William Louis Abbott in Thailand: A Research Resource on Southern Thailand in the 1890s

Abstract

This paper introduces an important group of archival materials deriving from two expeditions to southern Thailand by American naturalist William Louis Abbott (1860-1936) in the late 19th century. Beyond summarizing the localities he visited in Thailand, and the current organization and usefulness of his collections for research, the paper attempts to interpret Abbott’s unpublished archival correspondence to assess his collecting focus, biases, and purposes, as well as his perspectives on contemporaneous events in the Kingdom of Siam and in the surrounding, encroaching colonial regions. This also allows for an assessment of the important role these short expeditions to Thailand played in Abbott’s later, much longer period of collecting in insular Southeast Asia, as well as the role that he and other collectors of this period played within the history of anthropology and of museums.