engagement with scholarly literature and specifically those theories relating to religion and emotion can be found throughout the book. We see hints in the footnotes and the sources consulted that appear in the bibliography, but nowhere is there an explicit discussion of how the ethnographic data engage with scholarship on religion and emotion to advance or challenge the field. Bringing the discussions from the footnotes up to the body of the text would have gone a long way in adding some theoretical depth to the already fine ethnographic narrative. But none of this takes away from the fact that I will assign the book again in my course this year for it is clearly a work my students connect with. The colourful cast of characters that appear throughout the book and the various ways their culturally specific responses (not to mention the author's own) allow for a rich discussion of issues relating to religion, emotion, mental states, family dynamics, and gender. For those who enjoyed Sid Brown's The journey of one Buddhist nun: Even against the wind (2001) and Nancy Eberhardt's Imagining the course of life: Self-transformation in a Shan Buddhist community (2006), Julia Cassaniti's Living Buddhism: Mind, self, and emotion in a Thai Community is definitely something to read.
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