Performing the Isan Subject: Spirit Mediums and Ritual Embodiment in a Transitional Agrarian Society

Abstract

This thesis examines spirit mediumship in Chaiyaphum, a province in northeast Thailand. It explores the subjectivity, sociality, personhood, and religiosity of Isan people in relation to modern processes of state formation and socio-economic change. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Chaiyaphum, the thesis maps the rich pantheon and networks of spirit mediums in this province and pays close attention to ritual embodiment, performativity and personhood. Documenting the centrality of mediumship in domains that range from political legitimation to healing, the findings challenge the presumption that this form of vernacular religiosity is archaic, marginal or waning. Supernaturalism is strongly manifest in the lives of the people of contemporary Chaiyaphum and functions as a supple node for assimilating new concepts and symbolizing and negotiating new relationships in society. The thesis analyzes Thailand as a ritual state where people’s life and the state’s affairs are full of ritual practices. Spirit cults crucially contribute to state formation and nationalism. Ritual performances around historical figures that are enacted by the local people reproduce their subjection under the Thai state. Such spirit practices from the margins contain spectral power and maintain the central state’s power and the monarchy’s auratic potency. At the same time they draw the charismatic power of the central state into local circuits of sociality and meaning. In a region considered the powerhouse of state Buddhism, local spirit cults are not subservient to, undermined by, or detached from state Buddhism. They form a mutualistic relationship with Buddhism to serve people’s proximate needs. The thesis documents the intriguing world of medium-abbot, medium-monks, and spirit mediums whose techniques and authority are modeled on Buddhism, introducing the reader to a cast of practitioners whose identities disrupt the presumed hierarchies between Buddhism and mediumship.

Spirit mediumship is central to the reproduction of Isan personhood in a dynamic and shifting globalized social landscape. In a region marked by high levels of labor mobility and social fragmentation, spirit mediums serve as the linchpins for recombinant forms of sociality and selfhood built around an idiom of spiritual kinship. Spirit mediumship can be considered as a contemporary vernacular of empowerment. Spirits facilitate the recognition of female desire and the enactment of extra-domestic feminine social projects. Mediumship encompasses heterogeneous forms of desire and sexuality that conflict with conventional modernist identities. As a healing discipline, mediumship illuminates a material theory of the self and comprises a corporeal technology for mending afflicted personhood through ritual enactments. The multisensory and performative aspects of ritual healing shed light on the relevance of spirit mediumship in reconstituting selfhood in a region undergoing turbulent social change. Show more