Spooner, how were they to know things were going to get ugly with the KR? Who’s making excuses? War is mass murder, civilian or not. Whether you are convicted depends on who leaves the battlefield on top. It’s forever been the way. Better not to get into them if we’re going to cry about our tax money being used in such a way after the fact.
War is an institution. Over generations and civilisations it has been built into an institution and this is not going to change with petty outrage. We have built it into our social consciousness that war is necessary, and we are yet to acknowledge that it’s not. I bet if you were pushed, you too would find reason to fight. Better to embrace the stupidity of it and learn how to control it. That way getting into wars for fabrications, like the second USS Maddox ‘incident’, don’t need to occur, and the institution of conflict can be focused on something more positive, and even constructive.
“And as the bullets started flying, the mind turned to wet sand.”
Chris Mullins (a recently retired Labour MP who had previously exposed the Birmingham 6 miscarriage of justice) also discusses this matter in his recent diaries. I think it’s now assumed beyond all doubt that UK/US support for the anti-Vietnam Cambodian forces also reached the KR.
As for this post: Pol Pot was a mass murderer and a criminal – plain and simple, no equivocation. Casting him as a romanticised revolutionary is just complete and total garbage.
But there’s also no doubt whatsoever that the USA’s policy of annihilating civilian populations in SE Asia was also a criminal act of mass murder.
To condemn one and make excuses for the other – either way you play it – looks like an abject failure of any kind of guiding principle.
The USA has almost as much Cambodian blood on its hands as the KR.
Conveniently forgetting this is just the same as Shamir’s disgraceful and revolting revisionism.
“Spirits do not exist” Are you serious? They are everywhere in Thailand. Here are two filthy forest spirits that I saw with my own eyes. They were invited to attend a large festival in Ban Tiam as representatives of the spirit world. Their behaviour left something to be desired but, by and large, they represented the spirit community with style.
“Making offerings to spirits is about drawing them into local circuits of exchange and tapping into their power.” >> One problem with this formulation is that spirits do not exist, and that they therefore cannot have any power. Thus, the question is what precisely is it that is drawn into “local circuits of exchange”?
It’s a common misperception but it is a misperception.
One needs to draw a distinction between occultism, which engages with what are visualised as the forces of nature, and suggestion, which engages the unconscious components of the psychology.
If one is engaging in suggestion, belief is important. If what I would call occultism, it is not.
Unlike portrayed in the movies, power being exercised generally does not manifest quickly. Most occultism is about gradual change, for good or ill, though the overall gradual change is usually achieved by a series of single instances of discrete change – this is the way of nature and therefore is the way of life.
Hope this helps,
Annie
Did you know the brain of a horse and the brain of a human are structurally similar in that they have the same basic components? Ditto dogs, ditto sheep. Interesting – no? Annie wonders what it all means.
Andrew, thank you for this work. I am grateful for it at both a descriptive and explanatory level. There is too much of Thailand that we think we know that we don’t know if we know it or not, and you consistently pick topics at a nexus of where there is lots to learn and then learn something of it, with us along for the ride. So, thank you.
May I? I have just come back from meeting with an insurance company in the U.S.. They want us — a small clinic that serves people with low incomes — to expand capacity so that they can enroll more members in their insurance plan. It’s not quite ‘plant some garlic and we might buy it from you at the then-market price’, but it’s close, and we would very much welcome the security that a contract purchasing approach might provide with them. ‘Cause when you’re small and poor, you can be seriously harmed by even small investment failures.
Are these folks — New Asia Foods and their like — asking for long term contracts? Or just one crop at a time? Perhaps the long term contracts are more objectionable? I would not want to lease my clinic capacity to anyone on an indefinite basis.
Pol Pot…well it’s a good thing for all Cambodians that he is no longer with them in the flesh although I know a few – mind you not many Cambodians – who think he was a great Khmer nationalist and a hater of all things Vietnamese and that his ends (the deaths of large numbers of Cambodians and also many Vietnamese and a few other foreigners) justified the means.
Sure the policies of the US contributed to the rise of Pol Pot (one has to appreciate what US bombing did in Eastern Cambodia along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to understand this) but Pol Pot’s rabid form of Cambodian Maoism has little to do with the US. One has to dig deeper into Cambodia’s own history to appreciate not just how Pol Pot came to power but why he came to power and what he did when in power.
Stupidly as an extremely minor observer to events in Cambodia – I was in Cambodia when the Lon Nol regime fell in April 1975 – I thought Pol Pot (or should I say the Khmer Rouge because I had no idea who Pol Pot was at the time) had liberated Cambodia. I could not have been so wrong but persisted with maintaining the fiction that Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea had been maligned by its many detractors, including most importantly Cambodians who were able to flee Cambodia after 1975 dismissing them as counter-revolutionaries or simply reactionary elements of the ancien regime. This extended to joining in protests against Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and subsequent longer than was good for Vietnam presence in Cambodia. However, realistically it was Vietnam’s decision to invade Vietnam that contributed in no small way to the eventual demise of Pol Pot and the pathetic Communist Party of Kampuchea.
However, I am not sure what Geoffrey Cain hopes to achieve by even quoting this Israel Shamir because what he has lifted out of what Shamir is reputed to have said is drivel not worthy of debate. I very much doubt that Shamir is in the position to influence any debate on someone such as Pol Pot or that terrible period in Cambodian history but as I was wrong on suggesting that Pol Pot did good for Cambodia in the 1970s I might be wrong here as well.
“…it just means that this capacity to acknowledge and correct what is wrong is better than the systems that Pol Pot and other tyranical leaders found themselves in and perpetuated…”
Excellent article. Another reason that the AEC is unlikely to succeed is because it is a creation of governments which claim to want “free” trade, “free” flows, and lots of other supposedly free market configurations, but what is more likely is that governments (politicians and lawyers) will not be able to resist putting their paws on everything as has been tradition. There is already much noise about protecting jobs and protecting trade. Will that result in retaliation? Will the legal framework end up restricting the very freedoms the AEC purports to be advancing? Will the legal framework end up so porous that any K5 student can find the loopholes? Will the AEC result in anti-free trade policies with non-AEC countries (and possible subsequent retaliation)? Will taking in countries that are not ready result in negative impacts? Look what happened to the EU when politics over-ruled sense, and allowed the entrance of financial basket cases. Or is it better to throw the less adapted countries into the pool and hope they can learn to swim before they drain the water and kill the rest of the fish? The current plan is to do the latter (presumably without draining the pool), but, as then U.S. General (later U.S. President) Dwight D. Eisenhower noted, “Planning is everything, the plan is nothing.”
“I assure you that there is quite a big difference between muttering a few crude spells and exercising affective occultism.”
I agree Annie! Affective or effective? But there was a time (40 years ago?) (and you can take it or leave it), when effective (meaning it works) occultism was like a Seven-Eleven convenience even here in Bangkok. Getting a thief to return a stolen, or a cheat to return your lover or your money only needed a consultation with an old thin man from India (with his very young virgin assistant) at some dark corner at Chinatown. From the stories of my aunt(s) and uncle (many still living), those shamans from India were worth every Baht for occult services served and done.
Maybe those ‘professional shamans’ could still be found at remote Thailand, but more likely they’re doing their mystical practices in Cambodia, Laos and/or Myanmar.
(We still remember Thaksin and his voodoo witch ET from Myanmar, eh?)
I’m trying to understand who has the power? (I can see the power of those holding the guns and those controlling them, but if it’s the spirits, don’t they only have power over those who believe?)
Let me expand a little … to suggest that spirit practices reflect “docility and compliance” is, I think, to fundamentally misunderstand what is going on.
I don’t agree. And I didn’t say they reflect docility and compliance, I said they predispose to compliance and docility, which they most certainly do, precisely as religious adherence do to some ad-hoc rulebook. Ask any psychologist, you probably have one or two in the psych department.
Making offerings to spirits is about drawing them into local circuits of exchange and tapping into their power. Dealings with spirits are all about negotiation, pragmatic deal-making, domestication, evaluation and, in some cases, outright abandonment.
Sorry Andrew, you have this almost completely wrong. In Thailand, propitiating spirits is all (and only) about attracting good luck and repelling bad luck by means of merit-making or ‘tamboon’, with the possible exception of the local mere-mot and paw-mot. And perhaps a few of the monks, though these latter are generally a case of the emperors new clothes.
The ability of villagers to be able to deal with spirits is, in fact, fundamentally threatening to those who hold power in the centre – whether it be kings or governments.
Wrong again. I have yet to meet any Thai pooyay who is in the slightest concerned about the spirits beyond whizzing down the local wat and lighting a few joss sticks to keep the evil spirits at bay. What they choose to conniver to the hoi-polloy may be different, but what they really think and feel is precisely as I have stated. The reason for this is that the king is conceived as being all-powerful spiritually as well as temporally and is in fact superior to the spirits. Thus if you perceive yourself to be a ‘good man’ (ie one upon whom the king smiles), then you cannot err and you are not in any danger.
Villagers don’t have to rely on just one monarch (but, of course, why not cultivate him too) but they can deal with a wide array of lords and princes and install them in their own local palaces.
I assure you that there is quite a big difference between muttering a few crude spells and exercising affective occultism. There are only a few who can do the latter. I suspect you haven’t talked to any of them. But you make an excellent point of illustrating the extent of the superstition in Thailand (though not uniquely).
If we are interested in challenging domination, as I think both Annie and John Francis are, we should engage with the unruly, untidy and subversive world of spirits rather than recycling standard elite disparagement of alternative approaches to power.
There we have it Andrew, nicely put but I regret to tell you that if that is your experience of occultism in Thailand then you really do need to speak with different people. There is nothing whatever “unruly, untidy and subversive” about the ‘spirit world’ as you put it. If it appears so it is because the people playing with it lack the necessary knowledge and/or control (which two things are related).
Sorry to be so negative, but as I said, in my opinion, the article is superficial and altogether horrible. It betrays an almost complete lack of understanding of the worlds of psychology and occultism (folk or high). I know that people tend to believe almost anything written by someone with a ‘Dr’ in front of their name, but it ain’t necessarily so.
But of course that’s only my opinion. I say tomahto, you say tomayto.
Well yes, if you say so Andrew, whatever it was that you were actually saying. But then I expect I know more about the related fields of psychology and occultism that most.
Erm. By tired stereotypes, do you mean stereotypes that are not actually useful or stereotypes that people would rather call ‘tired’ because they are politically incorrect?
Bucket of cold water: How do you think stereotypes became stereotypes?
By the way Andrew, political correctness is itself a dreadful superstition. A belief that the gods of truth are dead and the gods of saying what you think people might want to hear have replaced them. After all, in the late 19th century, it was announced that there was nothing left to discover in physics (Lord Kelvin as I recall). It was politically incorrect and professional suicide to disagree with him. But he was quite wrong of course, as most sound-byte academics are.
But then I’m sure you know that already.
Annie
The only thing an excessively open mind does is to let the crap in and good stuff out. Still, many people with an excessively open mind think of themselves as enlightened. We think they are just unable to be discriminating. Always useful to be able to tell the difference between bottom and elbow. You’d be surprised how many people can’t. Or perhaps you wouldn’t be.
Let me expand a little … to suggest that spirit practices reflect “docility and compliance” is, I think, to fundamentally misunderstand what is going on. Making offerings to spirits is about drawing them into local circuits of exchange and tapping into their power. Dealings with spirits are all about negotiation, pragmatic deal-making, domestication, evaluation and, in some cases, outright abandonment. The ability of villagers to be able to deal with spirits is, in fact, fundamentally threatening to those who hold power in the centre – whether it be kings or governments. Villagers don’t have to rely on just one monarch (but, of course, why not cultivate him too) but they can deal with a wide array of lords and princes and install them in their own local palaces. If we are interested in challenging domination, as I think both Annie and John Francis are, we should engage with the unruly, untidy and subversive world of spirits rather than recycling standard elite disparagement of alternative approaches to power. (You can read more along these lines in Thailand’s Political Peasants.)
They (not Russia certainly not China not Japan) created the Syrian near genocidal civil war. If they stopped fueling it, it would die. Instead of the Syrians.
No one else wants to hear it either Khun V, so I’ll stop.
First, the belief among Thais in karma, predisposes them to accept what happens to them (often as a consequence of what some Thai pooyay has done to them or has done which affects them), in the name of it being ‘the consequence of some error in this or a past life’. It reduces self-determination and the willingness to take responsibility for what they do and what happens to them.
Second, it predisposes Thais to believe the fairytales that the King is an incarnation of Buddha and the Queen an incarnation of Suriothai – spread by the palace in order to ensure the longevity of the corrupt monarchy in Thailand.. To this extent, a major part of the propaganda campaign waged by the CIA in Thailand involves sending ‘lucky’ pictures of the king to all Thai households and encouraging Thais to burn incense and make offerings before the picture. This is still prevalent in thailand today.
Both aspects predispose Thais to compliance and docility. Just the way the establishment wants them.
But how does cultivating good relations with spirits in Thailand contribute to people’s misery? It’s not a matter of whether the cultural practice is “valuable” or not but of understanding how it operates in context. My book attempts to place spirit beliefs in their broader social, economic and political context. My argument is that spirit practices can tell us a lot about how people forge connections with sources of power in their pursuit of security and prosperity. For me, the lesson from anthropology is not that all practices are equally valuable. Rather the lesson is that judgements about practices are best made after an open-minded engagement with them. Rushing to dismiss a certain type of practice as “superstition” is a missed opportunity for learning.
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The power of spirits
Oho, р╕Щр╣Ир╕▓р╕гр╕▒р╕Бр╕Ир╕▒р╕Зр╣Ар╕ер╕в!
Counterpunch: Pol Pot wasn’t so bad
Spooner, how were they to know things were going to get ugly with the KR? Who’s making excuses? War is mass murder, civilian or not. Whether you are convicted depends on who leaves the battlefield on top. It’s forever been the way. Better not to get into them if we’re going to cry about our tax money being used in such a way after the fact.
War is an institution. Over generations and civilisations it has been built into an institution and this is not going to change with petty outrage. We have built it into our social consciousness that war is necessary, and we are yet to acknowledge that it’s not. I bet if you were pushed, you too would find reason to fight. Better to embrace the stupidity of it and learn how to control it. That way getting into wars for fabrications, like the second USS Maddox ‘incident’, don’t need to occur, and the institution of conflict can be focused on something more positive, and even constructive.
“And as the bullets started flying, the mind turned to wet sand.”
Counterpunch: Pol Pot wasn’t so bad
One issue that gets routinely forgotten is that the US, UK and Thailand all actively supported the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnam invasion.
Here’s a link to a question asked in UK parliament about the matter back in 1989. http://www.parliament.uk/edm/1989-90/160 and some of the debate that followed http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm198990/cmhansrd/1990-10-26/Debate-3.html
Chris Mullins (a recently retired Labour MP who had previously exposed the Birmingham 6 miscarriage of justice) also discusses this matter in his recent diaries. I think it’s now assumed beyond all doubt that UK/US support for the anti-Vietnam Cambodian forces also reached the KR.
As for this post: Pol Pot was a mass murderer and a criminal – plain and simple, no equivocation. Casting him as a romanticised revolutionary is just complete and total garbage.
But there’s also no doubt whatsoever that the USA’s policy of annihilating civilian populations in SE Asia was also a criminal act of mass murder.
To condemn one and make excuses for the other – either way you play it – looks like an abject failure of any kind of guiding principle.
The USA has almost as much Cambodian blood on its hands as the KR.
Conveniently forgetting this is just the same as Shamir’s disgraceful and revolting revisionism.
The power of spirits
“Spirits do not exist” Are you serious? They are everywhere in Thailand. Here are two filthy forest spirits that I saw with my own eyes. They were invited to attend a large festival in Ban Tiam as representatives of the spirit world. Their behaviour left something to be desired but, by and large, they represented the spirit community with style.
The power of spirits
Can you explain more?
Particularly about occultism: “which engages with what are visualised as the forces of nature“
The power of spirits
“Making offerings to spirits is about drawing them into local circuits of exchange and tapping into their power.” >> One problem with this formulation is that spirits do not exist, and that they therefore cannot have any power. Thus, the question is what precisely is it that is drawn into “local circuits of exchange”?
The power of spirits
It’s a common misperception but it is a misperception.
One needs to draw a distinction between occultism, which engages with what are visualised as the forces of nature, and suggestion, which engages the unconscious components of the psychology.
If one is engaging in suggestion, belief is important. If what I would call occultism, it is not.
Unlike portrayed in the movies, power being exercised generally does not manifest quickly. Most occultism is about gradual change, for good or ill, though the overall gradual change is usually achieved by a series of single instances of discrete change – this is the way of nature and therefore is the way of life.
Hope this helps,
Annie
Did you know the brain of a horse and the brain of a human are structurally similar in that they have the same basic components? Ditto dogs, ditto sheep. Interesting – no? Annie wonders what it all means.
The benefits of contract farming
Andrew, thank you for this work. I am grateful for it at both a descriptive and explanatory level. There is too much of Thailand that we think we know that we don’t know if we know it or not, and you consistently pick topics at a nexus of where there is lots to learn and then learn something of it, with us along for the ride. So, thank you.
May I? I have just come back from meeting with an insurance company in the U.S.. They want us — a small clinic that serves people with low incomes — to expand capacity so that they can enroll more members in their insurance plan. It’s not quite ‘plant some garlic and we might buy it from you at the then-market price’, but it’s close, and we would very much welcome the security that a contract purchasing approach might provide with them. ‘Cause when you’re small and poor, you can be seriously harmed by even small investment failures.
Are these folks — New Asia Foods and their like — asking for long term contracts? Or just one crop at a time? Perhaps the long term contracts are more objectionable? I would not want to lease my clinic capacity to anyone on an indefinite basis.
Counterpunch: Pol Pot wasn’t so bad
Pol Pot…well it’s a good thing for all Cambodians that he is no longer with them in the flesh although I know a few – mind you not many Cambodians – who think he was a great Khmer nationalist and a hater of all things Vietnamese and that his ends (the deaths of large numbers of Cambodians and also many Vietnamese and a few other foreigners) justified the means.
Sure the policies of the US contributed to the rise of Pol Pot (one has to appreciate what US bombing did in Eastern Cambodia along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to understand this) but Pol Pot’s rabid form of Cambodian Maoism has little to do with the US. One has to dig deeper into Cambodia’s own history to appreciate not just how Pol Pot came to power but why he came to power and what he did when in power.
Stupidly as an extremely minor observer to events in Cambodia – I was in Cambodia when the Lon Nol regime fell in April 1975 – I thought Pol Pot (or should I say the Khmer Rouge because I had no idea who Pol Pot was at the time) had liberated Cambodia. I could not have been so wrong but persisted with maintaining the fiction that Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea had been maligned by its many detractors, including most importantly Cambodians who were able to flee Cambodia after 1975 dismissing them as counter-revolutionaries or simply reactionary elements of the ancien regime. This extended to joining in protests against Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and subsequent longer than was good for Vietnam presence in Cambodia. However, realistically it was Vietnam’s decision to invade Vietnam that contributed in no small way to the eventual demise of Pol Pot and the pathetic Communist Party of Kampuchea.
However, I am not sure what Geoffrey Cain hopes to achieve by even quoting this Israel Shamir because what he has lifted out of what Shamir is reputed to have said is drivel not worthy of debate. I very much doubt that Shamir is in the position to influence any debate on someone such as Pol Pot or that terrible period in Cambodian history but as I was wrong on suggesting that Pol Pot did good for Cambodia in the 1970s I might be wrong here as well.
Counterpunch: Pol Pot wasn’t so bad
“…it just means that this capacity to acknowledge and correct what is wrong is better than the systems that Pol Pot and other tyranical leaders found themselves in and perpetuated…”
Agreed.
ASEAN’s missed opportunities
Excellent article. Another reason that the AEC is unlikely to succeed is because it is a creation of governments which claim to want “free” trade, “free” flows, and lots of other supposedly free market configurations, but what is more likely is that governments (politicians and lawyers) will not be able to resist putting their paws on everything as has been tradition. There is already much noise about protecting jobs and protecting trade. Will that result in retaliation? Will the legal framework end up restricting the very freedoms the AEC purports to be advancing? Will the legal framework end up so porous that any K5 student can find the loopholes? Will the AEC result in anti-free trade policies with non-AEC countries (and possible subsequent retaliation)? Will taking in countries that are not ready result in negative impacts? Look what happened to the EU when politics over-ruled sense, and allowed the entrance of financial basket cases. Or is it better to throw the less adapted countries into the pool and hope they can learn to swim before they drain the water and kill the rest of the fish? The current plan is to do the latter (presumably without draining the pool), but, as then U.S. General (later U.S. President) Dwight D. Eisenhower noted, “Planning is everything, the plan is nothing.”
The power of spirits
“I assure you that there is quite a big difference between muttering a few crude spells and exercising affective occultism.”
I agree Annie! Affective or effective? But there was a time (40 years ago?) (and you can take it or leave it), when effective (meaning it works) occultism was like a Seven-Eleven convenience even here in Bangkok. Getting a thief to return a stolen, or a cheat to return your lover or your money only needed a consultation with an old thin man from India (with his very young virgin assistant) at some dark corner at Chinatown. From the stories of my aunt(s) and uncle (many still living), those shamans from India were worth every Baht for occult services served and done.
Maybe those ‘professional shamans’ could still be found at remote Thailand, but more likely they’re doing their mystical practices in Cambodia, Laos and/or Myanmar.
(We still remember Thaksin and his voodoo witch ET from Myanmar, eh?)
The power of spirits
I’m trying to understand who has the power? (I can see the power of those holding the guns and those controlling them, but if it’s the spirits, don’t they only have power over those who believe?)
The power of spirits
Let me expand a little … to suggest that spirit practices reflect “docility and compliance” is, I think, to fundamentally misunderstand what is going on.
I don’t agree. And I didn’t say they reflect docility and compliance, I said they predispose to compliance and docility, which they most certainly do, precisely as religious adherence do to some ad-hoc rulebook. Ask any psychologist, you probably have one or two in the psych department.
Making offerings to spirits is about drawing them into local circuits of exchange and tapping into their power. Dealings with spirits are all about negotiation, pragmatic deal-making, domestication, evaluation and, in some cases, outright abandonment.
Sorry Andrew, you have this almost completely wrong. In Thailand, propitiating spirits is all (and only) about attracting good luck and repelling bad luck by means of merit-making or ‘tamboon’, with the possible exception of the local mere-mot and paw-mot. And perhaps a few of the monks, though these latter are generally a case of the emperors new clothes.
The ability of villagers to be able to deal with spirits is, in fact, fundamentally threatening to those who hold power in the centre – whether it be kings or governments.
Wrong again. I have yet to meet any Thai pooyay who is in the slightest concerned about the spirits beyond whizzing down the local wat and lighting a few joss sticks to keep the evil spirits at bay. What they choose to conniver to the hoi-polloy may be different, but what they really think and feel is precisely as I have stated. The reason for this is that the king is conceived as being all-powerful spiritually as well as temporally and is in fact superior to the spirits. Thus if you perceive yourself to be a ‘good man’ (ie one upon whom the king smiles), then you cannot err and you are not in any danger.
Villagers don’t have to rely on just one monarch (but, of course, why not cultivate him too) but they can deal with a wide array of lords and princes and install them in their own local palaces.
I assure you that there is quite a big difference between muttering a few crude spells and exercising affective occultism. There are only a few who can do the latter. I suspect you haven’t talked to any of them. But you make an excellent point of illustrating the extent of the superstition in Thailand (though not uniquely).
If we are interested in challenging domination, as I think both Annie and John Francis are, we should engage with the unruly, untidy and subversive world of spirits rather than recycling standard elite disparagement of alternative approaches to power.
There we have it Andrew, nicely put but I regret to tell you that if that is your experience of occultism in Thailand then you really do need to speak with different people. There is nothing whatever “unruly, untidy and subversive” about the ‘spirit world’ as you put it. If it appears so it is because the people playing with it lack the necessary knowledge and/or control (which two things are related).
Sorry to be so negative, but as I said, in my opinion, the article is superficial and altogether horrible. It betrays an almost complete lack of understanding of the worlds of psychology and occultism (folk or high). I know that people tend to believe almost anything written by someone with a ‘Dr’ in front of their name, but it ain’t necessarily so.
But of course that’s only my opinion. I say tomahto, you say tomayto.
The power of spirits
Well yes, if you say so Andrew, whatever it was that you were actually saying. But then I expect I know more about the related fields of psychology and occultism that most.
Erm. By tired stereotypes, do you mean stereotypes that are not actually useful or stereotypes that people would rather call ‘tired’ because they are politically incorrect?
Bucket of cold water: How do you think stereotypes became stereotypes?
By the way Andrew, political correctness is itself a dreadful superstition. A belief that the gods of truth are dead and the gods of saying what you think people might want to hear have replaced them. After all, in the late 19th century, it was announced that there was nothing left to discover in physics (Lord Kelvin as I recall). It was politically incorrect and professional suicide to disagree with him. But he was quite wrong of course, as most sound-byte academics are.
But then I’m sure you know that already.
Annie
The only thing an excessively open mind does is to let the crap in and good stuff out. Still, many people with an excessively open mind think of themselves as enlightened. We think they are just unable to be discriminating. Always useful to be able to tell the difference between bottom and elbow. You’d be surprised how many people can’t. Or perhaps you wouldn’t be.
The power of spirits
Let me expand a little … to suggest that spirit practices reflect “docility and compliance” is, I think, to fundamentally misunderstand what is going on. Making offerings to spirits is about drawing them into local circuits of exchange and tapping into their power. Dealings with spirits are all about negotiation, pragmatic deal-making, domestication, evaluation and, in some cases, outright abandonment. The ability of villagers to be able to deal with spirits is, in fact, fundamentally threatening to those who hold power in the centre – whether it be kings or governments. Villagers don’t have to rely on just one monarch (but, of course, why not cultivate him too) but they can deal with a wide array of lords and princes and install them in their own local palaces. If we are interested in challenging domination, as I think both Annie and John Francis are, we should engage with the unruly, untidy and subversive world of spirits rather than recycling standard elite disparagement of alternative approaches to power. (You can read more along these lines in Thailand’s Political Peasants.)
The power of spirits
Thanks Annie – perfect evidence of the desirability of open minded engagement with actual practice rather than resorting to tired stereotypes. AW
Counterpunch: Pol Pot wasn’t so bad
They (not Russia certainly not China not Japan) created the Syrian near genocidal civil war. If they stopped fueling it, it would die. Instead of the Syrians.
No one else wants to hear it either Khun V, so I’ll stop.
The power of spirits
There are 2 distinct and obvious ways Andrew.
First, the belief among Thais in karma, predisposes them to accept what happens to them (often as a consequence of what some Thai pooyay has done to them or has done which affects them), in the name of it being ‘the consequence of some error in this or a past life’. It reduces self-determination and the willingness to take responsibility for what they do and what happens to them.
Second, it predisposes Thais to believe the fairytales that the King is an incarnation of Buddha and the Queen an incarnation of Suriothai – spread by the palace in order to ensure the longevity of the corrupt monarchy in Thailand.. To this extent, a major part of the propaganda campaign waged by the CIA in Thailand involves sending ‘lucky’ pictures of the king to all Thai households and encouraging Thais to burn incense and make offerings before the picture. This is still prevalent in thailand today.
Both aspects predispose Thais to compliance and docility. Just the way the establishment wants them.
Annie.
The power of spirits
But how does cultivating good relations with spirits in Thailand contribute to people’s misery? It’s not a matter of whether the cultural practice is “valuable” or not but of understanding how it operates in context. My book attempts to place spirit beliefs in their broader social, economic and political context. My argument is that spirit practices can tell us a lot about how people forge connections with sources of power in their pursuit of security and prosperity. For me, the lesson from anthropology is not that all practices are equally valuable. Rather the lesson is that judgements about practices are best made after an open-minded engagement with them. Rushing to dismiss a certain type of practice as “superstition” is a missed opportunity for learning.