Communication between the King and People through the Royal Statements of King Rama IV

Abstract

This qualitative research aims at 1) examining the historical contexts influencing upon King Rama IV as he was a communicator between the king himself and his people by using his own royal statements and 2) considering what kinds of the communicative topics.

The research applied documentary analysis of King Rama IV’s royal statements and academic documents belonging to communication arts and historical studies. The validity result has been verified by various sources and in-depth interviews with scholars with expertise in related academic fields. The collected data were categorized, and inductively analyzed.

The result shown that 1) the influential historical contexts of the communicator were not only a) the interior circumstances that the king have to face with during his lifelong: his childhood experiences towards the royal court, his knowledge of both traditional and modern sciences together with the monkhood experiences when he had chances to closely contact with ordinary people but also b) the external conditions: the extension of Imperialism and trade liberalization. Both historical matters leaded the king to compose his statements in order to directly communicate with the people so that all of them could significantly participate in the civilized-nation development as for the king’s anticipation. 2) According to the study, contents of the statements covered political, economic and socio-cultural topics. Additionally, King Rama IV’s lively, clear and suitable communicative language organized by these following structures: chronology, location, priority, rationale, problem solution, motivation and respective topic, effectively impressed the receivers. Two kinds of figures of speech, simile and metaphor, were used in King Rama IV’s statements, as well.