Ontology, materiality and spectral traces: Methodological thoughts on studying Lao Buddhist festivals for ghosts and ancestral spirits

Abstract

The study of ghosts and spirits, and the ethnographic evidence associated with this, is a fertile area for developing methodologies. By employing theories of materiality and the anthropological study of ontologies, I argue that looking at the traces of spirits and ghosts in the material domain can reveal crucial insights into their nature, position and relationships with the living. Two ethnographic case studies from the Buddhist ethnic Lao are used to demonstrate how material traces can explain the ‘ontic shifting’ of certain ghosts. I will then explore how through the modernization and rationalization of Buddhist cosmology there have evolved competing ideas of the nature of ancestral spirits addressed in Buddhist rites. While in an older interpretation these spirits are accessible through objects and the exchanges between layperson, monk and spirit, ‘modernist’ Buddhist monks advocate that the dead cannot be reached through objects. Finally, I argue that the material traces of spirits and their different readings hint to important transformations regarding the conceptualization of ghosts and spirits through the socialist revolution and the rationalization of Buddhism.

Anthropological realism in a scientistic age

“…– rather than simply dealing with an immediate social need (Aulino, 2014). There is nothing incompatible about symbolism and modernity – but modernism, which often has recourse to an anti-realist objectivism, seeks to deny this association, arguing that symbolism is either wrong (for example, as superstition) or simply separate from concrete reality (see also Ladwig, 2013). That move denies the materiality of symbolic action, including language, flying in the face of the materialist perspective so eloquently expressed in the title of J.L.…”

“…4. See especially Heywood (2012); Heywood and Laidlaw (2013) Holbraad et al., 2014; Ladwig, 2013; Vigh and Sausdal (2014); Viveiros de Castro (2004).…”

Ghost Mothers: Kinship Relationships in Thai Spirit Cults

“…For someone in, for instance, a state of unrequited love, a Buddhist monk might give advice on resigning oneself to the state of affairs and letting go of attachment, while at a spirit shrine, he or she might be able to convince the spirit to intercede and change matters. This divide in repertoires between Buddhist practice and spirit devotion is brought out in the Lao case by Patrice Ladwig (2013), who shows that Buddhist laypeople and monks have very different perspectives upon the materiality of goods donated to the temple. While villagers see a material link between the world of spirits and the world of people, monks, following rationalizing socialist and orthodox Buddhist discourse, disavow such links.…”

Dreaming about the neighbours

“…As Webb Keane points out, the materiality of religious goods allows them to travel between very different “representational economies” (Keane, 2003): an amulet can move and acquire new meanings in ways that an idea cannot. Building upon the problem of religion and materiality, Patrice Ladwig adds that even within a particular religious rite, monks and laity may have very different notions about what role material goods play: Ladwig focuses on a comb given to (bald) Lao monks as a sign that the giver intended the offering to go directly to deceased relatives, whereas monks saw the gift as a symbolic sign of devotion to the Buddhist sangha (Ladwig, 2013).…”