jackson - political economy of 21st century thai supernaturalism

South East Asia Research, 20, 4, pp 611622 doi: 10.5367/sear.2012.0128

Review article

The political economy of twenty-firstcentury Thai supernaturalism

Comparative perspectives on cross-genderism andlimits to hybridity in resurgent Thai spirit

mediumship

Peter A. Jackson

Author details: Peter A. Jackson is Professor of Thai Cultural Studies in the Schoolof Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian NationalUniversity, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. E-mail: [email protected].

Pattana Kitiarsa, Mediums, Monks and Amulets: Thai Popular Buddhism Today, Silk-worm Books, Chiang Mai, 2012, 165 pp.

Deborah Wong, Sounding the Centre: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Per-formance, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, and London, 2001, 348 pp, withmusic CD.

Jean DeBernardi, The Way that Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and SpiritMediums in Penang, Malaysia, NUS Press, Singapore, 2012, 372 pp.

Bernard Formoso, De Jiao A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Over-seas: Purple Qi from the East, NUS Press, Singapore, 2010, 259 pp.

The resurgence in recent decades of spirit mediumship in Thailand, and indeedacross South East Asia, post-socialist China and the Russian Far East, provides aproductive site from which to explore a range of intersecting topics in transnationalcultural studies and comparative South East Asian studies. Transnationally, resur-gent Asian spirit mediumship is a signal example of the re-enchantment of thepostmodern world (Comaroff, 1994) and the failure of twentieth century theoriesof modernist secularization to envision the continuing vitality of religious inno-vation (Roberts, 1995). As Jean DeBernardi states, Far from being a living fossilfrom the archaic past, spirit mediumship and shamanism worldwide are engagedin an ongoing dialogue with modernity (DeBernardi, 2012, p 14), adding thatbecause of the Western tendency to equate modernity with secularism, few scholarshave regarded ritual as a form of modernity (DeBernardi, 2004, p 5). In SouthEast Asian studies, spirit mediumship is an iconic example of cultural, religiousand linguistic syncretism, and reflects cross-regional themes, such as the pres-ence of transgender ritual specialists, which many comparative scholars have notedbridge the tremendous diversity of the region (for example, Peletz, 2006, 2009).

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I consider here two studies that make major contributions to understanding theforces underpinning the resurgence of spirit mediumship in Thailand. PattanaKitiarsas Mediums, Monks and Amulets: Thai Popular Buddhism Today advancessignificant theoretical innovations in spirit medium research and in our under-standing of the intensely hybrid character of popular religion in Thailand. Pattanacriticizes syncretist models of Thai religion for failing to grasp the dynamics ofhighly commodified and mediatized forms of supernaturalism, arguing that theo-ries of cultural hybridity provide a more productive analytical lens. I also reviewDeborah Wongs Sounding the Centre: History and Aesthetics in Thai BuddhistPerformance. While published over a decade ago, Wongs meticulously researchedand lucidly written book has not received its due recognition in studies of Thaireligiosity. Perhaps because it was published in the Chicago Studies inEthnomusicology series, scholars of Thai religion have mistakenly thought it hadnothing to offer their field. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wongs ac-count of wai khru [honouring the teacher/guru] initiation rituals in schools ofclassical Thai music and dance-drama reveals the central role of the state andthe monarchy in the revival of forms of Brahmanical spirit mediumship. Inreading Pattana and Wong, I focus on what their respective studies tell us aboutfactors that lie behind the post-Cold War resurgence of supernatural religiosity atthe edges and outside the institution of the Thai Buddhist sangha (cf Jackson,1997, 1999).

In the second part of this essay, I take a comparative approach, drawing on JeanDeBernardis The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion andSpirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia and Bernard Formosos multi-country studyDe Jiao A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Overseas: PurpleQi from the East to reflect on two major gaps in Pattana and Wongs books, and inThai spirit mediumship studies generally: namely, the central place of cross-genderism and the very real limits to cultural hybridity that mark the borders ofThai spirit mediumships otherwise eclectic syncretism. While the highly genderedcharacter of Thai spirit mediumship is given prominence in almost all studies, thealmost universally reported cross-gender dimensions of mediumship are largelyrelegated to footnotes. And while spirit mediumship is widely eulogized as a siteof intense religious and cultural syncretism, the literature has rarely consideredwhat phenomena may resist incorporation within, or be unassimilable to, this os-tensibly omnivorous religio-cultural phenomenon. This essay focuses on only asmall selection of the expanding corpus of studies of resurgent South East Asianspirit mediumship to reflect on what they do and do not tell us about twenty-first century Thailands changing religious landscapes and rapidly growing spiritualmarketplaces.

Capitalism as engine of postmodern Asian supernaturalismMost spirit mediumship studies take a single country or even a single movementas their focus. But a comparative, regional approach is especially revealing. Oneof the most important results of a comparative perspective in understanding thepost-Cold War resurgence of Asian spirit mediumship is that it has occurred withequal intensity in formerly American-aligned capitalist societies such as Thailandand in ostensibly socialist countries such as Vietnam and China. The differing

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political complexions of post-Cold War Asian societies have proved to be irrel-evant to the resurgence of supernatural belief and ritual, with spirit mediumshipflourishing under twenty-first century versions of both market-oriented socialismand neo-liberal capitalism.

In the twentieth century, ostensibly competing political discourses of socialistand capitalist rational modernity in Vietnam and Thailand respectively both critiquedspirit mediumship with equal ferocity as a superstitious residue of pre-moderntradition that held each country back from achieving the desired transition to sci-entific (socialist or capitalist) modernity. Both countries governments institutedremarkably similar anti-supernaturalism policies across the middle decades of thetwentieth century, and, despite continuing political differences, mediumship hasbeen resurgent in both Thailand and Vietnam, as well as in neighbouring coun-tries in parallel over the period of neo-liberal globalization. (For studies on resurgentVietnamese spirit mediumship, see Taylor (2004), Endres (2011) and Fjelstad andNguyen (2011)). Since the 1980s, the Thai and Vietnamese governments haveboth relaxed central controls over popular religion and placed more emphasis onmarket-based, export-led economic growth. To some extent, the same has beentrue of China, where some forms of folk religion have also been tolerated sincethe transition to market-based socialism (see Yang, 2008). This comparative per-spective reveals clearly the central and highly productive role of capitalism inreligious resurgence across Asia.

From syncretism to hybridityPattana Kitiarsas Mediums, Monks and Amulets: Thai Popular Buddhism Todaysynthesizes the results of his two decades of research on Thai popular religion.Pattana sees popular Buddhism as emerging from the interplay of animism,supernaturalism, folk Brahmanism, the worship of Chinese deities, and state-spon-sored Theravada Buddhism and reflecting a convergence of the spaces of religion,capitalist economy and consumer society (Pattana, 2012, p 2). Pattana exploresnovel religious forms that not only draw on the supernatural to help followers (Isuggest devotee-customers is a more apt term) take advantage of, and avoidrisks associated with, the market economy, but whose very emergence is depend-ent upon both the market and mass media. He cites as a signal example the emergenceof the cult of the spirit of the late Thai luk-thung genre singer, PhumphuangDuangchan, who died of an autoimmune disorder in 1992 at the height of herpopularity. The monastery in Suphanburi province west of Bangkok where shewas cremated became a site of pilgrimage after the Thai press published tales ofher spirits reputed power to provide winning numbers in the national lottery.

Pattana criticizes what he calls the syncretist paradigm of popular Thai reli-gion for placing institutional Theravada Buddhism in a rigidly paramount positionand viewing Buddhism, Brahmanism and animism as isolated and static ratherthan being in constantly dynamic relations. He also criticizes Kirsch (1977) forwhat has proved to be a misguided prophecy that Thai religion would be progres-sively Buddhified with the advance of modernity, and prefers to describe Thaireligion as hybrid, in Bakhtins sense of the mixing of various languages withinthe boundaries of a single dialect and which gives birth to the new forms ofamalgamation (Pattana, 2012, p 15). Pattanas account adds to other deployments


of theories of cultural hybridity in Thai cultural studies (Harrison, 2010, p 22 ff)and cultural history (Jackson, 2010, p 187 ff). While he sees hybridization ashaving been present in South East Asian religions throughout history, Pattanaargues that the dynamism of Thai popular religion today is different in scale andcomplexity, with the religious syncretism model having been outdated by a fasttrack, cut-and-paste, postmodernizing reality within contemporary Thai society(Pattana, 2012, p 34).

From his critique of the empiricist notion of syncretism, Pattana proceeds toerase the artificial categorical divide between Buddhism and mediumship thatbesets scholarship which draws on Eurocentric notions of religion as necessarilybased upon doctrine or scripture. Taking practice rather than scripture as his start-ing point, Pattana describes magic monks [keji ajan] and spirit mediums [rangsong, khon song] as both representing forms of mediumship. While the vinaya ormonastic code of practice technically proscribes Buddhist monks from engagingin mediumship, Pattana describes some Thai magic monks as practising a modi-fied form of mediumship in which they invite an ong tham, which Pattana describesas a dhammic calling or superagency, to guide their actions, Every magicmonk needs a superagency. a powerful god, goddess, or other deity, whoowns and exercises his or her agency through a human mouthpiece or mediumwith communicative capability and ritual expertise (Pattana, 2012, p 41).

Pattana describes magic monks, such as Luang Phor Khun (see also Jackson,1999b), as postmodern mediums, which he defines as those who mediate be-tween otherwise separated, unexpressed facts and social relations in postmodernsociety, Both Luang Phor Khun and urban spirit mediums provide mediumship,performing relatively similar functions, albeit in different religious establishmentsand on different social scales. (Pattana, 2012, p 107) Pattana studies Thai magi-cal Buddhism and mediumship as complementary forms and components of asingle hybrid religious complex, overcoming the divide between research on Bud-dhism, which typically focuses on men, and studies of spirit mediumship, whichoften focus on women.

Royalist Brahmanical supernaturalismWhile Pattana emphasizes the roles of the market and new print and electronicmedia in the proliferation of spirit medium cults, Deborah Wongs study of thewai khru ritual reveals that the state and monarchy have also contributed to theresurgence of supernaturalism in Thailand. Wongs detailed ethnography and en-gagement with critical theory provide rich potential for further analyses of theperformative basis of political power in modern Thailand (see Jackson, 2004).Drawing on Geertzs account of the South East Asian theatre state, Wong empha-sizes that Thai court music and dance-drama have much more than mereentertainment value, remaining intimately related to the expression of royal powerand authority. Through studying the spirit mediumship at the heart of wai khruinitiations, she details how ritual invocation of the auratic power [barami] ofBrahmanical deities and the spirits of Thai kings remains central to the performa-tive basis of Thai royal influence today.

The wai khru is a ritual honoring of teachers of music and dance [that]transfers the spiritual power of the first, primordial teacher to present-day per-


formers (Wong, 2001, p xvii). All classically trained musicians and dancers mustbe initiated by a master teacher before they can actualize the sacred with theirbodies and produce the sound and movement that manifest the divine in the hu-man realm (Wong, 2001, p xvii). Wong, herself trained in and initiated into Thaiclassical music, focuses analysis on the figure of the primordial teacher, or khru,a term derived from the Sanskrit guru and also called the Old Father [phor kae],who is invoked in ritual initiation into all Thai classical performance traditions.As Wong emphasizes, in esoteric teachings the Old Father or first teacher of Thairoyal-sponsored orchestral music [piphat] and dance-drama [khon] is identifiedwith the deity Phra Isuan (Ishvara in Sanskrit), another name for Shiva. The OldFather or Shiva is believed to descend into the body of the initiating teacher orkhru, who is then a medium for the ritual transfer of the specialist knowledge andcharismatic power of the primordial divine guru.

While some Thai music and dance-drama teachers distinguish betweenmediumship and the invocation of the Old Father in wai khru rituals, Wong ob-serves that from a phenomenological perspective there is little to differentiate thetwo. Despite the long history of critiques of spirit mediumship by both absolutemonarchs and modernizing, post-revolutionary governments in Thailand, Wongdetails the intimate relationship between modern kings and the invocation of Hindudeities, protective gods and ancestral spirits in contemporary initiations into Thaiclassical music and dance-drama training. And through this, she also reveals howofficial sponsorship of non-Buddhist religiosity has contributed to the resurgenceof spirit medium cults. Wong details the pivotal roles of King Vajiravudh (r 191026) and more recently King Bhumibol (r 1946 to present) in the revival ofstate-sponsored Brahmanical mediumship. She notes that royal involvement inwai khru initiations was an early twentieth century innovation of King Vajiravudhas part of his revival of the Brahmanical symbolism of the god-king [devaraja],For the royal performers, he [King Vajiravudh] was (as officiant) the source ofthe spiritual power necessary to them; he was also the King and thus effected apower transfer in the style of the ancient devaraja (Wong, 2001, p 240). In the1970s and 80s, King Bhumibol, as medium for the auratic power of the Old Fa-ther, was also chief officiant in wai khru ceremonies to re-empower the lineagesof initiation into state-sponsored training in classical music and dance-drama.Crown Princess Sirindhorn was subsequently initiated into the Thai classical musictradition by master teachers who received their charismatic authority to act asinitiating officiants (that is, mediums for the Old Father) from her father, KingBhumibol.

A book published to accompany the release of the 2011 movie Khon khon (TheKhon People, dir Saranyu Wongkrajang), about competing dance-drama troupesin the mid-twentieth century, includes a photo of King Bhumibol officiating at awai khru ceremony in the School of Performing Arts on 5 October 1971 (Saranyu,2011, no page number). While Wong does not mention it, we nonetheless see herepoints of connection between the symbolic re-sacralization of the monarchy acrossKing Bhumibols reign (Jackson, 2009) and de facto official support for forms ofrevivified mediumship. The divine associations of Thai kings, both living anddead, are made explicit in spirit medium discourses. Pattana quotes one informantwho identifies the spirit of King Chulalongkorn (r 18681910) with the Hindugod Vishnu, and both King Vajiravudh and King Bhumibol are included in the list


of deities invoked in official wai khru ceremonies performed at the College ofDramatic Arts, with King Vajiravudhs spirit invoked as Phor Jao, or Lord Fa-ther (Wong, 2001, p 143), and the present monarch being called Luang Phor[Reverend Father] Bhumibol Adulyadej (Wong, 2001, p 142). Like Pattana, Wongproposes a perspective that does not take doctrinal Buddhism as the starting pointor standard against which to analyse Thai religiosity, citing Tannenbaums sug-gestion (1995, p 205) that Buddhism may be part of deeper [historical] patternsof belief, and models positing multiple religious systems at work in SoutheastAsia may miss the ways that they are part of broader, more encompassing belief(Wong, 2001, p xviii).

Thai transgender ritual specialists under the spell of the marketBoth Pattana and Wong devote chapters to the gendering of Thai spirit mediumship.Pattana states, The empowering strategies employed by magic monks and spiritmediums are conditioned and characterized by class and gender (Pattana, 2012,p 53). Wongs seventh chapter is entitled The Wai Khru as gendered culturalsystem, and she summarizes her book as being a study of how patriarchy de-fines Thai music making (Wong, 2001, p 218). However, Pattana and Wongsstudies are both framed within a heteronormative view of gender as a masculinefeminine binary, with Wong developing a critical feminist analysis of the subordinateplace of ostensibly heterosexual women in wai khru initiation. Neither Pattananor Wong explicitly considers the cross-gender dimensions of spirit mediumship,even though evidence they adduce has strong cross-gender elements. All the ex-amples Pattana adduces from his fieldwork and from historical sources are offemale mediums who channel male spirits, and Wong devotes several pages to afemale informant who is a medium for the Old Father, and in reference to whomWong uses the gender-hybrid pronoun s/he when describing the woman as pos-sessed by the Old Father (Wong, 2001, p 228 ff).

Michael Peletz makes the important argument that transgendered persons pro-vide a powerful lens through which to view pluralism in South East Asia, becauseof the vicissitudes of transgenderism index processes that have occurred across anumber of culturally and analytically interlocked domains (Peletz, 2009, p 5).However, Peletz is in error when he claims that modernity has led to thesecularization of all cross-gender phenomena in South East Asia by redefiningtransgendered individuals as contaminating (rather than sacred) mediators (Peletz,2009, p 16). In radical contrast, almost every author writing on modern spiritmediumship in Thailand reports the strong presence of feminine men and mas-culine women (see Irvine, 1984, p 321; Wijeyewardene, 1986, p 158; Tanabe,1991, p 202; Morris, 2000; Van Esterik, 2000, p 44).

Walter Irvine (1984) reported that village-based spirit medium cults in Thai-land declined in the 1970s as a result of modernization and urbanization. However,Irvine and many others, including Pattana, have also pointed out that, overall,mediumship has not declined in Thailand, but rather has relocated to urban cen-tres, where in the context of the market economy it has proliferated in new forms.Writing of Chiang Mai, Rosalind Morris observes, [s]pirit cults and the practicesof magical transmission are not only not disappearing in northern Thailand, theyare efflorescing along with the discourses of ritual (Morris, 2000, p 74). And


rather than heralding an eclipse of transgender ritual specialists, as claimed byPeletz (2006, 2009), marketized urban spaces have provided new opportunitiesfor ritual expressions of cross-genderism. Indeed, transgender ritual specialistsappear to have a greater presence in contemporary Thai and Vietnamese (see Endres,2011) spirit mediumship than in previous eras. In the past, South East Asian cross-genderism was often associated with magical religion as well as the domains ofaesthetics, dance and dramatic performance, all of which were essential compo-nents of religious rituals. With the marketization of everyday life, all of thesefields have been commodified in contemporary Thailand. As Thai supernaturalreligion has fallen under the spell of the market, new spaces and opportunities forthe expression of transgenderism have also emerged, with the prevalence oftransgender beauticians across the country being just one example. Endres arguesthat in Vietnam gender-transgressive males now have a greater role in spirit me-dium cults than in the past, creatively recombining a diverse range of traditionaland modern concepts to forge their transgender, bisexual or homosexualidentities within and across social and ritual spaces (Endres, 2011, p 149). Incontrast to Peletz, Endres attributes the growing queering of mediumship in con-temporary Vietnam to a greater tolerance of gender transgressive behaviour inVietnamese society at large (Endres, 2011, p 149).

Different genderings of the Nine Emperor Gods festival in Thailandand MalaysiaThe distinctiveness of transgenderism in Thai spirit mediumship is revealed whenwe compare accounts of the Nine Emperor Gods festival or the Chinese Vegetar-ian festival (Thai: thetsakan kin je) in southern Thailand and northern Malaysia.Worship of the Nine Emperor Gods has no exact analogue in China and originatedamong Hokkien-speaking Chinese migrant labourers in Phuket in the early nine-teenth century in response to devastating epidemics. The festival subsequentlyspread among diasporic Chinese in the Malay Peninsula (DeBernardi, 2012, p26), and in recent decades has come to be celebrated nationally in Thailand, where,as Erik Cohen (2001) notes, it has spread well beyond the ethnic Chinese commu-nity. Worship of deities associated with this festival, especially the ChineseMahayana female bodhisattva Guan Yin (Thai: Kuan Im), is also providing newspaces for transgender ritual specialists in Thailand. Separate studies of the festi-val in Penang by Jean DeBernardi (2012) and in Phuket and Krabi by Erik Cohen(2001, 2008) reveal important local differences in the gendering of Chinesemediumship, despite close ongoing connections between the Chinese communi-ties across the ThaiMalaysian border.

DeBernardi and Cohens single-site ethnographies of the Nine Emperor Godsfestivals in Penang and Phuket respectively do not engage the distinctiveness ofthe festival rituals in each country, most notably regarding the presence oftransgenderism in southern Thai celebrations but its absence in Penang. Cohenreports both male and female transgenderism among Phuket mediums, observingthat many female (and transvestite) mediums are believed to be possessed byGuan Yin (Cohen, 2001, p 24) and that some tomboys, females who adopt a maleidentity are mediums for male Chinese deities (Cohen, 2001, p 120). He alsodescribes the chief officiant at a Nine Emperor Gods shrine in Krabi as a young


male transvestite (kathoey) (Cohen, 2008, p 72), adding in a footnote explainingthat, Transvestite spirit mediums in Phuket shrines are normally possessed byfemale deities, particularly by Kuan Im (Cohen, 2008, p 87, note 3). In contrast,DeBernardi makes no reference to transgender mediums in her study of the festi-val in Penang. Indeed, DeBernardi (private correspondence) reports not havingencountered a single male spirit medium of Guan Yin during her many years ofresearch in Penang. DeBernardi (private correspondence) views the presence oftransgender mediums in Phuket celebrations of the festival as a distinctively Thaiinnovation. In his study of male spirit mediums in Taiwan, whose rituals haveclose connections to the Hokkien communities of Thailand and Malaysia, AvronBoretz (2011) also fails to report any instances of transgenderism.

That such a difference should be apparent in the gendering of mediums partici-pating in the same festival in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand, by diasporicChinese communities that share the same language and maintain family ties acrossthe border, is clearly a topic for further research. However, the different genderingof possession in the Nine Emperor Gods festival as celebrated in Thailand andMalaysia is only revealed when we read DeBernardis study of Penang in dia-logue with Cohens account of Phuket, further demonstrating the importance ofcomparative approaches to understanding the specific character of mediumshipwithin any national setting. The cross-gender character of mediumship in Thai-land is so universal that some authors, such as Pattana, who write only on the Thaisituation, regard it as the norm, and hence in no need of comment. Conversely, thegender-normative character of Chinese spirit mediumship in Malaysia is so uni-versal that researchers studying only this country, such as DeBernardi, regard thisgender pattern as the norm, and hence in no need of explanation.

Chinese spirit mediumship in Thailand is now practised within the frame ofThai gender culture, which has proved powerful enough to override the patriar-chal, gender-normative character of popular Chinese religion. The only exampleof cross-genderism in DeBernardis book is the case of the Datuk Aunt, a StraitsChinese (Nonya) Malay- and Hokkien-speaking female medium whose ritualshybridize Malay and Chinese beliefs. The Datuk Aunts possessing deity is a malebaby god named Datuk Lai Huat, a spirit whose name combines the Malay termDatuk with the Hokkien expression meaning Come Prosperity (DeBernardi,2012, p 185). DeBernardi does not analyse the gendering of the Datuk Auntsritual practice. Nonetheless, it appears that this form of cross-genderism that is,a female medium channelling a male spirit emerged from the hybridization ofChinese practices with Malay that is, South East Asian gendered understandings.This suggests a similar pattern to the emergence of cross-genderism in Chinesemediumship in southern Thailand, where gender-normative, patriarchal Chineserituals have been reconfigured within Thailands more gender-diverse culture.

Islamic and Christian limits to Thai religio-cultural hybridityPattana observes that cults of Guan Yin, Shiva and Ganesh have gained popular-ity beyond their traditional ethnic boundaries, drawing in ethnic Thai followers aswell as new generations of Sino- and Indo-Thais, as a result of the ethno-culturalassimilation project under the modern nation-building scheme (Pattana, 2012, p144). Writing of Penang, DeBernardi states, the practices of Chinese popular


religious culture are eclectic and locally diverse Chinese spirit mediums arebricoleurs who propose unique doctrinal syntheses (DeBernardi, 2012, p 9). Thewidespread view of Asian spirit mediumship as open, incorporative and effec-tively borderless emerges from what DeBernardi describes as a common logic ofpractice across the region that humans can invite spirits to share with them, andthat in exchange the spirits will offer comfort, assistance, and protection froma potentially malicious spirit world (DeBernardi, 2012, pp 910). This sharedlogic of practice is typically described as transcending divisions of ethnicity, lan-guage and religious affiliation. However, on the penultimate page of his book,Pattana mentions that there are limits to Thai religious hybridity, [N]either theChristian God and saints, nor EuroAmerican popular icons, have ever been in-cluded into these cults (Pattana, 2012, p 145). Pattana fails to mention that, evenmore surprisingly, there are no Islamic saints in contemporary Thai spirit mediumcults, despite Muslims constituting the countrys largest religious minority. Pattanamentions these very real limits to Thai religious hybridity in passing and does notprovide any extended analysis. For insights into why Thai popular religion hascultural borders, in radical contrast to the dominant academic discourse of hy-bridizing or syncretizing inclusivity, we need to look beyond single-country studiesto multi-site analyses, such as Bernard Formosos account of De Jiao, the teach-ing/doctrine of virtue, a Teochew Chinese movement based on automatic writing,also called spirit-writing and planchette divination, performed by male medi-ums.

Formosos study of De Jiao demonstrates the importance of multi-country stud-ies in understanding the scope and character of contemporary religious movementsin South East and East Asia. Formoso has undertaken extended periods of re-search in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and also amongdiasporic Chinese in Australia. De Jiao began in the Teochew-speaking Chaozhouregion of Chinas Guangdong province in the 1930s as a reaction to both the Sino-Japanese War and the rise of Chinese secular materialism, and the movement teachesa synthesis of Confucian ethics, Buddhist compassion and Taoist beliefs to re-store what followers see as the core values of Chinese civilization. The movementspread among diasporic Teochew communities in South East Asia and Australiaafter the Second World War, and despite being banned in the Peoples Republic ofChina, where it has been equated erroneously with the quite separate Falun Gongmovement, small underground congregations have nonetheless been re-establishedin that country.

Formoso details how De Jiao has responded in diverse ways to the divergingethno-religious assimilationist and segregationist policies that Thai and Malaysiangovernments respectively have pursued towards each countrys minority Chinesepopulations. Like many spirit medium cults in Asia, De Jiao is marked by greattolerance of theological diversity (Formoso, 2010, p 18), which opens the way toremarkable forms of inclusiveness. Formoso observes that under the aegis of theJade Emperor, the pantheon of De Jiao is open to every god, with none debarred(Formoso, 2010, p 6), with De Jiao pavilions, or temples, in Malaysia and Sin-gapore including Mohammed and Jesus Christ among their deities. However, whileDe Jiao pavilions in Thailand honour the largest number of deities of any countryin which the movement is established, neither Mohammed nor Jesus Christ appearsin its Thai pantheon.


Formosos study confirms Pattanas concluding remark that, despite its hybridcomplexity, Thai popular religion is not a completely open system that can incor-porate all religious forms. For reasons that remain to be explored, unlike someoverseas Chinese spirit medium cults in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore thatincorporate elements of Christianity and Islam, Thai supernaturalism has not bor-rowed from either of these religions, despite their long historical presence inThailand. The absence of Christian and Muslim figures in Thai supernaturalism isunusual in South East Asia, for, as Formoso observes, The syncretism extendedto western religions that De Jiao displays [in Malaysia and Singapore] is far fromunique in the Asian context (Formoso, 2010, p 48). In contrast to the dominantemphasis on religious hybridity in research that focuses exclusively onsupernaturalism within Thailand, comparative studies such as Formosos reveal adifferent, and to date neglected, question: namely, why is contemporary Thai popularreligion open to incorporating Indian and Chinese elements while remaining ap-parently resistant to borrowing from Islam and Christianity? Given the vast extentof Thai borrowings from the West over the past two centuries (see Harrison andJackson, 2010) and the centuries-long presence of Muslim communities in allregions of the country, the failure of Catholicism, Protestant denominations andIslam to impact on Thai religious belief presents remarkable exceptions to theotherwise lauded Thai capacity for cultural appropriation.

Formoso attributes the progressive dissolution of the ThaiChinese religio-cul-tural boundary, and the growing participation of ethnic Thais in Chinese cults, toa mix of cultural and political factors that reflect not only Thai Theravada open-ness, but, equally importantly, a decline in Chinese-background Thais sense ofcultural exclusivity. Formoso sees the decline of Chinese clan lineage associa-tions in Thailand because of restrictions imposed by mid-twentieth centurynationalist policy makers and, more broadly, the Thai policy of assimilation,such as requiring the adoption of Thai names, as having succeeded in reducingactivities directed toward the preservation of Chinese culture (Formoso, 2010, p78). The incorporation of Chinese religiosity into the contemporary Thai super-natural pantheon is no accident and is not, as Pattana (following Tony Reid) claims,a reflection of a Thai magic of tolerance (Pattana, 2012, p 34). As I argue else-where, the supposed Thai magic of tolerance is no miracle, but emerges from ahistorical strategy of power to manage a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state (Jackson,2010, p 192). The Sino-Thai supernatural synthesis has been made possible be-cause of the success of policies that restricted the activities of the Chinese, subjectedthem to an assimilationist policy of Thai-ification and attenuated the Chinesecommunitys sense of cultural and religious exclusiveness. Formoso shows thatSino-Thai religio-cultural hybridization is not a one-sided process of Thai appro-priation of foreign forms. Rather, it is a double process that emerges just as muchfrom Chinese-background communities progressively de-emphasizing their Chi-nese distinctiveness (including using Thai as the medium of communication inostensibly Chinese cults) as from Theravada Thai communities readiness to addChinese deities to their pantheon and Chinese rituals to their religious practice.

Formosos work indicates that the processes that facilitate religious hybridiza-tion and, just as importantly, also set limits to assimilation across religious, culturaland ethnic boundaries, are as much political as cultural. The resurgence ofmediumship in Thailand and elsewhere in Asia can thus only be understood fully


in its political setting. This is why Pattanas argument that spirit mediumship needsto be considered through the lens of theories of cultural hybridity, which, follow-ing Homi Bhabha, address the power relations underpinning cultural borrowing,rather than relying on apolitical notions of syncretism, is an important advance inunderstanding Thai supernaturalism.

In this light, the remarkable absence of Muslim figures in Thai mediumshipmust clearly be seen as reflecting contemporary political tensions concerning Is-lam. In a study of the Manora dance form of spirit possession in southern Thailand,Alexander Horstmann details how Islam has been progressively separated outfrom a religious complex that formerly united Muslim and Buddhist Thais througha shared belief in spirits and the healing powers of mediumship. According toHorstmann, older forms of the Manora demonstrated the coexistence and hy-bridization of spirit mediums with Theravada Buddhism and Islam (Horstmann,2012, p 104), with Manora mediumship previously bringing Buddhists and Mus-lims together in a shared space of sacred ritual. Horstmann writes of the resilienceand revitalization of spirit beliefs and spirit possession in southern Thailand(Horstmann, 2012, p 104), but emphasizes that revitalized Manora mediumship isnow linked with Buddhism, and excludes Muslims, as a consequence of growingdoctrinalism in Thai Islam and inter-ethnic tension and violence in the ethnicMalay-predominant southern border provinces. While previously it was not un-common in the Lake Songkhla area to observe a multireligious ritual, in whichspirit possession blends with Theravada Buddhism or Islam (Horstmann, 2012, p107), since the upsurge of violence in southern Thailand nothing is as it wasbefore and [Buddhist and Muslim] religious and ritual spaces are more rigidlyseparated and controlled (Horstmann, 2012, p 108). While Manora mediumshipenjoys resurgent interest among southern Thai Buddhists, the regions Muslimsare withdrawing from participation and the ritual is losing its interreligious foot-ing (Horstmann, 2012, p 113). In his doctoral study of Chinese and Thaiparticipation in supernatural religiosity in southern Thailand, Jovan Maud astutelyobserves that the pervasive presence and indeed ordinariness of hybridity in [Thai]history leads us to ask the more important and interesting question of how andwhy hybridisation fails or is limited in some way (Maud, 2007, p 378). At thesame time that resurgent Thai supernaturalism has included new Chinese,Brahmanical and other deities, it has simultaneously excluded Muslim ancestralspirits that were once part of the shared religious complex in southern Thailand.This cannot be interpreted other than in terms of the radically divergent socio-political contexts of the Chinese and Muslim minorities in early twenty-first centuryThailand. In other words, the ethnic mix of deities in contemporary Thai popularreligion mirrors the countrys socio-political order, just as the prevalence of cross-genderism in Thai spirit mediumship reflects the structure of Thai gender culturetoday.

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