

Wat Sela Rattana Papphataram in Lampang province

Dr Ratanaporn Sethakul from Chiang Mai, leading expert on the history of Lamphun.

The two-week long Field School’s targeted for museum practitioners in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, but we’ve met architects, artists, graduate students amongst the participants. Interesting bunch of people with vast experiences…  there’s this painter who studied the secrets of royal painting techniques in the grand palace, but yet was conflicted over the inability to share them, and now worries for its survival. There’re also participants from Bhutan, Kun Ming in China, Vietnam and Cambodia. All of which have quite profound experiences with museum work.

Our job scope? Well, officially, we are rapporteurs for the lectures and discussion sessions. But it has generously been expanded to include various humbled tasks that require no skill, probably just a subservience attitude and a smile. We summarise the lecture contents and submit the reports the day after. Unknown to many, while everyone else goes to bed after dinner, we (and another intern from UNESCO) slave on our computers till late just to figure out what they were discussing in the day.

Buddhist scrolls at Wat Sela Rattana Papphataram dating back to 1001 (Thai calendar). 1551 years ago!

The past few days have been tiring with intensive museums and temples visiting. However, it has been quite an enriching experience, and we’ve actually learnt quite a bit from this field school.