A Folk Taxonomy of Terms for Ghosts and Spirits in Thai (original) (raw)
Ghosts can be People: Physicality and Spirits in Thailand's Northeast
Nu might have seen a ghost. He had been walking in the forest in his home province of Phetchabun, in Northeastern Thailand, when he came upon something standing in the middle of a stream. It looked like a person, but very small -no more than three feet tall, stark naked with gleaming white skin. Its hair would have dangled to its feet, but the ends were oating in the water. It stood staring into the water, arms poised and ready to snatch a sh should one pass. Stunned, Nu stopped and watched it hunt for a while until it wandered o . "It was a phi kom koi [liver-eating ghost]" Nu concluded, "but a real one."
Ghost Mothers: Kinship Relationships in Thai Spirit Cults
Social Analysis, 2016
This paper examines the process of building kinship relations between Thai spirit devotees and violent spirits. I examine three spirit shrines on the outskirts of Bangkok: a shrine to the ghost of a woman killed in childbirth, a shrine to a cobra spirit that causes accidents along a busy highway, and a household shrine to an aborted fetus. The devotees to which I spoke actively sought out such places known for death in order to "adopt" or "become adopted by" such spirits, and, I argue here, this action allows for a re-negotiation of their position vis-àvis accident and trauma. I suggest that becoming a spirit's "child" forms a mutually dependent relationship, and through this relationship allows for the domestication of forces from outside the social.
The study of ghosts and spirits, and the ethnographic evidence associated with this, is a fertile area for developing methodologies. By employing theories of materiality and the anthropological study of ontologies, I argue that looking at the traces of spirits and ghosts in the material domain can reveal crucial insights into their nature, position and relationships with the living. Two ethnographic case studies from the Buddhist ethnic Lao are used to demonstrate how material traces can explain the 'ontic shifting' of certain ghosts. I will then explore how through the modernization and rationalization of Buddhist cosmology there have evolved competing ideas of the nature of ancestral spirits addressed in Buddhist rites. While in an older interpretation these spirits are accessible through objects and the exchanges between layperson, monk and spirit, 'modernist' Buddhist monks advocate that the dead cannot be reached through objects. Finally, I argue that the material traces of spirits and their different readings hint to important transformations regarding the conceptualization of ghosts and spirits through the socialist revolution and the rationalization of Buddhism.
Kasurupan: Spirits Taxonomies and Interpretation in the Practice of Kasenian Réak
Jurai Sembah, 2020
Kasenian réak is a regional variant of the Javanese horse dances from Bandung, Indonesia. Commonly known in the archipelago as jaranan, kuda lumping or jathilan, the Javanese horse dances are a group of ceremonial musical performances during which a group of performers, led by a trance master, undergo voluntary possessions on behalf of spirits of the ancestors and other supernatural beings, under the influence of a musical ensemble. In different possession and trance phenomena around the world recognizing the acting spirit is often the key to communication with the supernatural being and treatment of the possessed. Thus, more or less different and precise taxonomies may be developed in order to do so. In réak, the possessed behaviour is interpreted by the trance master and members of the group in order to meet the spirit’s various demands and act accordingly to manage the possession. The purpose of this article is to examine the spirits’ taxonomies at play in réak as a case study. I do this in order to show in which sense analyses of the phenomenon of possession based on classification often fail to grasp the complexity and thus the significance of the experience. The outcome will underline which benefits can be obtained by a an approach that gives more value to a context-based ethnography of the possessed and its peculiarities than to the development of a general theory of possession with comparative purposes.
The Role and Nature of the Ghost in Literature: The Malay World and the West
2016
Ghosts are believed to exist in both the Malay world and the West. Their presence' in folk stories, novels, plays, and short stories is a long-standing phenomenon. Their form, characteristics, and relationship with human beings, however, are different in the Malay world and in the West, as is their place in literature. This article considers the way in which ghosts are portrayed in these two very different cultures in both folk literature (cerita rakyat) and formal literature. Examples will be drawn from works in western languages as well as those in Indonesian and Malay, and from the traditional beliefs of both concerning ghosts but will not be limited to ghost stories. Rather, the appearance of ghosts in general literature, as opposed to stories only about g hosts, will be discussed. The role of ghosts in the literature of the respective societies-the purpose behind their appearance-as a literary device as well as an expression of culture is also considered. "He woke up f...
How the hungry ghost mythology reconciles materialism and spirituality in Thai death rituals
Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 2015
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Asian consumer culture by exploring how hungry ghost death ritual in the Buddhist world reconciles spiritual asceticism and materialism. Design/methodology/approach – This is an interpretive study that incorporates elements of visual semiotics, ethnography and qualitative data analysis. The native-speaking first author interviewed local ritual leaders of the Pee Ta Khon festival in Dansai, Thailand, while both authors witnessed examples of other Buddhist death rituals in Thailand and visited temples and markets selling death ritual paraphernalia. Data include translated semi-structured interview transcripts, field notes, photographs and videos, the personal introspection of the first author and also news articles and website information. Findings – The paper reveals how hungry ghost death ritual resolves cultural contradictions by connecting materialism and spirituality through consumption practi...
Chinese Gods, Ghosts, Ancestors and their Neighbours: An observation through fieldwork
This paper is a study on two annual events organized and celebrated by a Chinese community. The first event is the celebration of the birthday of the Tai Pak Kung 1 deity (大伯公) which falls on the second day of the second lunar month. The other event is a celebration of the Hungry Ghost Festival (七月半) which falls on the seventh lunar month. Through these two events, in addition to the Chinese celebrants, there are participations of other ethnic groups and also involvements of gods or deities of non-Chinese ethnicity. There is a synthesization of beliefs in this particular area, a Chinese dominated village which is situated closely to a Malay and two Bidayuh villages. The existence of these villages date back to time immemorial. The Chinese community respects the existence of " local " gods and incorporates the gods into their temple of worship. They believe the local gods offer them equal protection as their own gods. Likewise, the Dayak and Malay villagers also respect their Chinese neighbours and their beliefs. They accept and live with the festivity mood and noisy atmospheres created during the procession at the temple and at the cemetery. These communities are tolerant to and have lived to accept one another " s beliefs. 1 Note on the use of languages in this paper: All vernacular terms, unless otherwise indicated, are written in Romanized form according to the Hakka pronunciation. Terms in Bahasa Melayu are written in italic forms.
2019
Classic anthropological studies construe magic as a body of propositions and practices concerning natural laws that, though approximating science in several respects, is founded on a false assessment of reality. Per this outlook, magic is a set of fallacious premises and practices in contradistinction to wellgrounded and empirically verified science. Examining the ravenous spirit (phii pob) belief tradition practiced by several rural communities in contemporary northeast Thailand, this paper revisits the status of magical beliefs vis-à-vis science. An inquiry into experiences convincing believers of the reality of ravenous spirits reveals that the ravenous spirit tradition, like science, is 1) a body of propositions and practices anchored to a rational assessment of empirical evidence, and 2) a speculation on the possible causes of a phenomenon, inferred from its manifested effect, which is inevitably partial.
The Khmer Witch Project: Demonizing the Khmer by Khmerizing a Demon
Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond, 2016
This paper outlines an anthropological reading of Thai ghost films and their uncanny protagonists as a dialectic synthesizing ethnographic material with film analysis in an attempt to operationalize the premises of the ontological and spectral turns. The paper is the first systematic study of Phi Krasue-one of Thailand s most iconic uncanny beingsand its cinematic and vernacular ghostly images.)t grew out of an attempt to make sense of local Khmer-speaking interlocutors acceptance and reproduction of an idiosyncratic origin myth that locates the origin of Phi Krasue in Angkorian Khmer culture. Based on Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva s theories the paper identifies abjection and its essential ambiguity as the logical principle structuring imaginations of Phi Krasue in vernacular and cinematic contexts.) argue that the reading of a ghost film s social message depends on spectators embodiment of vernacular ghostlore and thus on an implicit knowledge of the cultural semantics Thailand s phi manifest. (owever, this paper offers not only a structural explanation for the self-evidence of Phi Krasue's origin in Angkorian Khmer culture, but also for the Khmer-magic link as the most important socio-cultural stereotype characterizing the category Khmer in Thailand s contemporary popular culture. Finally, the paper identifies filthiness as the social idiom used to explicate abjection as the logical principle structuring processes of self-formation in contemporary Thailand.
Presence in Spirit. What Spirits are (to the Kulung)
This paper aims to show how a population with an oral tradition, the Kulung from Nepal, conceives spirits and through that description to grasp the status which should be given to these representations in the language of anthropological analysis. I argue that spirits are not stable representations. Rather, they are representations that vary according to the situations in which they are actualized. The study of these situations (encounters with spirits and narratives about them, misfortune and divination, ritual, myth), which I label “fields of actualization,” reveal that the underlying representations of spirits are not homogeneous – notably when they have to do, according to the Kulung outlook, with re-presentations (evocating an absence) or manifestations (marking a presence). These representations are more or less articulated together according to a logic of looseness and of doubt. These unstable representations, which allow the articulation of otherwise incompatible elements, must constantly be rethought, which allows the elaboration of an implicit cosmology, partly constructed within a framework of action.
An anecdote found in the third juan of the Treatise on Discerning Virtue (Fenbie gongde lun 分別功德論) refers to the story of a group of monks who went to a graveyard to practice “dead body contemplation” (guan sishi 觀死屍) and witnessed a particularly curious event: a “hungry ghost” (egui 餓鬼; skr.: preta) brutally beating a dead body. In the lines that follow, the corpse is revealed to be nothing more than the body of the preta itself or, more precisely, the body that belonged to this creature during its previous life. Beating its own mortal remains, the “hungry ghost” unleashed its anger against the human weaknesses that led it to this unfortunate condition. Such preta accounts are common in so-called “popular” Buddhist tales, filled with anecdotes on noctivagous and man-eating creatures that haunt humans. In addition, “canonical” Buddhist sūtra-s and treatises specifically discussing this subject matter are also quite frequent. However, a much smaller number of texts go into greater detail about the various preta categories and their specific nature and “karmic origin”, elements which often prove to be more complex and subtle than expected. It is well known that, despite its integration into the Buddhist cosmological scheme, the concept of preta is in fact inherited from much older speculations linking this condition to notions that are at times far removed from those found in Buddhist texts. Before its assimilation into the five (or six) realms of rebirth by the systematizations of Buddhist scholastics, the preta is first and foremost “the one who proceeds”, in other words the “migrant”, that is to say “the one who travels” between the material world and the world of the ancestors, the pitṛ-s. The most detailed description of this rebirth path transmitted by the Chinese Buddhist tradition appears in a sixth-century translation of the Sūtra of the Foundations of Mindfulness of the True Law (Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra), the Zhengfa nianchu jing 正法念處經 (henceforth ZFNCJ), provided by Gautama Prajñaruci 瞿曇般若流支 (act. 538−543). Up until a few years ago, apart from this translation, completed during the first year of the Xinghe 興和 era (539) of the Eastern Wei, only excerpts and a Tibetan translation (dating from the late 11th−early 12th c.) of this text were known to exist. A Sanskrit manuscript containing this text was recently found in Tibet. The origins of this manuscript, which began to circulate in the Western academic milieu in the form of photographs, are unclear. However, various elements would seem to indicate that it was copied between the eleventh and the thirteenth century. Despite its precious contents, the ZFNCJ was most likely not very popular in India, nor in China, as there is no evidence of the existence of any commentary or any other kind of exegetical work regarding this text. The ZFNCJ lists thirty-six preta-s at the beginning of the chapter (pin) entitled “The Hungry Ghosts” (Egui 餓鬼品). Each entry is accompanied by a phonetic transcription of the “Indian language” ghost name, followed by a summary Chinese translation, that is to say an explanation of its meaning. The precise meaning of these ghost names is clarified in Chinese by short phrases explaining their general features, such as the food they consume, their physical aspect, etc. Lin Li-kouang was doubtless the first scholar to provide a translation and (hypothetical) restoration of the Sanskrit names of these thirty-six preta-s. Later, Wayman suggested a number of rectifications to some of Lin’s assumptions. In this study I will mainly refer to the Chinese version of the ZFNCJ. The preta names found in the Sanskrit manuscript and referred to in the present paper are based on the data provided by Daniel Stuart in his 2012 PhD dissertation. By comparing the terms found in this manuscript with the transliterations found in the Chinese translation, various philological problems can be pointed out. These problems are often quite difficult to explain and, at times, constitute serious inconsistencies. Such elements, which should be studied in greater depth, raise a number of interesting questions concerning the transmission of the ZFNCJ and seem to suggest the existence of different versions or recensions of the text. The work of the three abovementioned scholars proved to be an invaluable source of information for this paper and all Sanskrit transcriptions of these preta names are based on the data they provided. Moreover, by analysing the whole section of the text concerning the preta-s, which consists of two juan-s of the ZFNCJ, it is possible to point out further interesting features of the specific details given by this text, which has not yet been explored in great depth. In fact, apart from the abovementioned list of names, the text contains an in-depth description of the various categories of preta-s, giving full details in a series of paragraphs also containing verses and short digressions on other topics. The ZFNCJ pays particular attention to the karmic causes leading human beings into this kind of evil path of rebirth, as well as to their consequences and long-term effects.
Panel—Ghosts: Mind and/or Matter (The Problem of Classification) (2011)
ABSTRACT: The topic statement for the panel highlights the ambiguity of ghosts. Ghosts blur the mind-matter binary opposition, but also others, such as: living-dead, internal-external, this world – other world. Ghosts do not fit into usual “rational” categories. Classification problems are pervasive in paranormal fields, and ghosts exemplify them. The concepts of liminality and binary opposition from anthropology are useful in addressing the topic of classification. Anthropologists have addressed magical practices and mana (an impersonal supernatural power) in relation to classification. Problematical aspects of the paranormal can be conceptualized in terms of classification issues.
This paper argues that researchers doing ethnography can fail in their commitment to take what their informants say seriously. This often occurs, despite ethnographers' best intentions, when informant statements depart radically from Western distinctions between what is real and what is imaginary. When informants talk about things like ghosts, witches and magic, there is a tendency to apply analytic strategies which translate these informant statements about the world so they conform to Western understandings about what is possible in the world and what is not. This article describes for example some commonly applied interpretive moves used in dealing with informant statements about other than human persons. The analytic models and categories we use in these cases are equivalent to often tacit and taken-for-granted Western strategies for dealing with "non-existent things" and these make it impossible to take native statements at face value. We could turn the situation around in ethnographic analyses if we put under the microscope our own Western taken-for-granted assumptions and did so by taking definitions of reality, community, and the person radically different from our own seriously. KEYWORDS: Ghosts, non-human persons, interpretation, ontology, epistemology