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The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets.
... In accordance with the latter aspect of ton bun, Tambiah (1984, -a mystical belief among its followers and a consequent attempt to reconstitute the existing order that often boils up into revolt. In contrast, Cohen (2000 and2001) argues against associating modern ton bun such as Khruba Siwichai and Khruba Khao Pi with militant or apocalyptic millenarianism. ...
... The search for charismatic monks or holy men on the part of the Thai state and urban elite is nothing new. Scholarship on ascetic monks (Tambiah 1984;Taylor 1990 and1993) has pointed out that since the 1960s, urban elites have enthusiastically searched the periphery of the country for indigenous sources of charismatic power, in activities facilitated by improvements in communication and infrastructure. Taylor (1993) has documented four phases that the wandering forest monks of the Northeast follow. ...
... In arguing that Khruba Bunchum has become the next future Buddha in the eyes of his Shan followers, I should make it clear that As noted, the belief in the millenarian role of a ton bun is related to the belief that Buddhism is in decline and the shared view that society is experiencing a crisis. Tambiah (1984) associates millenarian expectations with the coming of a Buddha (Maitreya), whereas Keyes (1982, pp. 149-80) associates a ton bun with a bodhisattva or a person who wishes to become a Buddha in the future. ...
The study of holy men active in Thailand, Laos and Myanmar between
the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries has associated them
primarily with millenarian movements. In the twenty-first century,
Thailand–Myanmar border has seen the emergence of a holy man to
whom the concept of millenarianism is, in the current changing religious
environment, not applicable. Khruba Bunchum, a contemporary Thai
with a significant ethnic minority following in Myanmar, rose to fame in
Thailand after being forced to leave Myanmar and spending
three years meditating in an isolated cave. He has gained followers
among wealthy and middle-class Thais. His case illustrates the effect
of mobile media technology in transforming the practice of venerating
holy men. It suggests the need for a new approach to studying religious
movements, one that draws on religious, political and media sources.
... A good example of anthropological work on sexuality which went beyond the simple 'naming and claiming' approach was Herdt's now classic work on the Sambia (1984, which looks at same-sexual relations in Melanesia in terms not only of rituals of manhood, but also of the wider kinship implications of semen transactions. 2. The ideas presented here draw on recent contributions to the study of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia and the Pacific (Tsing 1996;Besnier 1997), including two in particular which deal with the issue of same-sex sexuality in the Philippines (Garcia 1996;Manalansan 1995). ...
... 1. The interpretation of transvestite contests as ritual performances grows out of my reading of anthropological literature on ritual, particularly more recent efforts, which have stressed the processual over the static (see, in addition to those cited in the text, Schieffelin 1976Schieffelin , 1985Tambiah 1985), as well as in discussions with, and through the writings of, fellow Ph.D. students working on ritual processes in the Department of Anthropology, at University College London, particularly Desmond Mallikarachchi and Nicholas Argenti. 2. I never actually saw an 'indiscrete' genital, although I was told about this happening to a gay performer at a beauty contest, and the question of its truth or falsity simply highlights the desire for it. ...
... Also, people can deflect or resist retribution by spirits using spiritual means. Invulnerability tattoos can function in this way (Turton 1991) as can supernaturally empowered Buddhist amulets (Tambiah 1984). ...
... Thai Buddhism, for its part, seems to have had an ambivalent attitude to forests. On the one hand, the forest monk movement (Tambiah 1984) valorises forests as providing an environment conducive to the practice of meditation. But on the other hand, in the 1970s many so-called 'development monks' encouraged forest clearance as part and parcel of the push to 'civilise' minority groups dwelling in upland forest areas and to combat communism (Darlington 1998). ...
... Pham, Q. H (2010) in "Buddhism and Folk Beliefs in Vietnam" delved into the integration of Buddhism and folk beliefs, citing specific examples of syncretism in temples and worship rituals. Tambiah, S. J (1984) in "The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets" studied the syncretism through the worship of forest monks and amulets in Thai Buddhism, drawing parallels to similar phenomena in Vietnam. Brown, R. L (1997) in "The Dhamma: Religious Practices in Modern Southeast Asia" explored the development and transformation of Buddhism in the modern context of Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, highlighting the interaction between orthodox religion and folk beliefs. ...
... As a holy man who restored pagodas and temples, Khruba Wenli echoed the actions of his precursors, such as Khruba Siwichai and Khruba Bunchum, who built Buddhist monuments in northern Thailand and Shan State. This tradition, marked by its transborder missions, has been considered a response to the intensive building of the Southeast Asian nation-states since the early 1920s (Bowie, 2017;Cohen, 2001;Keyes, 1971;Tambiah, 1984). Khruba Wenli's remarkable project of restoring Buddhist sites in the Chinese territory of Xishuangbanna as a Shan monk educated in Thailand demonstrates the religious connections of this borderland and their powerful pragmatism in reviving Buddhist cultures. ...
... Thus, consecration and kechi monks are the key elements to create apotropaic power and transfer it into PK and KR. Tambiah (1984) also noted that the Buddha image and amulets are created with power and energy through a life-giving process. There are two ways to give life to an amulet; the likeness and monk specialist. ...
This research focuses on the practice of Buddhist and animist amulets in contemporary Thailand, so called PHRA KHRUEANG and KHRUEANG RANG in Thai. PHRA KHRUEANG and KHRUEANG RANG are presented in response to demonstrate the relationship between Buddhist and animist amulets, and thus between Buddhism and animism, which have been influenced by the heightened process of religious syncretism. The study argues that there is no clear separation between the religiosity of the amulets moving from 'purely' animist amulets to 'purely' Buddhist Buddha images, Thai religiosity flows uninterrupted in a changing yet interconnected spectrum as in the visible light spectrum. A range of studies compared three categories within PHRA KHRUEANG and KHRUEANG RANG in order to highlight their relationship in terms of physical features and functions which are Forms, Functions, and Empowerment respectively.
... Certainly, Buddhism has many levels for followers, and these levels can be metaphorically seen as comprising a 'pyramid of wisdom' that is obtainable by all classes of people. Depending upon the wisdom levels of the believers, the Buddhism of the local people may differ from that of scholars and philosophers (Suksawaddee, 1996;Tambiah, 1984). Ordinary people prefer to believe in practical rituals, cults and supernatural powers rather than essence, philosophy and logical systems. ...
In Chiang Mai’s old town district, there are many monasteries that are still standing, some ‘living’ and some abandoned. These abandoned monasteries stand in the modern environment without any direct policymaking from the official stakeholders concerning their upkeep or protection. In this way, the remains of abandoned sacred places face a hostile environment and their survival is threatened. Each place is used in various ways, such as being utilized for government offices, being used as sacred places of elementary schools, or existing among poor communities; some are in the process of being revitalized. Most of the problems they face involve local people and how long-term management of these locations can be secured. This study intends to elucidate the 2006 procedure of the Thai government Fine Arts Department (FAD) with respect to the ten abandoned monasteries of old town Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai’s authenticity and cultural identity are crucial. People’s understanding and interpretation about these key aspects of the city fluctuate and depend on the different ‘goals’ of the stakeholders. Seeking to understand Chiang Mai’s true identity might be for a key factor in sustainable development of not only in tourism, but also the lives of local residents, and cultural heritage protection.
... Meanwhile some scholars asserted that the Sangha institution was instrumentalized to assimilate different groups of people into Thai state's power, namely, Nicholas (1999), Tiyavanich (1997), and Taylor (1993). However, reinterpretations of Buddhism also serve ordinary people in daily activities as discussed by Reynolds (2016Reynolds ( , 2015, McDaniel (2011), Kitiarsa (2007), Tambiah (1984) and Kirsch (1977). Moreover, some studies explore the ways that religions adapted to local contexts (including cultural, social, and political environments), due to the stream of modernity and intellectual critiques. ...
This paper examines the monastic administration in Thai Buddhism, which is ruled by the senior monks and supported by the government. It aims to answer two questions; (1) why the Sangha’s administration has been designed to serve the bureaucratic system that monks abandon social and political justices, and (2) how the monastic education curriculum are designed to support such a conservative system. Ethnographic methodology was conducted and collected data were analyzed through the concept of gerontocracy. It found that (1) Thai Buddhism gains supports from the government much more than other religions. Parallel with the state’s bureaucratic system, the hierarchical conservative council contains the elderly monks. Those committee members choose to respond to the government policy in order to maintain supports rather than to raise social issues; (2) gerontocracy is also facilitated by the idea of Theravada itself. In both theory and practice, the charismatic leader should be the old one, implying the condition of being less sexual feeling, hatred, and ignorance. Based on this criterion, the moral leader is more desirable than the intelligent. The concept of “merits from previous lives” is reinterpreted and reproduced to pave the way for the non-democratic system.
... ray undoubtedly displays remarkable scholarship yet he chooses to overlook certain important things. Despite his denials, a substantial influence of S. J. tambiah's and Michael Carrithers's study of forest monk traditions of thailand and Sri Lanka respectively (Tambiah 1984;Carrithers 1983) is quite discernible. Both tambiah and Carrithers have visualized that the state, the grāmavāsina/ Nagaravāsina (village/town) monasteries and the Āranyavāsina ('forest dwelling') monasteries together formed a functional matrix, on the models of the 'coreperiphery' dialectic; the state and the grāmavāsina/Nagaravāsina monasteries together forming the 'core'. ...
... In Bangkok, the sheer diversity of forms of spirit possession provides a striking illustration of the inadequacy of models of shared culture that far too often still underlie studies of Buddhist contexts (see White 2014 and this volume). In northeast Thailand, wandering ascetic monks-at the center of Tambiah's (1984) celebrated study of charisma-but also local Lao mo tham exorcists have been key agents in the integration of the region into "larger orders of power (Buddhism and the state)" (Hayashi 2003: 303). Charismatic virtuosi in Thailand, or Burmese cults that have sprung up around weikza, figures of perfection and immortality, can however also feed millenarian aspirations and sometimes opposition to the state (Brac de la Perrière et al. 2014;Ladwig 2014). ...
The anthropology of Buddhism may give the impression of already having a well-established lineage. However, understood as a collective endeavor bringing together specialists from different parts of the Buddhist world in a comparative spirit, it remains very much an emerging project. We outline in this introduction some of the striking features of the beginnings of this subfield, such as how it has undergone a process of emancipation from textualist interpretations of Buddhism, and survey some of its main thematic and analytic orientations, pointing in particular to its most substantial 'long conversation', on the structure and dynamics of Buddhist religious fields. Throughout, we focus primarily on the period following an assessment of the subfield made by David Gellner in 1990. Finally, we stress the importance and highlight the promise of a comparative anthropology of Buddhism that builds on a critical, reflexive examination of its central concepts.
... Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_8570-2 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 174 Buddhism and Forest Development 175 Buddhism has contributed to civilizing the forest in the modern era through subduing the wild forest 176 and its spirits, enabling human settlements to expand beyond city boundaries. In the late nineteenth 177 and early twentieth centuries, forest-dwelling monks bridged the space between muang and paa 178 thu'an (Stott, 1991, p. 149; see also Kamala, 1997;Tambiah, 1984;Taylor, 1993a). These Buddhist 179 monks chose to follow 13 ancient ascetic practices, including forest dwelling, called thudong, that 180 aided meditation and purification. ...
... Buddhadasa was convinced that the restoration of the forest monks' (phra pa) tradition 2 , which was almost obliterated after the Second World War due to state persecution and the disappearance of the forest, could be an important step in this direction. He suggested that contemplation of nature and livelihood in the forest had to be constantly practiced and revived, and these were indeed key features of the forest monks' tradition (Tambiah 1984; Taylor 1993 ; Kamala Tyiavanich 1997). The preservation of trees and forest, seen as sacred resources for the human body and mind, was thus one of the main teachings of Buddhadasa, who tried to model his temple in the fashion of the remote forest temples and shelters created by forest monks in the jungle. ...
In the late eighties the Thai eco-Buddhist movement, led by a fragmented network of Buddhist monks, mobilized in defense of the forested ecosystems and advocated rural communities in forest and land conflicts against the state-corporation alliance. The present discussion challenges the assumptions of those observers who described the local articulations of the eco-Buddhist movement in the nineties. By analyzing the life trajectory of two ecology monks operating in Nan and focusing on their representations of the righteous rural order, I will argue that the eco-Buddhist environmentalist approach, throughout the decade 2000-2010, became a hegemonic force, supporting the conservative powers’ effort to softly contrast the expansion of reformist social movements in the Northern Thai territories.
... Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_8570-2 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 174 Buddhism and Forest Development 175 Buddhism has contributed to civilizing the forest in the modern era through subduing the wild forest 176 and its spirits, enabling human settlements to expand beyond city boundaries. In the late nineteenth 177 and early twentieth centuries, forest-dwelling monks bridged the space between muang and paa 178 thu'an (Stott, 1991, p. 149; see also Kamala, 1997;Tambiah, 1984;Taylor, 1993a). These Buddhist 179 monks chose to follow 13 ancient ascetic practices, including forest dwelling, called thudong, that 180 aided meditation and purification. ...
Two contradictory images strike the traveler in northern Thailand. First is the lush, forested mountains rising beyond expanses of rice paddy land and small farming villages. Second is the spotty appearance of the mountains, denuded of primary growth in large areas and filled instead with economic crops such as cabbages or corn. Both images are set against the backdrop of congested cities, particularly Bangkok and Chiang Mai (the largest city in the north), through which all travelers pass before seeing rural areas. The contrasts inherent in these scenes point to a major tension in Thailand between the push to develop economically and efforts to conserve and protect the nation’s natural resources.
... The biography of Chokyi Dronma, despite some remarkably distinctive traits, follows the general template of a namthar (rnam thar) – an account of spiritual liberation. It has therefore an exemplary character and is informed first of all by the Life of the Buddha, which was the original paradigm for an exemplary Buddhist life (Tambiah 1984 ). The biography describes how Chokyi Dronma revealed herself as a Buddhist hero in a narrative in which non-Buddhist antagonists play a significant role and are explicitly said to recall the 'heretics' faced by early Buddhists. ...
Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines Number 15, November 2008
... The image is enlivened by opening its eyes; it is dhammacised by imbuing it with the ontological truth realized by the Buddha.' 58 Prior to this ritual, a statue is 'just' metal and only the central act of removing the wax or blindfold from the eyes transforms it. 59 As a Lao friend of mine put it: 'Now the statue has virtue and dhamma. ' This kind of ritual of bringing statues to life can also be applied to statues that do not depict the Buddha. ...
In Laos—one of the few remaining ‘officially’ socialist countries—Buddhism was abolished as a state religion after the revolution in 1975. However, since the 1990s the communist government has been increasingly using its patronage of Buddhism to gain legitimacy. With reference to the divine sources of power in Theravāda Buddhism, this article explores the extent to which modern Lao state socialism is still imbued with pre-revolutionary patterns of Buddhist kingship and statecraft. The analysis will focus especially on ritual patronage of a Buddhist relic shrine and on the recent inauguration of statues of deceased kings in the Lao capital, Vientiane. With reference to the ritual animation of ‘opening the eyes’ of the statues, and with regard to theories exploring the agency of objects, I argue that the Lao palladium has to be understood as being made up of ‘living’ entities. Finally, the article explores to what extent the control, worship, and creation of statues and relics today are still essential for the legitimacy of rule in the Lao People's Democratic Republic.
In recent years, robots have begun appearing in religious temples and events. One of the most recent developments of this kind is Mindar, a robotic manifestation of bodhisattva Kannon, preaching the Heart Sutra at the Kōdaiji Temple in Kyoto. Mindar is both a technological innovation and an artifact embedded in Buddhist iconography and thought. The android draws its status and agency from ritual consecration, the narratives that surround it, and its mechanical body that quite literally materializes Rinzai teachings about emptiness. While Japanese Buddhist statues of the past would come "alive" by means of wondrous divine presence, Mindar is animated and speaks by means of technological wonder. At the same time, turning Kannon into a machine and a preacher, created an entity in many ways more akin to statues and animatronic figures than contemporary robots. While its recursive movements and speech are fully orchestrated and repetitive, it is unlike many religious robots, not simply a sophisticated device, but also a ritually established and conceptually contextualized manifestation of a perfect being.
Climate change and environmental degradation are threatening livelihoods in many parts of the world. To develop pathways into a sustainable future and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, fundamental socioecological transformations are needed. This process requires not only appropriate policies as well as scientific knowledge, but necessitates radical paradigm shifts and changed mindsets and behaviour. Religious communities are crucial stakeholders for achieving these paradigm shifts: religion shapes social imaginaries and people’s values, and religious communities have the ability to act as agents of socio-ecological transformation. This volume seeks to elucidate the role of religious communities for ecological sustainability with a focus on Southern Africa. The book provides resources for scholars and students of religion and ecological sustainability, religious communities and faith-based organizations as well as policymakers, practitioners and NGOs in the field of sustainable development. It thereby seeks to facilitate knowledge exchange and to spark further engagement on religion and ecological sustainability in Southern Africa and beyond.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in a number of Orthodox parishes in Bucharest, this article discusses different conceptions of har among Bucharest Orthodox believers, practitioners, and clerics. Har stands for ‘grace’, ‘charisma’ or ‘gift’ depending on the context. An ethnographically grounded analysis of this emic concept, I argue, is essential for two main reasons. First, understanding grace through gratuity allows us to grasp diverse forms of religious change, such as committed church attendance and the detachment from communal religious life, in contemporary Romania. Second, seeing through the looking glass of Orthodox practice allows for unexplored insights into the workings of charismatic authority. The article ends with a seeming paradox: grace is ‘something extra’, an addition which is best grasped apophatically, that is, through subtraction.
Global warming and environmental deterioration have had an enormous impact on the Three Rivers Region. The rise of the monastic organizations in Tibet had its social-politic factors such as the international impacts on "Green Tibetan" movement, China's foreign non-governmental organizations (FNGO) policies, and the revitalization of Tibetan Buddhism. The first Tibetan Monastic Organization (TMO) was officially registered in Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (GTAP), People's Republic of China (PRC) in 2007. Since then an increasing number of TMOs in rural Tibetan areas started to take participate in conservation around the globally important Three Rivers Region, and these TMOs have begun to make an impact on environmental governance. In this paper, we chose Badma Rinto Wildlife Conservation (BWC) as the case study to obtain a better view of peoples' perceptions on the role of TMOs in conservation and development through questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and participatory observation. The study had illustrated that the conservation efforts from BWC is widely accepted from both local communities and government, and surprisingly with expectation from communities on BWC to bring greater influence in terms of future conservation and community development. Furthermore, the environmental work for conservation in Tibetan areas must be a collaborative effort among residents, Buddhist monasteries, monastic organizations, environmental NGOs, and the government.
The small community of forest monks in Sri Lanka is held in high esteem by the laity due to their perceived authenticity and faithful adherence to the Buddhist teachings, which is reflected in the generous material support extended to forest monasteries by public and private organisations as well as individual donors. Navigating this relationship between the faith they inspire and the resulting “gains, offerings and fame” which the teachings they follow proclaim to be “a bitter, harsh impediment” to reach their spiritual goals has always been a challenge for the monastics. The balancing act between the supposedly authentic practice of monks and the financial stability of monasteries has become particularly important today for ensuring the long-term survival and growth of forest monastic communities that espouse a way of life that is dramatically, and increasingly, different from lay society. Drawing from an autoethnographic study of one of the largest forest monasteries in the world, this chapter explores how a Sri Lankan reform movement that has looked to the ancient past through the Buddhist texts for its way of practice has nonetheless managed to thrive in the present by being inventive with financial management.
Articles on India folklore edited and published in Lokaratna e-journal of folklore foundation, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
Peter Schwieger (2000) has shown how Buddhism gradually became the dominant source of ethical values in Tibetan historiography by the 14th century. He states that Tibetan histories, which narrativise the remembered past, play a mythic role inasmuch as they confer constructed meaning on Tibetan culture, determine cultural self-interpretation to some extent and provide a source of normative claims concerning sociocultural interrelationships that hold true in the histories’ “present.” This article complements his analysis of the shift from a royal to a religious centre of society, by bringing theoretical insights from the field of narratology to bear on Tibetan historiography’s depiction of the emperors and their introduction of Buddhism to the Tibetan plateau.
Investigating the Central Eurasian theme of exile and return to power in state formation mythology, as well as Indic narratives of renouncing the throne in favour of the spiritual life, helps to clarify the processes involved in the introduction of both of these important topoi into early Tibetan biographies. Understanding the divergences between the Central Eurasian and Indic heritage of these Tibetan tales then allows for a preliminary discussion of the changing relation between religious and royal figures in early Tibetan biographical narratives. Finally, grounding these changes in theoretical discussions of types of fiction, mythology and historiography uncovers some of the narrative mechanisms which enabled a shift from status based upon kinship, military endeavour and fealty to the emperor as the highest member of Tibet to religious status drawing on Indic social structures. It will be seen that such a shift opened up the possibility that a subject of the emperor (at least rhetorically) could outshine an instantiation of indigenous divine kingship—a Buddhist cleric superior to royalty.
In this article I reflect on Grant Evans’ landmark and influential The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos since 1975, the way in which this book relates to the transformation from socialism to post‐socialism in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (LPDR), to the crisis of legitimacy of the communist regime, and to issues of social memory, Buddhism, nationalism, iconography, and ethnic minorities. I also consider how other scholars have engaged with The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance both critically and supportively since the publication of the monograph in 1998. I include in my analysis some observations on Evans’ quite radical change in political views over his career as a student, journalist and academic, culminating in his critique of socialism in general and the LPDR in particular and his controversial sympathy for the Lao monarchy.
In 1900, the Lao ethnonym, and thus the Lao, ‘officially’ disappeared from Siam. However, Lao culture and identity persisted at local, regional, and national levels. As Keyes (1967) discovered, ‘a Northeast Thailand‐based ethno‐regionalism’ emerged post‐World War II. This regionalism, which we re‐term ‘Thai Lao’ and specify to the majority ethnic community, exists in a contested relationship with both ‘Thai’ and ‘Lao’ identity. The survival of the Lao ethnic community's cultural identity occurred despite the best efforts of the Royal Thai Government (RTG) to eradicate aspects of Lao culture. These aspects included Lao language, religion, and history, using the school system, the Lao Buddhist Sangha, and the bureaucracy. Beginning in the 1990s, buoyed by a multitude of factors, the Lao ethnic community reappeared as the ‘Thai Lao’ or ‘Lao Isan’. This reappearance was noted in the RTG's Thailand 2011 Country Report (RTG 2011) to the UN Committee responsible for the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. For nearly four decades now, ‘Laoism’ has recurred in Thai academia, the media, the public sphere, popular traditions, and even Lao apocalyptic millenarianism. Following Smith (1986, 1991, 1999), this article utilizes a historical ethno‐symbolist approach to analyse this recurrence.
For a number of scholars, syncretism as an analytical approach to a group’s or an individual’s religiosity has several shortcomings. Denoting the mixture of tenets or practices belonging to different traditions, syncretism presupposes a clearly demarcated boundary between the syncretized traditions (McDaniel 2011, 17). It also implies scholarly wrought labels and categories, which are hardly shared by the people whose religiosity becomes the subject of academic scrutiny (Tambiah 1970, 42; T. G. Kirsch 2004, 706). In this paper I demonstrate that despite its shortcomings, syncretism can be employed to expound vernacular Thai Buddhism, whose heterogeneous composition has been argued to be “beyond syncretism” (Pattana 2005, 461). Ethnographic cases presented in this paper reveal that several Thai Buddhists, noting a dissonance between the doctrine of karma and the belief in magic, differentiate Buddhist from non-Buddhist elements. The rationalization they employ to resolve this dissonance is a syncretistic activity that renders their multifarious religiosity internally consistent and meaningful. These cases challenge the assumption that syncretism is inapplicable to the highly diversified and hybrid ways Thai Buddhists observe their faith since they neither draw the boundary between diverse religious tenets and customs nor adhere to a single orthodox ideal.
During the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, Thailand saw the emergence of a diverse range of ‘prosperity religions’, popular movements that emphasize the acquisition of wealth as much as salvation. This paper considers three Thai prosperity religions — the worship of the spirit of King Chulalongkorn, and more generally the Thai monarchy; devotion to the Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva Kuan Im; and movements surrounding auspiciously named Theravada Buddhist monks, both living and dead, reputed to possess supernatural powers. After a consideration of recent approaches to the study of Thai religion, the paper describes the form and separate histories of these movements, and then examines the ways in which they began to merge symbolically at the height of the economic boom. The paper concludes with a consideration of the critiques of the prosperity movements from Thai Buddhist doctrinalists, critiques which were fairly faint during the boom itself but which have grown in intensity since the onset of the economic crisis in 1997.
Museums are prominent sites of memory in contemporary cultures (Nora, 1989). They make memory sensible, collectible and transferable through the objects, documents and images on display along with the discursive practices attending their exhibition (Katriel, 1997). According to Tony Bennett, museums give rise to particular forms of ‘civic seeing’ in which ‘the civic lessons embodied in those arrangements are to be seen, understood and performed by the museum’s visitor’ (2011, p. 263). In their conserving and conservative capacity for showing what is precious (or abominable) in cultural legacies (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2000), they can also give voice to an explicitly mobilizing agenda, turning the museum into a tool for social advocacy. As such, they do not only provide knowledge about the past but also promote a sense of ‘epistemic responsibility’ (Linell and Rommetveit, 1998) whereby knowledge prefigures action.
Studies of religion in Buddhist societies of South East Asia have largely overlooked the role played by Buddhism in the growth of spirit cults. Through a comparison of Thai Buddhist and Tai pre-Buddhist conceptions of death and the afterlife, this paper shows how the theory of karmic causation introduced uncertainty about the status of rebirth and failed to erase previous conceptions about the afterlife. As a result, the belief in reincarnation coexists with the idea that the soul of the deceased may maintain an active presence among the living. Buddhism also imposed a redemption-cum-protection transactional pattern with spirits and deities, whose gradations of meaning are interpreted with reference to different variables. This pattern extends to supernatural patron-client bonds, a typical feature of the Thai social structure.
The purpose of this essay is, among other things, to correct the misunderstandings that some evolutionary psychologists have promoted about Clifford Geertz. It is indeed unfortunate that generations of cognitive scientists of religion have simply accepted unwarranted claims about Geertz's attitude towards cognition and psychology. Furthermore, this blind acceptance goes hand in hand with the equally faulty idea that cognition has nothing much to do with culture, except that cognition came first. In this chapter, I will briefly introduce Clifford Geertz. The bulk of the chapter will consist of a detailed analysis of Geertz's understanding of cognition and culture followed by a brief description of criticism from evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides. The final section will indicate how Geertz's ideas mesh well with contemporary cognitive, social and affective neuroscience. Introduction to Clifford Geertz Clifford Geertz was not only a significant figure in anthropology; he was one of the great intellectuals of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was born on 23 August 1926 and died on 30 October 2006. After the war, he studied literature at Antioch College in Ohio from 1946 to 1950, which left an indelible influence on his literary style. He also studied philosophy and was greatly inspired by John Austin, Gilbert Ryle and Kenneth Burke. He then moved on to graduate school at Harvard, studying under Clyde Kluckhohn at an interdisciplinary department called “Social Relations”. Here Geertz met anthropology, psychology and sociology. © Dimitris Xygalatas and William W. McCorkle Jr, 2013 and individual contributors, 2013.
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