Assistant Professor, Thai Buddhist Studies
About
Current research interests:
I am a cultural anthropologist of Thailand and Theravada Buddhism. My ethnographic and historical research investigates struggles over religious status, prestige and legitimacy in Thai Buddhism. I examine the social and cultural dynamics of debates about religious authority, identity and belonging in modern Theravada Buddhist Thailand, and I explore how these dynamics have been shaped in the post-colonial era by processes of urbanization, democratization, globalization and capitalist development. More specifically, in my fieldwork I have studied the subculture of Bangkok professional spirit mediums, and the social production of charismatic authority within their marginalized, stigmatized and weakly institutionalized community of religious actors. I am fascinated by the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion in the creation of mainstream Buddhism in the public spheres of modern Southeast Asian nation states. I seek to apply models and concepts from practice theory, field theory, assemblage theory and cultural studies in order to reinterpret vernacular religion and religious diversity in both Thailand and mainland Southeast Asia.
Current projects:
In my book manuscript, Spirit Possession as Buddhist Vocation: Piety, Devotion and Charisma in Modern Thai Buddhism, I analyze how professional spirit mediums rethink Thai Buddhist ideas about history, the spiritual pantheon, religious potency, piety and auspiciousness as they seek to carve out a new mainstream Buddhist vocation of oracular expertise. The book examines how the cultural meaning and ritual performance of trance possession has been transformed in their subculture, resulting in novel modern understandings of Buddhist charisma and legitimacy. Through a close examination of public and private rituals, everyday discourse and practice, and religious teaching and instruction within the subculture, I demonstrate that Thai professional spirit mediums advance a surprisingly conventional vision of Theravada Buddhist piety and practice. I explore how the religious idioms, repertoires and values endorsed by professional mediums draw upon and innovatively reinterpret mainstream Thai Buddhist ideas about devotion, esotericism, charisma, sacral power and ritual auspiciousness. Ultimately, the book highlights the similarities between Bangkok spirit mediums and other lay and monastic Buddhist virtuosos in the urban public sphere of modern Thailand, even as it documents how a stigmatized religious community is locked in a hegemonic struggle with multiple mainstream voices over competing claims to religious legitimacy.
My current research project investigates the cultural, social and material processes that support large-scale Thai Buddhist devotional movements. These 'cults' of piety, organized around a dizzying diversity of sacred figures, rely on a similar infrastructural assemblage: immobile shrines, mobile icons, hagiographic mythologies, modular ritual scripts, miracle narratives, diffuse networks of patronage, and mass media advocacy. Through an historical and ethnographic study of mass popular piety in the public sphere, I explore different strategies in articulating this shared Buddhist 'cultic' infrastructure. This project allows me to investigate contrasting patterns in how initially unconventional forms of Buddhist belief, practice and value are rendered normatively mainstream. In the process, I analyze how different social groups achieve this result through the creative use of capitalist production and exchange, mass media technologies, public ritual spectacle, and discourses of cultural heritage.
Teaching interests:
My teaching is broadly grounded in these various research interests. It is centered on Thailand, Thai Buddhism, religion in mainland Southeast Asia, and Theravada Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia. In these contexts, my courses explore questions of religious authority and diversity; the interplay of literature, materiality and performance in religious culture; consumer society, popular culture and religious change; and urbanization, modernization and globalization. At Michigan I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate level about Buddhism in Southeast Asia, Thai society and culture, Theravada Buddhism, and Thai Buddhism and film.
