This essay focuses on a form of unidirectional giving current in Theravada Buddhism: the institution of merit making as practiced in northern Thailand. Many scholars have noted its centrality in village religious practices but have failed to locate it within the broader context of class stratification. As a result, the prevailing paradigm of merit making misrepresents the character of the recipients, the donors, and their mutual interaction. This essay argues that cross‐class, unidirectional forms of giving such as charity may be important in mediating hegemony and resistance in complex societies.
For decades, scholarship on the Thai peasantry has proceeded as if the history of the peasantry were known. Scholars have luxuriated in tourist-brochure images of primeval abundance, reiterating unchallenged the famous adage from the thirteenth-century stele of King Ramkhamhaeng, “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields.” Little hyperbole exists in Thadeus Flood's statement, “For the past century much Western imperialist scholarship and Thai royalist scholarship has sought to perpetuate the image of benign Thai royalty ruling over a happy, carefree, and subservient populace dwelling in a land of sunshine and smiles” (1975:55). For observers of modern Thai society, demonstrations by discontented peasants and assassinations of their leaders have destroyed the myth of a rustic paradise. Nonetheless, the theme of self-sufficiency continues to dominate the literature on Thai history.
In this article, I analyze a village election in Thailand to show how anthropological insights into kinship systems can provide important avenues into understanding the gender dynamics of electoral politics. Because few women hold public office in Thailand, Thai politics has been considered a male domain. Exploring four social dramas in which conflicts made the hidden role of women visible, I argue that the public domain of electoral politics in rural Thailand is embedded within village practices of matrilocality and matrilineal kinship. [politics, elections, public sphere, women, matrilocality, matrilineages, Thailand]
Despite a growing literature revealing the presence of millenarian movements in both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist societies, scholars have been remarkably reluctant to consider the role of messianic beliefs in Buddhist societies. Khruubaa Srivichai (1878–1938) is the most famous monk of northern Thailand and is widely revered as atonbun, or saint. Althoughtonbunhas been depoliticized in the modern context, the term also refers to a savior who is an incarnation of the coming Maitreya Buddha. In 1920 Srivichai was sent under arrest to the capital city of Bangkok to face eight charges. This essay focuses on the charge that he claimed to possess the god Indra's sword. Although this charge has been widely ignored, it was in fact a charge of treason. In this essay, I argue that the treason charge should be understood within the context of Buddhist millenarianism. I note the saint/savior tropes in Srivichai's mytho-biography, describe the prevalence of millenarianism in the region, and detail the political economy of the decade of the 1910s prior to Srivichai's detention. I present evidence to show that the decade was characterized by famine, dislocation, disease, and other disasters of both natural and social causes. Such hardships would have been consistent with apocalyptic omens in the Buddhist repertoire portending the advent of Maitreya. Understanding Srivichai in this millenarian context helps to explain both the hopes of the populace and the fears of the state during that tumultuous decade.
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