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ID:
191693
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| Summary/Abstract |
Beginning in 2020, young people in Thailand have led rallies to protest the interference of the military and the monarchy in politics. They have also condemned the role played by Buddhist discourse and court ritual in celebrating kings as divine. ‘No God, No King, Only Human’ reads a protest sign. Simultaneously, however, some groups of protesters have used the same ‘religious’ repertoire, such as the astrological tradition of the court, in their activism, turning it into an instrument of resistance. This article explores this apparent ambivalence via an ethnographic focus on divination, a long-standing central feature of Thai politics. Drawing from a decade of fieldwork conducted with diviners (mo du) and their clients from both pro-regime and pro-democracy camps, including prominent young activists, I argue that progressive individuals do not necessarily need to reject cosmological ideas and rituals deemed conservative in order to resist. Rather, many proactively co-opt them to enhance their own position in the polity, further demonstrating the inability of those in power to live up to accepted moral standards. This strategy, which builds on a Southeast Asian tradition of millenarianism, mobilises dogmatic notions including karma in support of narratives and practices of resistance.
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| 2 |
ID:
163115
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| Summary/Abstract |
Marshall Sahlins argues that kings are ‘stranger kings’, as they typically originate from outside their kingdom or from the celestial realms. He advances that kings draw authority precisely from an ability to appropriate a geographic and cosmological Other for the benefit of their subjects. With this article, I propose that, in contemporary Thailand, a kingdom ruled by a Buddhist monarch, this defining ability of kings spreads to commoners. An ethnographic study of diviners (mo du) and their clients (luk kha) in Bangkok reveals that Thai Buddhists routinely make cosmologies. Such cosmology-making entails appropriating foreign and divine forms of knowledge in the manner of kings. I argue that this phenomenon allows commoners to master the idioms of power of Thai Buddhist kingship. This results in tensions between commoners, and places them in an ambiguous relationship with the monarchic state.
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