Chapter Three - Context, Hierarchy and Ritual: Theorizing the Total Thai Religious Field

Summary

A revision of the western notion of religion is required to understand the complexity of ‘multiple modernities’ in a globalized world. (Volker Gottowik 2014, p. 7)

Introduction: Strategies for Negotiating Cultural and Religious Multiplicity

The fractured structure of modernity that arrived in Thailand in association with Western imperial power engendered fissures within the total field of religious practice; structurally, administratively as well as in terms of academic analysis. While monastic Buddhism and the canonical Theravada Buddhist scriptures, the Tipitaka, came under state administrative control, support and sponsorship, multiform varieties of ritual conducted predominantly by lay specialists outside of monasteries largely fell outside the scope of state interest and bureaucratic oversight. And while scholars affiliated with departments of religious studies, history and politics studied Buddhist monastic structures and doctrine, research on non-monastic cults has predominantly been undertaken by anthropologists. These formal and academic divisions within the Thai religious field belie the fact that the religious lives of large numbers, perhaps the majority, of Thai practitioners from all walks of life cross over and between Buddhist and non-Buddhist ritual observance. To some extent this fact has been obscured by a regime of representation, instituted in response to Western power, that has foregrounded Buddhism while placing ritual practice in a subsidiary position in the background of religious life.

The fracturing of academic research on Thai religiosity between different disciplines, which have focused on Buddhism and non-Buddhist ritual separately, means that to a significant extent we have lacked conceptual categories and theoretical models of the total field that constitutes the religious lives of so many people in the country. This gap also means that we lack generally agreed frames by which to understand new forms of magical practice both in relation to establishment Buddhism as well as the deep history of divination, astrology, spirit possession and other ritual practices. Religious studies has struggled to provide concepts for the structuring patterns of the Thai religious field because its origins in analyses of monotheistic doctrine-based religions has left it largely bereft of ways of imagining a cultural order that is founded upon irreducible, and expanding, difference rather than notions of a uniting set of teachings.