Mediums, Monks, and Amulets

Mediums, Monks, and Amulets PDF Author: Pattana Kitiarsa
Publisher: Silkworm Books
ISBN: 1630417572
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Mediums, Monks, and Amulets is a sophisticated yet accessible study of the state of popular Buddhist beliefs as they are practiced in Thailand today. Using a combination of focused case studies and analysis, Pattana Kitiarsa explores the nature and evolution of popular Buddhism over the past three decades by focusing on those individuals who practice, popularize, and profit from it. The case studies profiled in this book include prominent spirit mediums and magic monks, the lottery fever surrounding the posthumous cult of folk singer, Phumphuang Duangchan, the Chatukham‐Rammathep amulet craze, and the cult of wealth attributed to preeminent monk, Luang Pho Khun. It also explores the history of both popular and official opinion surrounding supernatural Buddhism and its clashes with the rationalist, modernizing policies of Thailand’s monarchy and government. Mediums, Monks, and Amulets contests the viewpoint that supernatural elements within popular Buddhism are a symptom of the decline of the religion. Instead, it argues that this hybridity between traditional Buddhist beliefs and elements from other religions is in fact a symptom of the health and wealth of Buddhism, as it negotiates large‐scale commercialization and global modernity. What others are saying “Pattana Kitiarsa’s ability to weave his personal experiences in with sophisticated anthropological methods makes this book a fascinating and moving read. It is a welcome addition to the field and should be read by everyone interested in religion and modernity in Southeast Asia and beyond.”—Justin McDaniel, author of Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words (2008) and The Lovelorn Ghost and Magical Monk (2011) “Medium, Monks, and Amulets sheds light on the changing landscape of contemporary Thai religion that is increasingly influenced by ‘prosperity cults’ from both inside and outside the Buddhist establishment. This book helps us to make sense of the religious universe, where magic monks, spirit mediums, amulets, deities, and other religious commodities of different sorts keep appearing endlessly.”—Phra Paisal Visalo Highlights • Focused case studies on individual cult practices, including magic monks, spirit mediums, amulet cults, and other prosperity cults • Written by the perspective of an anthropologist who is also a follower of popular Buddhism • Discusses not only the interaction of popular Buddhist practices with modern‐day lawmakers, but also of nineteenth‐century royal interaction with supernatural cults

Mediums, Monks, and Amulets

Mediums, Monks, and Amulets PDF Author: Pattana Kitiarsa
Publisher: Silkworm Books
ISBN: 1630417572
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mediums, Monks, and Amulets is a sophisticated yet accessible study of the state of popular Buddhist beliefs as they are practiced in Thailand today. Using a combination of focused case studies and analysis, Pattana Kitiarsa explores the nature and evolution of popular Buddhism over the past three decades by focusing on those individuals who practice, popularize, and profit from it. The case studies profiled in this book include prominent spirit mediums and magic monks, the lottery fever surrounding the posthumous cult of folk singer, Phumphuang Duangchan, the Chatukham‐Rammathep amulet craze, and the cult of wealth attributed to preeminent monk, Luang Pho Khun. It also explores the history of both popular and official opinion surrounding supernatural Buddhism and its clashes with the rationalist, modernizing policies of Thailand’s monarchy and government. Mediums, Monks, and Amulets contests the viewpoint that supernatural elements within popular Buddhism are a symptom of the decline of the religion. Instead, it argues that this hybridity between traditional Buddhist beliefs and elements from other religions is in fact a symptom of the health and wealth of Buddhism, as it negotiates large‐scale commercialization and global modernity. What others are saying “Pattana Kitiarsa’s ability to weave his personal experiences in with sophisticated anthropological methods makes this book a fascinating and moving read. It is a welcome addition to the field and should be read by everyone interested in religion and modernity in Southeast Asia and beyond.”—Justin McDaniel, author of Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words (2008) and The Lovelorn Ghost and Magical Monk (2011) “Medium, Monks, and Amulets sheds light on the changing landscape of contemporary Thai religion that is increasingly influenced by ‘prosperity cults’ from both inside and outside the Buddhist establishment. This book helps us to make sense of the religious universe, where magic monks, spirit mediums, amulets, deities, and other religious commodities of different sorts keep appearing endlessly.”—Phra Paisal Visalo Highlights • Focused case studies on individual cult practices, including magic monks, spirit mediums, amulet cults, and other prosperity cults • Written by the perspective of an anthropologist who is also a follower of popular Buddhism • Discusses not only the interaction of popular Buddhist practices with modern‐day lawmakers, but also of nineteenth‐century royal interaction with supernatural cults

Mediums, Monks, and Amulets

Mediums, Monks, and Amulets PDF Author: Phatthanā Kitiʻāsā
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Amulets (Buddhism)
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description


Ghostly Desires

Ghostly Desires PDF Author: Arnika Fuhrmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374250
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

Culture and Communication in Thailand

Culture and Communication in Thailand PDF Author: Patchanee Malikhao
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811041253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
This book features research papers that examine a host of contemporary issues in Thailand. Coverage includes culture, gender violence, tourism, human trafficking, environmental and ecological issues, sustainability and the sufficiency economy, the (mis)handling of elephants, and more. It features a sociological and anthropological perspective with a dash of communication for sustainable social change. The papers investigate the various phases of communication technology and its impact on cultural change in the country. They explore the use of social networks and privacy issues as well as ethical journalism in the contexts of Thai Buddhism, Thai culture, and other enabling environmental factors. The contributors focus on documentary research of both quantitative and qualitative data on Thai social change as a consequence of globalization and digital technology. They first provide a general overview of social media and communication in the country. Next, the authors go on to explore the specifics of digital communication. This includes a look at its impact on the various ways of Thai communication given politico-economic and religious influences.

Seeking the Unseen

Seeking the Unseen PDF Author: Paul H. De Neui
Publisher: William Carey Publishing
ISBN: 0878089381
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Buddhism claims no god, yet spiritual realities abound in popular practice. What are these realities? What do they mean to the practitioners? How can understanding these realities inform Christ-followers seeking to communicate the good news of Jesus in ways that all can understand and relate to? In answer to these and other questions, SEANET proudly presents its twelfth volume, Seeking the Unseen: Spiritual Realities in the Buddhist World. Christian practitioners from thirteen different Buddhist cultures share insights gained from their wideranging experiences and perspectives. From Sri Lanka to Japan, from China to the Philippines, these women and men, Asian and Western, present on a topic that is often missing in mission literature today. And for readers seeking personal insight into the growing spiritual complexities of their own place in the postmodern world, lessons from these authors will guide you with practical principles from engaging, firsthand cultural encounters.

HIV/AIDS and the Social Consequences of Untamed Biomedicine

HIV/AIDS and the Social Consequences of Untamed Biomedicine PDF Author: Graham Fordham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317632737
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Drawing on the case of HIV/AIDS in Thailand, this book examines how anthropological and other interpretative social science research has been utilized in modeling the AIDS epidemic, and in the design and implementation of interventions. It argues that much social science research has been complicit with the forces that generated the epidemic and with the social control agendas of the state, and that as such it has increased the weight of structural violence bearing upon the afflicted. The book also questions claims of Thai AIDS control success, arguing that these can only be made at the cost of excluding categories such as intravenous drug users, the incarcerated, and homosexuals, who continue to experience extraordinarily high levels of levels of HIV infection. Considered deviant and undeserving, these persons have deliberately been excluded from harm reduction programs. Overall, this work argues for the untapped potential of anthropological research in the health field, a confident anthropology rooted in ethnography and a critical reflexivity. Crucially, it argues that in context of interdisciplinary collaborations, anthropological research must refuse relegation to the status of an adjunct discipline, and must be free epistemologically and methodologically from the universalizing assumptions and practices of biomedicine.

Unearthly Powers

Unearthly Powers PDF Author: Alan Strathern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477143
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This ground-breaking study sets out a new understanding of transformations in the interaction between religion and political authority throughout history.

More Than Words

More Than Words PDF Author: Richard Fox
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501725378
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Grounded in ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery, and self-defense, Richard Fox explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets, and other inscribed objects. Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of "the living letter" may be related to more recently emergent conceptions of writing—linked to academic philology, reform Hinduism, and local politics—which take Balinese letters to be a symbol of cultural heritage, and a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning. More than Words shows how Balinese practices of apotropaic writing—on palm-leaves, amulets, and bodies—challenge these notions, and yet coexist alongside them. Reflecting on this coexistence, Fox develops a theoretical approach to writing centered on the premise that such contradictory sensibilities hold wider significance than previously recognized for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond.

In Asian Waters

In Asian Waters PDF Author: Eric Tagliacozzo
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691146829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
A sweeping account of how the sea routes of Asia have transformed a vast expanse of the globe over the past five hundred years, powerfully shaping the modern world In the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes—an area stretching from East Africa and the Middle East to Japan—grew dramatically, eventually making them the busiest in the world. The result was a massive circulation of people, commodities, religion, culture, technology, and ideas. In this book, Eric Tagliacozzo chronicles how the seas and oceans of Asia have shaped the history of the largest continent for the past half millennium, leaving an indelible mark on the modern world in the process. Paying special attention to migration, trade, the environment, and cities, In Asian Waters examines the long history of contact between China and East Africa, the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism across the Bay of Bengal, and the intertwined histories of Islam and Christianity in the Philippines. The book illustrates how India became central to the spice trade, how the Indian Ocean became a “British lake” between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and how lighthouses and sea mapping played important roles in imperialism. The volume ends by asking what may happen if China comes to rule the waves of Asia, as Britain once did. A novel account showing how Asian history can be seen as a whole when seen from the water, In Asian Waters presents a voyage into a past that is still alive in the present.

Roaming Free Like a Deer

Roaming Free Like a Deer PDF Author: Daniel Capper
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501759582
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
By exploring lived ecological experiences across seven Buddhist worlds from ancient India to the contemporary West, Roaming Free Like a Deer provides a comprehensive, critical, and innovative examination of the theories, practices, and real-world results of Buddhist environmental ethics. Daniel Capper clarifies crucial contours of Buddhist vegetarianism or meat eating, nature mysticism, and cultural speculations about spirituality in nonhuman animals. Buddhist environmental ethics often are touted as useful weapons in the fight against climate change. However, two formidable but often overlooked problems with this perspective exist. First, much of the literature on Buddhist environmental ethics uncritically embraces Buddhist ideals without examining the real-world impacts of those ideals, thereby sometimes ignoring difficulties in terms of practical applications. Moreover, for some understandable but still troublesome reasons, Buddhists from different schools follow their own environmental ideals without conversing with other Buddhists, thereby minimizing the abilities of Buddhists to act in concert on issues such as climate change that demand coordinated large-scale human responses. With its accessible style and personhood ethics orientation, Roaming Free Like a Deer should appeal to anyone who is concerned with how human beings interact with the nonhuman environment.