Chapter One - Fundamentalism against Magic: The Contradictions of Religious Modernity

Summary

Certain where the developments dynamism in Asia, such as those occurring in Thailand, drive of diverse forms of capitalist production is rivalled only by the of ritual activity, both within and outside of Buddhism Religion and … ritual are an are affront crucial to to occidental the life myths of modernity.… as elsewhere. They urge us to … distrust of ‘modern’ nations, in Asia disenchantment, to rethink the mainstream telos of social development science. that (Jean still Comaroff informs 1994the , models p. 301) of much

Practices that continue to treat the world as enchanted … testify to the existence of realms of practice and, sometimes, institutions that are not premodern and yet are not always fully part of the world incorporated 2013, p. modernity 148)

Introduction: The Making and Remaking of Magic in Global Modernity

The diverse new forms of supernatural observance and magical ritual apparent in Thailand, and across Buddhist and Confucian East and Southeast Asia (see Yang 2000; Bautista 2012; Brac de la Perrière et al. 2014), demonstrate the intense religious dynamism that emerges in the context of market-centred, mediatized global modernity (Dirlik 2005). The novel forms of magical ritual in Thailand may escape classical definitions of modernity, but they are not premodern traditions.

On the contrary, they are highly contemporary phenomena. As David Lyon contends, “[m]any modernities exist, and they may be shown to have different ways of relating to the religious sphere” (Lyon 2000, p. 21). The Thai cults of wealth provide a lens through which we can see broader processes operating at the global level. This emergence of magical cults of wealth out of the economic and social conditions of late twentieth-century capitalism challenges us to rethink the meaning, character and direction of modernity. Indeed, the efflorescence of spirit cults in the midst of rapid market-based economic growth contradicts classical theories of the relationship of religion and capitalist expansion. As Sanjay Seth observes,

There are realms of knowing and living in the Western world, as in the non-Western world, that are part of the modern—they are not ‘survivals’ of premodernity destined eventually to be swept away— but which are neither lived through, nor wholly accessible to us through the categories of the social sciences.