The Cult of Phaya Narin Songkhram: Spirit Mediums and Shifting Sociocultural Boundaries in Northeastern Thailand (original) (raw)
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Pacific Affairs, 2010
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This thesis is a study of religious charisma, the state, place-making and cultural flows in the southern Thai borderland. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Songkhla and Pattani provinces, the thesis provides a historically-grounded account of popular Buddhism and other, particularly Chinese, religious forms and their relationship to state formation and transnational flow. <br><br>Southern Thailand provides a provocative site for the exploration of these issues. Located a great distance from Bangkok and inhabited by large populations of Malay Muslims and ethnic Chinese, the region occupies a position of ambiguity in the national Thai imaginary. The thesis considers the production of the South itself as a region within the Thai nation-state and the complex manner in which it is constructed as being both 'Thai' and 'un-Thai' in everyday constructions. <br> <br>As a mechanism to explore the central themes, the thesis focuses on a semi...
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As many scholars of Thai Buddhism have shown, Thailand's religious sphere incorporates animist and Brahminist elements into a new fusion. But this religious system is not seamless, rather it rests upon internal contradiction and division, between upper and lower class, rural and urban. Alongside the official spirit shrines devoted to the Thai state and the continued progress and expansion of the city, via an analysis of urban spirit cults, I address the unexpected irruption of nature, death, and accident into the planned urban cityscape. Here, I examine one nocturnal pilgrimage by a spirit medium and her devotees across Bangkok's spiritual cityscape. I ask what this 'spirit map' of Bangkok opens up for analysis in the context of those areas of Bangkok swallowed up by its continuous expansion, and address the nature of urban religious aspirations for her and her spirit's devotees. Ultimately, drawing from Bhabha's idea of hybridity, I argue that this medium's Bangkok presents a challenge to established hierarchies of power, a challenge that focuses on the unusual (e.g. accident sites) as evidence for the appearance of the transcendent. Mae Im 1 led the five women out of the noise and darkness of Rama II Road into the florescent glow of Lady Mother King Cobra's shrine. She dutifully assembled the required number of incense sticks for each of the lesser spirits and kneeled at their altars in turn before moving up the low 1. Mae Im here is a pseudonym, as are other personal names mentioned.
Stone Masters: Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia (review)
Journal of Lao Studies, 2024
The edited volume 'Stone Masters' examines stones, tutelary spirits and power encounters in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. The title choice is a deliberate break with previous tendencies to refer to “the so-called guardian spirits” as benevolent, when in fact they are often capricious, violent and dangerous. Inspired by the panel ‘Stone Masters’ from the 22nd Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), held at the University of Sydney in July 2018, the volume is assembled in three sections and includes a Foreword by Luiz Costa, who advocates for a reading of the book in its entirety. He states that although each essay is self-standing and is crucial to the sum of all contributions, “a reader who does not read the whole book will miss out”. https://www.laostudies.org/journal/journal-lao-studies-jls?fbclid=IwY2xjawHbM7VleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfh\_3ZWyH8OhTwVqlbCN2AACTWF6oCgrniW1aEMDFitKo8l0vr70Y5kPAg\_aem\_FptWQlOfRx\_I3\_Wdo6A72g
Negotiating Thainess : Religious and National Identities in Thailand's Southern Conflict
Lund Studies in History of Religions, 2012
Only weeks after I returned from a three-month research trip to Thailand's northeastern city Khorat in 2003, where I had studied magical elements in contemporary Theravāda Buddhism, Thailand suddenly made headlines in the international media. Following the raid of a Narathiwat army camp on January 4 th , 2004, and the subsequent wave of arson attacks, sabotage, bombs and shootings, the long-forgotten Patani conflict had once again come to public attention, as newspaper articles and TV-reports from around the world tried, with varying degrees of success, to make sense of this resurgence of violence. Despite my many visits to Thailand and studies of Thai language, history and culture, it struck me how little I knew about this long-term and quite severe conflict. Since then, I have closely followed the developments in the Patani region, the southern frontier bordering Malaysia. Two and a half years later, after a long night out in Oslo, I switched on the television and tuned into BBC World News, only to find video images of tanks and armoured vehicles rolling into the dim streets of a city I recognized as Bangkok. At dawn on September 19 th , 2006, the Royal Thai Army was staging a coup d'état to oust the controversial, yet highly popular, Thaksin Shinawatra from office. Junta leader, General Sonthi Boonyaratkalin, the first Muslim Commander-in-chief of the Thai army, was quick to point out the devastating deadlock in the Patani region as one motivating factor for the coup. Despite the fact that, for weeks, rumours of a coup had flourished in Bangkok due to the severe political crisis following the conflict between the Thaksin administration and the traditional Bangkok elite, including the upper echelon of the army, it still came as a shock. After all, fifteen years had gone by without such unconstitutional interference on the part of the army, a rather long period of time in the Thai context. Nonetheless, while going to bed that night I had more or less resigned myself to the situation, thinking: "Well, this is how it's done in Thailand." That thought, however, did not last very long, and the 2006 coup became the event that triggered a prolonged interest in Thai politics in general and the Patani conflict in particular. Two weeks after the coup, I submitted my Ph.D. proposal to Lund University, of which this dissertation is the result. 10 I wish to express my gratitude to a wide range of people without whose help and assistance this dissertation would never have been finalized. First of all, my profound and sincere thanks goes to my supervisor Professor Olle Qvarnström at the Department of History of Religions at Lund University, and assistant supervisor Professor Torkel Brekke at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, for safe and sound guidance from beginning to end. Without their continuous encouragement and support throughout the process, this dissertation would never have materialized. I would also like to express my deep appreciation to Lund University and the Department of History of Religions for accepting my proposal, and to