Narrative Practice and Cultural Change: Building Worlds with Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders in Thailand [1st ed.] 9783030495473, 9783030495480

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvi
Beyond Conformity: An Anthropology of Empathy and Problem-Solving for Understanding Complex Lives (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 1-61
Front Matter ....Pages 63-64
How Do Shared Languages Create Personal Narratives? (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 65-90
How Do Stories Create Human Worlds? (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 91-121
How Are Differing Personal Realities Shared? (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 123-157
Front Matter ....Pages 159-160
The Kohn and the Language of Social Obligation (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 161-190
Why Nirvana? The Manut and the Language of Solitude (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 191-214
Transnational Solutions to a Local Problem: The Human Natures of Buddhist Consumers (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 215-252
The Meanings in Lives (Steven Grant Carlisle)....Pages 253-263
Back Matter ....Pages 265-281

Citation preview

CULTURE, MIND, AND SOCIETY

Narrative Practice and Cultural Change Building Worlds with Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders in Thailand Steven Grant Carlisle

Culture, Mind, and Society

Series Editor Yehuda C. Goodman Department of Sociology and Anthropology The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel

The Society for Psychological Anthropology—a section of the American Anthropology Association—and Palgrave Macmillan are dedicated to publishing innovative research that illuminates the workings of the human mind within the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape thought, emotion, and experience. As anthropologists seek to bridge gaps between ideation and emotion or agency and structure and as ­psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical anthropologists search for ways to engage with cultural meaning and difference, this interdisciplinary ­terrain is more active than ever. Editorial Board Eileen Anderson-Fye, Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University Jennifer Cole, Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago Linda Garro, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles Daniel T. Linger, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz Rebecca Lester, Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis Tanya Luhrmann, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University Catherine Lutz, Department of Anthropology, Brown University Peggy Miller, Departments of Psychology and Speech Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Robert Paul, Department of Anthropology, Emory University Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Department of Anthropology, Utrecht University, Netherlands Bradd Shore, Department of Anthropology, Emory University Jason Throop, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles Carol Worthman, Department of Anthropology, Emory University More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14947

Steven Grant Carlisle

Narrative Practice and Cultural Change Building Worlds with Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders in Thailand

Steven Grant Carlisle Behavioral Social Sciences California State University at San Marcos San Marcos, CA, USA

Culture, Mind, and Society ISBN 978-3-030-49547-3 ISBN 978-3-030-49548-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tumjang/Moment/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Robert, Nancy and David, without whom this would not have been possible for many reasons.

Series Editor’s Preface

Steven Carlisle’s book is an exploration into a classic, yet still current, conundrum in Psychological Anthropology—how the complicated connections between human subjects and the societies they live in are worked out, and how to represent this self/society interface in our explorations of local and global social milieus. Drawing on extensive and intensive fieldwork in late modern Bangkok, Thailand, Carlisle focuses on the ways local and localized ­cultural idioms and conflicts around issues like karma, ghosts, consumerism, and capitalism are all worked out through shared narratives. These narratives are circulated and negotiated within the social fabric of family, friends, and significant others. Carlisle examines, for example, how Buddhists exchange different understandings and narratives of the world among themselves, while trying to figure out growing tensions between a desire for material goods and a spirituality of an otherworldly disconnection; and how they interpret and reinterpret a narrative about experiences of a young woman struggling with her karma. The depth of the inquiry into narrative work comes about, in ­particular, when Carlisle demonstrates the interface of narrative work and intimacy—how the persons he worked with deliberate constantly about vii

viii      Series Editor’s Preface

their karmic decisions, their relations with ghosts, and with global and local capitalism. They are thus busy in determining how to improve their chances to be loved and how to love; deciding which emotions and thoughts they should reveal to others and which to hide; and how to work out their relations with their children and with their parents. Attentive to broad social and political contexts and using a psychoanalytic mode of listening to such negotiated narratives, the book ­highlights the playfulness in which narrators experiment with important events in their lives, especially with intimate and close relationships, and how they form ever-changing narratives for themselves and others. The book demonstrates then how people interact while using and reusing in different ways the diverse symbols, meanings, concepts, motives, and values that are embedded in shared narratives. Carlisle avoids a sociological over-emphasis on the power of structures and the environment and shared symbols in shaping persons. He also rejects a psychological over-emphasis on the power of autonomous individuals to shape their lives. Instead, he carefully carves a middle ground between the social and the individual. In following this ­in-between space at the intersection of shared cultures and selfhood, he looks into the co-construction of narratives as a medium through which persons help themselves and others to come to terms with differences and solve deep problems in their lives. In joining the ethnographic inquiry into the life-worlds of Bangkok’s residents with whom Carlisle has established close connections, the reader gets to rethink about the role narratives play in their and presumably in other human subjects’ lives. Carlisle argues that persons use narratives to negotiate not the meaning of life but the meanings in their lives. As is the case within psychotherapeutic encounters, persons try time and again to figure out through the narratives they tell and retell, edit and co-edit, how they understand and manage the world and their place in it. Further, the flexibility through which such shared, yet ­open-ended, narratives can be transformed allows for ever-changing local experimentation with their meanings, possibilities, and limits.

Series Editor’s Preface     ix

On another level of analysis, Carlisle offers anthropologists and other social scientists a new understanding of social solidarity—how persons are brought together. Even in the face of deep social and personal contestations, people are engaged, he argues, in joint, and separate, efforts to make sense of themselves, their significant others, and the communities they live in. Such interactive and intersubjective work is constituted in an extremely flexible social fabric—Carlisle provides us a new metaphor, “an animated chainmail mesh.” Such a mesh, which is worked out through shared narratives, still has its limits and boundaries, and yet it invites an ongoing cooperation among persons. It also allows individuals to narrate their own ways of being in the world. Carlisle invites us to explore then how societies are brought together not through conformity alone, but by individuals and groups that deeply interact while figuring out shared yet contested narratives. Empathy, satisficing, and joint problem-solving are crucial, he concludes, for sorting out social and personal differences. Yehuda C. Goodman Department of Sociology and Anthropology The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel

Acknowledgments

Several of the ideas in the first chapters of this book were initially explored, in different forms, in articles published in Ethos, the Journal for the Society for Psychological Anthropology. The help and guidance of two of its editors—Janet Dixon Keller and Ted Lowe—played an important role in their shaping, as did the feedback of the (anonymous) reviewers. The seeds of the last chapters appeared in my dissertation. The guidance of the members of my committee—Roy D’Andrade, Arthur Droge, David Jordan, and Richard Madsen—was very helpful in their development. Steven Parish, my committee chair, provided immense support for many years throughout my time at the University of California, San Diego. I would also like to recognize the people who participated in the Dynamics of Belief working group, which began as a panel at the American Anthropological Association meetings, and concluded as a special edition of Ethos: James Bielo, Abby Day, Julia Cassaniti, and Douglas Kline. My writing partner and co-editor for that project, whose efforts were extraordinary, was Gregory Simon. Charles Lindholm provided valuable contributions, and Ethos editor Janet Dixon Keller was instrumental here as well. xi

xii      Acknowledgments

Funding for the original project was provided by the Hayman Dissertation Fellowship, the Stoller Foundation, and the Foreign Language Areas Studies Fellowship. I am grateful to the National Research Council of Thailand for granting me permission to undertake my research. I would also like to thank Sergio Kamm, Tara Knight, Linda Strauss, Peter John, Bob Halliday, Glenn Yarwood, Axel Vogt, Loc Dinh, Ryan Cook, Joseph Boschetto, Edward Chang, Thomas Emsmiller, David Carlisle, Robert Carlisle, Sonu Bedi, David Perlmutter, Gabriel Jones, Adolfo Muniz, Konane Martinez, Danielle Andrews, Jeffrey Bass, Shawn Bender, Sharla Blank, Zachary Orend, Robert O’Leary, and Benton Giap for their advice and support during the many years of work on this project.

Contents

1 Beyond Conformity: An Anthropology of Empathy and Problem-Solving for Understanding Complex Lives 1 The Problem and Its History: Talking About Different Lives in a Shared World 4 A Good Place to Start: The Anthropology of Local, Experiential, Relational Worlds 7 Phenomenology and Person-Centered Anthropology 12 Closing the Intersubjective Divide Through Narrative, Practice, and Language 15 Narratives in Practice 16 Orienting Ourselves in Time and Space: Expanding on Bourdieu’s Practice Theory 17 The Pinch of Destiny in Building Shareable, Personal Truths 23 Chatri 25 The Basic Argument: Living Through Narratives 31 Richard Rorty’s Philosophy of Language 37 The Nature of Languages 37 Passing Theories and the Ad Hoc Nature of Life-Worlds 39 xiii

xiv      Contents

The Grammar of Stories 41 Dynamic and Evolving 43 Summing Things up and Tying Them Together 45 What Comes Next: Negotiating Worlds That Are Larger Than Life 49 References 58 Part I  Narratives That Construct Linguistic Realities 2 How Do Shared Languages Create Personal Narratives? 65 Negotiating a Sense of Objectivity 68 Replacing Internalization with Synchronization 69 The Relationship Between the Shared and the Personal 72 The Grammar of Karma Stories: Standards for Narratives 74 The Language of Karma and the Eyes of Crabs 76 Grammar Rules 1 and 2: Karma as Merciless and Impersonal 77 Rule 3: The Importance of Emotion 78 Rule 4: Karmic Metaphors 79 Rule 5: The Subjective Evaluation Rewards and Punishments 81 Policing Karma Stories 82 The Significance of Synchronizing Languages 83 The Next Set of Problems 86 References 88 3 How Do Stories Create Human Worlds? 91 Experienced-Propositional Beliefs 94 Sincere Belief as a Narrative Expression of Experience 98 Forgetting into Stories 101 Thinking, Hoping, and Feeling into World-Shaping Beliefs 103 More Than Good Luck but Less Than a Choice 104 How Do Personal Truths Create Greater Realities? 106 Belief-as-Experienced vs. Belief-as-Explained 109 Karma Is Real Because Chatri Is Real 112 Conceptualizing Oneself in Buddhist Terms 113 Larger Lives 116 References 120

Contents     xv

4 How Are Differing Personal Realities Shared? 123 Theories That Hold Worlds Together 125 Perspective-Taking and the Development of Dialects 131 Two Ways of Organizing Reality 132 Societies with Diverse Dialects: Holding Together, Moving Apart 136 The Language of Human Nature and the Grammar of Ghosts 140 Practical Experience and the Language of the Self 144 The Work of Problem-Solving: Accommodating Models to Experience 146 What Holds Societies Together? 151 References 156 Part II Languages That Shape Thai Worlds: The Manut and the Khon in Bangkok 5 The Kohn and the Language of Social Obligation 161 Human Nature as Interdependent 164 Khon: The Language of the Obligated Offspring 167 Stories of Sacrifice: Locking into the Language of the Khon 174 Beating Is Better Than Yelling: Control Over Emotions 178 Rieproi Behavior 180 Worldly Lives: Interdependent but Isolated 182 References 190 6 Why Nirvana? The Manut and the Language of Solitude 191 A Place for Emotions that Don’t Fit in the Life of a Khon 194 The Unenlightened Manut 198 Dependent Origination, Defilement, and Solitary Suffering 199 Suffering Alone: Nirvanic Narratives in Everyday Life 201 Khon and Manut as Interconnected 207 -Instead 209 References 214

xvi      Contents

7 Transnational Solutions to a Local Problem: The Human Natures of Buddhist Consumers 215 The Problem of Consumerism in Bangkok’s Cultural Landscape 220 Commodity Fetishism: Theory and Transnational Applications 222 The Social Lives of Commodities 226 Sulak Sivaraksa and Commodity Fetishism in Modern Thailand 227 Understanding Thai Consumerism 231 An Incompletely Capitalist Society: The Khon and Sacrifice Value 233 Love and Money: Related but Distinct 237 Commodities in the World of Khons and Manuts 239 Commodity Fetishism as Therapy Through Stories 241 Narrative Reconstruction as Cultural Psychotherapy 244 References 251 8 The Meanings in Lives 253 The Limits of Flexibility 255 Cultural Experience as Narrative Therapy 256 A Note on Perspective-Taking and Heuristics in Ethnography 259 The End 261 References 263 References 265 Index 275

1 Beyond Conformity: An Anthropology of Empathy and Problem-Solving for Understanding Complex Lives

“Are ghosts real?” I asked Tren. At that moment, the context of the question made sense in my mind, if not in his. It was a hot night. Close to the equator, Bangkok nights are almost always hot, and usually muggy. We were walking west along Silom Road, toward the river and away from what serves as the city’s financial center during the day then transitions at dusk into a sprawl of night clubs, sex clubs, restaurants, and tourist shops. As we continued moving, the city’s congested traffic and glaring neon illumination gradually gave way to quieter blocks of shophouses, stores on the first floors closed and shuttered for the night, the lights in the residential rooms above slowly switching off. Eventually, we came to the neighborhood where Tren’s grandparents had settled when they first came to Bangkok, when his father was a boy.1 This comparatively dimly-lit and deserted old street was the sort of place that frightened most of my friends here. For Tren, who kept hopping behind me so that I would protect him from the cockroaches skittering across the sidewalk, the fear was of these malaeng saab, and not, as it was for most of the Thais I knew, of ghosts.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_1

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2     S. G. Carlisle

Tren said he wasn’t sure if ghosts exist. “They’re like love,” he explained, taking his eyes off the sidewalk for a moment. “If you’ve never experienced love, how do you know if it’s real?” This was an unexpected turn. “Is love real?” I asked. He told me a story he’d seen earlier on the news about a man who had killed himself so his son could use his life insurance to pay off his gambling debts. That was love you could be sure of, Tren said, setting the bar rather high. Love, ghosts, death, and money: These themes float through Thai conversations all the time. But how do they relate? One of the tasks anthropologists set for themselves is to understand how people bring their visions of the world together. In recalling the experience, I can’t help but wonder: What moved Tren’s thoughts from ghosts to love, then money, and back to death? Where did these connections, shaped together into a loose story, come from? How much was standardized by his society, and how much was drawn from Tren’s own idiosyncratic history? How much came to him at that moment, simply in response to the day’s events, the drift of our conversation, or by walking near his family’s old home? And how much did these sources all overlap? If I understood this, it would help me understand my friend—but it was important for other reasons as well. Exploring the way he connects love, death, and money—and karma, and cockroaches, and his family and everything else—reveals how he puts together a vision of his world. Human beings are limited in what they can know, but they create visions of reality that are as large as their universes—almost infinitely larger than the lives that create them. And the way Tren conceptualizes a reality that is larger than his life matters, because this lets us see what motivates him: It gives us a window into the sorts of questions he worries about, the limits of his knowledge, and its possibilities. It reveals the goals he has, the interests he pursues, the fights he will take on, and the ones he’ll let pass. In other words, this vision of the world can also explain how he fits himself into his society. And this matters because the way he thinks and acts and speaks—his unconscious habits and the well-thought-out decisions he makes—constitutes his contribution to Thai society. If we look a bit wider, to the people who have taught him, and the people he influences—people pursuing their own aims—we

1  Beyond Conformity: An Anthropology …     3

begin to see that Bangkok and Thailand are the products of millions of people following their own motivations moment to moment, creating the moving, changing systems that give rise to the next generation of worldviews. There is a line, then, that travels through the narratives individuals tell about their lives, connected to their visions of the world and their conceptions of self. This line travels through the cultural information that members of a society share and teach one another, and then back through to the stories they tell. Knowing this, how can anthropologists talk about how people interpret their worlds? As Sapir pointed out, humans live in dynamic social contexts. They move from one context to the next—one job site, one relationship, one conversation—and the understandings that emerge from those contexts change as well. But Sapir’s vision of a cultural reality made dynamic through communication is only a start. Often, the challenges individuals face don’t come with a good guide for resolution and require a response that doesn’t fit with cultural norms (Holland et al. 1998; Mattingly 2012). Tren could have defaulted to one of several not-so-original answers in his thinking about love. Even when predictable responses are available, drawn easily from a cultural context, people will often come up with theories that come and go, that satisfy for the moment but lack enduring value (Rorty 1989). The flux of ideas and interpretations (restrained more, perhaps, than many people realize, by social forces) is a consistent element of human life. This is one result of living in a dynamic social environment: Making sense of the world, and making sense of other people’s descriptions of it, is often a matter of heuristics more than of identifying pre-set patterns and rules. When Tren set out his theory, he was wondering about the nature of love, but also about the nature of what he could know about love in other hearts. And to some extent, this reflected his notions about what it means to be human, as seen through his ideas about his human abilities to love and to know. The answer that Tren came up with at that moment is part of this dynamic system. It doesn’t reflect some grand final answer about the nature of human life, but it does reflect something fundamentally human, an ongoing project that all of us undertake every day: Starting from his own perspective, he was attempting to

4     S. G. Carlisle

put together, in a new and possibly better way, what he knew about this changeable world, and to work out how he fit into it. We can think of this fragment of conversation about love and ghosts as the work of being human—a tiny, transient piece of Tren’s project of making sense of himself in his world. And just as money and death are rearrangeable pieces of the cognitive networks that Tren used to think, feel, and act with, Tren himself was contributing to the fluid social networks that make up his community, his city, his nation, and the family of our species. How, then, can we make sense of all these moving parts?

The Problem and Its History: Talking About Different Lives in a Shared World Even among members of close-knit societies that appear homogeneous, ideas about how the world works can vary greatly (e.g., Hollan 2000; Wallace 2009; Froese and Bader 2010). When he explored views of God in deep interviews with evangelical Christians in the United States, Peter Stromberg discovered that, among people for whom a relationship with God was very important, individualized conceptions differed radically, even among people who worshipped together (1993). And Schieffelin writes that, among his Kaluli subjects, all of whom ostensibly observed the same religion, the fact that there was no standardized form that allowed information about the spirit world to be passed from one person to the next meant that “there [was] a great deal of variation in what people know about the invisible realm and many lacunae and inconsistencies in the content of this knowledge” (1985: 720). Schieffelin asserts that this lack of semantic order is interesting in part because of “the difficulty it poses for conventional ways of talking about a ‘belief system’” (1985: 720). Heuristics play a larger role here than the Kaluli seems to realize. Anthropologists cannot depend upon the presence of shared, stable, underlying cultural conceptions to make sense of the societies they study. Since Durkheim’s day, many of the approaches anthropologists have typically pursued show a marked tendency to focus on the forces that lead to conformity (Laidlaw 2002: 312). They have not gone so

1  Beyond Conformity: An Anthropology …     5

far as to deny the existence of difference and variation within a cultural context, but they have created the illusion of an overly stable foundation of cultural forces which bring people back to the norms when they stray. I will call these approaches sociocentric because they emphasize the power social forces have to create realities which individuals must assimilate. Sometimes the assumption of a more-or-less unassailable grounding is overtly stated in the theories anthropologists propose; at others, it is simply implied.2 Playful innovations like Tren’s give us reason to question the solidity of that foundation. In my life, at least, there are often moments when assumptions about the strength and breadth of what I take to be foundational cultural norms suddenly seem ungrounded. The evidence for this incompletely shared order in our social worlds can become visible when people become perplexed by a poem written by someone like themselves, or in the time spent with intelligent, thoughtful people who lay out unexpected views, had their perspectives challenged by a contemporary novelist or philosopher or friend, been surprised by the insight of a student, or who has ever discovered that their loved ones are not exactly the people they thought. Anthropologists should not take the firmness of the foundation of shared cultural norms for granted. In this book, I will propose an approach that decenters the forces that lead to conformity, balancing them with the importance of individual experience, goals, empathic understanding, and practical problem-solving. This leads to an anthropocentric approach to anthropology—one that recognizes the power of social forces but also realizes the fact that their power is limited by several factors. First, cultural information is communicated from individual to individual. Like a great game of telephone, a society’s understandings are apt to change as they are transmitted. In this approach (as in many other contemporary approaches), people always face one another when trying to figure something out rather than referring to a set of standardized norms. The ability to make sense of what other people think and do requires a sort of cognitive empathy. This, along with cooperative problem-solving abilities, is an essential skill for negotiating cultural life and worthy of study (Carlisle 2015). While social forces do tend to limit the changes that

6     S. G. Carlisle

emerge from incomplete and flawed communication, evolution and variation are features of cultural transmission, and should not be treated as bugs in a Durkheimian world. Second, personal circumstances often give rise to new, unexpected, and unpredictable experiences that fall outside of cultural norms. These can lead to idiosyncratic reconceptualizations of both the world and one’s sense of self. As a result, ways of thinking, acting, and seeing the world are not just the product of individual assimilations to cultural norms, fitting new information into existing models. People often accommodate new information as well, reshaping their models to incorporate what they have learned in new and, at times, distinctly individual ways. The anthropocentric anthropology explored here examines the forces that lead to accommodation—changing models to take new information into account—as well as better-explored tendencies toward assimilation. As Tren attempted to understand the world he lives in, how much was shaped by shared standards, and how much was filtered through the unique lens of his own individual experiences? The central questions in this book explore the balance between conformity and individual innovation, and the use of heuristics and empathy in creating and communicating understandings of the world. We can sum them up this way: How do people negotiate their visions of what the world is, how it works, and how they fit into it?

If we live in a world where there are no final standards that people can refer to when they assemble those visions—or if they are prone to play with them, as Tren was, or if they are confronted with contradictory interpretations, evidence that is incomplete or ambiguous (as Bourdieu [1977] suggests), or if, as Schieffelin argues, people only assume, mistakenly, that their pictures are complete and the same as other ­people’s—then how is it possible for people to develop visions that are comprehensible to others? As we ask this question about what goes on on the level of individuals, then, we must also ask about the ways people relate to one another:

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How should we approach the question of social coherence without reifying a solid underlying stratum of shared understandings?

It is important to develop a model that finds an appropriate range between rigidity and openness. It must be open enough to recognize the differences among people, and the challenges to communication and cooperation that they pose. But it must also account for the ways that relatively weaker cultural norms maintain coherence so that these differences don’t lead societies to fly apart, sinking human lives into mutual incomprehensibility at too large a scale. If anthropologists can’t refer to a dependable set of shared cultural norms, then we must develop an approach that foregrounds the local, experiential, and relational. In other words, this model must be person-centered as it explores the impact of social forces. For people like Tren, these issues come into focus when we look at how they negotiate their ways through their worlds. Most Thai Buddhists rely on two different sets of perspectives on reality and ways of finding meaning and value. One, embracing Buddhist values and philosophies, is taught at the temple. The other, built on the value of relationships and comfort, is learned largely in the home. This leads to another practical, ethnographic question: How do Bangkok’s Buddhists reconcile the demands of Buddhism with the demands of family life?

A Good Place to Start: The Anthropology of Local, Experiential, Relational Worlds Using the tools available to them in their complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory social worlds, how do people create, negotiate, and communicate their visions of what is and what should be? Holland et al. (1998) have developed an approach that recognizes the power of social forces in shaping individual identities while also acknowledging the fact that forming an identity—making the connection between someone’s vision of self and their environment, and

8     S. G. Carlisle

making sense of that self ’s place in the environment—requires work on the part of the individual. By focusing on the work people must do to learn to be themselves, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds places the individual at the center of a number of “figured worlds,” a complex web of institutions and relationships, each of which brings with it its own roles, goals, and symbols (1998: 41). The work of identity formation is done as people learn themselves into the forms of autobiographical narratives available in their environments. For example, problem drinkers begin to understand themselves as alcoholics as they internalize the form of the Alcoholics Anonymous story (1998: 74). Then, they can apply personal symbols, drawn from the experiences of an individual’s own life, to fill out the narrative structure, to make it feel coherent and true. While Holland et al. provide some space for innovation—they say that human agency “may be frail” in many cases, but extant—by and large the examples they provide explore the ways that people establish themselves within worlds that are already well defined (1998: 5). People are presented with sets of symbols that they can use—and choose to use in somewhat unorthodox ways—but eventually, the people the researchers encounter come to inhabit worlds figured in much the same ways. There is a subtle focus, then, on an underlying set of shared cultural structures. The contributions these authors make to the conversation about the relationship between visions of the world and narrative are significant, but since the publication of Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, a number of anthropologists have begun to articulate approaches that recognize the larger role unpredictability plays within cultural environments and the improvisation it requires. The recognition of underlying structures, then, appears more and more to be a reification of structures that don’t always exist. The result has been the development of more person-centered, and also less sociocentric, approaches. In recent years, many anthropologists have begun to recognize that the unpredictability of human lives means that innovation, experiment, and improvisation are central to human life. When people diverge from cultural norms, they are not necessarily creating exceptions to ­pre-set rules (Garro 2000). If there isn’t a shared set of stable underlying

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cultural norms to refer to, people end up using heuristics, combined with their empathic abilities, to make sense of an unpredictable world. Anthropologists who favor this approach have been developing frameworks that make space for greater interplay between individual minds and social forces. This realization was a long time coming. Laidlaw (2002) sees Durkheim’s influence as the reason why anthropology has focused largely on the ways societies restrict human action. He attributes this to Durkheim’s notion that people are so awed by the power of society that they naturally want to follow its dictates (2002: 313). Because social forces cause people to internalize certain attitudes, these forces shape their perspectives and visions of themselves as well. The strength ascribed to social forces—and the tendency to orient theories around them—might be why the study of society has focused not just on the sources of “unfreedom” of action, as Robbins (2007: 294) calls it, but on the forces that lead to conformity of thought as well. If anthropology has become structurally predisposed to emphasizing the sources of conformity while downplaying the tendencies people have to diverge from them, it has also become clear that these forces lack the power to shape identities and choices completely (Parish 1994: 278). A number of paths have emerged that explore the significance of the individual as the locus of experience, effort, and motivation (Parish 2008; Mattingly 2012, 2013). A number of approaches, fitting loosely under the rubric of ­person-centered anthropology, focus on individual experiences. They examine the ways that personal histories and perspectives reflect both shared norms and the work individuals do to make sense of their realities (Desjarlais and Throop 2011; Hollan 2012). These approaches allow them to explore social realities without getting caught up in the prevailing Durkheimian orientation. While recognizing the power social forces hold in shaping individual lives, person-centered approaches also draw attention to important questions about how people negotiate their relationships with social norms. (Some person-centered approaches, therefore, end up being more sociocentric, others more anthropocentric.) Although person-centered anthropologists take a variety of different tacks, they generally share an interest in developing an anthropology that is local, experiential, and relational.

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Parish points out that a person’s self is not a stable, fixed, essentialized thing, but rather the product of ongoing negotiations (2008: x–xi). Selves reflect an interpolation between preexisting senses of self and the adjustments that need to occur in order to make sense of one’s self in one’s current situation (2008: 77, 103). And because societies are built in part from the interactions between these flexible, moving forms, society exists as a process as well. Some recent person-centered studies in moral anthropology raise questions about the limits of shared cultural knowledge, and how far it can go in guiding an individual’s responses to the situations she faces. Setting aside the notion that humans interact in an orderly, easily comprehended reality, Cheryl Mattingly looks to ancient Greek tragedies, which explore the relationship between humans and their chaotic, contradictory worlds. Life is fragile, she writes, and people are vulnerable to a variety of unpredictable forces (2012: 168). She follows this to the conclusions that general rules cannot be applied effectively to many specific situations, and that innovation is often necessary. Instead, human lives are laboratories, and people experiment with different moral identities as they attempt to shape themselves into the people they want to be (2013).3 Mattingly argues that many anthropological approaches to morality have “a tendency to equate the moral with systems or structures rather than persons and an inclination to define agency in terms of practices rather than the efforts of particular individuals in particular circumstances” (Mattingly 2012: 175). The emphasis frequently falls on externally imposed processes of teaching and shaping instead of on work people do to shape themselves. This is problematic for several reasons. First, the focus on social forces can make it difficult to talk about the interactions of diverse motives and moral creativity within the ­individual (2012: 177). Furthermore, when theories focus on the sources of conformity, they allow little space for the small experiments that people perform—like Tren’s, when he made the connection between love and ghosts—in questioning cultural norms. These little experiments, in a moral mode, at least, are quite common, she claims (2013). And, when aggregated over time, they can lead to social change. This is something sociocentric approaches tend to overlook.

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Taking person-centered approaches, both Mattingly and Jarrett Zigon (2014) argue that people must work to be able to make sense of their situations. Further, the moral work they do can shape their ­relationships and social contexts in ways that anthropologists might not expect if they focus only on social forces. By attending to the individual, and her self-shaping work, both anthropologists raise questions about the stability and predictability of social norms, and, therefore, raise questions about the ways people connect with, and make sense of, the worlds in which they live. As a result, their work points toward theories that emphasize the importance of individual thought and action along with social forces, moving away from assumptions about the centrality of conformity. Sociocentric approaches also frequently overlook the fact that these experiments can produce individuals who take different perspectives on their experiences and assemble their visions of reality in different ways. This leads to another issue with studies that focus on conformity. As Douglas Hollan points out, when anthropologists assume the existence of a solid foundation of norms, they overlook the significance of the differences among experiences and perspectives (2012: 43). This simplifying tendency obviates the need to look at variations between individuals, or to measure the strength, breadth of acceptance, or significance of the norms anthropologists perceive. They have tools for evaluating these variations—as Strauss and Quinn explain, the stability of shared information exists on a spectrum, ranging from the widely shared and long-term stable to the temporary and transient. When does something become shared enough to be considered “cultural”? It is “simply a matter of taste,” they write (1997: 122). The sort of cognitive approach Strauss and Quinn describe, built around the ways people assemble their visions of the world, does not fit comfortably with the selves presented in sociocentric theories, which downplay the significance of individual perspectives. It is important to recognize the variations in experiences that lead to the incomplete sharing of norms and values. Hollan (following William James) calls this the “pinch of destiny,” the necessary variation inherent in human lives and, therefore, human minds (2012: 42).

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Phenomenology and Person-Centered Anthropology A robust anthropocentric approach must allow us to distinguish among individuals’ visions of reality without generalizing by cultural or demographic group. How can we temper what we have in common with that personal pinch of destiny? Where do lived worlds overlap, and how do people communicate across the differences? More simply put, when people share a conversation, what, exactly, is it that they share? When Thai Buddhists talk about love, there are generally some basic ideas that they share with one another. For one, love is thought to involve sacrifice. And because most of Bangkok’s Buddhists have been taught to avoid intense emotional expression, love is often communicated indirectly, through actions that hint at it rather than through words. While this can give us a general sense of what Thais mean when they speak of love, to understand what “love” means to Tren as opposed to some prototypical Thai (who, of course, does not exist), we need to look at his personal experiences as well as the social forces he encounters. When we speak, Tren and I pass words between us—but rak and phi connote things very different from love and ghost, the English terms I use as their closest equivalents. And even among people who think more naturally in Thai than I do, different experiences give rise to different conceptions. Pannee, for example, told me that she didn’t require the grand gesture of suicide to express her love for her husband or their daughter; cooking and keeping a clean house should suffice. And this concept of love differs from what Gop thought. His mother died when he was very young, but sometimes he glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye, he said, hovering just out of sight, looking after him in her ethereal way. If a young bachelor like Tren talked about rak with Pannee or Gop, they would use the same word, but the meaning would reflect the very different configurations of their own experiences with love. They had certainly heard similar discussions on love at their temples, seen some of the same music videos, and sat through many of the same saccharine romances that the Thai entertainment industry produces in abundance. They all understand the word—but this does not mean that they understand it the same way. What they are doing is fitting these shared words into personalized patterns of understanding

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and views of the world. When people share a conversation, then, what is it that they actually share? All we can be sure of is that they share the experience of having a conversation. If we want to understand Thai conceptions of love in a way that goes beyond simply being able to use the word conversationally, then we have to move beyond the forces that shape shared, general understandings, and think about the specific experiences of specific people. In addition to making sense of unpredictable words, then, we must also be able to make sense of the fact that people share a physical reality, but because of that pinch of destiny, their visions of what the world is and how it works are often out of synch with one another. How can we make sense of their differences, while also recognizing the importance and extent of the similarities? Questions like these are central to phenomenological anthropology. Many phenomenological anthropologists are working toward an anthropology that is local, experiential, and relational, reflecting the unpredictability of human life and the dynamic nature of societies. They have developed an increasingly robust understanding of the functions of experience in shaping social realities. Phenomenological anthropologists adhere to a variety of different approaches and methodologies; in general, however, they prioritize embodied, intersubjective, temporally informed perspectives and are wary of theories that move too far from what individuals experience, both from within their bodies and from without, consciously or on the periphery of conscious perception (Desjarlais and Throop 2011: 92). Here, it is important to distinguish between the typical assumption that people share a common reality and their individual visions of reality. These visions are what many phenomenological anthropologists call the life-world—one’s interpretation of reality, taken for granted as real but also historically conditioned, that people generally take to be reality itself (Desjarlais and Throop 2011: 91–92). Building on the work of Husserl, Alessandro Duranti (2009, 2010) shows a number of points of fracture where life-worlds can diverge from one another.4 He argues that intersubjectivity—awareness of the presence and influence of other people—is a prerequisite for communication (2010). When people employ conceptions like the life-world, they assume that other people have minds similar to their own, and

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that the minds around them attend to the same objects in the same world. This is an important point for Duranti. A belief that communication and mutual understanding are possible can occur only if there is a sense that people share common experiences. As a result, people believe in a shared vision of reality when, in fact, this notion is an educated guess, not a certainty. It is possible, then, that life-worlds are quite different from one another, each developed in its own way, with its own symbols and sets of meanings. Duranti explains that there are a ­number of ways that people come to recognize a common physical reality while still creating their own individuated visions of it.5 He paints a picture of a social world in which people share an orientation to reality and often think they share an interpretation of it, but also live in distinct life-worlds. Sapir (1949) writes: While we often speak of society as though it were a static structure defined by tradition, it is in the more intimate sense, nothing of the kind, but a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity ranging from a pair of lovers or a family to a league of nations of that ever increasing portion of humanity which can be reached by the press through all its transnational ramifications. It is only apparently a static sum of social institutions; actually it is being reanimated or creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature which obtain among individuals participating in it.

Societies are made coherent, to some extent, through the pressures placed on people as they fit (or fail to fit) into their social relationships. But the differences in personal histories that give rise to different ­life-worlds make Sapir’s statement about the dynamic nature of society even more important. These meetings of individuals appearing in one another’s life-worlds—collisions, collusions, harmonizations, and synchronizations— inform the relationships that underlie institutions. People work together, but also independently at the same time. They must understand one another—having a sort of cognitive empathy—without becoming each other. They influence one another, but they do not move in lockstep.

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Closing the Intersubjective Divide Through Narrative, Practice, and Language So instead of living in cultural worlds in which shared meanings and responses to social forces can be taken for granted—reflecting the heritage of Durkheim—we must find other ways to talk about how societies hang together. These are cultural worlds where improvisation is necessary, as Mattingly and Zigon argue, and where mutual understanding faces significant barriers. These are worlds where interpretation, both of the world around us and of one another, poses challenges, and, therefore, perspective-taking (a form of cognitive empathy) and solving social and cultural problems are essential skills. How can we deal with intersubjectively defined social worlds while recognizing the ad hoc, innovating nature of human thought and action? If everyone lives in his own life-world shaped by his own unique pinch of destiny, and if social forces are limited in their power to produce conformity in thought and action, then how can people learn to communicate across the intersubjective divide? Often, the stuff that gives rise to meanings that motivate actions— what people use to make sense of themselves and their worlds—is best studied through the stories that they tell about their own lives and the lives of others, and through what those stories tell us about the webs of meaning that support them. The underlying practices of storytelling, narrative-shaping procedures that make one person’s stories comprehensible to his friends, allow societies to hold and grow together. At the same time, individual experiences provide material for those stories, allowing people to find meanings that suit their own needs. The rest of this chapter provides the grounding for an anthropocentric anthropology that lets people think and experience themselves into their own compelling life-worlds while, at the same time, allowing for intersubjective communication and cooperation in changeable, unpredictable cultural realities. This approach will be fleshed out more fully in later chapters.

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Narratives in Practice In describing the significance of narratives for the creation of human identities, Capps and Ochs (1995) pay close attention to the creation of delicate, varied life-worlds. They explore the stories told by Meg, a woman who suffers from agoraphobia-based panic attacks. They identify a “master narrative” to explain her attacks—one that fits with the expectations laid out by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders (Capps and Ochs 1995: 11). But they also recognize a second story, and a second set of symbols, hidden under it. Acknowledging this subjugated narrative, Ochs and Capps argue, is essential to understanding Meg’s agoraphobia (1995: 11–12). Like many of their anthropologist colleagues, psychologists involved in narrative therapy are heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. They often differ from the anthropologists, however, in the elements of his work they emphasize. Many psychologists focus more closely on the ways that people compose unique identities, paying less attention to the influence of forces that lead to conformity of thought. Michael White and David Epston, for example, argue that the basic human ability to reshape the symbols that constitute one’s narrative, and even change the shape of the narrative itself, can be essential to improving mental health (1990). The focus on unique, individual self-development suggests that communication is possible even when one person’s autobiographical life-world is out of synch with those she encounters. Because they focus on reconceptualizing individual life-worlds, ­narrative therapists are often able to treat the secondary characters in stories like Meg’s as static entities. Given the parameters of their studies, this is a luxury they can realistically and responsibly afford. But anthropologists working to understand broader social contexts must consider the ways people influence one another. How does communication and cooperation across disparate life-worlds work? Extending Bourdieu’s practice theory to apply to ­ ­narratives will help here. In order to that, we must begin with an ­explanation of how humans orient themselves in their worlds.

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Orienting Ourselves in Time and Space: Expanding on Bourdieu’s Practice Theory Pierre Bourdieu lays out a practice theory that explains how people use memories of physical movements that come to feel natural to establish their sense of the real (e.g., 1977). This guides their thoughts and actions. This approach is incomplete; other memories, including those that build stories, also create taken-for-granted senses of what is true. In this way, a sense of veracity comes not just from our relations in space, but through a different type of time than the one Bourdieu addresses—through the stories of our histories—as well. In order to make these corrections to his practice theory, it’s important to recognize that Bourdieu’s approach is just as much about memory as it is about the body. First, however, we must look at the ways people situate themselves in reality. There are a few existential facts about human beings that shape their perspectives. We all exist at a single spot in space at any given moment, which means that we can only perceive a tiny piece of the information we might need. And while we can theorize about what goes on in other minds, we cannot be sure about it. As social beings, we often find ourselves having to guess. Instead of assuming that people are able to understand the expectations of others completely by dint of a shared culture, anthropologists often recognize that people orient themselves toward one another. They often use perspective-taking—the learned tendency to adjust one’s perspective in an attempt to see things from someone else’s point of view (e.g., Epley et al. 2004). In this cognitive form of empathy, people attempt to reconcile the information that shapes their life-worlds with what they figure exists in other people’s. This form of intersubjectivity takes place between two people at a time at its most effective, and not society as whole. One needs to know the people from whom one takes perspectives to do it well—and recognizing the use of perspective-taking gives anthropologists the ability to explore how people share cultural information with much greater precision. In addition to information shared with others, human visions of reality are shaped by our perceptions of time. We can perceive only things that happen in our time scale, seeing neither a balloon ripping

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apart as it pops nor the galaxies drifting away from one another. We can only guess about the future, but we can remember what went on in our pasts—to a certain extent. Memory is far from a perfect recording system as it is often portrayed. It is mutable; one’s past (as one remembers it) changes as one’s needs in the present change (Marsh 2007). It is often taken for granted that a person’s certainties—in the form of her truths—motivate her actions. In fact, the situation is not so simple: As I will show, because of the way memory works, a person’s motivations can also create the memories that lead her to her truths. The ­habits of thought that go into building one’s narratives, then, shape the ­information one chooses, and this helps organize one’s life-world. (This feedback loop between motivation and memory can push life-worlds even further apart.) How do we construct our visions of the universe if we are stuck in such tiny fragments of space and time? Bourdieu criticized anthropologists who thought of culture as “an explicit and at least ­semi-formalized… repertoire of rules ” (1977: 2. Italics in the original). Because life presents us with all sorts of circumstances, often unexpected, sometimes unique, no set of cultural rules for behavior could cover all of them. The ways that people organize the memories of their past experiences, then, take the place of cultural templates as an ­important part of the ways they assemble their realities. Bourdieu’s observations about the different ways that memory informs experience and behavior coincide with experimental e­vidence gathered by memory psychologists. The formulations laid out by Endel Tulving are consonant with those laid out by Bourdieu and expand on them. Understanding Tulving’s scheme allows us to understand Bourdieu’s practice approach more deeply and to extend it beyond bodily habits to encompass the habits that go into storytelling as well. Based on the observations of the different ways information is acquired and used, Tulving divides memories into three distinct c­ategories, all of which contribute to human understandings of reality: semantic, procedural, and episodic (Tulving 1985: 2). We need all three of these to function, but each of these behaves differently and contributes ­different aspects to our visions of the worlds around us.

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Semantic memories are of general knowledge and all types of facts (Tulving 1985: 2). A form of declarative or noetic memory, these memories can often be brought to consciousness easily and constitute rules, norms, bits of trivia, and conceptions about the workings of the world. They can be used to build a map of the world, but by themselves they tend to seem rather disconnected; someone can know that Chester A. Arthur was the twenty-first president of the United States, but have no idea of the context in which he learned it. Semantic memories often lack emotional connections or personal significance. Although they can be useful, it may also be difficult to imagine why memories like the one about President Arthur persist in one’s mind. Semantic memories gain significance, however, when attached to procedural and episodic memories.6 Procedural memories are instructions for doing things. They allow people to tie their shoes, bake cookies, and balance checkbooks. These memories connect us to our environments. They are anoetic or non-declarative: When I tie my shoes, the particular steps don’t come to my conscious mind. I just seem to do it. We can think of these memories as relating to three different fields: They deal with “the acquisition, retention, and utilization of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills” (Tulving 1985: 2). The procedural memories that govern motor skills—the ones that allow someone to strike a commanding pose, or to bring in the harvest—are what Bourdieu calls the body hexis, and they sit at the heart of Bourdieu’s approach (1977: 82). Bourdieu argues that the fact that they are non-declarative sets these instructions outside of the actor’s awareness and removes them, to some extent, from rational analysis. (More recent work, however, has shown that this is not entirely correct. See Desjarlais’s and Throop’s discussion of phenomenological anthropology [2011].) From the hexis grows the habitus. Once habituated thoroughly enough, procedures feel natural and are taken for granted as correct and proper, Bourdieu argues—and in this way they become the solid foundation on which understandings of reality are built. The symbols that attach to them and the social structures that reflect them— these are generally semantic memories—come to feel natural as well. Knowing how to gauge one’s grasp when shaking hands is a procedural

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memory; knowing when to shake hands involves semantic knowledge of social norms. Understanding that one’s honor depends on fulfilling a promise that one has shaken on, then, grows from this, and from that grows a piece of a sense of how the world works. This combination of memories Bourdieu calls the habitus (1977: 72). What Bourdieu names habitus I will call a procedural complex of memories. I give it this name to highlight the connections between the different types of memory and one’s experienced world; this will be important since the different types of procedural memories create their own types of memory complexes. The solidness of the habitus spreads through the stories people tell about their lives in the form of interpretations of experiences, Bourdieu asserts, and creates a complex of memories that constitute a vision of reality—connecting to both semantic and episodic memories as well— that is anchored in motor-skill procedural memories. Built from the totality of a group’s hexis, these ways of being come to feel obvious and natural—taken for granted that this is how the world works. Bourdieu calls this experience doxa and describes it this way: “a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization (as in ancient societies) the natural and social world appears as self-evident” (Bourdieu 1977: 164). In this way, Bourdieu explains, connections that exist in memory come to feel like objective truths. Bourdieu argues that people choose how to behave in each situation, with its unique aspects, by using what he calls “practical sense” (1977: 66). He describes this as “social necessity turned into nature, converted into motor schemes and body automatisms…” (1977: 69). Responses to situations don’t usually require people to step back, analyze their situations, and then reference those analyses against a compendium of cultural norms. Instead, he explains, people respond in ways that appear instinctive because they have become familiar, and, being based on or built on anoetic procedural memories, they are not conscious. The idea of practical sense, then, plays a powerful role in his theory because it eliminates the need for a broad, coherent “culture” altogether. Instead, people respond to each situation by acting on internalized senses of what is appropriate in that moment, drawn, often, from what they learned elsewhere.

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Bourdieu explains that building his practice theory around ­ otor-skill procedural complexes makes it fragile. Because these m complexes tend to collapse when challenged with alternative visions of reality that cause people to think consciously about unconscious habits, people can live immersed only in one social game at a time. If one were to try to play a different game—and see things from a different perspective—it would turn the doxa into heterodoxy (1977: 169). It would become open to question and analysis, and, therefore, lose its anoetic, ­taken-for-granted rightness. A more resilient practice approach, then, one that can handle and absorb challenges through conscious thought, should acknowledge the fact that people often shift among different identities and ways of making sense of their world as they pass from one context to another. Furthermore, it should explain how life-worlds change through the accommodation of new and challenging information. A practice theory that could handle this would explain how people’s visions of reality remain flexible as well as resilient, immersing them into their social games in such a way that they don’t necessarily end up questioning the nature of reality altogether, even as they move from one to the next. For Bourdieu, then, realities are built around motor-skill procedural memories. But in his analysis of procedural memories that ground individuals’ visions of the world, I believe he stops too soon. While the non-declarative nature of motor-skill procedural memories causes them to feel obvious and appropriate, this is not the only kind of ­non-declarative memory that can have this effect. Instead of a single habitus—one set of habits drawn from this type of memory—Tulving’s formulation suggests that there can be other kinds of habitus, drawn from other sorts of procedural memories that come to feel natural over time. (We find this in the previously cited “acquisition, retention, and utilization of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills” [1985: 2]). The motor-skill memories that allow a person to sit at a desk and write a series of symbols that form calculus equations are the same as the ones that allow her to compose love letters. But the cognitive-procedural memories that allow her to write letters and do calculus—the habitual paths of conscious thought instead of the habits that guide the hand—are all very different. Making sense of the rest of this chapter

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will be easier if readers remember that motor-skill procedural memories make it possible to accomplish physical tasks, while cognitive-procedural memories make it possible to accomplish mental ones, like telling different kinds of stories. Because of the non-conscious, automatic nature of procedural memories, they are connected to a sense of self only indirectly, through autonoetic memories—consciously accessible memories that contextualize one’s actions in time and one’s body in space (Tulving 1985: 3). Procedural memories, raised in the moment and bound only to the immediate situation, rarely have emotions attached directly to them (Tulving 1985: 3). That is, when someone wins a marathon, it is not the procedures of adjusting the hips for balance and repeatedly squeezing a series of muscles that, by themselves, can cause her to feel pride. What matters are the things she remembers consciously that build into stories—the sense of success after previous failures, the responses of the people around her. This ability to remember oneself in context belongs to another class of memory. This last form—episodic memory—connects people to their worlds in a different way. This kind of memory, and the kinds of thought that go with it, will be the central objects of exploration in this book. Instead of building bridges through physical actions like Bourdieu’s habitus, they connect people to their worlds in time and through a (largely) conscious sense of self. Episodic memories are often related to a particular period in one’s past (this morning, as opposed to when I was living in Thailand) and involve the passage of time (spilling my tea, followed by dealing with the mess). Tulving describes these memories as autonoetic (1985: 3). They involve an autobiographical component (I spilled my tea; I learned about Chester A. Arthur at school) and often bring in emotions, ideas, sensory imagery (my ­history classroom had blue walls and old, wobbly desks), and anything else a human can experience. Episodic memories—the bases for stories—describe connections between things in time and space, following rules specific to different kinds of narratives, that govern connections. “My shoe was untied so I tied it” follows familiar narrative logic to most Americans. “My shoe

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was untied and Pluto is no longer considered a planet” requires further information to make this an acceptable story. It is possible to hold contradictory pieces of semantic information at the same time (to think that Arthur was the 23rd president, for example, while also being kind of sure he was the 21st president). Semantic knowing can, therefore, be an iffy proposition. But if I attach this fact to an episodic memory (wobbling in my desk as Ms. Naramore discussed President Arthur), then this has a veridicality that a semantic memory alone will not. Arthur may not have been the 23rd president, but if I specifically remember my teacher saying it, then the episodic memory of my experience will feel true, even if the semantic element—the fact in memory—has slipped and changed over time. A sense of remembering, associated with episodic memories, imbues a memory with a greater feeling of reliability than the one that comes with calling up a decontextualized semantic fact, even if that fact is correct (Tulving 1985: 10). Therefore, a different sense of veracity (in addition to the one Bourdieu described as coming from motor-skill procedural memories) comes through autobiographical episodic memories. Because autobiographical stories are largely conscious, and can be reinterpreted and edited as one’s perspective changes without losing that sense of veracity, a practice theory that includes the cognitive procedures that support narratives can be both flexible and resilient. And while narratives vary from one person to the next, the fact that people in a society often share knowledge in forms that organize and shape stories—what Jerome Bruner calls canonical narrative forms (2004: 694)—also allows them to learn one another’s symbols and make sense of their meanings quickly and easily.

The Pinch of Destiny in Building Shareable, Personal Truths Most personal conceptions of the world are built not around semantic facts and procedures alone, but also around the episodic memories that hold them together and give them focus and significance.

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Bruner (2004) explains how the remembered, narrated, culturally conceptualized world, and someone’s sense of self in the context of that world, comes into existence as people tell stories about their lives from their own perspectives. Bruner argues that autobiographical stories form the realities through which people live: [E]ventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure ­perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very “events” of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical ­narratives by which we “tell about” our lives. (Bruner 2004: 694)

But then, what does someone put into her stories? The moments in a life tend to be very complex. People receive much more information than they can process effectively or remember. In order to create an episodic memory that is more than an enormous blur of facts and impressions, a selection process must occur. People narrow down the information they retain and build their stories based on culturally learned patterns. Thai karma stories, for example, are built by connecting memories of events following a set of rules specific to stories about karma. (This would lead to the segmenting and purpose-building of stories that Bruner talks about.) The rules that govern the shaping of stories tell a person how to do something. They are, then, a form of cognitive-procedural memory. These sets of memories—procedure-built episodes, populated by the semantic facts that fit into the form of a story, often supported by other facts and assumptions that don’t appear in the story as it is told—develop into what I will call narrative complexes. A habitus built around motor-skill procedures tells people how to move through and act in their worlds, and connects people to their physical realities. In a similar way, a set of habits, built around the cognitive procedures that tell people how to construct culturally recognized stories, connect people to their pasts and futures, and creates their histories. Where Bourdieu starts by showing how people become embodied in space and their physical realities, we can begin here by exploring the ways people are embedded in the truths they perceive over time.

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One’s pinch of destiny may best be understood through autobiographical narratives, as they carry experiences and shape identities. Autobiographical narratives are important in this anthropocentric approach because, in a society with no uncontestable ground rules, in which some interpersonal variety is inevitable, we need to have a theoretical system that allows people (as storytellers in this case) to fit into the range of the normal, while not necessarily being typical. That is, their stories can be comprehensible and acceptable, while also diverging from the most standardized of narrative forms. Few topics, I suspect, reflect one’s pinch of destiny as completely as one’s ideas about love. The people I spent time with in Bangkok had all experienced it, but they had experienced it in different ways. They had all thought about it, and its role in their stories differed. Some looked at it knowing they had found it, others expecting to find it, and a few were in despair about their possibilities. Probably the person who thought the most about it, and talked about it most often, was a man in his early thirties I’ll call Chatri. None of his experiences of love are unique, but many of them are unusual, and of unusual significance for him. His stories are comprehensible, though, because the patterns he uses to articulate them are familiar to the Thais I knew—and, to some extent, to Americans as well. He began telling me stories about love late one night, in my apartment near the center of the city.

Chatri Usually, he sat in one of the chairs and drank tea as we chatted in a combination of Thai and university English, his shirt slightly loosened, tie on the coffee table, but on this particular evening Chatri knelt on the inlaid wood floor, his face buried in the cushions of the sofa as he recalled the afternoon when he was twelve, in a remote, dusty corner of Isan, when he washed his mother’s dead face and, because he was the youngest child, lit the pyre that consumed her. His father quickly ­abandoned what was left of his family. With no place else to go that day, Chatri’s head was shaved, his clothes taken, and he spent the next eight months in the saffron robes of a novice, making merit for his mother, so that she would stay in heaven for a time.

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The monks at Chatri’s temple provided cold comfort, but cold comfort is better than no comfort at all. Attachment to other people causes suffering, they taught, and the best way to alleviate grief is to break the sense of connection. Chatri spent his time in the temple studying Buddhist thought, learning to read Pali-Sanskrit, the long-dead liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, trying to understand the importance of eliminating the things that, according to the monks, most defiled his character—his desires for love and connection. Isolated within the temple community, away from his remaining family, he studied the basic Buddhist truths—that all pleasure leads to pain, that all love leads to loneliness. Chatri had memorized the lessons, the same lessons that all Thai Buddhists learn at the temple as children, and more than this, he believed them. But he could not bend his heart to accept them. And twenty years later, he knelt on the floor and cried into my sofa as he experienced one more time the grief that came with the loss of his mother. He had been dumped again. He’d invested in a relationship with a tourist on vacation, and when the gentle let-down that his friends had all anticipated finally came, he was taken by surprise. Chatri was at my apartment this time, because we had been at dinner together before the bad news which came, via e-mail, at an Internet café with a dolphin theme, directly below the Phrom Phong Skytrain station. He was too upset to go home and face his relatives, who, he thought, did not know he was gay, so I let him stay with me. We started off discussing this short, otherwise-happy relationship, but there was only so much we could say about that. There was a moment of quiet, and Chatri said, plaintively, “I miss my mom.” Other times he had been with other people. He spent the night with other friends and cried with them about his recent loss and the older losses that still dogged him. But how did he get here? How did Chatri end up becoming who he was—almost permanently lonely but also prone to falling in love with the wrong people, a devout Buddhist whose faith had failed to deliver on the Buddha’s promise to relieve suffering? Unable to become the sort of person who follows the Buddha’s instructions and give up his connections to the world, he was also

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unable to turn his back on Buddhist ideals and notions of love to find a different way to develop his relationships. The surrender to grief that night reflects a rift that cut across several different stories that Chatri used to organize his life-world. In a simple sense, looking at the semantic facts about the people in Chatri’s narratives, the tourist had more than a passing commonality with his father and resembled him much more than his mother. A middle-aged man, he also disappeared at an importune moment. But this is not the dimension that mattered: In the expansive, connective logic of narrative thought, what mattered to Chatri was the sense that he had suddenly lost someone to care for him. What brought the tourist into contact with his mother in Chatri’s mind is the idea of unexpected abandonment, a story that he saw repeated again and again. This narrative, and the ideas that supported it, formed a central part of his life-world. Maternal love and adult romance were connected through this narrative complex. Typical semantic categorical notions about the roles of men and women in Thailand, and of rural Thais and visiting farangs, have become jumbled here in this narrative structure as well. His repeated romantic failings, which also play a background role in this story (as part of the underlying narrative complex of his stories about love, they served to confirm, and, at times, drew him to elaborate on, the basic narrative form), were due, he says, to a stain on his karma from his youth that may take this entire lifetime to pay off. Discourses about Buddhism, then, and stories about the loss of parental love, have also gotten tied into his identity as a gay man, and into social games that might result in love. Chatri was proud of his transformation from, in his words, a barefooted farm-boy to member of Bangkok’s professional middle class. At the age of 18, for the first time, Chatri left the tiny village near the Lao border where he grew up to head to Bangkok. His sister lived there, somewhere near a place called Silom Road—and not understanding how large a city could be, he got off the bus and asked around until he met someone who knew her.7 With extraordinary luck, he found his ­sister the day he arrived. Soon, he found a job, delivering maps. One day, as he made a delivery to a large department store, he came across a recruiting booth for

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Ramkhamhaeng University, an affordable public institution with a good reputation that accepts all students who have finished high school. He sold food on the street and worked at the reception desk in a small hotel near the brothels of Patpong to pay for his education and help support his sister’s family. His father came to Bangkok for his college graduation—the first in his village’s history—but Chatri did not know it. He says he learned later that his father came to the gates of Ramkhamhaeng and stood outside, crying, proud of his son’s accomplishment and ashamed of his own failures as a father. Although Chatri did not see him that particular day, it remained an important story in his life, a way of making some sense of his aloneness. When I met him, about a decade later, Chatri had put his ­tenacity, education, and skills to work as an executive for a large European manufacturer, then as an independent businessman, and then as an office manager for a small foreign-owned firm. When I think of him—and the stories I tell myself about him—I often remember one of the pictures he displayed on a homemade table in his apartment. It was taken on a professional-development trip for promising young executives to Scandinavia—a small, trim man from the tropics in a big, bright snowsuit, smiling nervously, looking slightly intimidated by a reindeer. Chatri told a version of this story, too: He was almost always in just a little bit over his head and used his rather remarkable native abilities to try and make things work out. His goals were built deep into his character, interacting with each other—and often contradicting one another. He thought of these in terms of another story that he told himself. When he became successful in his work, he said he would begin to feel the loss of his parents, and a sort of loneliness developed that he couldn’t stave off. This led him into a series of disastrous relationships and quests, quests which have involved quitting good jobs and traveling around the world for months or years to chase the ghosts of love that seem to hover just beyond his reach. When his searches for romantic love foundered (as they always had in the past), and he ran out of money, he would return to Bangkok, find a new job, and begin the cycle again.

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In these stories, romantic failings have little to do with personality differences or mismatched priorities. These are not love stories in the traditional Western sense—they are also karma stories. He attributes these failures to that serious sin he thought he committed as a boy. Therefore, these stories end with his attempts to resolve his problems through private, individual charitable acts of atonement instead of getting to understand the mechanics of his relationships, his partners’ characters and desires, and his own romantic proclivities. For Chatri, the idea that he would fail romantically seemed natural. The cognitive-procedural memories for constructing a karma story involve the idea that, when someone has done something wrong, he will be punished for it. In constructing his story, he saw a cause–effect relationship between his acts as a youth and his problems as an adult. Because people learn by example, often assimilating new ways of doing things through unconscious imitation, habits can become normal without ever becoming conscious. In the same sideways fashion that Thai children come to understand how to present their hands to be held by their parents (a motor-skill procedural memory), they also learn the standards that go into composing the stories of their lives. Chatri’s stories about the temple, and his father, and his karma, are comprehensible not because the people who hear them are already familiar with the specific semantic facts—they do not initially know the details of his personal history—but because they are familiar with the procedural rules that go into telling the types of stories he tells. Chatri—like all people—is embedded in the personal and cultural truths of his history as much as he is embodied in his physical reality. He is a being constituted by the narrative complexes that get expressed through his stories. That is, he understands who he is, as a man, as a son, a lover. He also understands what he is, as a creature of loneliness, and a being in a Buddhist universe, riding the waves of karma, understood not exactly through the experiences he has had, but rather through the stories he built out of them. Many sociocentric approaches tend to describe people using the logic of semantic categories and tend to assume that people envision one another that way, too. But thinking through contextualized narratives is quite different from thinking through context-free semantic facts. Bruner

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(1985) argues that, where semantic fact-based thinking (What he calls “paradigmatic” thought [1985: 102]) is meant to produce logically consistent results and weed out false conclusions, narratives work expansively, making narrative connections that would often be deemed wrong by scientific thought. Where paradigmatic thinking seeks ­context-free, impersonal facts, narratives create visions of verisimilitude that work only in particular contexts (Bruner 1985: 97), following the rules that govern whichever specific story they are being fit into. Where decontextualized facts allow people to develop broadly applicable rules in their thinking, autobiographical narrative thought, with its tendency to expand and contextualize, and to include the teller in its web of connections, creates meanings that may matter only in specific situations (1985: 98). In this way, stories allow symbols to proliferate and take on personal meanings that may become comprehensible to other people through the telling, while also reflecting idiosyncratic experiences. (This is how Chatri’s breakup with a European man connected to his memories of his mother’s funeral. The connection is perfectly clear once one understands the rules of the story from which it comes. And this comes from the ability to see, empathically, the parallels between the parts of the story.) It is not just shared semantic categorization, then, that builds worlds. It is personal experiences and the symbols they give rise to—at times even unique experiences and symbols, formed into narratives—as well. Narrative complexes, then, provide anthropologists with a useful path to explore the relationships between shared narrative forms, individual experiences, and the communication of personal symbols. In their classic work on narrative therapy, White and Epston write: The logico-scientific mode represents personhood as a passive arena that is reactive to impersonal forces, drives, impacts, energy transfers, etc. This is implicit within the terms it sets. It assumes, for the sake of inquiry, that some force or forces internal or external to the person are acting upon the person, and that these are what shape and constitute lives. At times, in such scientific inquiry, persons are reduced to high grade automatons. (White and Epston 1990: 82)

They conclude that they need to recognize the value of narratives if they are to find their clients’ individuality and volition. It is through

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contextualized autobiographical memories that experiences become meaningful, and the greater message of a story becomes true to the teller. Once the rules that govern a world are established, then desiring to act within those guidelines follows naturally. By building his reality in part through his narratives, Chatri is able to connect his unique, personal experiences to one another. He also uses widely shared cognitive-procedural rules (the ones that govern karma stories, and ­ other story forms as well) to build his narratives, which allow those stories to be comprehensible to others. A person’s autobiographical narrative complexes are like her habitus: It doesn’t exactly belong to her. In a way, she belongs to it. It creates the contexts in which she understands herself to exist. While she makes choices based on it, and can innovate to some extent, adding and subtracting elements as makes sense, she is not aware that she is its author—just that she is making it conform better to reality. This notion—of the character writing the novel she appears in—is challenging to articulate, especially when she switches from a reality based on one narrative complex to another. The best way I have to explain it is this: She doesn’t own it; she lives through it instead.

The Basic Argument: Living Through Narratives Exploring the ramifications of the idea that people live through narrative thinking, this book presents a theory of cultural communication, cultural experimentation, and cultural change. Bruner titled his article “Life as Narrative” because, when people look at their pasts, they assemble them in the forms of stories. They use contextualized, connective logic, based on cultural knowledge of the elements of storytelling to create their retrospective visions of their lives. His descriptions are oriented toward reflections on the past; in itself, this has little to say about immediate experience in the present moment. Bourdieu, however, provides a model that we can use to understand how people think themselves into their immediate realities. Instead of discussing lives as narratives, then, I will expand on Bruner’s idea to show that people live actively through narratively organized worlds. (Here, I will use the phrase narrative thinking to refer to thought that

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is guided by the chains of connections made in the specific narrative complexes a person thinks with. This thought provides pictures of narratively organized worlds.) The information organized through narratives doesn’t only shape people’s pasts. Often, narrative thinking orients them and organizes their responses in the present. The information built into narrative complexes also gives people frameworks for communication, problemsolving, exploration, and experimentation. Thais learn to tell a number of different kinds of stories about their lives, adding personal symbols to broadly familiar forms. This allows their stories to become personally meaningful, interpersonally negotiated, and socially shared. Moreover, storytelling allows people to develop narrative complexes that are both individuated and culturally coherent. A large amount of information is communicated through and retained in the culturally recognized stories that shape and are shaped by narrative complexes. These create people’s abstract understandings of their lifeworlds, but can also be called on moment to moment to deal with the situations they face in daily living. This is possible because these autonoetic complexes are built around first-person perspectives— they can be used to compare experiences in the past with the circumstances of the present, and figure out how to respond. They can also be used empathically; by trying to see through another’s eyes, people can interpret, categorize, and, at times, judge the experiences other people convey. As a result, my subjects’ personal histories create predispositions they use to deal with the people and things they encounter (sometimes more successfully than others). These first-person predispositions can, then, be used in a variety of different circumstances. They are portable and also relatively durable— they change along with the narrative complexes that underlie them. In other words, as a product of narrative thinking, applied to the moment, they are a way of thinking about one’s self. It seemed perfectly natural for Chatri to collapse in tears after his breakup. But of course, it wasn’t. He could, for example, have decided he and his friend weren’t well suited for each other and recognized that he was a passive player in a mutual split. He could have fallen into anger,

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or concluded that one of them was too good for the other. Instead, years of experiencing losses—of thinking about them and organizing them into this particular kind of story—had made the easiest path to ­understanding this experience one of grief. The apparent naturalness of his response reflects a certain way of thinking about those narrative connections between identity, emotion, his nature, and his history that made grief seem automatic, natural, and obvious—and maybe even the only possible response at that moment. The story of loss that Chatri told himself was an important first-person predisposition, part of his sense of self. A self, then, is something like a candle flame—it responds to its surroundings actively in each moment, while drawing from, and being shaped by, the wax of its narrative complex.8 A narrative complex exists as a web of connections in memory, but it often gets expressed, from moment to moment and in relation to life outside the mind, through the naturalized, habituated flickering of thought from one connection to the next. The relationship between Chatri’s narrative complex of ideas about love and the form of self related to it is why he cried. This, of course, is not Chatri’s only narrative complex, and not his only self. Thais have a number of selves, useful in different contexts at different times. Like everyone else, Chatri’s selves are built from webs of connections that spread, through the stories he tells himself, to include notions of status and role, propriety and morality, and everything else that contributes to an orientation toward the situations in which he finds himself. Those webs inspire him to feel and suggest logical ­connections of cause and effect specific to the narratives they attach to. These narrative selves reflect the unique, idiosyncratic experiences that arise in each life. They also reflect different identities, often widely shared, informing the values, goals, and habits appropriate to a son, a businessman, a monk. Finally, these predispositions also carry with them diverse ideas about human nature, with its potentials and limitations—as battered by karma, as unperfected in the Buddha’s terms, as seeking love. Instead of relying on impersonal cultural information, people often depend on their practical, instrumental first-person predispositions to make their decisions and hone their ideas. They employ forms of empathy, understanding other people by comparing themselves with them.

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And instead of thinking about the events and objects they encounter in terms of abstract categorizations, they often take a pragmatic, instrumental approach to categorizing, built around their own interactions with them. As a result, Thais do not need to depend on a large volume of impersonal semantic information to make sense of the world around them. Often, they need only a practical understanding of themselves that they can use to empathize with, and measure up against, other people. Because this leaves a good deal of space for interpretation and innovation, there are many opportunities for exploration and creativity while still allowing for cooperation, community, and social coherence. Early one morning, after a party that lasted through the night, I inadvertently created a situation in which I lead a woman to make use of her first-person abilities, to think empathetically about human nature, and to negotiate the shared meaning of a story, and its place in a larger narrative complex, with the people around her. Awakening from an uncomfortable sleep on a chair to noises emanating from the kitchen, I found the young women of the group preparing a number of small dishes—rice, fruits, cooked vegetables—and sealing them tightly in plastic wrap. We took them to the street in front of the house, and several monks, walking silently, in single file through the gray light before dawn, came to collect our alms. We placed the offerings in their bowls, then knelt as they held their hands above our heads and chanted Pali blessings over us. As the monks departed, Aek turned to me and said, “Don’t you feel good?” Bourdieu’s explanation for why kneeling before a monk would produce good feelings makes sense up to this point: It is a learned response to this sort of habituated physical interaction with a monk. But his approach cannot explain what happened next. I felt the way one feels after a long party and a short nap, I explained. I appreciated being able to join in an interesting new experience, but it hadn’t filled me with the sort of satisfaction, it appeared, that the others were experiencing. Aek seemed a little surprised. She said that she always felt good after giving alms; it was automatic, she thought.

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That is, in the relevant narrative complex (one that interwove alms, karma, human nature, and Aek’s own emotions), giving to monks was a source of skillful karma, and the natural result was an increased sense of well-being.9 Aek immediately undertook to reconceptualize her narrative to absorb this new and unexpected piece of information. As Bruner (1985) points out, the logic that people use when thinking through narratives is expansive, contextual, and flexible. It allows people to accommodate and assimilate new information to their stories by finding contextually appropriate connections or by introducing new symbols that fit within an established narrative form. This can happen without falsifying those stories or destroying the feeling of verisimilitude, as happens when people think paradigmatically. She sought information that would not violate the terms of the story. I had not been raised a Buddhist, Aek remembered and, therefore, hadn’t learned the value of giving alms—but I was certainly human, and it made sense to her that all humans would share that feeling. The women discussed this phenomenon, and one of them proposed a new theory to make sense of the moment. Feeling one’s karma was like acquiring a taste for something: You have to know what to look for before you can appreciate it. I really did feel good, on some level, they all agreed. It was natural for a human. But lacking the spiritual sophistication of a lifelong Buddhist, I just didn’t know where to look for the feelings. When I unintentionally challenged her ideas about karma and psychology, they didn’t fall apart, and Aek did not push back, telling me I was wrong. Instead, the women found a slightly new way to fit the facts together, consciously and intentionally changing the story, from applying to human nature in general to differentiating between sophisticated, properly educated Buddhists and the rest of humanity. She did not assemble her theory-for-the-moment from pieces of motor-skill procedural complexes, then; in Bourdieu’s formulation, novelty and doxa do not go together. Instead, it seems likely that, as Bruner suggests, Aek recruited a fact most of my subjects knew from other stories about non-Buddhists.

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I often heard stories about the weakness and limitation of minds that had not been fortified through Buddhist discipline. Chatri once explained that he didn’t invite me to visit his home village, for example, because there were phi bop in the area—these are ghosts that slowly kill their victims by eating their organs—and people like me, who lacked a good Buddhist upbringing, were prone to being possessed. This was supported by widely shared, impersonal knowledge—people generally said it was so. But he also had personal stories of victims who had to be exorcised when they began to show symptoms of possession, and he wanted to spare me the trauma. Aek’s reinterpretation is a pattern I found repeated throughout life in Bangkok: The demands of the present structure memories of the past, and people use their ideas of the past to think about what comes next. The flexibility and openness that occur when people live through narrative thought can be culturally useful. Those first-person predispositions (selves emerging from narrative thinking) can be used to find solutions for a wide variety of problems. It allows people to make sense of unfamiliar experiences by fitting them into familiar categories and schemas, or by innovating new ones. They can be used to promote and justify theories that people find emotionally satisfying, or make the world a little more predictable. And switching between selves allows Thais to confront different kinds of problems simultaneously in ways that individual selves cannot. This flexibility even leaves open the possibility of innovating new versions of older stories creating revisions to ideas of human nature—and these can go on and inform new notions of self. In other words, this flexibility allows room for diversity and change as well as cultural continuity. My intent here is not to suggest that narrative thinking is the only way that people make meaning. But this form has, I believe, been undervalued in anthropology and is much deserving of exploration. Before we conclude, there is one more piece of the puzzle we need to look at: the sources of originality and difference. Bourdieu shows how common bodily habits can lead to conformity and the ­taken-for-granted acceptance of the status quo. But this doesn’t work for autobiographical storytelling; the complexity of individuals’ perspectives on the situations in which they find themselves can produce great

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narrative variety. This poses a problem: How can we understand how people can make sense of one another without a standardized, pre-set guide?

Richard Rorty’s Philosophy of Language Some of the significance of Bourdieu’s work rests on the fact that it moves what anthropologists used to call “culture” inside the individual, providing a way to talk about human thought and behavior as both culturally informed and natural-feeling. It is learned and shared, and also lived through, created in the processes of everyday living. His approach is limited, though, in that it does not account for the fact that people often live through multiple, sometimes contradictory, cultural frameworks. (This is not just a modern phenomenon; Thai Buddhists have had to reconcile two visions of reality described by the Buddha, at times at odds with one another, for many centuries.) As a result, it has little to say about the need to accommodate the “pinch of destiny” that all people carry with them, to engage in the norm-defying experiments that Mattingly discusses, to communicate among lives shaped by different life-worlds that the phenomenologists explore, or to examine the ongoing processes of cultural change that results from these factors, and others as well. Philosopher Richard Rorty sets out an approach that allows for the flexibility Bourdieu’s practice theory lacks without sacrificing the ­intuitive-seeming, lived-through nature that Bourdieu’s practice theory explains. Where Bourdieu focused on everyday living, Rorty constructs his conception of “languages” largely to explain variation and evolution in scientific and philosophical visions of reality. His approach can, however, be adapted to deal with the ordinary issues of everyday life.

The Nature of Languages In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty confronts a central problem in conceptualizing the self. Cartesian dualism, as he describes it, is the idea that there is something inside us—a mythical

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essential self, a human nature that we can’t observe directly but can make inferences about based on our thoughts and behaviors—that is distinct from the material world outside of us. Between the self and the outer world, many philosophers have argued, sit human beliefs (which that self uses to make sense of the outer world) and desires (which motivate its actions). That is, these essential selves are home to interpretive and motivational frameworks that allow us to live in the world (1989: 10). This makes intuitive sense to many Westerners (if not all Buddhists), but it gives rise to a passel of problems that, Rorty says, Western philosophy has not been able to resolve adequately. Rorty addresses those problems, closing that gap between self and world, by replacing a verb: Instead of arguing that humans have beliefs and desires—implying the existence of some unknown, unknowable underlying something that produces them—he asserts that humans are networks of beliefs and desires (Rorty 1991: 265). That is, humans, as far as we can know and experience ourselves, are the interpretive and motivational frameworks that give shape to our thoughts, memories, and feelings. These frameworks, in Rorty’s use of the word, are languages. Instead of a collection of words and rules that govern speaking and writing, a language is a way of seeing the world. Rorty argues that a raw, brute reality exists beyond those interpretive frameworks—but because it exists outside of our interpretations, we can’t be certain of anything else about it. (Since our brains exist in that physical world, our ideas about our brains are products of interpretation as well.) This has not stopped us from trying to make sense of the world however; notions of the workings of the world are fundamental to these frameworks, which Rorty names languages. People don’t simply speak these languages, then; they think with and live through them. Rorty’s languages provide the structures people use to define and organize everything. Languages don’t simply provide interpretations of the world as a whole—they also interpret the things that exist in it. And since people live in the world, languages also produce interpretations of one’s own being. Theories of self and ideas of human nature, then, are the products of the various languages that people use to solve their problems and survive (Rorty 1989: 7). Often, these conceptions arise incidentally, in very unphilosophical ways, as side effects of attempts to resolve problems, as people go about the business of doing other things.

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Some languages are more fully developed to answer some sets of questions, some for others. None of these, in Rorty’s thought, captures any objective truth that exists beyond interpretation, or can be more true than any other. Rorty’s claims about the radical flexibility of languages have been controversial—and they do not fit comfortably with some of the phenomenological ideas described earlier in this chapter. I have chosen to discuss his ideas here (rather than, for example, those of Donald Davidson, whose overall body of work harmonizes more closely with the ideas in this book) because of a relatively narrow aspect of Rorty’s writings—his ideas concerning passing theories and the negotiation of languages. These are, I think, helpful and lead more intuitively into the cultural discussions that follow. But this doesn’t mean that his shortcomings should be overlooked. To avoid complicating this ­chapter further, I discuss the philosophical positioning of this book in the ­endnotes here.10

Passing Theories and the Ad Hoc Nature of Life-Worlds We cannot know reality directly, Rorty argues. We must look through the lenses of our interpretations. These languages—these systems of interpretation—are held together by theories people create about how the world works. Some of these theories are more useful for answering specific problems at specific times than others, and some last longer as well. Meaning systems, then, exist in states of flux. Because it recognizes this flexibility, Rorty’s conception of languages provides us with a solid basis to understand how people think themselves into their culturally informed realities in spite of the dynamic nature of societies. What often appears to be testing the nature of reality is, Rorty argues, a form of creating an interpretation that stands in for brute reality. Therefore, what people think of as external “realities” are actually interpretations that they have created themselves. Humans have a remarkable ability to respond to the unexpected. They invent meanings of their own when clear guidelines do not exist. They are even capable of making multiple meanings out of the same information. Donald Davidson points to the fact that people have the

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ability to make sense of things that should, given the rules of English, be senseless. He cites a lovely piece of not-exactly-nonsense written about a humorist named Ace: The careful conversationalist might try to mix it up with him in a baffle of wits. In quest of this pinochle of success, I have often wrecked my brain for a clowning achievement, but Ace’s chickens always come home to roast. (Davidson 1986: 1)

Instead of using the standard notions of grammar all English speakers know, to make sense of this they have to come up with “passing theories”—devised in the moment to deal with the moment, to figure out what the author intended (Rorty 1989: 14). In this case, the author manages to communicate his message to his audience without following many of the familiar rules. Immediate passing theories are built off of larger theories about what to expect from someone else in general—but as relationships change, these theories, too, pass. Sometimes they are replaced with other transient theories, sometimes with sturdier, longer-lasting (but still impermanent) theories. These more stable passing theories can rely on even larger, longer-lasting theories about what people do in various situations. And these rest on even more enduring theories about the nature of thought, communication, and laws of the universe (1989: 14), some of which, like the idea of karma, have endured for thousands of years. What makes passing theories pass is nothing more than the fact that humans’ understandings about themselves and their worlds (even the understandings that seem most stable) are always, on some level, rules of thumb— always subject to reexamination and recontextualization within a person’s systems of thought. Languages, then, make an excellent place to start to understand the often variable and unpredictable world people find themselves in—but this is not where understanding ends. Rorty uses this to argue that, while languages which seem to have solidified into discourses are important, they should not be thought of as immutably powerful in their ability to shape human thought and behavior. Rather, they act “simply as a flag which signals the desirability of using a certain vocabulary when trying to cope” with a particular context, an invitation to look at things from a certain perspective (Rorty 1989: 15).

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When I asked Tren about love and he connected the concept to something he had seen on the news, this might have been a passing theory he invented in that instant, or it might have been an idea he had developed before and was still thinking with. People make sense of one another not because they have been programmed to recognize an enduring set of underlying norms, but rather because of the flexibility and interpretive capacities that humans show in theory-making and meaning-finding. Rorty’s claim that all language boils down to a series of passing theories, some much more stable than others, is important because it allows us to look at our subjects’ negotiations between shared cultural ideas and their immediate circumstances in a new light. Communication is possible not because people understand specific culturally defined ideas, but because they either know, or are able to intuit, the rules that govern the exchange of information. Rorty’s approach implicitly recognizes the natural ability to make use of creative problem-solving and perspective-taking to create coherent social behavior and communication.11 This framework allows us to think of our interpretations as fundamentally flexible, and able to shift as we encounter new information and circumstances. (As suggested above, interpretations are not infinitely flexible—but it is helpful to start with an orientation that accepts flexibility as normal, rather than taking “unfreedom” as the default.) Anthropocentric approaches like this—with a fundamental emphasis on the ways that people deal with their worlds, rather than just the ways their worlds impose cultural forms on them—provide a robustness to human interaction that sociocentric theories cannot. More than that, it requires us to look at the role that immediate interpretations of circumstances play in the negotiation and renegotiation of meaning systems.

The Grammar of Stories In Rorty’s view, languages are ways of talking about—and seeing and living in—the world. As socially shared interpretations, they are learned and negotiated—and not the self-evident, natural, or intuitive responses

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to the world outside as many people assume. Rorty’s work is useful to anthropologists in that it lets us think about members of a society as actively creating or affirming the languages they share. This allows for a certain amount of room for change and openness in dealing with different circumstances. And this, then, leads to the evolution and individuation of these frames of reference. “The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs.” Rorty writes. “But it cannot propose a language for us to speak” (1989: 6). Rortean languages exist both as psychological structures in individual minds and as mediums for social communication. Like all visions of the world, they are stored in the three types of memories Tulving describes—and, therefore, in the different types of memory complexes discussed earlier. These complexes lead to meaning systems that can create a detailed (if often incomplete) interpretation of reality. And because languages are generally negotiated socially, there must be guidelines that help people understand one another.12 Therefore, Rortean languages (like spoken languages) have grammars—structures that people learn which help them make sense of what other people say. Where the guidelines of English grammar shape sentences, the grammars of Rortean languages are used to organize understandings of everyday life. These understandings are often built around the stories that people tell. And where English grammar organizes words into patterns that others can interpret easily, the grammar of a story allows people to organize symbols (a mother dying, a father crying, a boy working his way through school) in ways that others will understand. Therefore, the tools people use to organize their stories—the cognitive-procedural knowledge of how a certain kind of story should go—become part of the shared grammar of a language. When Thais use the language of kammatic Buddhism to talk about a karmic experience, for example, the specific details of a story someone tells might be unfamiliar to the listener, but these stories follow a well-known narrative grammar which organizes the vocabulary of symbols they use to tell it. Knowing these basic patterns makes it possible for listeners to make sense of unfamiliar information. The Thai Buddhists I spoke with all understood the grammar rules (stored as ­cognitive-procedural memories) governing karma stories implicitly. In a

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proper karma story, every good deed must be answered with good fortune, similar in size and kind to the original deed. Bad deeds are repaid in the same way. If a story does not include these elements, then it is not a proper karma story (Carlisle 2008). Like other procedural memories, the grammar rules that govern the production of karma stories are largely n ­ on-conscious—but my subjects knew them. While they did not normally articulate them directly, and found it somewhat difficult to do, when I told them a karma story that did not adhere to these rules, they could identify and correct points that were not true to the narrative form (Carlisle 2008). The structure of karma stories, familiar among Thai Buddhists, makes it possible for listeners to develop a reliable passing theory about the details of what the teller is trying to convey. In much the same way that people expand their vocabularies by taking the meaning of a new word from context, the familiar framework of the story makes it possible for listeners to expand their Rortean vocabularies to include the new symbols that appear in the story which they now share with other people who know the story.

Dynamic and Evolving If we step back and look at the broader social environments in which languages exist, then, we can see that they do not partition the knowable universe into neat, cogent divisions. They are dynamic, responding to intellectual and cultural pressures. Just as organisms compete to survive, languages exist in social environments shaped and defined by other languages. They evolve, sometimes vying for survival based on social utility (not objective correctness), or overlap with other languages, providing different, and sometimes competing, sets of meanings and truths. The evolutionary nature of Rorty’s languages allows them to respond to the needs of groups as well as individuals. Successful innovations in the ways people conceptualize things are ones that listeners can make sense of, and apply most effectively. New ways of organizing and interpreting what one encounters in the world are always being invented and tested—new ideas about love, for example, like the one Tren came up

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with—and those that answer common questions in useful ways linger, then spread as others learn them, and become part of a language. When the new story form is useful or helpful, it tends to spread from person to person. Innovations tend to arise, which Rorty calls “metaphors.” Like coral growing in the ocean, they enter common usage, become part of the ways people think, and form the foundation on which the next generation of innovations will grow (1989: 16). The stories that result can themselves become the grist for the passing theories of friends and relatives as they negotiate each other’s narratives and help one another provide explanations and interpretations of their experiences (Ochs et al. 1989). In this way, the narrative complexes that support one’s autobiography are not just the product of one’s past; they can also be the products of one’s individual needs in the present. And they are not just built from one person’s memories, but can be negotiated through the different relationships in someone’s social environment. In this way, the networks of interlinking relationships Sapir discusses don’t simply describe social structures—they play into shaping and reshaping senses of self and the world. Rorty argues that, since truths are a by-product of languages and have no bearing on any pre-linguistic reality, the search for final, objective truths is a pointless project (1989: 8). This is where the philosopher and the anthropologist part ways. The search for Objective Truth may be a fool’s errand, but the search for locally constituted truths—the beliefs and assumptions that underlie human conversations and shape our motivations, negotiated over centuries of aggregated living, acting, and talking, are central to the projects anthropologists undertake when they try to understand the worlds of their subjects, even if they aren’t built into some objective reality. Rorty’s work forces the reader to view meanings as heuristics. In this way, it allows us to emphasize the unpredictability of experiences, and the inherent distance between human minds as people’s interpretations evolve in their own directions. As Mattingly, Zigon, Duranti, and Hollan demonstrate, the question is not whether situations are open to varied interpretation but rather just how varied the negotiations of those interpretations allow them to be. Rorty’s work shines a light on the ad hoc, flexible nature of human responses to the worlds in which people

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find themselves, which Tren demonstrated as he explored the parallels between love and ghosts during our walk to the river. In the same way that English speakers can make sense of phrases like “I have often wrecked my brain for a clowning achievement,” they can also develop theories to make sense of experiences and events that fall outside the normal guidelines for thought. Truths are specific to the situations in which they appear. Adapting his ideas, then, allows us to explore the flexible nature of those linguistic worlds without predicating a stable foundation of shared meanings and standards. Common interpretations can come strongly recommended, but they cannot be mandatory. In contrast to Bourdieu’s approach, which leads to a social order that is rigid and friable, this basic position of Rorty’s makes his work more amenable to dealing with the issues of experimentation and ­individuation raised by Hollan, Mattingly, and the other anthropologists discussed in the first part of this chapter.

Summing Things up and Tying Them Together Both Rorty and Bourdieu have developed explanations for how ­people lock themselves into specific visions of reality, coming to see those realities as true and ruling out other ways of seeing. Both are convincing as far as they go—but both are also limited. Rorty’s explains how conscious, intentional, philosophical negotiations lead to the development of new languages (e.g., 1989: 6), but his work is not as good at explaining how the processes of everyday living make beliefs about the world possible for people who are not philosophically inclined. Bourdieu’s approach suffers from the opposite problem. He explains how ­day-to-day activities create ideological and social orders—but as he points out, they tend to fall apart when challenged consciously. Where Rorty’s strength is in explaining how people can think themselves into difference but is less good at explaining conformity, Bourdieu’s lies in describing how people can come to accept the status quo, but less in how they individuate themselves. I will argue that the philosophy of language and the sociology of embodiment are not as far apart as they might appear at first. Both

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theories depend on memory complexes and habits of thought in constant engagement with intersubjectively defined contexts. If we recognize that Bourdieu’s motor-skill-focused hexis is only one sort of procedural memory, we can expand our ideas about behavior-shaping habits to include cognitive procedures as well. Then, we find a sort of narrative habitus that stands up to self-examination and challenges from others, a problem Bourdieu’s approach cannot deal with. If we begin with the idea that the stories people tell reflect their visions of reality—that is, that their cognitive-procedural memories partially constitute and are constituted by their Rortean languages—and that people live through those complexes moment by moment through their first-person predispositions, then we can begin to see the outline of a cognitive practice theory. This theory is similar to Bourdieu’s, expanded to include the cognitive-procedural memories that shape autobiographical narratives as well as motor-skill procedural memories. Just as people live themselves into their habitus, they come to see their visions of the world embedded in the stories they tell about their lives—stories about love, karma, ghosts, and everything else—as true. This approach, combining the strengths of Rorty and Bourdieu, has a number of advantages.13 First, it allows us to explore the ways people manage their differences while remaining comprehensible to others. Rorty’s self is capable of thoughtfulness, questioning, and innovative problem-solving. It emerges from memories of the experiences that self has had (episodic memories that have been shaped by the ­cognitive-procedural memories that “segment and purpose-build” the stories that constitute a life, as Bruner would say)—and locks a person into their autobiographical history in time, much as Bourdieu showed that motor-skill procedural memories can lock people first into their physical worlds. If we combine Rorty’s approach to the work of making sense of the world using passing theories with Bourdieu’s ideas about a self that emerges from habits that allow people to interpret their worlds, and expand that to include the idea that these selves emerge in part from autobiographical narratives, we get something that improves on both of these thinkers’ approaches to human life.

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And as I will show in the second part of this book, looking at the negotiation of languages through narratives gives us insight into cultural changes in situations which generally encourage conformity. And this brings us back to the questions with which I started. By moving away from assumptions of Durkheimian unfreedom (1915), about societies as naturally producing conformity, we can think about individuals both in their sameness and in their differences. And this allows us to understand what motivates them individually. Looking at societies as the sum total of those samenesses and differences, without assuming from the start that their societies come together naturally, we can also study the processes that keep them coherent while allowing for variations, the roots of cultural change. By looking at the compelling nature of personal experiences as they get fit into familiar story forms, or nudge the edges of those forms, we can learn how personal truths come to be true, how languages allow those truths to be motivating and shared with others, and how the massed motivations of individuals allow realities and societies to hold themselves together. My work here has been heavily influenced by the concerns raised by the anthropologists discussed in this chapter, who attempt to develop an approach to anthropology that is local, relational, and practical. Like Bourdieu, I am concerned about questions of motivation—how people come to believe in their life-worlds deeply enough to act based on their prescriptions. And like Zigon’s work, this book shows how these ideas are negotiated through relationships. Following Rorty and, in a different vein, Hollan, it examines the ways these negotiations lead to the evolution of shared conceptions. Extending Mattingly’s approach, it explores the ways lived worlds become labs for exploration and self-creation not just of moral possibilities but of human natures, meanings, and visions of reality. These concerns have led me to a narrative-based anthropocentric practice approach that is: • Oriented around practical, everyday behaviors and habits of thought, • Reflective of concerns that are local, experiential, and oriented around relationships, • Focused on the instrumental nature of the ways people make sense of themselves, one another, and their physical and social worlds,

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• Concerned not just with the disciplines that lead to conformity, but with the ability people have to put themselves in one another’s shoes, and with communal problem-solving. It recognizes the power of forces that lead to conformity in shaping human behavior without overlooking the equally powerful human capacities for empathy and innovation. As a result, this book deals with a number of challenges ethnographers face. It: • Provides an approach that deals with the forces that push people toward conformity while also accounting for the dynamism inherent in human relationships that can lead to cultural change and innovation, allowing for flexibility, adaptability, and evolution in cultural forms alongside stability and continuity. • Explains how ordinary behaviors and habits of thought lock people into their visions of reality in ways that motivate further actions and thoughts, and that can be strengthened by challenge. • Describes societies as laboratories for problem-solving, exploring and creating new forms, and as forums, where people pass those innovations on to one another. They can make sense of one another empathically and learn about the innovations others have created. As Tren and I walked toward the river that night, then, talking about ghosts and love and avoiding the roaches on the street, we had a conversation that was unique, in my experience, in its content—most of the passing theories that came up in my mind, at least, soon passed and haven’t come back. What is more important than the content is the fact that the methods we employed were very typically human: Tren was using his freedom (or maybe his lack of “unfreedom”) to experiment in his own way, using the stories at hand and the skills he had to solve the problems posed by the notion of love. As we worked through those questions, we faced each other, trying to make sense of one another’s ideas as a way to understand the world. This way of thinking and talking is essential to human life, I believe. Among adult Thais in Bangkok, the use of creative problem-solving to collaborate on a problem is at

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least as common as attempts to discipline one another into conformity. Similarly, the use of cognitive forms of empathy to make sense of another person’s words happens as often as—if not more often than— attempts to bring them toward cultural norms. And if we recognize the importance of the not-entirely constrained nature of human thought, then the simple fact that we can understand conversations like this one—conversations that must take place millions of times each day in Thailand—convinces me that we must develop an anthropology that accounts for the significance of cognitive empathy and ­problem-solving in creating visions of reality that are larger than the lives that create them.

What Comes Next: Negotiating Worlds That Are Larger Than Life Chapter 2 explores a pain Aw developed in one of her eyes, which she understands to have been karma’s response to her mistreatment of crabs as a child. Her notions of karma grow not out of doctrines she learned at the temple, but rather through stories she heard from others, then learned to develop for herself. Using karma stories as a model, this chapter explores the nature of narratives in Thai Buddhists’ lives. Karma stories follow a number of basic rules which are shared widely in Aw’s community, but this narrative structure remains open, allowing Aw to insert personally meaningful symbols that were also comprehensible to the people in her world. This makes it possible for people to understand, accept, or reject one another’s stories, making them both culturally shared and also personally meaningful. Chatri had a deep, abiding interest in his karma, which he mapped out, at odd moments, on balance sheets. It shaped his actions and much of his thought, to the point that he had come to believe in the idea that the universe runs on the law of karma, and that his future is shaped by it. Exploring the way Chatri dealt with karma, Chapter 3 reverses the assumptions of many anthropologists about beliefs: His actions are not a product of a preexisting belief in karma. Instead, his conviction that karma is real and important grows out of practical, habitual actions and

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thoughts in everyday life. The simple act of rehearsing his karma stories (based on the socially sanctioned, personally meaningful model discussed in Chapter 2) changed his memory so that karma was not just one plausible explanation for the events in his life, but the only possibility. Similar to the way Bourdieu’s Kabyles practice themselves into a motor skillsbased habitus, he narrated himself into a narrative habitus based on the habits that govern karma story telling. In this way, he locked himself into a vision of reality that he found compelling and motivating, and a vision of human nature that was both durable and portable. He could apply it to himself and other people, and use in diverse situations. These chapters form a cycle that explains how people create their visions of reality, including human nature, lock themselves into those visions, and pass them on to become real to others. Chapter 2 explores the ways canonical narrative forms give rise to stories that are personal, believable, and socially acceptable. Chapter 3 looks at the ways these narratives create larger visions of the way the universe works, and how those visions give rise to ideas about human nature and senses of self as a kind of being who is able to perceive the truth of the stories discussed in Chapter 2. Then, it explores the processes through which these individual realities can be negotiated and shared with others, giving rise to common narrative forms that form the bases of the stories discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 4 explores the experiences of Ben, who believes that, as a young man, he was attacked by the ghost residing in his grandmother’s house. With the help of his family, he developed a culturally new and idiosyncratic vision of the kind of specter his attacker was. In spite of the fact that this being did not appear in other Thais’ bestiaries, his friends and family accepted his contribution to the “ghost” category as valid. This was possible because people don’t just assimilate information into preexisting semantic categories, but take one another’s perspectives, using first-person predispositions to think themselves into one another’s stories. To do this, people do not need to draw on a huge library of shared semantic information, but rather a much more limited amount of shared ideas about human nature and one another’s experiences—the Rortean grammar of a shared language—that allows for ­perspective-taking to happen. Moving beyond the idea that people can create senses of reality that they accept as real, this chapter explores how

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those conceptions evolve to absorb new and novel information. It also suggests a different orientation anthropologists can take toward enculturation: People are not simply students absorbing lessons from those around them, but innovative negotiators and co-creators of those cultural realities. The first part of the book focuses on narrative complexes and the role they play in shaping the Rortean languages that organize many Bangkok Buddhists’ lives. The second part explores the social environments those languages create, the human natures they define, the ways these interact, the problems they lead to, and how those problems are resolved. The goal here is to apply this practice approach to important issues in the anthropology of Thailand. It looks at questions of love and family life, the conflict between a family-oriented values system and the Buddha’s ideal of disconnection, and the role of capitalism in Thai lives, beginning with the idea that social worlds are unpredictable, and full of interesting people with their own agendas, motivations, and ways of seeing things. To understand the lives of Bangkok Thais, we first need to look at the familial and religious environments in which many central experiences that create Thai ways of being take place. I explore some of the most broadly shared experiences Thai Buddhists encounter, and the languages they shape and are shaped by. Chapter 5 focuses on how family relationships shape people’s perspectives: How Pannee leverages her daughter’s happiness to shape her into an ethical person, and how Oh learned to cope with separation from his parents when he was sent away to school as a small boy. To create people who are disposed to the cooperation and interconnection necessary for comfortable survival in a society built around interdependence, the Rortean language of the obligated offspring shapes people with powerful emotional needs and gives rise to a social structure which requires most emotional conflicts to remain hidden. This tension is expressed, and made tolerable, to some extent, through narratives of sacrifice. A second Rortean language helps many Thai Buddhists resolve these tensions. Chapter 6 explores the language of the solitary sufferer, which is closely associated with the notion of a defiled human nature, described in Buddhist doctrines. How does Theravada Buddhism,

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with its doctrinal emphasis on world renunciation, compete in a social environment dominated by the language of obligation which provides ways of life that allow people to satisfy their basic biological needs as well as answer many of the emotional needs that that language creates? This chapter provides an answer to this long-contested question about Thai society’s relationship to nirvanic Buddhism. The answer is simple once we give up the idea that Thai behavior is guided by obedience to Buddhist doctrines. Instead, this chapter looks at stories about the practical alleviation of suffering. The life-worlds shaped by these two languages exist in a symbiotic, mutually supporting relationship. Although they depend upon one another, they also conflict in ways that become more visible as Thailand has developed economically and the middle classes have grown. Chapter 7 explores a creative synthesis of several disparate ways of talking about the world adopted and adapted by some middle-class Thais. This synthesis reconciles the conflict that exists between the desire for consumer goods and the Buddha’s teachings about transcending material cravings. Before the Thai economy developed to the point where the consumption of luxuries was widely possible, living, as the Buddha recommended, a simple life that was not consumption-oriented was the norm. In a day when luxuries abound for some members of Thai society, however, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the two major languages compete with one another on this front: In the language of obligation, being a good parent or child requires providing material support, much of which comes in the form of commodities. And evidence that one is valued also comes in the form of the gifts one receives. One possible resolution to these conflicting values comes as some Thais have found a way to reimagine their natures as human beings. A transnational definition of human nature is used to resolve this local conflict. By borrowing ideas from commodity fetishism theories, they can tweak the conceptions of human nature found in those languages. The result is an emotionally satisfying solution to the problem that does not require sacrificing either one’s commitment to Buddhism or love of luxuries. By adjusting conceptions of human nature in this way, narratives about consumption can be reoriented toward a new sort of conclusion, one that reflects

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well-known stories about colonization. This chapter looks at the underlying causes and the social conditions required for a possible large-scale piece of cultural evolution—the change in the conception of human nature among some of Bangkok’s better-off. The final chapter brings together the themes of this book. It looks at how narrative complexes help structure the ways people think about their lives through the elements of day-to-day existence—like worrying about karma or trying to be both a good Buddhist while also being a good parent or child. The processes of living these ways cause people to find themselves locked into perspectives and identities that shape and are shaped by Rortean languages. When anthropologists look at the worlds shaped by those languages as the products of interpersonal negotiation, communication, perspective-taking, and problem-solving become central to social cohesion. As Bangkok Thais live their lives day to day, then, confronting the problems and questions that arise, they do more than simply rely on shared cultural knowledge or a hexis. By thinking about their lives through the stories they tell, they create something rather amazing: They create visions of a universe as ancient and enormous as the human imagination can handle. They narrate themselves into realities much larger than the lives that create them.

Notes 1. Like all the Thai names here, this one is a pseudonym, adopted to protect the privacy of the people who participated in my research. Occasionally, some small details that might allow identification have been changed as well. My primary fieldwork took place between 1999 and 2001 among middle-class ethnic Thai Buddhists in Bangkok, in their twenties, ­ thirties, and forties. It has continued, through many shorter visits, in the years since then. It involves participant observation and recorded open-ended and directed ethnographic interviews with approximately 20 subjects. Methods approved by the UCSD Human Subjects Review Board.

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2. Bradd Shore, for example, argues for a vision of psychological life that is stabilized around a central set of cultural rules. Constitutive rules are the most basic, laying out the fundamental parameters of the social games in which people engage. Procedural rules explain how people are expected to act within this basic framework, and strategies allow people to play creatively within the limits of the prescribed procedures (Shore 1996: 105). Constitutive rules form the basis from which people can diverge and within which they play—but Shore’s approach does not allow for change here. Elsewhere (Carlisle 2015) I have argued that, unless there is an authority that can define cultural rules for everyone else, there can be no truly constitutive rules. 3. Similarly, Jarrett Zigon asserts that the unpredictability and variability of human situations force people to create ad hoc solutions to many of the problems they encounter (2014). 4. Duranti himself depends upon a related concept, what he calls the “cultural attitude” (2010: 18). 5. Aspects of different people’s life-worlds are built referring to the same objects in an environment, both animate and inanimate. Many are created by nature and some are built by other people, spanning the gaps between life-worlds, made to further various personal agendas and goals. People also encounter distinct social roles, and a sense of ­“being-with”: a feeling of a common orientation around shared experiences. They also share languages, which shape interactions (Duranti 2010: 26–28). 6. Anthropological theories built on the concept of “culture” often focus on the importance of semantic categories, and the logical relationships that occur between them. When these guidelines are conscious, or when they are extrapolated from their contexts by anthropologists, they become subject to rational analysis and logical comparison. This is, of course, the attitude that Bourdieu was criticizing. 7. A dozen or so years later, at the beginning of 1999, there were over 9,200,000 people in greater Bangkok, by one estimate (Alpha Research Co., 1999: 17). 8. The simile is, obviously, imperfect: Selves don’t consume the materials that inform them as candles burn wax. 9. Is it possible that the women gave alms to the monks based not on the good feelings they derived personally, but rather because of their knowledge of the universal, impersonal Buddhist doctrine that says

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this sort of behavior improves one’s karma? This was probably part of the reason—but this cannot be all of it. Among Thai Buddhists, the abstract doctrine of karma is intimately tied up with the practical experience of feeling the results of one’s karma. Without an immediate sense that she had done something good for herself, an experience that had occurred many times in her past (i.e., without some sort of concrete evidence of its value), it seems unlikely that she would have engaged in this behavior. 10. It should be clear by now that this book is sympathetic to the approaches taken by some phenomenological anthropologists who explore the ways that human understanding is shaped by the body and brain. Rorty divides philosophies into two types: those that recognize an objective reality that we can say something about, and those that, like his own, do not acknowledge any pre-linguistic realities that would necessarily shape an interpretation of it in a particular way. Readers might wonder how this book can also make use of the work of a philosopher as unphenomenological as Richard Rorty. I will argue that external realities can sometimes point humans toward particular interpretations, but those interpretations are often murky at best. So while languages are vital in shaping human existences, this book will draw a little bit from the other vision as well, when it concerns the phenomenological aspects of human existence. These occur when discussing the limits and potentials of human knowledge and self-conception that appear to be inherent in human patterns of thought. That said, I find that Rorty’s discussions of passing theories and the negotiation of languages create an effective jumping-off point for discussions of the ways that our social and physical worlds become compelling. To take this position, however, I must explain the limitations of his approach. Rorty’s idea that no language is better suited to dealing with reality than any other leads, potentially, to a rejection of some of the ideas that underlie the notions of physical embodiment and psychological embeddedness which play important roles in this book. This “loss of the world,” Frank Farrell argues, places Rorty’s work in a field of an untenable pragmatism (1994: 122–123). Recognizing the ethnocentric biases inherent in many notions of culture-built “universal” human natures is important—but it is possible to overestimate the importance of culturally constructed notions as well.

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As Heidegger points out, the shape of most human bodies suggests interpretations for many of the objects we encounter (although it still leaves leeway for interpretation—see, for example, Zigon 2007). Aspects of memory and our relationship with time organize our interpretations (e.g., Bourdieu 1977). And although he denies the existence of an underlying substrate on a number of occasions, Rorty himself acknowledges a limited sort of human nature playing through his work in the form of the human capacity to suffer (1989: 40). Finally, in order for a coherent vision of Rortean languages to be possible, there must be some processing and organizing potentials in the mind that can handle a language: People must have the abilities to perceive, remember, and engage in the sorts of reasoning that make it possible to use Rortean grammars. Rorty (like many other theorists) passes lightly over this. The sorts of memories that people have and the types of reasoning they employ will be heavily influenced by their contexts, but we must be ready to think about the potential for those as innate abilities, and to consider their limitations. That said, Rorty’s notions about the flexibility of interpretations (limited in this book, of course, by the structures of the mind and body) focus attention on the importance of the plasticity of thought and the range of possible interpretations that humans engage in as they construct their worlds. Importantly, he does this while also allowing room for a self not determined entirely by sociocentric forces. The basic problem Rorty takes on, Cartesian dualism, involves the idea (articulated in many different forms over the years) that outer realities are differentiated from inner ones. His notion that self and language create a coherent whole gives his approach (and those of other philosophers of language) a distinct advantage over schools of thought like power/knowledge-oriented discourse theories. In my reading, these theories must constantly confront the problem of the dualism between (inner) subjectivity and (outer) power/knowledge. As Hirst (1979) points out, one must first have a subjectivity to be acted on by social forces. But most discourse theories involve the idea that subjectivity is created by social forces, and this creates a problem in making sense of which comes first. Furthermore, attempts to explain how individual subjectivities “suture” themselves to their social realities (e.g., Hall 2000)—in part a way to explain how they come to be taken seriously by the individual when they are not necessarily beneficial to her—have

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not always been successful. And, of course, there remains Foucault’s problem of excess libido that cannot be explained by social forces alone (Holland et al. 1998). In my estimation, both Rorty and Donald Davidson underplay the importance of compelling social forces, which certainly do have an important role in social life. In this book, I’m seeking a middle-ground between Rorty’s notions, in which subjectivities are not firmly bound to external exigencies (and Davidson’s, in which they are somewhat less free), and self-defeatingly sociocentric approaches in which subjectivities are imposed too thoroughly by external forces. I do this by emphasizing the processes through which meanings are negotiated among members of a society and learned through experience. There is no doubt that there are negotiations that a child uses to learn herself into a physically, socially, and culturally workable subjectivity (e.g., Piaget 1968), even if the details of the processes are still being hashed out. Developmental psychologists like Piaget demonstrate that physical realities do, in fact, suggest preferred interpretations. It’s hard to imagine an adult living a comfortable life without accepting the notions like object permanence—except, of course, for those brief moments when you half-believe that your keys have disappeared. (See, for example, the work on animism by Hornborg [2006]. Even something as durable as object permanence isn’t a truly immutable, unpassing theory.) However, this does leave room for the idea of languages that arise and evolve through life in social worlds. 11. This form of meaning making exists in addition to, for example, the fear of punishment (e.g., Foucault 1976; Kondo 1990). 12. They are, therefore, unlike the early-Foucauldian notion of discourses, generally seen as inscribed on bodies from outside (e.g., 1976). 13. One advantage of this approach—important, but not fitting with the flow of the argument—is that it takes care of the problem of idealism (or what Bourdieu called objectivism [1977: 2])—the notion that culture sits outside of the self, as a reference one can call on to make sense of things. Rorty argues against the existence of an essential core self that has beliefs and theories attached to it (1991: 185). Instead (borrowing from Sandel), he refers to a “radically situated self ” (1991: 185): It is that which interacts with the world around it. This self becomes what people experience of themselves—a web of desires and beliefs about passing theories, as Rorty phrases it (1991: 185). These beliefs and

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desires (which we can articulate as “I feel” or “I wish”) connect to one’s autobiographical episodic memories—and these desires, when plugged into what someone remembers, give rise to habits and motivations. My subjects in Bangkok are not motivated to go to the temple because Thai culture tells them that they should go; instead, the desire to visit the temple often emerges naturally from a socially informed meaning system that associates good feelings with participating in temple activities. This gets rid of the idea that people depend on a “culture” consisting of a large series of shared semantic memories (rules, norms, values, and the like) that they learned somewhere along the line and call on when they need to make a decision. Instead, it directs us to look at actions and interactions among people and the environment. We can think of the stuff that holds members of a society together as coming largely from shared interpretations of experiences, interpretations shaped by the grammars that organize them into stories. It also sets discourses in their proper context: As a basis for developing interpretive theories, they are vital to informing social life and facilitating communication. But when it comes to shaping selves, they are not so powerful that they can completely override individual experiences.

References Alpha Research Co. 1999. Pocket Thailand in Figures, 3rd ed. Bangkok: Alpha Research Co. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1985. Narrative and Paradigmatic Modes of Thought. In Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing: Eighty-fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education Part II, ed. Elliot Eisner, 97–115. Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education. Bruner, Jerome. 2004 [1987]. Life as Narrative. Social Research 54 (1): 11–32. Capps, Lisa, and Elinor Ochs. 1995. Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carlisle, Steven. 2008. Synchronizing Karma: The Internalization and Externalization of a Shared. Personal Belief. Ethos 36 (2): 194–219.

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Carlisle, Steven. 2015. What Holds People Together? First-Person Anthropology and Perspective-Taking in Thai Ghost Stories”. Ethos 43 (1): 59–82. Desjarlais, Robert, and C. Jason Throop. 2011. Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 87–102. Davidson, Donald. 1986. A Fine Derangement of Epithets. In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. LePore. Cambridge: Blackwell. Duranti, Alessandro. 2009. The Relevance of Husserl’s Theory to Language Socialization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19 (2): 205–226. Duranti, Alessandro. 2010. Husserl, Intersubjectivity and Anthropology. Anthropological Theory 10 (1–2): 16–35. Durkheim, Emile. 1915 [1912]. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. London: Allen & Unwin. Epley, Nicholas, Boaz Keysar, Leaf Van Boven, and Thomas Gilovich. 2004. Perspective Taking as Egocentric Anchoring and Adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (3): 327–339. Farrell, Frank. 1994. Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism—The Recovery of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1976. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Froese, Paul, and Christopher Bader. 2010. America’s Four Gods: What We Say About God—And What That Says About Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garro, Linda. 2000. Remembering What One Knows and the Construction of the Past: A Comparison of Cultural Consensus Theory and Cultural Schema Theory. Ethos 28 (3): 275–319. Hall, S. 2000. Who Needs ‘Identity’? In Identity: A Reader, ed. P. Du Gay, J. Evens, and P. Redman, 15–30. Newcastle upon Tyne/Glasgow: Sage/ Glasgow Caledonian University. Hirst, P. 1979. On Law and Ideology. Bassingstoke: MacMillan. Hollan, Douglas. 2000. Constructivist Models of Mind, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Development of Culture Theory. American Anthropologist 102 (3): 538–550. Hollan, Douglas. 2012. On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience. Ethos 40 (1): 37–53.

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Holland, Dorothy, William Lachicotte Jr., Debra Skinner, and Carole Cain. 1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hornborg, Alf. 2006. Animism, Fetishism, and Objectivism as Strategies for Knowing (or Not Knowing) the World. Ethnos 71 (1): 21–32. Kondo, Dorinne. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Laidlaw, James. 2002. For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 311–332. Marsh, Elizabeth. 2007. Retelling Is Not the Same as Remembering: Implications for Memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (1): 16–20. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality. Anthropological Theory 12 (2): 161–184. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2013. Moral Selves and Moral Scenes: Narrative Experiments in Everyday Life. Ethnos 78 (3): 301–327. Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor. 1989. Detective Stories at Dinnertime: Problem Solving Through Co-Narration. Cultural Dynamics 2 (2): 238–257. Parish, Steven. 1994. Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City: An Exploration of Mind, Emotion, and Self. New York: Columbia University. Parish, Steven. 2008. Suffering and Subjectivity in American Culture: Possible Selves. Houndmills, Hampshire, England: Palgrave MacMillan. Piaget, Jean. 1968[1964]. Six Psychological Studies, trans. Anita Tenzer. New York: Random House. Robbins, Joel. 2007. Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change. Ethnos 74 (3): 293–314. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, Edward. 1949. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality. American Ethnologist 12 (4): 707–724. Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stromberg, Peter. 1993. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Tulving, Endel. 1985. Memory and Consciousness. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie Canadienne 26 (1): 1–10. Wallace, Anthony F.C. 2009. Epilogue: On the Organization of Diversity. Ethos 37 (2): 251–255. White, Michael, and David Epston. 1990. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities. Anthropological Theory 7 (2): 131–150. Zigon, Jarrett. 2014. Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World. Ethos 42 (1): 16–30.

Part I Narratives That Construct Linguistic Realities

How do people create the life-worlds that shape the intersubjective ­realities that go on to inform others’ life-worlds? People contextualize themselves in their worlds largely through the stories they tell about them, and the narrative complexes that support them. In the next chapters, I will explain how people can accomplish something rather amazing: How they can take the specific events of a single life and negotiate their meanings with the people around them to create a vision of a universe that existed for ages before they were born and that extends beyond their ken in all directions. Part I of this book explores how people create worlds that are both deeply personal and intersubjectively shared by looking at how Rortean languages shape narrative complexes, and how narrative complexes shape languages—and how this relationship becomes cyclical. In Chapter 2, I will show how the language of karma enters Thai Buddhists’ lives by shaping personal narratives. The fact that a story is consonant with the conceptions of a narrator’s community is not sufficient to make it true, however. Chapter 3 explores the ways that ­personal narratives end up feeling true to the teller—that is, how languages come to be lived, not just known. Then, it looks at the ways

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the specific linguistic truths embedded in a story can enter a shared language, becoming the material that enters other people’s ­narrative complexes. From here, the cycle connecting personal experiences (as expressed through narratives) to shared truths (encapsulated in ­languages) begins again. Having laid out this way of thinking about the nature of cultural worlds, I will turn my attention to a significant point about these ­narrative-built realities: They tend to be flexible. Chapter 4 will look at the ways that narratives don’t just reproduce ways of constructing the world—they can change it.

2 How Do Shared Languages Create Personal Narratives?

About thirty years before she told me this story, when Pannee was growing up in a small town in Thailand’s south, she witnessed something that would shape her vision of the world—and her actions in it—in a variety of ways. She says: One day as I was walking to school, walking, walking, I saw someone riding a bicycle, wearing red clothes, going very, very, very fast. And then I saw, oh, he’s a teacher who teaches at my school. He was wearing red, although he usually wore black. But why was he riding so fast? I saw behind him, a buffalo! Totally huge!

This unusually large, angry buffalo had escaped from a slaughterhouse near the school, Pannee explained. It had been restrained, a chain around its neck, and hit in the head with a large hammer, twice, to knock it unconscious before being slaughtered. Less than pleased with what was happening, the bull broke free and charged out onto the street where it encountered the surprised teacher, wearing the color thought to offend bulls, and began the chase. The teacher turned his bicycle around and rode away as quickly as he could. Realizing he was running out of steam quicker than the buffalo, © The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_2

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he dropped his bicycle and ran into the nearest house—the house of the very man who usually oversaw the slaughtering of cattle at the processing plant from which the bull had escaped. The overseer sat at a desk in the front room. “Buffalo! Buffalo!” cried the teacher, then hid in a small bathroom beneath the stairs.1 The bull crashed through the front of the house, found the overseer, and gored him to death. The bull was soon subdued by slaughterhouse employees, and when the teacher finally emerged from the bathroom, shaken but unhurt, he went back to the school to tell his tale. For Pannee, the message from this episode is clear, and this reality has shaped her motivations: You never know when your karma is going to come back. This life, maybe not, but in your next life, maybe. Not long. Life is short. But since that time, I have never eaten beef. I don’t eat cow, I don’t eat buffalo. I’m scared.2

It is easy to sum karma up in a quick heuristic that all small Thai Buddhist children know: Do good, get good; do evil, get evil. But why do they believe it? It would be an oversimplification to think that beliefs in Buddhist dogmas are the products of direct teachings of semantic facts. When I asked my subjects why they believed “do good, get good; do evil, get evil,” no one told me it was because the monks said so, or because their mothers insisted it was true. We could consider the fact that not accepting karmic doctrine would make someone strange in the eyes of most Thais, but social pressure can convince people to say things; it cannot produce sincere belief. We could talk about the ways that karmic discourse is inscribed onto them, but this seems to miss the mark because even among Thai Buddhists, different people understand karma differently. It is also an inefficient approach; developing a sociocentric conception of forces that could discipline this idea into the population hardly seems necessary in convincing people to believe. For Pannee, it was the experience of karmic reality contained in her story—the fear in the teacher’s voice, the sudden death of a guilty man—that matters to her, not the dry and at times dubious teachings of a local monk. As a result of this story, and the many other karma stories that weigh less heavily on her mind, Pannee said, she is convinced of

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the truth of the doctrine of karma. For her, karma is self-evident. Too vivid to be ignored, proof of the truth of the doctrine can be seen in the universe and gathered from experience. For many Thais, it is not a doctrine that people have learned to espouse. On the contrary, it is the experience of karma—experiences embedded in the narratives people tell about it and their worlds—that makes the monk’s teachings feel right. More than teachings, it is the stories—and the narrative complexes they spawn—that matter. Karma stories follow the rules of narrative thought that Bruner discusses. They are expansive and create a feeling of trueness. They are immune to the paradigmatic reasoning which would make the stories subject to empirical refutation. If Pannee starts with her set of karma stories and then applies its principles, we can see how she could build it out to an entire linguistic universe. Some people are born rich, Pannee points out, and some are born poor. Some are intelligent and handsome, while others are stupid, or luckless, or plagued with physical problems. How could it be that we are all born so unequal, she asked, were it not for what we had done in previous lives? But what if the universe isn’t just? I asked. Pannee has no answer for this, and neither did anyone else. There is a fundamental predisposition in the Thai language of karma, borne in millions of stories like this, that brings people to believe that the universe is ultimately fair, the balance kept by karma. This predisposition shapes Thai Buddhist behavior in many ways. While it is the visceral fear of being killed by a bull in some way that causes Pannee to avoid beef products, an associated message—the karmic idea that people deserve what they get in general—goes a long way in encouraging people like Pannee to support the status quo and respect their karmic betters. If we approach lives informed by karma this way, understanding Thai Buddhist society as being a product (in part) of tens of millions of karmic lives, those lives defined by hundreds of millions of karma stories, then the top-down idea of karmic doctrine comes to appear unnecessary, and its being imposed on its believers from outside—instead of an emergent aspect of Thai Buddhist

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languages—comes to feel rather belabored. Languages like this emerge and support themselves through the natural processes of intelligent thinking and storytelling that suffuse everyday life in Bangkok. But with millions of people leading lives that are similar in broad swaths but different in the details, developing symbols that reflect their own personal experiences, how can we talk about the development of a shared batch of cultural symbols and meanings? And if every one of those millions must work to discover their own ways into an intersubjective reality that other people can deal with, then how can we talk about social coherence at all?

Negotiating a Sense of Objectivity When the teacher in red finally emerged from the bathroom, he did not meet the Angel of Karma who told him what happened; karma is considered to be an impersonal force of nature. There is no need for an angel of karma in the same way that there is no need for an angel of gravity. But unlike gravity, which can be perceived through the senses, karma must be known through intellectual processes. How, then, did Pannee become certain that it was karma that killed the overseer and not bad luck or the choice of living in a potentially dangerous neighborhood? To say that it is in her culture simply begs the question. We must look into the processes that make this sort of understanding possible. Languages are not just negotiated between people. People negotiate them privately as well, as they attempt to interpret their own lives to themselves in narrative form. People often connect the events in their lives with passing theories and then forget the work done to put the pieces together. The fact that some passing theories are quickly forgotten (and others never get noticed in the first place) makes it possible for someone to invent a story—simply an interpretation of a series of events—and then believe it. When a reality constituted by passing theories comes to appear to reference objective truths, a sense of comfortable certainty takes the place of a notion of invention. When the author fails to see her authorship and believes that she is a reader of reality instead, her invention takes on the appearance of fact.3

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Languages that provide interpretive schemes for understanding reality often suggest that they are not, in fact, interpretive schemes, but true translations of reality. The languages of Thai Buddhism (I will describe two in this book—one about karma and one about the quest for enlightenment) posit that an objective reality exists, one that can be known by those with proper training. It implies that reality is best understood as referential—a view of objective reality, read using the tools of the Dhamma, and not constructed through interpretation. It also implies that the work that goes into contextualizing events into karmic narratives, drawing the connections between causes and effects, does not create a reality that can be understood. Rather, it interprets a preexisting state of reality. Instead of understanding communicative behavior through the use of passing theories that change from moment to moment, however, the complex of ideas and symbol systems that go into the Dhamma—the system of Buddhist teachings—gives rise to a more stable set of heuristics that can be used to combine personal events with knowledge of the Dhamma to create karma narratives.

Replacing Internalization with Synchronization If we take a person-centered approach to human experience, then it becomes clear that the ideas behind the concept of internalization do not hold up. Understanding the ways that people invest in cultural materials, both cognitively and emotionally, is essential to making sense of the ways that people interact with their worlds, and this term, which seems to fit best into sociocentric approaches, does not do those ­personal processes of justice. First, “internalization” covers a variety of different phenomena. They range from the ways that emotions are connected to cultural propositions, to the effects those cultural propositions have on cognition and perception (Throop 2003: 114). The term also relates to lessons learned in childhood (Vygotsky 1981 [1930]; Briggs 1998) and the work of ritual on the perceptions of adults, which allow people to accept and understand their positions in the social order (Turner 1969; Shore 1996: 259).

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In spite of its widespread use, the term “internalization” suggests certain underlying assumptions which these theorists tend not to accept. The term suggests the idea that the processes anthropologists study when they study internalization are ones in which material from outside the individual enters her. This is problematic for two reasons. First, meaning systems are the products of ongoing negotiations. The internalizer is not a passive vessel for new cultural materials in the same way that a salt shaker is a vessel for salt. Material is taken in and adopted in a variety of different ways, and, as Spiro (1997) points out, it is internalized at a variety of different depths. Some lessons become central to living, while others never go beyond the cliché. Furthermore, the claim that, for example, “Thai Buddhists internalize the doctrine of karma” carries with it the suggestion that all of them take in the same material in the same ways, when the variety of perspectives on karma suggests that, while at some level there is a good deal of sharedness, the relationship that karma has to the rest of someone’s conceptions of the world will be as varied as those worlds are. It is not how information enters that matters, then, but the ways that cultural materials get used. What situations evoke the internalized material? What aspects of a person’s perspective does it shape, if it shapes any aspects at all? Making sense of the way a bit of cultural material fits in with the languages a person speaks, thinks, and feels tells us a lot. It allows us to understand the ways that individuals structure their realities, how they connect that reality to their social and physical environments, and the methods by which they communicate information about that structure to others. The processes that govern the taking-in of information are not uniquely useful to anthropologists, then; it is how that information fits with what appears to the individual to be an external reality, and how this information gets communicated to others. This, of course, is what makes the salt in a shaker worth thinking about: Putting it in the shaker is not especially interesting; what matters is what happens when it comes back out: What it is applied to, and the effect it then has. And yet the karma concept (like many others) appears to be very widely shared across the Buddhist and Hindu worlds (Obeyesekere 2002). Some basic components appear to be almost universal among

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Thai Buddhists. How does one concept find its way across diverse ecosystems of thought? This is not a question of information coming into an individual or going out, but rather one of reproduction—how is it received, integrated, and passed on to people who have their own variant visions and languages? To understand internalization, then, we must understand the ways materials are received, integrated, and expressed.4 When people integrate shared cultural information, they find a place for it in their linguistic visions of the world. If we focus on this active integration into someone’s idiosyncratic life-world, as opposed to looking at the way it is sent into someone’s mind, it makes more sense to talk about its externalization. This is not a process wherein reified culture or discourses are inscribed onto moldable minds. Instead, we should look at the creation of a behavioral environment in which active minds communicate with similar (if not identical) materials, creating contexts in which others can understand, and learn, or reaffirm, one another’s ideas. But “externalization” does not describe the processes adequately, either. Where “internalization” suggests the existence of a powerful, reified culture, “externalization” implies the possibility that minds are free from cultural influence on some fundamental level. Instead of thinking of beliefs as the products of the internalization of a particular doctrine forced from the outside, they should be viewed as the products of a negotiation of a linguistic vision of the world. These negotiations take place as people talk about their lives in a way most common among humans: They tell stories (Dunbar 2004). On the surface, narratives often appear to convey simple pieces of information about the causes and effects in one’s experiences. In fact, as bearers of Rortean languages, they do much more than that—they also reflect shared doctrines, as well as embody theories about the connections between events (Capps and Ochs 1995; Bruner 2004). That is, as they help shape narrative complexes, they also participate in the constitution and confirmation of visions of truths. Implicit in every karma story is a vision of the nature of reality, thought to have been observed referentially, that is expressed whenever a karma story is told.

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This vision is laid out for policing—its approval or rejection—by other members of the community, evaluated according to an implicit rubric of shared guidelines. In this way, the shared notions of karma stay in alignment with one another while the stories continue to reflect the idiosyncratic, personal experiences of their narrators. They fit their experiences into their languages using a common grammar in ways that allow for differences between individuals to be expressed while permitting people to understand one another in spite of those differences. This is quite different from what is suggested by “internalization.” This policing keeps one another’s conceptions in line—and keep deeper visions of the world similarly structured as well. Instead of an outer ideology being internalized into the individual, then, we might better talk about what I have called the synchronization (Carlisle 2008) of languages—or, when there is less pressure for them to match closely, their harmonization.

The Relationship Between the Shared and the Personal Karma appears in daily conversations in a number of different forms. Occasionally, people discuss doctrine—exchanging semantic ­information—but more commonly they share karma stories with one another. These are often personal narratives, although I have heard many second- and third-hand tales, and seen many on television and in film. One simple, common story goes like this: I made an offering to a monk, and afterward I felt good because of it.

Making offerings is thought to be a source of skillful karma, and one’s mood is thought to be linked to one’s karma, so good deeds like this naturally produce good feelings. Occasionally, karma stories are used to explain someone else’s good or bad fortune. (One struggling merchant attributed the success of a shop a few doors away during an economic downturn to the owner’s good karma, although he could not

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identify the specific acts that produced it.) A third type expresses the constitutive nature of the narrative more completely. In these stories, like Pannee’s story of the bull, moral acts are described and then connected to karma’s responses, often in great detail. These stories make up about half of my sample. Thai Buddhist doctrine makes the workings of karma clear: Good acts are always rewarded, bad acts always punished, in proportion and kind. Only the timing is variable. If you give to charity today, you may come into unexpected money this evening, or it may return as an unexpected cache of food in the year 3000, when you are a fox. Karma is interesting to my subjects by virtue of its instrumental nature. By assessing one’s life history, one can get a very rough sense of what may be in store. The more general sense that the universe is partly organized by the law of karma is purely academic to most Thais; what matters to them is the fact that it can be used to think with, to help order, interpret, and organize—and thereby create, as Bruner claims—the events of a life, and, following Rorty, a language describing reality. So karma is more than an abstract force of nature. It is also an active presence in the lives of my subjects. To some, it is mildly ­preoccupying. Joey complained of a feeling of uncleanness resulting from past bad acts, and living with a sense of foreboding, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Chatri, on the other hand, has programmed his life around the idea that he will use this incarnation to improve his karma—his goal is to give as much as possible and take as little as he can, so his next incarnations will be better. Although they share an understanding of the doctrine, each of my subjects has his or her own relationship with it. They claim that, in ordering the universe, karma orders their lives—but in fact, the way it orders their lives informs the ways they order their conceptions of the universe. Karma, then, is both deeply personal and individual, and also universal and impersonal at the same time, and these two senses shape and inform one another. Social negotiations, then, result in a belief in rules that govern a universe that is larger than the lives of people who share the environment in which they negotiate karmic truths, and bigger in space and time than all of the historical Buddhist communities that support such beliefs.

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The Grammar of Karma Stories: Standards for Narratives Languages are powerful in part because people can agree on the rules of grammar while using them for very different purposes. Grammars provide the structures used to build personal meanings and allow those meanings to be conveyed to others. For example, teachers can set up situations in which particular grammars come into play and help people develop their own sentences (or stories) with them. Holland et al. (1998) write about the ways that members of Alcoholics Anonymous learn the form of the alcoholic story and transform themselves into “alcoholics”—people who define themselves in terms of this story. A similar narrative construction of reality occurs among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea. Schieffelin writes that, when mediums go into trance, they channel spirits thought to be able, among other things, to locate lost pigs. But when channeled through the mediums, the spirit’s information is markedly ambiguous. There are dozens of places in the tropical forests that would fit his initial description. However, by ‘not knowing the name’ of the ground, he avoids pinpointing a specific location. … When the location of the pig was finally determined, the séance participants doubtless felt that they had received spiritual ­authority, whereas to a western observer, it appeared that they had constructed most of it themselves. (1985: 718)

In this way, the medium uses a familiar grammar, but leaves the specifics open so that the observers, fluent in the language, can fill in the blanks and create their own narratives.5 This creates a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose sort of situation. If the pig is not where ­ the medium says it is, then the listeners have misinterpreted him. If, by some chance, the pig is there, then the medium has scored a hit. Schieffelin’s subjects come to the séances prepared to believe the mediums’ information, and also ready to project in their own ideas, to “complete the construction” of the reality the medium describes (1985: 721). The medium presents a form which the observers (who, without realizing it, are actually active negotiators) fill in the blanks with passing

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theories, creating a story which they can believe—and the medium then uses this story to demonstrate the veracity of his claims as a medium.6 What can we say about this kind of language, one that shapes realities through social negotiation? Schieffelin’s work shares something with Thai concepts of karma: In these, there is an attempt to connect the personal—perceptions, cognitions, and emotions—to a greater shared conception of the world. But where Schieffelin studies people who specialize in creating vague-but-recognizable frames, karma stories are usually told by, and judged by, amateurs—lay Buddhists who are attempting to make sense of the events of their lives. The standards that govern these grammars all lead to specific kinds of conclusions that can be evaluated by members of their communities. They can neither be so vague that they become meaningless, nor so specific that they can be proven wrong. The narratives they produce must be consistent enough to be recognizable and reproducible in different situations, but not so rigid that they exclude enough stories to become virtually useless. Like all negotiated languages, uses of the language of karma are open to evaluation. In the same way that successful Kaluli mediums develop reputations for dealing with spirits, the ability of a Buddhist to create a successful karma story comes along with the ability to evaluate others’ karma narratives effectively. In this way, the standards that support karma stories are passed from one generation to the next, although the standards themselves rarely become explicit. As with spoken English, the rules that govern karma stories are rarely articulated, but well known: 1. As a natural force, karma is never merciful, and always just. 2. Karma is impersonal. It cannot forgive, persecute vindictively, or play favorites. 3. Because humans have no absolute way to measure right and wrong, one must gauge one’s karma—and, thus, develop one’s karma ­stories—based on how one feels. The size and intensity of karma’s response to an action are in proportion to the significance of the act itself. Small acts reap small responses; big ones reap large. 4. Karma makes metaphorical connections between actions and events. This is what humans can perceive.

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5. Karma also has a private aspect. The way one feels about an action and the significance it has in one’s life history matter. Except in cases in which the cause–effect relationship is extremely intense and visible, the individual makes the final decisions about his or her own perceptions of karma’s cause–effect relationships. (This holds unless a story violates another standard.) (Carlisle 2008: 203–204). Stories that follow these guidelines come up often in conversation in Bangkok, each telling a subtle reminder of both the nature and power of karma (on the conscious level) and, less overtly, of the tools—­ cognitive-procedural memories that produce the narrative complexes— as the pattern is perpetuated from one generation to the next. Understanding the workings of these stories can give us insight into the construction of narrative complexes and their social communication.

The Language of Karma and the Eyes of Crabs Aw, who was 20 when she told me this story, said she had learned an important lesson from this experience. Between the ages of 10 and 12, she said, her parents would send her to the market to buy food for dinner and then have her prepare it. On days when she came home with crabs, she would not kill them immediately; instead, she would poke their eyes out with her knife. She liked the way their eye-stalks would flail and the dark liquid that would ooze from the wounded sockets. Killing animals for food is not great for one’s karma, but if done properly, most Thai Buddhists think, it does little harm. Torturing animals, on the other hand, is not recommended. Eventually, she realized that she would have to pay for her actions and stopped the practice. But several years later, a pain began to develop in her left eye. The pain slowly worsened. Glasses and then an eye patch did nothing to relieve it. It became hard to carry out her ordinary responsibilities and almost impossible to study, and her doctor was unable to find a cause or a treatment to ease Aw’s suffering. After about a year of this, Aw and her mother celebrated Mother’s Day by taking a week-long, meditation-intensive temple retreat. As she

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meditated, the pain in her eye faded, and its cause became clear: It was the karmic return of the pain she inflicted on the crabs by poking their eyes. And meditation—thought to be a source of skillful karma, because it moves people away from their desires—expedited its dissipation. Today, she said, she can see perfectly. She is in excellent health— except for an intermittent pain in the lower back; she also used to like cutting ants in half with her cooking knife.

Grammar Rules 1 and 2: Karma as Merciless and Impersonal The doctrine of karma relates to the Buddhist conception that everything is interrelated. The Buddha described five laws of nature that connect all causes with their effects: the laws of physics, heredity, the causal of chain of associated thoughts that trigger one another, and a law that allows these other laws to interact (a thought leads to an action which leads to a physical result, inspiring another idea, and so on), and one more, the law of karma. Just as the laws of physics cause a ball thrown against a wall to bounce back at a particular speed in a particular direction, sending out a moral act will cause that action’s return (Payutto 1995: 1). A skillful act—one taken with proper foresight, care, and enlightened intention—will produce a skillful return. The laws of physics dictate that dropping a glass will cause it to break. The law of karma applies to the motivation behind the action. At times, the relationship between cause and effect is immediate and easily visible, as when the dropper cuts her hand as she gathers the broken glass. If the glass was broken in anger, then the anger expressed must necessarily return to the actor at some point as well. (If she cuts herself because her anger causes her to clean hastily and carelessly, then this is her karmic return.) Because all things are interrelated, this integration of physical causes and effects with moral causes and effects (and the other rules as well) are considered perfectly normal. Every moral action that takes place receives a necessary and appropriate response. Just as the laws of physics dictate that an equal and opposite force will meet a falling glass, an equal and opposite force will

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meet an act inspired by (usually) human desires—and this, according to Buddhist doctrine, is justice. Because karma is a product of natural forces and not a conscious entity, there is no possibility of mercy for an action taken in haste, or one done by a child or someone who cannot make proper decisions on his own. Although many wish it were otherwise, karma allows for no extenuating circumstances and holds no court whose mercy one can hope for.

Rule 3: The Importance of Emotion When it comes to the importance and uses of emotions, Thai conceptions of the mind differ from many of those found in the West. D’Andrade describes the European-American folk model of the mind as defining emotions as interfering with the certainty of beliefs at times. “Feelings are portrayed as ‘coloring’ one’s thinking, ‘distorting’ one’s judgment…. The image here seems to be of a force which is a sort of perturbation of the medium” (1987: 124). Among Thais, however, reality testing is a holistic matter more than one that is simply rational. When my subjects evaluate questions that came down to “what is good?” they tend to rely on their emotions more than many Americans might. More than this, beliefs about the limited ability most people have to “see Dhamma”—to perceive the truths of reality directly, without having to reason them out—allow intuition and emotion as well as reason to play into answering questions like “What is real?” and “What is true?” (A similar point is made by Nisbett et al. 2001.) In cases like karma, emotions are thought to be objective responses to outer realities. Living well, doing good, and seeing the world through skillful eyes cause one to feel good; the opposite is thought to lead to bad feelings. Because of this close association, karma and ­general e­ motional states are often collapsed into one another. At these moments, people do not evaluate their karma by looking at their ­behavior over the course of their lives, but rather by how they feel. Joey, a young executive who dreads the return of his childhood ­transgressions, thought about the emotional evaluation of his karma this way: “I heard about Christians, if they do something wrong… they

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can go to the preacher, and…everything’s gone, just finished.” For a Buddhist, of course, karmic forgiveness is impossible since there is nothing that can grant absolution, so he is left feeling unclean. “I ­ do not mean like dirty,” he added, “but it stays with you forever.” As transgressions fade into the past, what lingers, in Joey’s mind, are the emotions. “…karma, you know, that’s the feeling, you [can] not see everything, just the feeling, because you know, if you do something wrong, something bad, you are going to get something bad after that, or maybe next year – that’s the feeling, just the feeling.”7 Evidence for the importance of emotion in self-evaluations can be found throughout the daily lives of many Thai Buddhists. The day before his final interview for admission to a graduate program at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand’s most prestigious school, Od did not study. Instead, he went and made offerings at a popular shrine—one thought to be favored by Brahma—outside the central Bangkok Hyatt. I asked him if Brahma would help him get into graduate school. His answer was as direct as it could be: He said that the visit made him feel good. Similarly, when I asked people why they wore amulets—if they really were efficacious in protecting them—they did not answer with a yes or a no. Instead, again and again, I was told that the amulets made them feel good. Yes, the spirits protected them. They could tell through the feeling. Yes, the spirits were real. They could feel them. To have a feeling about a possible karmic connection means more in Thai than it might in English—to have a feeling about something is to know something. This raises questions about epistemology—what it means to be a Thai Buddhist knower. Where many Westerners think of rationality as the human function that allows people to know what they cannot see, in the Thai context the situation is more complex. This is an issue to which we will return in the following chapters.

Rule 4: Karmic Metaphors It is important to remember that, in Thai cosmology, the law of the return of moral actions works just as the laws of physics do. If every action leads to an equal and opposite reaction in physics, then every

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moral act leads to an appropriate response that must be understood using the tools available to the human mind. In this case, seeing karmic connections appears in the form of the ability to interpret events metaphorically. Thai Buddhists identify karmic causes and effects through metaphorical connections between them. In Aw’s case, the metaphor involved eyes—injuring the crabs’ eyes with her knife resulted in injury to her own eye. But the story could have been completed in other ways as well—had she been stabbed with a knife or injured by a crab-pinch, these could have been seen as metaphorically appropriate effects instead. Since no one knows how or when one’s karma will return, connections must be determined later, once the story is completed, and completed in a way that makes sense in terms of Thai cultural categories. In my survey, metaphorical connections most ­ often involved parallel body parts (the son of a man who shot a monkey in the arm was born with a withered arm), parallel actions (years after he boiled turtles for soup, a man was scalded), and also monetary ­transactions (one hopeful merchant always gave money to the poor when he had bought lottery tickets). Other metaphorical connections are, of course, possible.8 As a result, karma stories often tend to have interesting ironic twists in their returns—seen as the product of the interpretations of human perceptions, and not inventions of human creativity. Metaphor is significant here because it controls the number of possible connections between causes and effects. Under the expansive narrative logic of karma stories, all of the events in a person’s life become possible symbols in a karma story—but at the same time, the need for an appropriate match limits the possible pairings. In this way, karma becomes rational and comprehensible, if not actually predictable. The fact that karmic responses are morally appropriate prevents Aw being rewarded for injuring the crabs. The proportionality of the scope of causes and effects is also significant. The fact that crabs are seen as lower forms of life suggests that Aw’s punishment was sufficient to pay off her debt; a loved one will not have to die, for example, in response to each crab she killed. By winnowing the possibilities in these ways, karma stories create a set of clear, relatively narrow, socially accepted standards that allow Thais to evaluate one another’s stories. At the same time,

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the socially sanctioned demand for strong, compelling (at times even enticing) ironic connections between causes and effects draw attention away from the enormous volume of everyday experiences that might possibly be interpreted as karmic. How, then, could Aw’s eye problem not be related to the crabs? In these ways, karma stories can be completely individualized— responding to the emotionally compelling issues in individual lives, while also sharing a generally accepted form. But all of this leads to a new problem: How does someone balance her own standards against those of the people around her?

Rule 5: The Subjective Evaluation Rewards and Punishments When he was a boy, Phra Rajsudhianamongkol (who became a monk as a young man) writes, he once gathered turtles and cooked them to make a soup for his dinner. At another point, he made a meal of bird-meat, killing his prey by breaking their necks. Many decades later, as an elderly monk, he was injured in a horrific car crash—his neck was broken (he says) and, as he lay injured on the hood of the car, the radiator exploded and he, like the turtles, was scalded (2000: 47–48). Aw tortured crabs for a year and suffered a painful eye, while Phra Rajsudhianamongkol only engaged in the killing of animals twice, without causing gratuitous pain, but he nearly died, and spent months recovering in the hospital as a result. Why the discrepancy in punishments? The evaluations made by a layperson who cooks meat most days will likely be very different from the ones made by a monk-like Phra Rajsudhianamongkol, who, if his monastic life were typical, had never cooked anything since he entered the monastery 60 years before, and who has spent a good deal of time thinking about the size and significance of his karmic transgressions.9 Interpretations depend on several things: The raw material of life events one can call on, and the subjective sense of the importance of a particular moral act. At times, the causes and effects may not appear to

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fit. Steeped in an environment that emphasizes humans’ imperfect and sinful nature, and one in which his daily actions are constrained to the point where he may not have had the opportunity to do much harm, the Monk’s sense of his transgression is probably much greater than Aw’s whose life and lifestyle resembled that of many middle-class Thais. Where the monk may feel that his punishment fit his crimes, other Thais may see excessive suffering and seek a different karmic connection. Karmic doctrine provides the community with an out in this case. A reward or punishment that seems too slight may be incomplete— something else will happen later to balance the picture. If a response seems too enormous, then it may also refer to some other event that took place in a previous life. Karma stories are matters of mixing and matching, then, combining the events of a life with the emotions that draw attention to moral acts (guilt for having hurt animals, comfort in knowing that the universe owes one money, and the like). While some extreme acts (like the intentional murder of another human) require a certain level of karmic response, my subjects were generally willing to accept the cause–effect connections that other people made in regard to the size of the reward or punishment. (They were much less flexible, for example, when considering the metaphorical quality of the response.) This is largely because of the difficulty in knowing another person well enough to be able to evaluate the size and significance of all of their moral acts. Only the truly enlightened can see the full scope of other people’s karma— and the truly enlightened are few and far between.10

Policing Karma Stories Karma stories are popular topics for discussions among friends, sermons given by monks, and movies and television programs. Although people rarely articulate the grammar rules that allow a karma story to make sense, my subjects were fully aware of them, having learned through the countless examples they have encountered during the courses of their lifetimes. Just as with written and spoken language, grammatical mistakes in karma stories often felt wrong to my subjects. And just like

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spoken errors, grammar errors made when speaking the Rortean language of karma are subject to correction, to being brought in line with community norms. I asked a number of subjects for examples of dubious karma stories— ones that did not fit all five standards. While they were often eager to discuss the doctrine and tell stories themselves, none of them could come up with examples of flawed stories they remembered hearing. Eventually, I began suggesting hypothetical karma stories with errors in them.11 Could someone like Aw have lost her wallet in response to injuring the crabs? No, everyone I asked replied, recognizing that this would be metaphorically inappropriate. Bong connected this hypothetical loss with something else. “If she lost it, maybe it’s because she had stolen [money] from somebody before,” he said, suggesting a second narrative to compliment the first, each conforming more closely to the rules of this grammar than the one I suggested. This was an unusual exercise, of course—and not one in which I observed Thais engaging. It does suggest, however, that my subjects had a thorough, implicit understanding of the procedures that go into creating the effective karma stories that permeate the Thai Buddhist world.

The Significance of Synchronizing Languages When people learn to speak the language of Thai Buddhism, and the karmic component of that language, they learn to use a shared structure that allows other people to make sense of personal symbols. With knowledge of Aw’s story, the symbolic connection between eye pain and killing crabs is clear; without that structuring story, however, the link between those personal symbols, reflecting the realities of one woman’s life, is completely obscure. The fact that the grammar of karma stories is learned and shared makes it possible for Thais to make sense of one another when they talk about their karma, and, in this way, to correct each other if they veer from the accepted form. At the same time, these personal symbols, connected in episodic memories that have become associated through the narrative procedures my Buddhist subjects learned (expressed through those grammar rules), allow Aw to see karma

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as real and the doctrine as true. More than this, it allows her to develop her own personal relationship with karma. It is one that is strong and certain where other Thais often hold more doubt, and one that is basically positive. Now that she has paid off the debt of the crabs, she feels that her karma will bring generally good things her way. This is different from Joey, who dreads the return of his early deeds. The way karma fits into her life and her experiences, then, is different from the way it fits into Joey’s, and even further from the way Chatri tends to conceptualize his karma which, as the reader will soon see, he thinks about more in terms of giving and receiving than in terms of harm and retribution that were the themes of this story. When we think of cultural materials being shared, then, it will often make more sense for us to think about grammars being shared instead of the specific elements of a vocabulary. In this case, the form of the story is much more important than the symbols themselves. Many anthropologists have focused on specific symbols, however. For anthropologists who take a sociocentric approach, this makes sense. If we look at “culture” as a teacher and not a medium for negotiation, we find that symbols often start there, and have a uniform set of shared meanings that people internalize. Obeyesekere (1981), for example, distinguishes between personal and public symbols, responding to Leach’s claim that all symbols are public. But when we talk about the division between public and personal, it draws attention away from the processes that give meaning to personal symbols and also make them publically acceptable. What matters, when it comes to veracity, is not the crabs and the eyes, but the shared underlying grammar that makes the story sensible, and gives the symbols both shareable meaning and personal truth. I am certain that, among the millions of Buddhists who live in Bangkok, there are many karma stories that relate to eyes—and probably a few others that relate eyes to crabs as well. (Chatri, in fact, has a karma story in which eyes figure—but he does not choose them as a central symbol.) But in those cases, the stories will probably be different, and when they are different, what they mean to the tellers, and how they fit into their lives, will be different as well. And yet, at the same time, a well-told karma story will be comprehensible to all Thai Buddhists. Instead of dealing with specific symbols, then, we should

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think about specific grammars that allow people to connect their own experiences to shared conceptions, and explore the different types of grammars—some, like the grammar of the karma story, are rather inflexible, conserved over many centuries. Others, however, are looser and more open, allowing for much greater negotiation. And when people by the million negotiate and renegotiate in similar ways, this can lead to cultural change. This approach to thinking about communication in terms of the grammar of stories rather than in terms of the specific meanings of symbols is important for several reasons. 1. The idea of “internalization” demonstrates one of the problems with non-person-centered approaches. Internalization comes up short and approaches that focus on the idea of material from outside being foisted on our subjects, unchanged and unreconfigured, make little sense. Instead of learning a vocabulary passively, the emphasis here is on the skills that go into interpretation, and into creative problems solving—as when people attempted to correct flawed stories, or when they develop their own. We should recognize the importance of negotiation—both internal and among members of a group—and explore the variety of uses that people make of their cultural environments. 2. Looking at the underlying grammar of a language allows us to see how something like karma fits into the greater context of the way individuals make sense of the world. As a result, we can move away from the idea that cultural claims must be treated as social claims; rather, they are accepted because they are meaningful concepts for each person. Karma is not just a socially sanctioned doctrine that floats from Buddhist mouths, disconnected from personal experiences, nor is it a conception that has generally been adopted because it is the socially correct thing to do, or because failure to accept it will result in punishment, but because it is part of the shape of the narrative complexes that inform Thai Buddhists’ life-worlds.

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The Next Set of Problems Karma, then, is personally experienced, socially acceptable, and ­doctrinally true. Each of these three dimensions is important in its own right for the acceptance of karma, and each supports the other two. The language of karma connects individuals to one another and the larger cultural patterns that underlie much of Thai life. The fact that other people endorse an interpretation is not, by itself, enough to make it compelling. With the knowledge of the rules I outlined earlier in this chapter, anyone can concoct a karma story from the experiences of their lives. Even assuming that someone was generally predisposed to accept a karmic explanation, how would she be able to move beyond awareness of the fact that she made those connections herself? The fact that karma is a shared doctrine that connects to personal stories, then, is not sufficient to create the beliefs that motivate people to act in ways that shape their intersubjective realities. But it is a necessary precursor. Another possible explanation for acceptance of karma, the idea that habitually thinking about it will suffice to make it believable, falters as well. People can, and often do, question their habits. And even if it were habituated, that doesn’t make it important, a concept people don’t just think about, but one they can think with if they choose. Against Bourdieu, I will argue that beliefs work best when people think through them. If we are going to take the people we work with seriously— which, in the case of Thai Buddhists, involves treating them as people capable of thoughtful introspection and commitment to meaningful ideas beyond the simple social conformity that also plays a role in their lives—then we need to look more deeply into minds and societies, and the languages that create and hold them together. But when it comes to introspection, there does appear to be a problem with the formulation as far as it goes: The logic appears to be circular. Thai Buddhists know that the universe is just because karma metes out the proper rewards and punishments, and they know that karma is fair because the universe provides karmic justice. My subjects generally lived complete, examined lives, able to identify and deal with logical fallacies and emotional inconsistencies. (If anthropologists fail to recognize

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this, I believe, they do wrong by the people who gave them their time and help.) A simple tautology that connects justice to karma to justice again could not serve as part of the basis for the well-examined lives that many Thai Buddhists lead. Everyday Thai ontology, however, provides the grounding this philosophy requires. When it comes to taking a story that is simply accepted and making it one that is believed, we will need to look in a different direction—we need to explore the nature of belief itself, and the psychology behind perceptions of reality.

Notes 1. Pannee remembers this vividly, although she claims she hurried on to school when she saw the buffalo approach. The lucid, exciting, and colorful picture she paints resembles something she might have seen on television or at the movies. 2. The karma stories conveyed here are typical of the ones in my collection. Many of the stories relate to the experiences of the young, which include a large number of narratives of examples of cruelty to animals (a tendency my subjects later came to regret) and about repayment for the sacrifices parents and older relations made for them. 3. “At very least,” Bruner points out, autobiographical narratives are “…a selective achievement of memory recall; beyond that, recounting one’s life is an interpretive feat” (Bruner 2004: 693). 4. “Internalization” suggests a one-way street: information going into the individual. This may be an artifact of earlier anthropological theories, like Benedict’s configurationism (1934), which gave “culture” concepts greater power. 5. Lambek (2002) also writes about this phenomenon in his work among Malagasy-speaking sorcery victims. The guidelines that shamans use to govern the relationship between spirits and their victims look something like the guidelines that shape the relationship between Thai Buddhists and their karma. 6. In his work on poison oracles used by the Azande, E. E. ­Evans-Pritchard describes a wide variety of ways that errors, inconsistencies, and other issues with the oracles’ predictions were justified (1976). This complex system of corrections suggests that it is much

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harder for the Azande to maintain a belief in the oracles than it is for Thai Buddhists to continue to believe in Buddhism. Karma stories are written retrospectively, gathering together events that have already happened from a wide repertoire of possibilities, while the oracles are used to answer specific questions which often have singular answers. Furthermore, Buddhist notions of karma provide believers with an out the oracles don’t have: A karmic event may occur in response to something that happened in a different, and entirely unknowable, lifetime. 7. The idea that only the individual can judge her own moral worth fits uncomfortably with the idea that karma works the same for everyone. How is it, for example, that some murderers are happy? Pannee did not believe that someone could kill another person intentionally and still feel good. First, she explained, someone like this must be evincing some psychological deficiencies or delusions. Furthermore, since what goes around comes around, killers must know that, at some point, they will experience something equally awful to the crime they committed. This is not, she points out, a recipe for happiness. 8. It is possible that connections in some karma stories are based on personal, idiosyncratic categories, but their private nature would not assist in general acceptability, and are usually not held up for consideration as proof of the existence of, or the workings of, karma. 9. Killing animals for food is still killing—and vegetarians are considered to have somewhat better karma than meat-eaters. Killing to eat, however, is viewed as somewhat justifiable and, therefore, less damaging to one’s karma. 10. One exception to this rule is the story of the buffalo and the overseer, told by Pannee. The connections were beyond dispute in her mind— and, in any case, the overseer was in no position to disagree with the interpretation. 11. My subjects understood the hypothetical nature of these stories.

References Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Briggs, Jean. 1998. Inuit Morality Play. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 2004 [1987]. Life as Narrative. Social Research 54 (1): 11–32.

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Capps, Lisa, and Elinor Ochs. 1995. Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carlisle, Steven. 2008. Synchronizing Karma: The Internalization and Externalization of a Shared, Personal Belief. Ethos 36 (2): 194–219. D’Andrade, Roy. 1987. A Folk Model of the Mind. In Cultural Models in Language and Thought, ed. Dorothy Quinn and Naomi Holland, 112–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunbar, Robin I.M. 2004. Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective. Review of General Psychiatry 8 (2): 100–110. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holland, Dorothy, William Lachicotte Jr., Debra Skinner, and Carole Cain. 1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2002. Fantasy in Practice: Projection and Introjection, or the Witch and the Spirit-Medium. Social Analysis 46 (3): 198–216. Nisbett, Richard, Incheol Choi, Kaiping Peng, and Ara Norenzayan. 2001. Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Versus Analytic Cognition. Psychological Review 108 (2): 291–310. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1981. Medusa’s Hair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2002. Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Payutto, P. 1995. Good, Evil, and Beyond: Kamma in the Buddha’s Teaching, trans. B. Evans. Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation. Phra Rajsudhianamongkol. 2000. The Law of Karma—Dharma Practice, Vol. I, trans. Suchitra Onkom. Bangkok: Suchitra Onkom. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality. American Ethnologist 12 (4): 707–724. Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Spiro, Melford. 1997. Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press. Throop, C. Jason. 2003. On Crafting a Cultural Mind: A Comparative Assessment of Some Recent Theories of ‘Internalization’ in Psychological Anthropology. Transcultural Psychology 40 (1): 109–139.

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Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Vygotsky, Lev. 1981 [1930]. The Instrumental Method in Psychology. In The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, ed. James Wertsch, 136–143. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

3 How Do Stories Create Human Worlds?

The previous chapter explored the ways that narratives become ­personally meaningful and acceptable to others. But if they are the products of creative minds in negotiation with one another, how do they come to feel true? For this to happen, people must be unaware that they are writing their own stories, and also find meaningful, relevant ways to connect those stories to their visions of themselves and their realities. Explaining these is the goal of this chapter. Bourdieu developed his practice theory in response to problems he saw in the anthropological theories of his day, theories which set individuals partially outside of their cultures. Some theories required that they refer to rules and guidelines to make their decisions, as outsiders might when trying to fit in. Others suggested the people were able to use some sort of rationality that was external to what they had learned in their cultures to make decisions (1977: 5–6). Bourdieu’s approach was meant to insert people entirely into their cultural environments, responding to it in ways that are spontaneous and non-reflexive, but also culturally shaped. This problem is central to this book, but the solution he provided remains imperfect. This chapter attempts to explain more fully how people lock themselves into their worlds. © The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_3

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Bourdieu argues that people must be born into the social games they play in order to remain unaware of the other possible ways of ordering societies. They maintain that order through their actions and decisions, based on their motor-skill procedural complexes (1990: 67). Because these habits are anoetic—inaccessible to consciousness—they allow the individual to feel a seamless connection between the way she acts to fit into society and the way she acts to fit into the physical world (Bourdieu 1977: 90). This gives rise to what he calls doxic beliefs— people accept the way things are as the way they should be because, without reflecting, it feels obvious and right (1977: 164). Maintaining doxic beliefs can be tricky, though; the doxa is delicate. This sort of conformity remains unquestionable only as long as no one thinks to question it. The doxa will break down if someone examines her life closely and discovers that her position is the product of a system of power that promotes some interests at the expense of others, and not just the result of nature taking its course (1977: 164–165). When doxa fails, an articulated orthodoxy must take its place, in which the oppressed are given explanations that rationalize their oppression (Bourdieu 1977: 169). Orthodoxies invite questioning, however, so they are harder to maintain. Ignorance is specifically not bliss in most circumstances, then—but it is necessary to maintain a certain kind of comfort, and analysis often threatens the game. In developing a theory that explains how people lock themselves into their cultural realities by denying them special, non-culture-bound thinking abilities, Bourdieu avoids the pitfalls that came with the theories of his day. In a similar way, Rorty’s approach also denies people special, non-context-bound thinking abilities. But where Bourdieu saw the sort of questioning that leads to orthodoxy and heterodoxy as the enemy of enmeshment in a game with rigid rules, Rorty sees it as less threatening because in his vision, the rules of social games are inherently flexible. It is clear that rigorous, thoughtful, wide-ranging questioning can strengthen, and even modify, a way of seeing the world from within the confines of the rationality that vision of the world creates. Working with American Evangelical Christians, Peter Stromberg (1993) brings Rorty’s philosophy into anthropological practice. Common American views of the mind, he writes, tend to obscure

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the fact that people shape their own realities. The popular-but-faulty “referential model” he describes involves the idea that a person has a core self that can perceive and talk about an external reality (1993: 7). In this model, people experience a shared reality and talk about those experiences with words with set definitions. This folk model generally encourages people to think of the world as a stable place that they can study objectively, and not something that we can only know through the work of interpretation, fitting our experiences into old theories or making new ones. Therefore, much of what people say refers to this shared reality that, they believe, is understood passively. Instead, Stromberg argues that understanding is always an active, creative process, even when this is hidden by the referential f­olk-theory, because it renders the passing theories people use to interpret their worlds invisible. As a result, while people interpret constantly, this referential folk-theory encourages people to recognize some interpretations as interpretations, and to assert that others are concrete, objective facts, denying their interpreted nature. Therefore, meanings can be negotiated publicly and shared extensively (if not completely) while also maintaining a personal significance and veracity that relates to individual experiences and preoccupations. In this way, he explains, realities, built through Rortean languages, are constitutive, constituted and reconstituted as people think about them (Stromberg 1993). The idea that people see reality as referential while it is, in fact, understood constitutively, plays an important role in shaping the argument in this chapter. Although it may seem backward at first glance, the authoring of life stories builds a language and shapes a life-world. Karma is a concept, embedded in narratives, that people like Chatri use to shape their visions of the world and of themselves. Instead of perceiving a karmic universe and building stories about it, they use these narratives to inform a vision of reality that is governed by the rule of karma, and this vision of reality gives rise to a sense of self. This sort of self is able to perceive the workings of karma and, therefore, can verify karma stories. The fact that they have been verified supports notions about the karmic nature of the universe, endorsing, as the cycle continues, his sense of himself as a karmic being.

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Bourdieu argues that intellectual exploration destroys doxic belief. Instead, I will argue that exploring and, importantly, retelling autobiographical narratives can strengthen one’s sense of the rightness of one’s reality, creating a sense of the world as an ancient place and the universe as vast. In other words, the human ability to learn and speak languages leads to the creation of worlds that go far beyond what one can actually be sure of.

Experienced-Propositional Beliefs As we waited for our dinners to arrive at a small open-air cafe, the conversation waned, so to pass the time Chatri pulled a legal pad from his bag, drew a large “T” on it, and began composing a balance sheet. In the first column, he recorded a list of the things he had done for his relatives: He had bought his brother-in-law a taxi. A sister received money for a pickup truck. Nephews and nieces had been given food and a place to stay in Bangkok. Many people had received many things. In the other column, he listed his debts. His siblings had provided him with much—they raised and supported him from the age of 12 when he had left the monastery after his mother died. It looked like the sort of balance sheet Chatri often used to run his small, faltering business, keeping track of the credits and debits owed by and owed to the people in his life. But it wasn’t about them, he explained. It was an existential reckoning of this life’s karma. Chatri enjoyed this; it struck me that calculating his karma was something of a pastime for him. As he entered each credit, he told me the time of the gift he made, and what he thought it was worth— how the air-conditioned taxi, with its automatic meter, was more comfortable and able to draw a better class of customer than the old, open-air duk-duk, hot and dangerous and belching smoke, that his ­brother-in-law used to drive, and how the pickup was a boon in that it made getting rice to market so much easier. Exact values in the currency of karma cannot be identified, but he could get a rough idea as he summed up the virtues his gifts provided.

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Most Thais do not keep existential ledgers of their karma, as much as anthropologists would appreciate it, but the notion provides us with a useful metaphor for thinking about the ways that these stories are formed. While the formal, written form was uniquely Chatri’s, the basic pattern, and the tendency to keep tacit track of one’s karma, is not at all uncommon. While this particular iteration was done in part for my benefit, it was clear from his practiced, organized presentation that Chatri had drawn this chart before. It was a reflection of a personal reality, one that he had thought through over and over, and it had changed over the years, especially since he had been able to repay some of his debts and begun accruing a positive balance. I was impressed by the creative way he applied modern business methods to calculating his karma but I can’t say that I was surprised by the fact that he would do it; he thought about his karma as much as anyone I knew. When Chatri made his chart, he was not exploring his position in society—who owed him what in the local social games he played, which debts he could call in. In fact, he specifically did not want his relatives to repay him; he said he wanted to use this life to build up karmic credit for the future. This is not really a reckoning of practical realities or the social facts of the situation. Instead, the chart represented something much bigger: He was evaluating his location in an entire universe— what karma, as a force of nature, owed him. Chatri was firmly ensconced in a karmic universe. Aware of the possible existence of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, and cognizant of scientific atheism, he was still locked, with sincere belief, into a vision of reality that depended heavily on karma. In spite of Bourdieu’s assertions that ambiguity kills doxa, in the languages of Thai Buddhism this sort of awareness of alternative ideas about reality can be the beginning point for evidence that karma exists. There are many questions that are important enough to people that the doxa-destroying questioning of basic assumptions must be common, if not endemic. Is karma real? Does God exist? What about love? Is our world full of ghosts? It is not especially important if these questions can’t be answered objectively here; they matter personally and socially. Whether karma is real or not is a question for the ages. The evidence for it—karma might be non-existent, or an essential part

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of the underlying structure of the universe—must always be contestable. Even if Rorty finds the whole hunt for final, objective, extra-linguistic truths philosophically fruitless (1989: 8), beliefs like this—beliefs that both connect to personal experience and explain something about the invisible structure of the universe—are found in societies all around the world. More than this, by spanning the gap between personal experience and shared conceptions of the workings of the universe, the ways people deal with these questions play an essential role in connecting people to their realities. It is not the objective truth of the existence of things like karma and God that make them believable, but the lived experience of them. We can define a belief as a truth to which someone has a subjective commitment to its being true (Carlisle and Simon 2012: 222). Some beliefs are important because they are what structure a person’s interpretations of, and interactions with, reality. Therefore, a belief is also an organizing principle—not just something that one thinks about, but thinks with, and uses on the way to drawing further conclusions. (That is, beliefs are parts of Rortean languages, as shaped by different kinds of memory complexes.) All beliefs function as passing theories, but the ones of interest here—the theories that rise to the level of seriousness to which we often assign the term “belief ”—usually remain part of someone’s ways of thinking for a long time. If one believes, thinking about God or karma—and also ­thinking with these concepts—provides one with a way to organize a lifeworld. Often, these structuring propositions, what I will call ­experienced-propositional beliefs, form the assumptions that underlie both individual belief systems and shared philosophies.1 These are often abstract propositions, but, because people organize their understandings of reality around them, they feel fundamentally true. And through their unremarkable and usually unremarked use, these beliefs become part of the fabric of human existence itself. Narratives can articulate the experiences that demonstrate the truth of the propositions that make up experienced-propositional beliefs. Shared story forms that describe experiences, such as Thai karma narratives, can provide answers to questions like “Do we live in a karmic

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universe?” and serve as the justification for experienced-propositional beliefs. If one makes sense of one’s life through stories, then how do stories come to shape the beliefs they contain? The idea that people create their beliefs through autobiographical stories leads us to two questions. 1. How can Chatri be the author of his stories while also seeing himself as an observer of the karmic universe around him at the same time? 2. Chatri can’t just choose to believe what he wants. For people who tend to be aware of the influences that shape their thoughts, the idea that something would be advantageous to believe can actually make it harder to take as true. And yet people often hold c­ onvenient beliefs. How can people believe what they (ostensibly) want to believe, while not simply choosing their beliefs at the same time? To make sense of this, we need to take an anthropocentric approach to understand narrative processes that create a sense of a believing self that can invest sincerely in its beliefs. Before we go on, however, we need to define “sincere.” People can claim beliefs for different reasons. Are they sincerely committed to a vision of the world that leads to a particular set of motivations, or are they pretending to adopt a certain motivation for the sake of a social game? Or have they taken it on unreflectively, because others have? Sincerity is a measure of the seriousness with which one takes an idea. It is not a measure of conviction; one can question and wrestle with a belief sincerely—that is, one can doubt the truth of a statement (that karma exists, for example), while still thinking the answer is important. It is also not a measure of social honesty. One can lie about a sincerely held belief. A sincere belief is one an individual thinks about often, and that helps organize the way a person sees the world, and himself in it. Chatri’s belief in karma is sincere because it is interwoven with his thoughts and feelings about his family, his work, and his future. In other words, a sincere belief is one that someone thinks with. How does this connection come to exist? How does this become part of the ­life-world that karma built?

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Sincere Belief as a Narrative Expression of Experience How can someone be the author of his stories while simultaneously thinking of himself as an observer of the karmic universe around him? Chatri’s balance sheet of unpaid debts and credits is a record of unfinished stories, stories that his understanding of karmic narratives leads him to believe need to be completed. Closely attuned to his karma, he had strong ideas about which narratives had been concluded and which had not. A few years before we had our karma-conversation dinner, a credit of about 20,000 baht (about 800USD at the time) had been removed from his balance sheet: Chatri: I helped a lot of people, you know. Sometimes, when I’m not feeling rich, I loaned [my friend] money… oh, I have loaned my friend money, but I never [got] it back.2 SC: How much? Chatri: Oh, it cost a lot, 20,000 [baht]. Sometimes I help my family a lot. SC: Oh, that’s a lot of money. Chatri: Oh, it’s a lot, but you know I can give, I can help people in need because I believe that to give is a good thing, you know, and then, one day, you will get it back. But you don’t think about it. When you can help people, you have [joy] in your mind. So. You know I believe in that.… You know, one day, you know, my sister, she needs money, but I did not have enough money … So, I just picked up the phone, and I start to talk to my friend in New York.… When I start to pick up the phone, you know “Chatri?” “Yes?” You know, I start crying… so he said to me, “Well, Chatri, what’s going on? Why are you crying?” So I explained to him, my sister needs an operation on her eyes because she became blind suddenly. He asked me how much I needed. I said, “It’s, uh, oh, almost $7000.” He said, “OK, Chatri, don’t worry about it. Tell me your sister’s account,” and then he transferred it. You know, I appreciate it and I thank [him] so much, and I will never forget his help [in] those times, and I hope I can pay [that] back… I am able to do that in other ways.

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After telling a few more stories, he concluded his explanation of karma this way: “I just believe that what I have done for people [returns to me] when I need something. So I believe in that, therefore.” The narrative complex that animates Chatri’s conception of karma, then, is quite unlike the abstract, decontextualized arguments about “believing” that have constituted most of the more recent anthropological conversations about belief (e.g., Lindquist and Coleman 2008). They are also far from the abstract teachings of the monks at the temple. For Chatri, his karma is bound up with the families that raised him, the friends who helped him, his obligations, the good that he has done, and the gifts he has received. It is part of the fabric of his relationships, his vision of himself as a moral being, and his expectations for the future. While he understands that the law of karma is a fundamental part of Buddhist doctrine, the doctrine itself is secondary to him; karma is not so much dogma as a way of thinking about his connection to reality. The articulated doctrine of doing good and getting good is a distillation of stories like these. What matters to him on a personal level is the concrete fact that giving $800 to a friend allowed his sister to have her $7000 operation. It is an aspect of the experience of being Chatri, understood, as it is woven into his life, through his narratives. The remembered experience of the story is more central to his thinking than its explanation in propositional form. But then, why does Chatri connect those specific events in his ­stories? In the last chapter, Aw could have connected the pain in her eye to a variety of different experiences to create different karma stories. At this point, however, we can take the question to a different level: Why assemble these events using the karma story form at all? Reality provides no rulebook, and cultural order is incomplete. Because life’s events are ambiguous, and because categorizations shift as people move through them, decisions about categorizing are often made without ­well-defined frameworks. Chatri could explain his sister’s providence as luck, as a product of karma, as disguised misfortune, or something else. He could also attribute it to something in the generous nature of his friend, which would be another story entirely. But the friend’s generosity, or the warmth of their shared feeling, does not appear here at all. In this story, it is not caring that saved his sister—it was the impersonal

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force of karma. Why does he choose the specific narrative structure he uses at this moment, while setting the rest aside? Part of the answer can be found in the fact that it made Chatri feel good. Chatri thinks about his karma because he likes thinking about it: At this point in his life, he felt, the universe owed him. As he rehearsed his karma stories, then, he constructed them in such a way that they pointed to a happy, prosperous future. Note that karma provided him with $7000 in response to the $800 he gave—but he did not mention the thought that he might owe the universe the other $6200. Instead, he told me, his American friend was much richer than he was, so the sacrifice was comparable. At some point in the past, it appears, Chatri became aware that his loan of 20,000 baht was not going to be repaid by his friend, and so it fell to karma to compensate him. When his New York friend stepped forward with the money, Chatri crossed the debt off his ledger and completed his story. The story does not just help him make sense of the universe in which he lives, it helps him find a place for himself in it— one that, at this point in time, he finds satisfying. Over time, Chatri’s stories changed. As his nieces and nephews entered young adulthood, they used his apartment as a springboard to lives in Bangkok, which allowed him to repay the debts accrued to the siblings who had sheltered him when he was young. Every now and then, some piece of good fortune—a raise or an unexpected gift—came his way. Each of these credits and debits was dutifully fit into his grand karma story—and each change, finding its place, came to seem necessary and inevitably correct, and felt good. Emotion, then, is part of the answer. But as I pointed out earlier, this can only be part of the answer. Believing something and wanting to believe something are very different things. How had Chatri managed to remove all the possible doubts and challenges that could remain in the mind of someone as thoughtful and broadly experienced as he was? Life tends to be full of incomplete and potential stories with loose ends that never get tied up. The psychological processes that occur as we tell and retell the stories of our lives cause us to streamline them, making certain interpretations necessary, and the rest impossible. “Remembering,” as Milan Kundera writes, “is a form of forgetting” (1995: 128).

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Forgetting into Stories In developing his approach, Bourdieu overlooked a very important point: There is more than one way to forget. Remembering is a form of forgetting, Kundera realized, and forgetting, I should add, is a form of world-making. Episodic memories, which build up connections between things and events, work differently from memories about decontextualized semantic facts. The process of remembering a story—telling it to oneself or to others—has the effect of streamlining it. Details that people remember are strengthened with each retelling, while those that lack salience in most retellings eventually fade to inaccessibility. When this happens, it is as though these moments never occurred (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce 2000). Although storytellers can’t feel the process, the memories they select for their stories over and over eventually become the only possibilities available to tell. This, then, raises an important question: How do people select their details? Like Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, Halbwachs argues that narrative realities are responsive to the truths one wants to demonstrate (1952: 45). Over time, this process of forgetting causes narratives to simplify, matching the needs of the narrator as she responds to her audience and the cultural contexts in which she tells her stories, as well as to the shared narrative models through which the stories are organized. Details that might support alternative narratives or work against culturally sanctioned narrative forms, then, will tend to fade. So an honest storyteller doesn’t eliminate details because she finds them unsavory in a general sense, but rather because they are irrelevant to her goals in telling a story. Therefore, telling a story with a particular goal in mind (like the desire to portray oneself as a good Buddhist, or a thoughtless teen, or to make a certain point like figuring out how good one’s karma is) can shape the narratives one remembers. Marsh (2007) presented experimental subjects with a narrative about a conflict between two fictional college students and asked them to produce an argument that favored one randomly selected side over the other. When she asked her subjects to recall the story later, they were more likely to remember the details that supported

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the side they were assigned to support. More than this, they also demonstrated a tendency to remember information that was not actually in the narrative at all—shifting traits between the characters, for example— in ways that supported the perspective they were randomly assigned to defend (Marsh 2007: 17). Building on Bartlett’s (1932) work, Marsh writes, “What people remember about events may be the story they last told about those events” (Marsh 2007: 19). As details are winnowed, stories are constituted in narrower and narrower terms, slowly eroding potentially nuanced, messy, contradictory, and complex experiences into simpler, ostensibly objective reflections of referential realities. And when the details supporting other possible interpretations have vanished, the story that is left must, to the rememberer, be the truth. This effect becomes more pronounced if we accept constructivist theories of the mind, like the one outlined by Hollan, which offers a powerful set of tools for making sense of the ways that people orient themselves within their environments (Hollan 2000, 2012). While many psychodynamic theorists argue that thoughts tend to remain conscious unless they are forced out of awareness, constructivists argue for the reverse. Unless something brings some thought into awareness, it will remain unconscious. As a result, constructivists view the mind as fragmented; different aspects of memory and experience stay apart from one another unless there is some reason for them to join. Hollan describes “vertical splits” between aspects of human minds—splits that separate one module of thought and experience from the next (Hollan 2000: 540). Disconnection is the norm, not the exception. Because episodic memories are the only basis on which people can think themselves into their worlds, people demonstrate a strong tendency to trust the veracity of their own remembered narratives (Ross and Buehler 2008: 224, 227). Even many psychologists, who should be aware of memory’s flexibility, casually adopt the folk-theory that memories work like movie cameras, faithfully recording every detail (Loftus and Loftus 1980) instead of recognizing that they slowly evolve new facts.3 If Chatri accepts the idea that he lives in a karmic universe, then considering karmic connections becomes necessary when thinking about the gifts he has given and received. In his story, the money he received from

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his friend in New York does not reflect the fact that this man trusted him to tell the truth about his sister, or the fact that Chatri often cultivated connections with well-healed, professional friends. While these facts may figure into different stories he could tell about the same subjects, they are irrelevant to the story he tells here. The ­eye-operation story makes a connection between the two events—the unrepaid debt and his sister’s illness—that are related only through karma. Chatri’s New York friend played into other narratives as well, and many of the details of their relationship remained salient in his mind. But in many other karma narratives which link disparate events, the only connections that remain visible are the ones that relate to karma. Remember Pannee’s story of the slaughterhouse overseer whose karma caused him to be gored by an escaped bull in his living room: What remains of the overseer in Pannee’s memory? Not his other virtues and sins, nor whether he was a loving family man, nor (it is possible—she does not know) a devout Muslim. What is left? Nothing but his gender, his job, his address, and his death. With this information, there is virtually no other story that Pannee could tell about him and believe at the same time. So the idea that stories are built from selections from a complete library of semantic facts is nothing but a popular myth. Without something to make a fact important, like the framework of a story, the library slowly reduces itself. Without different stories to believe— without the full range of facts that could be remembered to make different connections—the possibility of fitting increasingly attenuated information into diverse narrative grammars goes away. And the result is that, if there is only one remaining form for the storyteller to use, it must be seen as the correct one (Carlisle 2012). This explains why Chatri does not—and cannot—see himself as the author of his karma stories.

Thinking, Hoping, and Feeling into World-Shaping Beliefs In retelling his stories until other possible explanations have faded away, Chatri thinks himself into believing in karma. And he hopes and feels himself into thinking about it. The audience for the eye-operation story

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is often Chatri himself, although, obviously, other people listen in from time to time. Buddhist doctrine suggests that he view his positive karma as an investment in the future; this makes these stories appealing to ponder. It holds out the possibility that his care for others will be repaid when the universe proffers someone to care for him, and that the gifts he has given will result in a comfortable life for himself in the future. So the fact that the story feels good does play in here. But it is not the fact that he likes it that makes it feel correct. This emotional appeal causes him to tell it to himself regularly and at odd moments—like when he waits for dinner at restaurants—and this regularity has most likely solidified his stories, removing unhelpful details, and streamlined them. They are no longer one possible interpretation but the only possible truth. The emotional drive to retell stories, then, can make them feel more true. And this answers one of our questions: How is it that Chatri comes to adopt a referential ideology and see himself as the perceiver of objective reality rather than the composer of a new story? The retelling of stories makes them feel true not just because they are habits, or because they are desirable, although both of these might be true. Instead, these stories feel true because their tellers have reshaped their webs of meanings to match them. Where Bourdieu argues that people remain unaware that they are playing games they could step outside of, the approach described here diagnoses the situation differently. Instead of having to protect his game from details that would reveal its arbitrariness, Chatri has either forgotten the details that could make his interpretive choices appear arbitrary, or ruled them out. Even when those possibilities are presented, therefore, he has forgotten that this is just one option. This is a system in which people become participants in the only possible game—and, therefore, it ceases to seem to be a game at all.

More Than Good Luck but Less Than a Choice This brings us to the second question: How can people believe what they (ostensibly) want to believe, while not intentionally choosing their beliefs at the same time?

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While Chatri participates in the constitution of the reality in which he lives, he does not simply choose to believe in karma. If he did, of course, he would not actually believe; sincere beliefs about a referential external world involve recognizing the fact that one does not create one’s own desired realities. But then, why is it that sincerely held beliefs are often self-serving? It is not because the idea is socially sanctioned, or because it follows logically from the Dhamma, and not directly because it is emotionally satisfying. The fact that a belief is shared by some members of a society may be enough to encourage lip-service, but it is not sufficient to cause others to believe it as well. And the fact that something is rationally possible does not mean that it exists. While the social monitoring and disciplining that go on when people tell karma stories is necessary to pass on the rules of those stories, the fact that someone knows how to tell a story does not mean that she believes it. So then, why? Having composed stories in which the karmic universe owes him, Chatri finds his belief in karma satisfying. But satisfaction is very different from truth. Chatri believes his chart represents reality; it is not just a daydream that he enjoys reviewing. If he thought it were merely a wish, he would not draw the same satisfaction from it. The fact that a man with good karma believes in karma, then, is more than a lucky accident—but, because beliefs cannot be chosen, it is also less than a deliberate choice. Beliefs, then, can come from a different kind of doxa, one shaped by cognitive-procedural memories. Although the procedures themselves tend to remain unconscious, thinking with them and through them, and considering their products are parts of everyday life. These truths can be flexible and resilient—enough so that they can provide the grounding for thinking and talking about the world in a variety of situations. They can provide a sort of doxa that can stand in the face of diversity and challenge.

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How Do Personal Truths Create Greater Realities? Recognizing the fact that people forget themselves into their truths through habits of thought casts a different light on the nature of belief than the ones set out in many anthropological approaches. In spite of the fundamental importance of unprovable beliefs in both practical daily living and academic thought, the anthropological record has been thin on ideas explaining beliefs for a number of decades now, and most attempts to explain it have been problematic at best. Some—like Lindquist and Coleman—have set out to get rid of the idea entirely. They discovered, however, that they could not (2008: 2). Setting aside Bourdieu’s work, done almost half a century ago, most of the anthropological talk of belief has been about what is believed, and not how believing works.4 Lacking a clear understanding of how people believe what they believe has complicated the task of understanding those beliefs themselves. The ways Westerners often conceptualize beliefs—and c­ onceptualize the sorts of beings who hold those beliefs—create several problems when we try to work them through. Taylor (1989) shows that Western conceptions of human nature have, for the last several centuries, described people as separate from their truths: They can be objective, rational, disengaged observers of reality. This allows them to imagine that they can step back from the world and discover truths without recognizing their own involvement with and underlying biases toward those truths. When talking about a belief, then—“I believe in God,” for example—there is a strong tendency in the West to take the “I” for granted, as some pre-cultural, metaphysical entity. Instead, thinkers often explore the meaning of “believe,” as, for example, Needham (1972) does, to isolate and examine the social meaning and verifiability of truth values. Once isolated, Needham discovers that there is nothing one can compare them with to gain certainty, so he concludes that the concept of “belief ” itself is ultimately misleading (1972: 245–246). (This makes sense; things that have been taken out of context become very hard to measure contextually.)

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Other thinkers who adopt the approach Taylor describes go directly for “God”—as does biologist and atheism-advocate Richard Dawkins (e.g., 2006). Both Dawkins and Needham seek logical, ­non-culture-bound ways of making sense of beliefs instead of looking at them as aspects of the ways people organize their lives. What both of these approaches overlook (in typical contemporary Western style) is the fact that beliefs are not contingent upon any state of reality or abstract feeling in the mind, but are, rather, reflections of a certain kind of life—of an “I,” a type of culturally constituted knowing self. To escape the problem of Cartesian dualism (discussed in Chapter 1), Rorty places a believing self in its cultural world, not behind it. He argues that an identity is a combination of the beliefs and desires that define a language, not that an identity holds those beliefs and desires. They are, as Rorty argues, a part of the web of meanings that makes a person the kind of being she is (1991: 185). Isolating “God” or “believe” from that contextualized self, therefore, involves removing those words from the interpretive framework which gives them meaning. To make sense of the statement, “I believe in God,” then, we must pay careful attention to the “I.” Trying to study a belief without understanding the context in which it exists would be as futile as taking a rook from a chess set and dissecting it under a microscope to discover why it moves left and right but not on the diagonal. There are a number of problems that are resolved easily if we give up the idea that people internalize pre-defined beliefs presented to them as they orient pre-cultural selves toward their societies. In its place, we can recognize the fact that people negotiate and practice their beliefs into their life-worlds. The first problem, already discussed, relates to the fact that beliefs are often self-serving. This raises the issue of how people deal with the problem of believing things simply because they want to. Furthermore: 1. Humans hold many beliefs very deeply and sincerely, even when there is little rational evidence to support them. As Benedict Anderson (1991) points out, many people would die to defend their beliefs— beliefs, we should add, that many other people would die to defeat.

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Just explaining a situation rationally often does not suffice to convince people. There must, therefore, be a non-rational aspect to beliefs. 2. While some people’s deeply held beliefs contradict other people’s deeply held beliefs, there are often others close by who are basically unconcerned with the beliefs that either of those two sides takes as fundamental. (This is not the contrast between the God-fearing Baptist and his ferociously atheist sister, it’s the contrast between the ardent atheist and an apathetic, non-committal agnostic.) Why do some people hold a belief sincerely while their neighbors just don’t care? Simple social pressure, then, is an incomplete answer. In addition to a non-rational component, there must be a not-entirelysocial component as well. These problems are only problems when we try to isolate beliefs from one another—and, therefore, from their believers. For Chatri, believing in the truth of karma does not take effort; instead, his effort went into rehearsing his stories. But once the narrative has been created and solidified as the only possibility, it becomes a part of his way of being, not a claim that was somehow sutured onto his character. Because other people have other interests and preoccupations, and because some of them spend little time thinking about their karma, they have not built the narratives with the same strength and nuance that he has. While all the Thai Buddhists I know are fluent in the language of karma, some of them apply it to many subjects, others do not. In this way, some people will believe deeply and intensely while their friends and neighbors don’t. But they can, of course, still use beliefs as markers of membership in a group, or as a response to social pressures. It appears, then, that when social thinkers talk about “beliefs” they are talking about two different kinds of things. When they talk about them as social claims or as doctrines, they are talking specifically about the expressions of people’s beliefs, and not the contextualized, “I”-shaping aspect of a belief. It is something they can think and talk about, but not, in this form, something they think with. While these expressions can play an important role in social life, focusing on this first and foremost makes it easy to overlook the importance of the other aspect of belief, the aspect embedded in one’s language and

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gets lived—the structure of narratives and habits of thinking. As people practice them, these ways of thinking burrow themselves into lifeworlds, becoming part of the fabric of truths in which people live, expressed through first-person predispositions. These truths become the building blocks for the realities into which they have locked themselves. How, then, can we talk about these two ways of conceptualizing belief?

Belief-as-Experienced vs. Belief-as-Explained When anthropologists ask about assertions of semantic truths—“What do you claim to believe?” The answers, which relate to the conscious, at times strategic expression of doctrines, are what I call beliefs-as-explained (Carlisle 2012). At other times, their questions relate to the phenomena explored in this chapter, the narrative construction of a certain kind of reality. The question we can ask our subjects here is something like, “How did you become the sort of person who believes this?” I refer to this as a belief-as-experienced. Both of these questions are important, and they are certainly related—but while these two approaches to belief play different roles in human life, anthropologists frequently confuse or conflate them. Chatri thinks about karma—his own and other peoples’—through his narrative complex, which gives him the sense that he has experienced karma. He composes his karmic reality, then—the ­ belief-asexperienced—without referring overtly to the doctrine of karma itself. His understanding of his nature as a karmic being living in a karmic universe allows him to build a life-world that rests on the conviction of his own autobiographical, experience-based conception of existence. That said, Chatri’s belief in karma also relates to the formal Buddhist doctrine, and he often asserted that doctrine proudly, demonstrating that he was a good Buddhist. But how, exactly, do beliefs-as-explained and beliefs-as-experienced relate? Does the doctrine (as explained) give rise to the karma story (the memory of an experience)? Or, going the other way, has the experience of living in a karmic reality given rise to that handy little idiom about doing good and getting good? Or

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are his self-conscious claims about being a good, believing Buddhist simply part of the social games he plays, unrelated to his experiences in a possibly karmic universe? When anthropologists talk about beliefs as being imposed from outside, they generally talk about beliefs-as-explained. Sperber ­ (1985), for example, discusses beliefs in terms of their social, identitygiving value. A person who claims a belief this way does not need to have brought this into her way of thinking, beyond understanding that it is a good thing to say when the question comes up. Claiming a ­belief-as-explained is like saying, “I believe this because I am Thai.” The ­belief-as-explained may be remote from experience. This probably happens often—but, of course, it is not the only way. Coming from the opposite direction, Chatri’s belief in karma reflects his memories of a very vivid set of experiences. His culturally and experientially shaped personal narratives allow his belief in karma to become a part of an integrated, self-defining system of interpretation and action, connecting experiences and self-conceptions. If we think of beliefs-as-experienced this way, then it becomes possible for their organizing principles to conflict with one another and to evolve over time in response to changes in behavioral environments and life events. From this angle, then, beliefs are not claims that a person accepts a truth, because the belief serves to ground the truth. Rather, this is the result of the fitting of one’s memories to the karma story model, and the model to one’s memories. Because of this, a sincere, convinced believer integrates the belief into her perspective in a way that can make it difficult to sort out well enough to discuss directly. Pouillon writes, “[I]t is an unbeliever who believes that the believer believes in the existence of God” (Pouillon 1982). Lindquist and Coleman add to that: “For the believer, the existence of God is not ‘believed’ but ‘perceived’” (2008: 5). If we ask a believer, “Why do you believe in God,” then, the answer will not be particularly enlightening: She believes in God because, in her life-world, God is real. A question more appropriate to ask (if not easier to answer) might be: “How have you become the sort of person who knows that God is real?” Exploring the etiology of a belief reveals the problematizations

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of the self that creates it. We can understand a claim like “I believe in God” to mean, “I am the sort of person who, in my narratives about the world, can perceive God.” This is an articulation of the experience of living in a particular kind of life-world that contains a particular kind of perceiving being. There are times when the belief-as-explained is essential to our understanding of a situation. In contexts of conflict, where beliefs serve to define identities, the claims often become objects of consideration in and of themselves. And in times of change, when people seek new ways to make sense of their situations, the self-aware exploration of beliefs is often valuable. When someone can only answer part of a question, self-conscious articulation of beliefs can often become part of the process of seeking resolution. As Sperber claims, it is often a way of asserting an identity, or of placing oneself in a social category, or of aligning with a group. In these cases, the belief-as-explained becomes salient. So how do these forms of belief relate? Chronologically, it seems likely that Chatri became familiar with “do good, get good”—a broad, abstract semantic claim—as a small child, before he understood what karma meant in the specific terms described by the stories. But if we approach the notion epistemologically, it seems that an understanding of the story form is required before the ­belief-as-explained can become meaningful. There must be some prior experience in order for “do good, get good” to take on the specific meaning it has to most Thai Buddhists. The explanation of the doctrine can’t come first. This abstract exposition of natural law does not include the specific guidelines one would need to compose a convincing karma story, or even enough of the information one would require to derive them. And in a social world in which accepting karma is viewed as unquestionably ordinary, the motivating force of the belief-as-explained, “Do good, get good; do evil get evil”—as distinct from the experience of doing good and getting good—is very unclear. It is unreasonable to assume, then, that the belief-as-explained could provide either the motivation or that logical structure that would allow people to organize their experiences into beliefs-as-experienced.

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While the narrative complex teaches people to construct karma stories so that moral acts are properly repaid, the doctrinal claim itself— that the nature of the universe is such that doing good acts reaps rewards while doing bad brings punishments—can serve to sum up the moral of the story. This conclusion is baked into the story from the start, but its articulation isn’t necessary in the telling. The doctrinal belief-as-expressed is like a fruit growing on a tree: The tree of lived experience needs to be there to keep the fruit alive—at least for as long as the belief is something more than a social claim.5 This distinction is often lost as it can be awkward to articulate beliefs-as-experienced; they represent claims about truths that, like gravity, are often built into assumptions about reality without requiring—or even necessarily involving—articulation. Instead of making a statement like, “I believe this because I am Thai,” which may be socially useful but experientially empty, then, articulating a belief-as-experienced often involves something more like, “I take karma as a basic organizing principle of my life and my world.” At times, however, the tendency of anthropologists to separate the doctrine from the experiencing self leads to unnecessary complications.

Karma Is Real Because Chatri Is Real This leads us to an important point, but one that is difficult to make intuitive. English speakers tend to think of themselves as “having” beliefs, or “holding” them. This reflects what Stromberg calls the “referential ideology”—the idea that one’s inner self is separate from an objective outer world. However, there is no distance between a person’s beliefs-as-experienced and the reality they perceive. The idea of a ­belief-as-explained (“I believe in God”), which separates “I” from “believe” by putting them in two separate words, is an articulation that often distracts people from seeing that the belief is part of the organization of a believer’s view of reality. It would be easy—but wrong—to assume that adherence to the doctrinal belief-as-explained would serve as sufficient basis for Buddhist

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beliefs about karma. A straw-man argument might go something like this: Socialized into accepting karmic doctrine as logical and sensible, people come to feel that it is correct. Based on this sense of karmic correctness, they find anecdotal evidence to support the idea. Then, since no one resists the concept too loudly, they pass it on to the next generation, endowing Buddhist cultures with karmic components that people believe over centuries.

Many anthropologists appear to accept this thesis tacitly, although it leads to a reductive and tautological conception of the relationship between beliefs and the people who believe them, and also between experience and doctrine. The statement above reduces to a tautology that looks like this: Karmic dogma explains the experiences people have, while their experiences justify adherence to the dogma.

Although this approach can explain the social acceptance of the karma concept in a very basic way, the claim, “To a Buddhist, karma is real because it is real,” is a very dissatisfying explanation. From a logical perspective, it becomes a truism, not a truth, and truisms tend not to hold up to the scrutiny of the thoughtful and informed well at all.

Conceptualizing Oneself in Buddhist Terms How, then, do people develop beliefs that are sincere, well-examined, and integrated into distinct life-worlds? The answer becomes clear if we look at the ways that laypeople’s ideas about Buddhist doctrine problematize a perceiving, sensing self. Just as people with vision can see things, people who believe that they can sense their karma live in worlds where they believe karma is detectable. Chatri understands that he is this sort of karma-perceiving being. He can use this innate ability—the sort of ability that allows him to test his hypotheses, as

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the ­philosopher-monk Buddhadasa Bhikku put it—to understand the nature of karma. The intuitive ability to “see Dhamma”—perceive the truth of objective realities intuitively, a skill one acquires at enlightenment—is the ideal: Now intuitive insight, or what we call “seeing Dhamma,” is not by any means the same thing as rational thinking. One will never come to see Dhamma by means of rational thinking. Intuitive insight can be gained only by means of true inner realization. (Buddhadasa Bhikku 1956: 43)

Awareness, then, and the intuitions that accompany it, is the royal road to understanding here—not, as many Western theories would have it, reason (Taylor 1989). None of my subjects claim to be anywhere near enlightenment, although, as small children, they all had been required to meditate in school. Small children are about as good at sitting quietly and emptying their minds as one might expect, and, as adults, the memories of frustration had caused almost all to give up the idea of trying it again. They did not abandon the idea of seeing Dhamma, though. In spite of the fact that they lacked the refined, meditation-borne consciousness it requires, most of my subjects believe that their intuitive certainties reflect some intermediate level of Dhamma-seeing below the one the Buddha attained. In these cases, then, Buddhadasa’s enlightened awareness is replaced by intuition and emotional conviction. As a result, many Thais trust their intuitions and emotions to provide them with objective truths. As Chatri understands himself, this is part of his nature. He can use this—as an aspect of his first-person predispositions—to respond to the things he sees and the people he talks to. Because Chatri is the sort of being who is able to connect cause and effect through reason, intuition, and emotional certainty (as suggested by his understanding of Buddhism), he feels, intuits, and, therefore, knows the connections in his karma stories are real. And because he is the sort of being whose intuitions reflect reality, his sense that the connections he makes are the results of karma serves as evidence that they are, in fact, karmic. This Buddhist-inflected self is central not just to

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Chatri’s conception of who he is, but in creating the contexts in which he lives and learns—they help create the language of his reality that grounds the contextualized, meaningful truths of his world. They are not simply truisms that can slip softly away. So Chatri is far beyond accepting karma tautologically, or merely socially. It is not real just because it is real, and it is not real because everyone else says so. It is real because he is the sort of being who can perceive it—he can intuit it, and he can make rational connections between karmically related events. Belief in karma is predicated on the fact that the language he thinks, acts, and interprets reality through has endowed him with the identity of one who can perceive karma. That is, to be Chatri—and to be a Thai Buddhist—is to be a karma-sensing being. Beliefs, then, are self-supporting, but in a rather complex way. Beliefs like this become real because believers imagine themselves into their life-worlds in ways that allow them to see or feel or know particular truths. He knows karma is real in much the same way he knows gravity is real: He is built to sense it. Chatri grounds his belief in karma in his own existence as having had karmic experiences (interpreted by a knowing self that is informed by lay Buddhist conceptions) that are also real. So karma is real because Chatri is real. And as Chatri travels through his life, his predisposition to see the world through a karmic lens has become durable and portable. As he retells and rehearses his stories, based on his culturally sanctioned intuitions and observations, as he draws up his balance sheets and tells people about what the universe owes him, he creates more opportunities to affirm and endorse his ideas about karma. Because karma is real, it provides meaning for his actions and motivation for his thoughts. And because he is motivated by this meaningful belief, this way of seeing the world affirms itself. The longer he lives through these habituated narratives, the more often he tells these stories to himself, the less he is able to consider alternative possibilities, and the more he affirms his existence as this kind of Buddhist knowing self. In the ordinary, ostensibly obvious and natural processes of living day to day, then, Chatri practices his world, and his particular kind of self, into existence. Thoughtful analyses of

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experiences, not blind adherence or social sanctioning, lock Chatri into his life-world. He doesn’t just forget himself into his stories—the fact that his stories are true confirms his own existence as well.6

Larger Lives Approaches that claim beliefs rest either on conformity to social norms or on tautological reasoning, rather than reflecting aspects of someone’s life-world, lead to two problems. First, they prevent us from seeing the variety of visions our subjects hold, and from recognizing the value of the intelligence and difference reflected in those visions. As Schieffelin (1985), Stromberg (1993), and Hollan (2000) point out, in many cases, variety and nuance in beliefs are there to explore. It is probably true that many Thais accept the doctrine of karma uncritically, but we cannot assume that this mode is typical; this group of believers does not include Chatri and other devout lay Buddhists and also overlooks centuries of deep-thinking philosopher-monks. And this flattening out of beliefs prevents us from developing a nuanced view of the varied “I”’s that underlie the semi-shared intersubjective worlds in which people live, potentially leading to the faulty tacit assumption that beliefs are completely shared. If we assume that people absorb ideas uncritically, not contemplating them in relation to experiences or other ideas, it becomes difficult to think about any individualization of beliefs—not just stories—or to identify nuance and differences among believers. If we were to assume that karma stories play the same perfunctory roles in people’s lives, we would lose the ability to distinguish the deep believers who have developed idiosyncratic life-worlds that organize and are organized by their individuated beliefs. Personalizations of beliefs in karma reflect different underlying conceptions of people’s places in the world as well. Among the subset of subjects in my study of middle-class Buddhists who live in Bangkok, were male, college-educated, and between the ages of 20 and 35, all claimed to believe that karma was a real force of nature. But some of them dreaded the return of their karma because of perceived past sins; others awaited their rewards eagerly. Jin rarely thought about it at all while Chatri oriented his life around the idea that the universe would

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repay his good deeds. But approaching the doctrine as a standardized “internalized“ belief (rather than one synchronized across different ­life-worlds and integrated into languages) eliminates the need to develop an explanation for why, other than social sanctioning and exposure, people would accept the belief. To understand what karma means in Thai society, we need to explore what it means to individuals, and this involves measuring differences in attitudes, interpretations, and valuations of importance. Here, then, we have a functional explanation for Rorty’s insight: The languages that people use are shaped largely by their narratives, and these shape the ways people conceptualize their life-worlds, and themselves within them. In writing his karma stories, Chatri does something rather incredible. He takes events that are quite small in the grand scheme of things—loans of amounts of money that are large to him now but tiny compared to the amount of money he will hold during his lifetime, gifts that recognize relationships so few in number that he can count them on his fingers—and, by applying the laws of the karma story to them, he creates an entire universe, its karmic wheels turning, balancing, and rebalancing itself in a state of chronic adjustment, a universe with invisible rules which, he believes, apply to everyone and everything in existence for all time. He has created a world which is much larger than his life—unfathomably larger than any human’s experience could possibly be. From an unrepaid loan of a few hundred dollars grows a planet in what he takes to be a referential reality. The fact that he has developed this first-person predisposition is useful to him in a number of ways. Chatri’s predisposition to understand himself as able to perceive karma means that he is able to calculate his karma, but it also means that he is able to evaluate other people’s karma stories, and even have something to say about their karma. It is durable because it is self-supporting and then portable because he can apply it in many situations. (“You have sin,” he told me one day when I put the autobiography of a monk in the same bag as my gym shoes. The physical proximity of the dirty and the holy was enough, he felt, to harm my karma.) The fact that he thinks he has good karma allows him to imagine himself and his future in distinctive ways as well. This is a vision of reality oriented around the self and

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personal experience—a factor that will become very important in the next chapter. And this completes the cycle of world-creation. In Chapter 2, I explained the ways that shared truths inform and shape personal stories. Here, I showed how personal stories become iterations of p ­ ersonal truths, and then how those personal truths come to create larger worlds. People can share the ideas embedded in these life-worlds with one another—and so from these personal worlds, shared through stories, come the general truths that inform and shape the personal stories discussed in Chapter 2. I have argued for a person-centered approach that allows for a relatively high level of flexibility in dealing with individual differences while also recognizing the forces that breed similarities. These chapters have looked at how narratives synchronize, and how people can communicate about karma even when their ideas about it differ. The next chapter will begin to explore the development of differences which are greater than the relatively minor ones explored here. I will argue that, in fact, it is possible to create a social environment in which people can communicate and cooperate even if they share relatively little in the way of beliefs. This broadened vision of flexibility opens the door to understanding cultural change.

Notes 1. When people espouse beliefs, they usually take the form of statements of fact, organized as propositional models about the state of the universe. Models of reality that lay out propositions may be very concrete (e.g., “I got money for my sister’s operation”) while others are more general and harder to prove unambiguously (“karma maintains moral balance in the universe,” or “karmic responses are always metaphorically appropriate”). 2. I conducted this interview relatively early on in my fieldwork. Done in a combination of English and Thai, many of these statements were made in one language and repeated in the other so that I could verify my translations. The language here represents my attempt to capture Chatri’s intentions as closely as possible. Later interviews were conducted in Thai and translated by me.

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3. And being aware of this, of course, wouldn’t really help. Knowing that one’s memories might (or might not) be skewed in a particular direction would not allow someone to retrieve the original narrative, lost in the retelling. 4. This does not include the work of a small group in which I participated—see Carlisle and Simon (2012). 5. This approach, then, differs from those of a number of other social thinkers—like Geertz (1973) and Durkheim (1915), and their followers—who think about beliefs in terms of explicated cognitive structures which then shape experiences. These thinkers have been criticized for theorizing a world which more recent anthropologists see as too heavily informed by conscious thought. What I offer here is a middle path, one that recognizes the importance of conscious practice while moving the constitutive field away from intentionality. 6. One of the central issues this book explores is the relationships between cultural epistemologies and ontologies. People’s ideas about how they learn about the world reflect their notions of what they think they themselves are. Instead of viewing emotions as a response to interpretations of experiences, for example, many Thais see them as direct, unmediated responses to the world outside the mind. In the same way that a sensation of sweetness is a natural, automatic response to sugar entering the mouth, a feeling of fear, in some cases, is seen as an automatic response to the presence of a ghost. In this light, humans are emotional perceivers, not just creatures that experience emotions. Why, then, are Thai Buddhists encouraged to use memory, reason, and emotion to question beliefs about karma, but not to use their understandings of karma to question beliefs about memory, reason, and emotion? The reasons, I think, are practical. It would be difficult to live as a being who could not trust her ability to reason or remember. (This seems to be the case in spite of the fact that, as many experimenters, including Loftus and Loftus [1980] have shown, memory is not a particularly reliable or consistent guide to the past.) Chatri—along, perhaps, with most of the rest of humanity—accepts the idea that his understandings of reality are referential. He perceives what he perceives because it is real, and he knows what he knows because it is true. If we reconceptualize the world as constitutive instead of referential—of realities as products of the ways people think and not the other way around—then we need to pay careful attention

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to questions of epistemology. What people know about reality isn’t grounded immediately in reality itself; it is grounded in the way they look at it, and the way they look at the world leads them to make decisions about not just what they can know, but how they can know it.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Press. Bartlett, Frederic. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buddhadasa Bhikku. 1956. Handbook for Mankind. Bangkok: Dhammasapa. Carlisle, Steven. 2012. Creative Sincerity: Thai Buddhist Karma Narratives and the Grounding of Truths. Ethos 40 (3): 317–340. Carlisle, Steven, and Gregory M. Simon. 2012. Believing Selves: Negotiating Social and Psychological Experiences of Belief. Ethos 40 (3): 221–236. Conway, Martin, and Christopher Pleydell-Pearce. 2000. The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System. Psychological Review 107 (2): 261–288. Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt. Durkheim, Emile. 1915 [1912]. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. London: Allen & Unwin. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1952 [1992]. On Collective Memory, trans. L. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hollan, Douglas. 2000. Constructivist Models of Mind, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Development of Culture Theory. American Anthropologist 102 (3): 538–550. Hollan, Douglas. 2012. On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience. Ethos 40 (1): 37–53. Kundera, Milan. 1995. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. L. Asher. New York: HarperCollins.

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Lindquist, Galina, and Simon Coleman. 2008. Introduction: Against Belief? Theme Issue: “Against Belief?”. Social Analysis 52 (1): 1–18. Loftus, Elizabeth, and Geoffrey Loftus. 1980. On the Permanence of Information Stored in the Human Brain. American Psychologist 35 (5): 409–420. Marsh, Elizabeth. 2007. Retelling Is Not the Same as Remembering: Implications for Memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (1): 16–20. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford: University of Chicago Press. Pouillon, Jean. 1982 [1979]. Remarks on the Verb ‘To Believe.’ In Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History and Myth, ed. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, trans. John Leavitt, 9–23. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ross, Michael, and Roger Buehler. 2008. Creative Remembering. In The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, ed. Ulric Niesser and Robyn Fivush, 205–235. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality. American Ethnologist 12 (4): 707–724. Sperber, Daniel. 1985. Apparently Irrational Beliefs. In On Anthropological Knowledge, 35–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stromberg, Peter. 1993. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

4 How Are Differing Personal Realities Shared?

The first time I heard about Ben’s ghost, one sunny afternoon on a beach by a bright blue Andaman Sea, he, A, and I were sharing scary experiences. It was not really a story meant to tell his friends about ghosts. People tell stories for a variety of reasons—to make themselves feel good, to remind themselves of times past, to entertain the people around them—but they do something else as well. Autobiographical narratives help people locate themselves in their realities. They tell people who and what they are, and how their universes work. This was the point of the story. Many years later, when I had a voice recorder with me, I asked him to tell me the story again. This, Ben says, is what happened. About 30 years ago now, when Ben was in his late teens, his grandmother’s house—specifically his aunt Noy’s bedroom—suddenly acquired a new tenant. While she slept, a boy-like spirit would run and play around her bed. A pragmatic woman, and uncommonly brave, Noy usually rolled over and ignored the spirit.1 But one night, when the phantasm was especially annoying, she treated it as she would a ­difficult child and scolded it. It was not a child, of course, and it responded like a ghost: It grabbed her, dragged her out of bed, and dumped her © The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_4

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on the floor. This was enough for Noy. She picked up her pillow and moved into her mother’s room—not an unusual sleeping arrangement in Thailand—and what used to be her bedroom became the new store room. Sometime later, Ben went to visit his relatives. As evening fell, Ben announced that he would spend the night in Noy’s old room. This was a decision he would soon regret. So far, the goal of this book has been to find a way of talking about how the people we study live lives that are their own—interesting, intelligent, emotional, and self-aware—while remaining mindful of the fact that they must also conform, to some extent, to shared standards and communicate with one another. This involves exploring the ways that meanings can emerge individually while also being negotiated socially, serving as the basis for intelligent conversations and deep feeling. But the work of being human is, in fact, work—and individual efforts to make sense of life will, at times, lead to different conclusions. Intelligent thought and deep feeling about the unusual personal experiences that every human being encounters can lead to something many anthropological theories have trouble dealing with: individual ­innovation and the social evolution that sometimes comes with it. Languages are negotiated moment by moment, experience by experience, and relationship by relationship, and this leaves us with a new question. At times, we find languages like the one about karma, with its clear-cut grammar of narrative rules maintaining its synchronized meaning system. In other situations, in which there is less pressure to have all Thais using the same language, what keeps these languages mutually comprehensible? It seems clear that if the meaning systems that constitute languages evolve, then different groups that have shared a language in the past must also evolve apart. This chapter will explore the evolution and management of Rortean dialects. A dialect, as I am using the term here, refers to a form of a language that has evolved far enough from other versions of that language that the differences have become noticeable and possibly problematic, but has not moved so far that it has become a different language, no longer comprehensible to other speakers. As cultural environments evolve, there will be situations in which complete

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synchronization is no longer possible, but some form of interpersonal harmonization of mutually recognizable dialects must come into play instead. This chapter will look at a bunch of questions that surround the ­evolution of meanings, and the ways people deal with cultural differences. Here are the questions, and thumbnail answers: 1. How do languages spawn dialects? This occurs when individual experiences cannot be brought into conformity with preexisting discourses or cultural norms. 2. If people cannot refer to a basic dictionary drawn from shared discourses or culture, then how do different dialects remain mutually comprehensible? Instead of orienting themselves toward a set of abstract norms or standards, as many sociocentric anthropologists assume, people focus directly on one another, using their abilities to create passing theories (based on their first-person predispositions) to develop an empathic sense for other people’s meanings. 3. Once the methods behind this divergence become clear, we can ask a question about languages that extend beyond the personal relationships in which they are negotiated: What holds societies together? That is, how do people manage one another so that their dialects remain parts of the same language instead of flying off into incomprehensibility? This relates to a skill called “perspective-taking,” which will be explained in due course.

Theories That Hold Worlds Together Since Durkheim’s day, there has been a bias against exploring the different versions of languages that exist among individual members of the same groups. And yet it is clear that differences do exist. Psychology has not had quite such a difficult time with this. Piaget (1968 [1964]) writes that, because people must adapt to new information in their environments, equilibrating is a central function of the human mind. In his terms, equilibrium comes about when someone’s personal models of the world match with her experiences in it. Maintaining equilibrium

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involves making two kinds of constant adjustments. When someone assimilates, she takes new information and fits it into preexisting models. The model remains the same; it gets applied to new information. This has been the case with karma stories. At times, however, preexisting models cannot absorb strange new pieces of information or experiences. In those cases, the individual will accommodate her mental models— bend them to satisfy the demands of new experiences (Piaget 1968 [1964]: 7–8). When people assimilate new experiences to preexisting cultural models or languages, shared understanding and easy communication continue. But when people accommodate, the passing theories they adopt may cause them to accommodate in different directions. These variations can slowly begin to challenge accepted norms, eating away at the notion of a natural, easy cultural coherence. What follows is an example of the accommodation of a new concept that, because of the flexibility of some Thai meaning systems, can be comfortably absorbed. Ben described his encounter with the ghost in his aunt’s room this way: Ben: So one day, I just – when you’re young you don’t believe things like this. I was just quite curious. … So I went to sleep in that room. … Then suddenly, I feel somebody come into the room. SC: You felt it? Ben: At midnight, then I – yes, because when I slept I turned my side [SC: OK, yes] to the door, so I did, I felt somebody walk into the room. So I just tried to turn and see if there’s somebody there. And then that person just sat on me. So I can’t move. SC: I see. … So you rolled over, and then somebody sat on you after you rolled over? Ben: No, no, I couldn’t roll over at all. I tried to roll over but I can’t.

Being unable to control his body or breath, as he would later tell me, fell outside of Ben’s previous experiences; he suddenly found himself in the position of having to assimilate this new information to some model of human experience or other. Reality did not suggest a preferred language in this case, so Ben had to choose the most useful of the different meaning systems he knew to make sense of this unfamiliar

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experience. First, he said, a passing theory based on a scientific explanation, sleep paralysis, came to mind.2 This biological model is one among many—but two more will come into play before the situation resolves itself. Ben: And at this time, I’m still thinking about science. So I’m thinking, maybe I’m sleeping in the wrong position, and part of my body is numb so I can’t move. So I think, ‘Never mind, later it will be better,’ and I think that this is not real.3 This cannot be real – a ghost or somebody coming and sitting on me.

Ben had a desire to assimilate this to a language that describes his nature as that of a being whose experiences can be explained scientifically. In biological terms, this sort of experience is known as “hypnopompic paralysis”—a physiological state that leads to temporary numbness, paralysis, and an inability to breathe as people awake (Cheyne et al. 1999). Ben was not aware of the fact—or, it is possible, has since forgotten—that this paralysis is sometimes accompanied by frightening auditory hallucinations (Cheyne et al. 1999: 320). In spite of his desire to read this in the language of biology, then, his hopes are quickly dashed: Ben: And so suddenly that person just leaned on me and whispered in my ear, [tauntingly] ‘Is this too heavy?’ And that’s the time that I’m scared. ‘Oh! No, this is real!’ SC: Huh! Ben: Yeah. And at the time, I’m really, I’m really really scared…. I still remember that – I think it was a guy, and he said that – ‘I’ll ask you something, one question, and if you give me the right answer then I’ll go.’ But [now] I cannot remember the question! I cannot remember the question. … ‘I will ask you something and if you give me the right, the right answer I will leave you alone.’ Something like that. Yes. I cannot remember what he asked, and I cannot remember what I answered. But then, I remember that I tried to push him up. I just switched myself really fast, and then he just disappeared. SC: So did you answer the question? Ben: I think I did but I don’t remember.

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In Ben’s understanding, both ghosts and hypnopompic paralysis could have held him as he awoke, but only a ghost could ask questions. At this moment, then, what became salient was not his nature as a biological entity, but as a creature connected to a world full of spirits and invisible beings. This version—relayed many years later—is probably different from the one that went through his head the following morning. But his immediate interpretation will lay the groundwork for future thought about the issue. As time passed, a number of factors shaped it through several sets of negotiations. First, his immediate physical circumstances—sleeping in the bed abandoned after the last ghost attack—may have predisposed him psychologically to interpret any odd event in the night using the language of ghosts even before he went to sleep. The next morning at breakfast, Ben connected his experience to the model for a particular ghost—the experience, he and his family decided, was the result of a visit by a phi-ahm (pronounced “pee ahm”), considered a common Thai ghost, which paralyzes its victims as they wake by sitting on their bodies. This model of the self is informed by Thai folklore, which had already shaped his relatives’ stories of their experiences with ghosts, and had been passed down from their elders. This folklore-based conception of his nature describes him as the sort of creature that ghosts like to attack, as something that is vulnerable to their attacks, and as something that can draw the ire of spirits by challenging them. (“When you’re young you don’t believe things like this…”) Ben’s immediate social environment encouraged him to lean toward the language of ghosts. Stories develop as they are told, and they evolve not just through the work of one who tells the story in the first person; co-narration contributes importantly to the development of stories (Ochs et al. 1989). A member of a family that is prone to encounters with ghosts, when Ben got up in the morning he had breakfast with a pair of people who did not just have a predisposition to believe in ghosts in general, but a specific notion that the room he slept in was haunted. Ben was close to the bottom of his family’s hierarchy in those days, but while he was not the family expert on ghosts, he was the

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expert on his own experience. He brought something new to the family’s understanding of their non-human house-guest. Long before Ben arrived, the family had already decided that Noy had been attacked by a ghost (and had not, for example, had a dream or encountered an animal). But Ben’s story helped them redefine the ghost in Noy’s bedroom to accommodate his new experience. It became a playful, boy-like phi-am. Over time, a third language other than those of ghosts and biology, with a third set of ideas about human nature, appears to have come into play as well: one concerning the stages of life. In the stories my subjects tell about their lives as teenagers, they frequently portray themselves as immature, unwilling to accept their elders’ wisdom. Like Aw’s story about the crabs’ eyes, Ben’s interaction with the ghost reflects a common narrative form involving teenagers making rash decisions, being punished, and learning their lessons. His encounter with the ghost represents two types of rebellion—against the ghost and also against his elders, who recommended he stay out of the room. He says, “I think it happened because when [Noy] told me [about the ghost] I didn’t believe… I tried to challenge, I think that’s why it happened.” Ben ends his retelling by being put in his place by his elders: The next morning, at breakfast, they were pointedly unimpressed by his resistance to their wisdom. “‘I told you so,’ something like that,” Ben remembers Noy and his grandmother saying, in keeping with the rules of this narrative language. “‘You just [had to] try by yourself ’…” While shared semantic memories about the nature of ghosts form much of the backbone of what makes the story comprehensible in Thai contexts, it is not the semantic facts but the narrative flavor that makes the spectral interpretation more compelling than the biological one for Ben: the stories of his relatives, the history of the room, and his idea of himself contextualized within the life of a typical Thai teenager. This story, then, isn’t just about ghosts—it is also about the languages Ben speaks and thinks with, the overlapping but distinct human natures they imply, and how they inform the identities he adopts. These relate not to abstract cultural notions, but his vision of himself in the first person, as an experiencer experiencing a certain set of contexts. His identity as a teenager in relationships with his elders contributed to

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the initial rounds of co-narration. His identity as a member of Thai society, with its strong tradition of ghost-lore, and, within that society, his identity as a member of a family with a history of spectral encounters (and not, for example, a family of skeptical scientists) also contribute. That first morning, the storytelling reflected several things: an instrumental desire to figure out what happened the night before, a very local narrative about his family’s relationship with ghosts, and (possibly then, possibly later) an egocentric narrative conception of himself and the way teens behave. Later on, this story was told and retold, at first for the benefit of audiences of young men, and then for the benefit of Ben himself and his not-so-young friends, and most likely it evolved to meet the interests of those audiences. The anthropological history of Ben’s story, then, is not one simply drawn from a stable cultural catalog of semantic facts, but one in which facts are negotiated and renegotiated in the changing contexts of a life over the course of time. At this point, it is important for us to recognize that this ghost does not exist as a set of semantic facts for Ben but rather as an experience, remembered as autobiographical episodes. Therefore, Ben would not assimilate his perceptions to match preexisting semantic norms. Since the story was true to Ben, his models of reality would have to bend to accommodate this new information instead; something new was produced that made sense in the cultural contexts in which he has lived. Phi-ahm are not known to appear as playful children, or to bother people before they fall asleep. And while childlike ghosts can be physically aggressive, they are not thought to have the power to paralyze. Negotiations among Ben and his family produced the conclusion that the room was inhabited by a new and (to Ben and his family, and to many other Thais) unknown type of ghost: phi-ahm-like in that it attacks sleepers, but also one that can appear to its victims when they are fully awake. These context-bound conclusions bring us to the next point: Realities are negotiated in daily life in real time. The negotiations Ben and his family undertake reflect an orientation to one another—the power dynamics within the family, the quirks of their house, and their individual personalities. We have moved from the consideration of discourses

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themselves to considering the workings of passing theories to explain unfamiliar experiences. In this case, the next step must be to explore the ways that this interpersonal contextualizing works. Since there is no stable cultural substratum to which Ben’s family can refer, we should examine the ways that human beings are able to orient themselves to one another as they pass cultural information among themselves. If people are oriented toward one another, listening to and evaluating their neighbor’s languages, learning from them and taking them seriously, then anthropologists must do the same. The exact process is known to psychologists as “perspective-taking.”

Perspective-Taking and the Development of Dialects It may appear ironic that human egocentricity—the fact that we are all stuck in our own first-person perspectives—makes empathy possible. But people have an intuitive understanding of their own perspectives and predispositions: the limitations and abilities that come with having the sorts of senses, emotions, and cognitive abilities attached to a particular kind of human nature. And because humans have well-developed conceptions of themselves, informed both by basic physical experiences and by culturally informed learning, it is possible for them to imagine themselves into other people’s perspectives and to develop passing theories about their intentions. Known as “perspective-taking,” this form of cognitive and, at times, emotional empathy is a skill developed early in life. In normal adults, it is habitual and consistent, if not always easy (Epley et al. 2004; Surtees and Apperly 2012). In ambiguous social situations, people begin by “anchoring on their own perspective and only subsequently, serially, and effortfully accounting for differences between themselves and others until a plausible estimate is reached” (Epley et al. 2004: 328). These passing theories are limited by the theorist’s own perspective, however. Once someone has taken another’s perspective adequately to make sense of a situation, he will probably stop. These authors call this “satisficing” (2004: 334). In many cases, then, people will tend not to synchronize their perspectives perfectly, but they will

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use their empathic abilities to bring their perspectives into reasonable harmony. When anthropologists recognize the importance of perspective-taking in everyday life instead of assuming a consistent orientation to a set of overly stable models or discourses, it becomes possible to see how people accommodate not just one another’s perspectives, but, more broadly, one another’s models of reality in ways that deal with their preoccupations and the needs of the moment. (This is not to say that people necessarily accept those accommodations—but they do have the ability to recognize them.) People relate directly to one another and, as often as not, understand one another through the stories they tell. This conception of cultural communication as immediate and interpersonal allows us to explore the tensions that exist between individual experiences and social demands for coherent, comprehensible expression. The next issue, then, relates to “satisficing.” Research into perspective-taking begins with the assumption that there are times ­ when people have similar but slightly different perspectives from one another—mutually comprehensible dialects of the same language. At the moments when people try to communicate across a divide like this, the Rortian dialects must be similar enough to make communication possible, but different enough to require accommodation. That is, these meaning systems must be close enough for satisficing to be possible, but far enough apart for it to actually occur. This defines a sort of sweet spot among relatively shared personal dialects—an area of imperfect agreement that allows them to be harmonized and keeps variation in check. In the sweet spot, individual variations can exist, but those variations are not so extreme that they cannot be satisficed effectively.

Two Ways of Organizing Reality Often, new information is integrated through assimilation into a preexisting hierarchy of increasingly abstract categories. In Culture in Mind, Bradd Shore develops a model of cultural sharing which works along these lines (1996: 53). He conceptualizes culture as involving categories organized into trees. At the top of each tree are the most specific pieces of

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information; each twig feeds into a larger branch below it, which creates a broader category, and these category branches feed into limbs below them—categories that embrace other categories—all the way down to the most general of categories that come together at the trunk. Noy’s ghost fits into the childlike-spirit category, which fits into the ghost category, which fits into “things that can hurt people,” and which fits eventually into “things people have experienced.” People often deal with information this way, but not always; this method has its limitations. This way of categorizing may produce accurate descriptions, but eventually it loses its specificity, and with it its usefulness. As we move down the hierarchy, the broadening of categories can result in the loss of the ability to make meaningful discriminations. Ben’s encounter was not with something that fit into the very narrow phi-ahm category, but because of its phantasmal nature and the history of the room it was easy to file it in the broader ghost category. Placing a noisy, childlike ­phi-ahm-like spirit in the “ghost” category along with the other phantasms he has experienced and heard about may allow Ben to garner some useful information about what to expect and how to deal with it. Filing it under the very broad “things people have experienced” category, along with things like “seeing the movie version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets without having read the book” and “spear-fishing for octopus” may be factually correct, but there is probably very little useful information that could come from organizing these things together—and potentially a lot of room for confusion. In the long run, then, if we are to make useful sense of the world, we will need another way of thinking about organizing information as well. Therefore, this sort of semantic categorization is not the only way that people make sense of what they see and hear. When listening to stories, people often accommodate information into new models through perspective-taking. The first time I heard Ben tell his story, we were on the beach with A, another young man, who began to show signs of fear as Ben spoke. He clenched his fists and tensed his shoulders. He said he would have been scared if he had been in Noy’s room that night—and I am prone to believe him. It was apparent that he actually was experiencing fear on this sunny afternoon by the sea, many years later and many miles away. People tend to be thoroughly

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habituated to taking one another’s perspectives; it occurs frequently when hearing stories. Instead of analyzing the semantic information that Ben was parsing out, then, evaluating the perspective through impersonal (or third-personal) categories, A thought and felt himself into Ben’s perspective. It seems likely that you, the reader, did something similar when you read Ben’s ghost story. Instead of analyzing stories as a series of semantic facts, the structure of first-person narratives and the tendency to take perspectives invite readers to imagine themselves into Noy’s bedroom. The tendency that A and others have to think about personal information in empathic, episodic terms (as contextualized and personal) reflects a different sort of processing than the type that Shore describes. Where Shore thinks about information organized into shared semantic hierarchies, people often deal with information like Ben’s ghost by placing themselves into its context, and thinking about it in episodic terms instead. And this is important because it should change the assumptions we make when we think about the ways people process information that does not fit into ready-made categories. When people encounter an anomalous situation, moving down a hierarchy built of decontextualized semantic facts to find a category broad enough to contain it might be an effective way to deal with it. But there will be times when the loss of information is too great. Placing Ben’s ghost in the very broad category “Things people have experienced” will not allow Ben to draw useful conclusions, but it could confuse the matter by adding a large amount of extraneous and unhelpful information. Perspective-taking accommodation, on the other hand, provides people with a different way of organizing new information while maintaining a high level of specificity. Instead of moving down the categorical hierarchy to make sense of Ben’s experience, asking “Is this new thing a ghost?” A used his ability to perspective-take and jumped to an entirely different model and with it a different sort of question: “Is this ghost something that I (as a human) could experience?” His palpable fear response makes it clear that the answer to that question was yes. This is an important move: Instead of thinking about the nature of ghosts and what they can do—because in this case the answer is

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somewhat up for grabs—he is thinking about the nature of human beings, and what they can perceive. That is, he used his own first-person predisposition (as someone who could be attacked by a ghost) to empathize and evaluate Ben’s claim as possible or not. Accommodative perspective-taking is different from the assimilative process Shore describes. Where Shore’s model deals with new information by moving down the hierarchy, perspective-taking involves a lateral move to a different model. Instead of exploring the ghost family tree, the perspective-taker asks questions about the other person’s perspective—and these questions draw on instrumental notions of human nature, the nature of the world, and what it is possible for humans to experience in it. In other words, perspective-taking gets at basic questions about the Rortian languages that people speak, as they are applied to practical situations. Can a ghost make a person feel happy, or teach her useful, practical lessons? Most Bangkok Buddhist models of human nature (as they relate to ghosts) would say no. It is in the nature of ghosts to attack people, and it is in the nature of people to suffer, not profit, when ghosts attack. Perspective-taking also provides a limiting function; it reigns in possible interpretations. People do not perspective-take uncritically. Simply understanding someone else’s perspective does not automatically make it acceptably true. Perspective-taken accommodation more or less leads people to ask, “Can I see this interpretation as sensible based on what I know about this person’s experience?” There are limits to the redefinitions of categories and models people are willing to make in the service of accommodation. Someone may find the claim, “My eye is tingling” unfamiliar—but most people have experienced a tingling sensation of some sort and also know what it feels like to have a sensation in the eye. This claim could be accepted because it relates to familiar human experiences. But the claim, “The light bulb that appears over my head when I have an idea itches” presupposes a different notion of what it means to have an idea and what constitutes a body, and would, therefore, probably fail to gain the acceptance of most interlocutors. (Among Thai Buddhists, a member of the “ghost” category that causes joint pain might be acceptable, if unorthodox. A ghost that takes an active hand in advising its victim on healthy

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eating and smoking cessation probably would not.) The idea of a “tingling eye” may be unfamiliar, but it fits within most normal conceptions of the body. When someone speaks of an itchy light bulb, however, they have probably left the sweet spot of the comprehensible and have begun speaking a different language entirely. In these cases, an inability—or an unwillingness—to satisfice can lead to censorship and the return of errant speakers to acceptable dialects. In these cases, then, what makes a comprehensible dialect—and not a foreign language— is the ability to successfully satisfice another’s perspective, based on a shared conception of human nature. (It is important to remember that these visions of human nature are not formulated as deep philosophical explanations, but rather as everyday beliefs-as-experienced, built into the first-person predispositions that people use to think themselves into one another’s lives with.) Perspective-taking provides a practical solution to immediate problems like the one Ben’s family faced in figuring out what happened when he was attacked. But this process—and its potential for accommodations which would warp his family’s models and move them away from the common, shared ones—presents a problem for when anthropologists start assuming that their subjects employ stable cultural models and discourses. What we need, then, is a way to talk about societies that allow models and discourses to exist in flux while also remaining within sweet spots that keep them as dialects of the same languages.

Societies with Diverse Dialects: Holding Together, Moving Apart The fertility of an anthropocentric social garden—one in which we can see the variety of ideas, interpretations, and Rortian dialects that sprout up and compete like weeds against more established conceptions—creates a methodological problem: How can we talk about both social coherence and variation? People do not orient themselves directly toward sets of discourses or semantic categories, but rather toward the people in their immediate cultural environments. These friends,

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co-workers, enemies, and relatives are complex beings, contributing their own quirks and agendas to their environments. Sometimes they share discourses, sometimes they don’t. In addition to assimilating information to old models, then, people must accommodate their models as they listen to one another’s dialects, evaluating, negotiating, and learning from them. How are societies able to maintain recognizable languages while allowing people to live lives and explore meanings that cause them to develop idiosyncratic dialects at the same time? What keeps societies together, preventing dialects from evolving into mutually incomprehensible languages? In a prescient piece critiquing anthropological notions about conformity (cited in part in the first chapter, but which bears expanding), Edward Sapir wrote: While we often speak of society as though it were a static structure defined by tradition, it is in the more intimate sense, nothing of the kind, but a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity ranging from a pair of lovers or a family to a league of nations of that ever increasing portion of humanity which can be reached by the press through all its transnational ramifications. It is only apparently a static sum of social institutions; actually it is being reanimated or creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature which obtain among individuals participating in it. (Sapir 1949: 104)

It is not static social order but human activity that creates society; what Sapir suggests is that we look at “society” as the sum of its human parts that do not necessarily march in lockstep and produce conformity. If we think of locally negotiated dialects (like Ben’s family’s evolving, augmented dialect about ghosts) as the basis for human communication then instead of assuming a social consensus, we need to think about how differences between dialects work, and how those differences can be managed. If every family negotiates its own ideas about ghosts like Ben’s does, what prevents the various and variegated dialects about ghosts (and, of course, everything else) from becoming so different that they become mutually incomprehensible? An anthropocentric approach

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takes the assumption of cultural coherence that makes it possible for people to communicate and cooperate, and balances it against the recognition that societies are composed of dynamic actors, pursuing goals that often reflect perspectives and intentions relating as much to individual interpretations of idiosyncratic experiences as they do shared discourses. Centripetal forces must be measured against the centrifugal.4 My point here is this: When we talk about societies, coherence and conformity are not necessarily synonymous. Coherence can be maintained without requiring lockstep conformity among the members of a society, or even of a demographic division. As they communicate, people constantly take perspectives and satisfice their answers into sweet spots. To test a story, Thais may ask themselves something like: “Is that how karma works?” or “Do ghosts do that?” The lowest common denominator for a sweet spot comes when someone asks, “Can a person experience this?” Coherence can remain possible, then, as long as the members of a society continue to share, at the very minimum, a limited grammar that describes human nature as the locus and focus of experiences. As a result, cultural environments can be broad, diverse, and dynamic, while the dialects that constitute them remain mutually comprehensible. It is not hard to find approaches that allow people to balance assimilation and accommodation in intersubjective realities. These start with Hallowell, who presented a practice-based approach, focusing on the patterns of experiences as they are lived, rather than on shared, internalized categorizations and semantic hierarchies (1955: 75–110). As Duranti and Zigon point out, people create themselves in context, negotiating passing theories in response to their physical environments and their relationships with other people. Approaches like this can help us understand the negotiations that take place from one moment to the next, but they do less to bring the larger picture into focus. We need to be able to talk about how some negotiations become the basis for the long-lasting habits, values, and narrative forms that serve as the basis for widespread social coherence. Marsh’s (2007) insights about the flexibility of narrative memory (especially when seen in light of a constructivist view of the mind) suggest that behavioral environments don’t just bring concepts together;

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they also act to keep them apart. As Ben and his family developed their interpretation of his nocturnal experience, and as he assembled and reassembled the resulting autobiographical narrative to suit the ­teenager-encountering-ghost story that he tells today, it is possible that other facts may have been left out, which eventually faded from memory—and therefore from his remembered reality—altogether. Long-lost bits of story might have pointed him toward the sleep paralysis theory, for example, or in another direction completely. The tendency to eliminate details is nothing more than the mark of a story oriented to a particular use—but if details can disappear entirely over the course of time, then what was once a storyteller’s narrative bias can become his indisputable truth. We might call this insightful ignorance: the failure to make connections because relevant information has been lost on different sides of a constructivist divide in the self-reflexive processes of storytelling. (This ignorance becomes insightful because it keeps apart ideas that people have learned belong in different, relatively well-defined categories.) Details in Ben’s story that could have endorsed the sleep paralysis hypothesis may have been edited out over time, bringing the phi-ahm’s ability to steal breath to the fore. The connection between the loss of breath and ghost attacks is a rather unorthodox connection in Thai terms. But for Ben, it will play an important role in a future spectral experience. This insightful ignorance has cemented Ben’s narrative into a ghost story—one that his family, with its particular predispositions, can endorse. What we have here, then, is a theory of meaning-production that focuses on the habits that Ben and his family engage in on a daily basis, and one that reflects their interactions with what Hallowell calls their behavioral environment. Habituation of the cognitive-procedural rules that shape stories (the grammar of languages built into narratives) and the particular details of those stories lock Ben and his family into a set of truths they honestly believe in because the practices of narrative thinking eliminate alternative possibilities. And this gives rise to a substantial level of coherence among them. On the social level, this approach provides us with a more ­complete picture of the animated ecosystems of thought and action that allow individuals to connect shared conceptions with personal

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experiences in complex, relationship-driven behavioral environments like Ben’s. Instead of living in a Durkheimian world in which culture teaches coherent lessons and interactions bend toward conformity and regularity, this allows for the existence of a teeming ­social-emotional-intellectual reality in which people negotiate meanings, interpretations, and intentions in the context of their life histories, their social needs, their preoccupations, and their instrumental projects. Instead of orchestrating sociocentric uniformity, these interactions lead to a sort of cognitive cooperation—shared negotiation of models in which the members of Ben’s family help one another pursue their own not-always-conventional projects, undertaken as they attempt to make sense of the world and their lives in it.5 Instead of looking at a shared set of socially pre-defined discourses, this sort of cognitive-procedural memory-oriented practice approach suggests that we must also look at the sorts of experiences that people share, and what those experiences tell us about the ways they imagine themselves and their worlds. The conversational, instrumental nature of the negotiations of these languages leads to two standards that allow ideas to survive in this dynamic environment. They must be: • Clear enough to be communicated, and • Applicable broadly enough to be useful. In the case of Ben and his ghosts, there are two sorts of ideas that pass this test: ideas about ghosts as they relate to notions of human nature and about the nature of knowledge. And these ideas arise from typical experiences that come with being a Thai Buddhist.

The Language of Human Nature and the Grammar of Ghosts What makes a ghost story acceptable? “Ghost” (commonly transliterated phi—pronounced “pee”) is a category more difficult to define in Thai than in English for several reasons.

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First, Thai Buddhist cosmology does not draw a boundary between the natural and supernatural, as do many cosmologies in the West, so Thai ghosts cannot be distinguished as different from other natural phenomena as they often are in the United States. Some ghosts are the revenants of dead humans, but not all ghosts are thought to share that past. Thais also recognize a wide variety of ghosts with a wide variety of traits— some are visible, others not, many are deadly, some attack from the outside, others possess, or infest living bodies. As a result, it would be difficult for Thais to define ghosts by what they are, or by what they can do. There are some traits that can provide us with a weak definition of the “ghost” category, however—one that allows us to get a general sense of what belongs in the category, even if it does not draw firm lines around the edges. Ghosts are considered to be animate, even if they are not animals. Most ghosts are thought to harbor malevolent intentions toward humans, although at times those intentions can be obscured. Ghosts are also usually dangerous, some playing harmful jokes, some homicidal. Ghosts are also, according to all of my subjects, very real.6 Although they are often invented to drive the action in films, stories, and telenovelas, my subjects differentiate between ghosts that inhabit fictional worlds and the ones that exist in theirs. In real life, they say, ghosts tend to appear to people when they are alone, and rarely leave concrete evidence of their presence behind; ghosts tend to be identified through circumstantial evidence. What constitutes evidence of the presence of a ghost, therefore, depends on the witness—and his or her own subjective, individual judgments. Lacking objective measures for identifying ghosts, then, Thais rely on their own sensory and emotional responses to determine whether or not a ghost is present. One man claimed that the alley behind his house was haunted; he knew this because, sometimes, leaves would rustle when there was no wind. I asked if the rustling could have been caused by a rat or a falling branch. It could not, he explained, because he felt certain it was caused by a ghost. When considering ghosts in real life, then, Thais do not always rely on abstract categorical definitions. People can argue about types of ghosts using semantic categories, but this sort of conversation—the sort anthropologists are most likely to encounter—is different from

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the ways people think when they are by themselves, and trying to figure out what they witnessed. Although my subjects believe that ghosts exist objectively in their own right, they are best understood through experiences, in terms of how they are perceived by, and what they do to, people. The grammar of Thai ghost stories, then, is not about the semantic “ghost” category itself, but rather about the rules that govern the experience of witnessing or being attacked by a ghost. So ghosts must be understood from the egocentric perspective of the observer (or victim), and in instrumental terms—what a ghost can do and how that can be avoided. What almost all ghosts share is the danger they pose to humans. But they differ from other members of the very broad category, “things that can harm me” (that can also include, for example, rabid dogs, asteroids, and the ocean). This is because they tend to trigger o­therwise-inexplicable sensations—a feeling of fear, often accompanied by chills, goose bumps, hair standing on end, and a pit in the stomach.7 It is the physiological response, combined with sensory awareness (usually auditory—the sounds of rustling leaves, creaking floors, the unexpected whirr of machinery turning on in the night) that convinces people that they have witnessed a ghost. The “experience of a ghost” category—what humans can experience a ghost doing— includes sensory experiences and emotional responses, as well as the occasional physical one, like the phi-ahm’s ability to paralyze people as they wake (Carlisle 2015). Built around experiences like these, a wide variety of spirits have been identified. In one Thai village, Hengsuwan and Prasithrathsint (2008) have identified linguistic terms for 51 distinct species.8 The phi bop, an unseen spirit that inhabits a victim’s body (either human or animal) and slowly eats its organs, was thought to be common in Chatri’s home village. (This, he explained, as I reported in Chapter 1, was one reason why he was unwilling to take me home: because, as an open-minded intellectual who lacked the strength of character of one who had been raised Buddhist, the phi bop would see me as an easy target.) If it is not exorcized, it causes strange and inappropriate behaviors (such as

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drinking and smoking in women) before it kills its victims. The phi braed (known in English as a “hungry ghost”) suffers from endless hunger because its mouth or its gullet is so narrow that it can only accept one grain of rice at a time. They are thought to be humans reborn in this form as a result of karma accrued through living greedy lives. They appeared at one subject’s temple when she was a child, either as a terrifying warning, or in search of merit from the monks and prisoners to ensure a better rebirth when their lifetime as a ghost came to an end. (Since they did not speak, the reason for their presence was unclear.) If the phi braed serves as a warning about avarice, the phi tai hong tong klom warns of the dangers of intense love. One such ghost is that of Ms. Nak (in Thai either Mae Nak or Nang Nak ) the antagonist of what Justin McDaniel believes may be central Thailand’s most famous ghost story. Retold often in film, on television, and even in an opera, the story is widely thought to be true, and the spot thought to be Nak’s grave is a site of veneration (McDaniel 2011).9 A devoted wife who died at a moment of deep emotional attachment—while giving birth—she was unable to leave her family. When her husband, away on government service at the time of her death, returned to their village, he found his house and his family ostensibly in order, held together by the power of the ghost of his wife. Determined to keep her husband ignorant of the fact that she and their child had died, she murdered his friends and neighbors as they attempted to reveal her secret. Andrew Johnson (2013) describes a spate of phi tai hong (ghosts of bad deaths—of people who met sudden, violent ends) haunting the high-rises and abandoned construction sites of the northern city of Chiang Mai. Johnson’s subjects, like mine, found that these ghosts appeared in eerie, emotionally disconcerting contexts. He argues that these entities tend to appear in places that represent the broad failure of Chiang Mai to develop and prosper as many of the city’s residents expected (2013: 300).

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Practical Experience and the Language of the Self As I argued in the last chapter, the ways that people understand their worlds reflect the ways that they understand themselves. Conceptions of what it means to be a human are reflected in the ways people think about the ghosts in their worlds. And thoughts about what it means to be a specific kind of person, of a certain age or gender or class, are reflected as well. The ways Thai Buddhists think about ghosts, then, locate them in both the natural universe and their social worlds. If we look at ghosts instrumentally, through the lens of the effects they are thought to have on humans—that is, how they relate to human nature—then another important question emerges. What defines conceptions of “human nature” in a way that Thai Buddhist understandings of the concept remain coherent and useful for communication? In this view, all discourses are up for negotiation, but some move more slowly than others. A number of institutions in Thailand act to create and stabilize notions of human nature—some different from what Buddhist orthodoxy might suggest, but stable enough and shared broadly enough to serve as the basis for perspective-taking accommodation. It was the shared conception that humans can perceive karma, for example, that made Aw’s and Chatri’s stories acceptable. A lot of what makes it possible for people to know their karma also makes it possible for them to know when a ghost is present. As it relates to knowing and understanding ghosts, many Thais consider human nature to be more intuitive and emotional than rational. The truly enlightened can “see Dhamma,” intuit the objective truth. This involves identifying the details of someone else’s karma, as well as seeing the ghosts around them. The Buddha’s enlightened awareness is replaced by intuition and emotional conviction in the as-yet-unenlightened. In spite of the lack of rational evidence, therefore, for Ben (and for my other subjects) a sense of certainty will suffice for knowing many things, including when a ghost is present. This broadly shared instrumental vision of human existence—as knowing through intuition and feeling—defines the sweet spot that

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allows other people in Ben’s cultural environment to evaluate his claims about ghost attacks on his terms and to accept (and possibly reject) them. When Ben says something like, “I felt scared, so I knew there was a ghost around,” it is generally accepted as a normal human experience. People tend to emphasize different aspects of the Dhamma’s ideas about human nature in ways that reflect the investments they have in their social positions. As a Thai Buddhist, Ben understands his nature, and his ability to know about the world, through his feelings and intuitions. It is not just his vision of human nature that contributes to this understanding, however—it is also his sense of himself as a member of a certain stratum with a certain status in Thai society. As Bangkok has emerged as a center of capitalism with a bustling middle class and a growing upper middle class, many Thais have begun to see a divide develop between more successful, this-worldly strivers, and those who are less success-oriented, slower-moving, less deluded, better Buddhists. Ben has been taught that people who focus too intensely on satisfying materialistic desires, striving for worldly success and pleasure, tend to be insensitive to higher, more subtle truths. In this way, many of my subjects juxtaposed people who live hurried modern lives against an envisioned (and, often, probably invented) traditional lifestyle, one generally considered to be more Buddhist and somewhat less deluded. People who live simple lives, therefore, are thought to be somewhat better able to intuit truth and are more sensitive to truths and realities that less sensitive people might overlook. Although many members of Ben’s family live in Bangkok and do the sorts of work one finds in cities, some think of themselves using a more rural idiom, as traditional, unhurried Buddhists who adhere more closely to country standards than those of the big city. (This investment in lower-middle-class lifestyles comes through most noticeably in Ben’s, and some of his relatives’, preferences for country music and ­peasant-style clothing.) If being a simple, unhurried member of the lower middle class makes a person more sensitive, then Ben’s family’s sensitivity to things like ghosts can become the birthright of people in their position. It should not come as a surprise that many Thais see a proclivity to being attacked by ghosts as a bad thing. But for Ben, this tendency—a tendency which he shared not just with Noy but with

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several other members of his family—can be interpreted as a plus. “[I] t runs in the family,” he says. “…I think it’s just kind of like when you have a talent and know how to sing. Not everybody knows how to sing.” His notion of a hauntable self, then, is connected to his vision of himself as strongly intuitive, which itself is an applied version of a slightly more enlightened, slightly less professionally oriented, traditional Buddhist self. Ben’s vision of himself as the sort of being that tends to be attacked by ghosts, then, reflects an instrumental, egocentric variation on doctrinal Buddhist discourses which leads, in one direction, toward a theory of the mind (as knowing about things like ghosts through intuition) and, in the other, toward a theory of a moral self living in an economically diverse country.

The Work of Problem-Solving: Accommodating Models to Experience The sort of forgetting that allows people to believe their stories reflect the workings of nature is similar to the sort of unawareness that, Bourdieu claims, allows people to believe their habits reflect nature’s ways. But there is an important difference between the memories that lead to stories and the memories that lead to body habits: While body habits are anoetic—both the history of the habit and the habit itself are invisible to the conscious mind—narratives are autonoetic. While the evolution of a story is generally lost, the current story can be brought to consciousness—and once conscious, it can be analyzed, studied, theorized, and used in different ways without losing the sense of trueness that would be fatal to Bourdieu’s doxic truths. And this is how a ­narrative-based practice theory differs from—and expands upon—one that comes from Bourdieu’s habitus. For our subjects, analysis and reinterpretation open doors to new possibilities. Twenty years after his first encounter, Ben, now entering middle age, had moved to Singapore. It was here, he said, that he encountered a second ghost—one even further from typical than the phi-ahm-likespecter he met in his aunt’s bedroom. This second encounter is quite

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different from the first, but they share enough of the things that were most memorable to Ben the first time around to lead him and his family to see this as a ghost attack as well. Their conclusion, that it was an attack by a new form of ghost, will set this entity well outside most typical Thai definitions of the “ghost” category and force the model to accommodate. Ben was alone, using a friend’s kitchen while the friend was out. As he waited in the dining room for the timer to ring, he became aware of a series of unusual sensations not entirely unlike those of the previous attack: Ben: [I didn’t] know what’s wrong. This had never happened [before], but it’s very strong, the feeling is very strong. And I’m very very scared. It happened to me, just like something squeezing inside me. I don’t know what happened. I feel something heavy on my chest, I feel my heart pounding, bup, bup, difficult, and I feel like, difficult to breathe. But when I left [the house], I’m totally fine. Back to normal.

Later, he mentioned some other aspects of the experience: He broke out in a cold sweat, and his hands became cold and damp. He was thoroughly shaken by the experience. “I just left. When I left I just called my family.” SC: So… it wasn’t something inside your body, it was something outside your body that made you feel that way. Ben: [Yes], because I also told this [story] to my family. We just talked, we discussed, maybe there’s something in the house, really strong. SC: What do you mean, something in the house? Ben: Maybe, and maybe it doesn’t welcome guests, or something like that.

This ghost was never audible or visible, and when it squeezed Ben’s chest, it did something that ghosts normally do not do. Ben’s attribution of this experience to a ghost attack, then, would be rather unusual, if he hadn’t already been attacked by a breath-stealing phi-ahm. At the same time, readers familiar with the symptoms of panic attacks will find some of the ghost’s manifestations—the loss of breath, the clammy

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hands, the pounding heart—familiar.10 While phi-ahm mimic sleep paralysis, Ben does not know of any type of ghost thought to cause the symptoms of a panic attack. Ben and his family are doing something interesting here, something that falls outside of the expectations of theories like Shore’s. They do not rely directly on pre-set cultural norms about ghosts. Rather, they revise their standards, using salient details of personal histories, mediated through input from people in his behavioral environment, to explain Ben’s somatic experiences. At about the same time that Ben was being attacked in the kitchen, another friend of mine began experiencing a series of similar attacks, resulting from encounters with a different sort of spirit. This one took the form of an overbearing co-worker who had suddenly inserted herself into his social circle and had begun making unwanted demands on his time. His cell phone beeped one evening as we sat in a commuter boat. He looked at the name of the caller and suddenly our conversation stopped. He became rigid and gasped for breath as he waited for the phone to stop ringing. This determined spirit would not hang up; the phone rang and rang and the blood drained from his face. Later, he told me that, in moments like this, he felt the world close in around him. Maak was not familiar with Western notions of panic attacks, and did not know what to make of the experience, which occurred whenever this woman called. He did not conclude that he was being attacked by a ghost, however—he decided that the episodes were a strange new psychological response to this particular social stressor. Why, then, did Ben choose to explain his experience as spectral? As far as Ben and I know, this second entity doesn’t behave like any ghost in the Thai menagerie. And the symptoms that Ben described did not match those of any type of ghost attack with which Ben and his family were familiar. Ben’s decision to seek his family’s advice makes perfect practical sense—they are his first recourse in many situations—but the fact that he called them immediately instead of reaching out to friends and relations who might be less prone to present him with a phantasmic interpretation suggests that his choice of cultural environment played a role in his interpretation, and that he may have been heading

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(intentionally, if not consciously) toward the idea that he was attacked by a ghost. But there is something else in the mix here. The phone calls Ben made that day covered uncharted territory for him and his family. In defining an unfamiliar but disturbing experience that called out for explanation, they did more than simply define a new type of ghost. They clarified the boundary between experiences that are caused by states inside the body, and those that come from without. In doing this, they also helped redefine (in a small way) Ben’s model of human nature, in terms of what can happen to a person when encountering a ghost. Taking Shore’s assimilation-based approach for interpreting this second experience will not help because, in Ben’s mind, it fell outside the parameters defining ghost attacks. Phi-ahm squeeze the breath out of people, but they only do it while they are sleeping. Other ghosts attack while people are awake, but they do not take their breath. In order to assimilate this in Shore’s terms, Ben and his family would have had to move down the semantic hierarchy to a broader category—going from, for example, the “phi-ahm” category to the more general “ghost” category to something even broader—perhaps to “strange somatic states” or “frightening things”—but these categories are so broad they would not help him, and moving up another branch from “strange somatic states” would be unhelpful because the members of the category he already knew did not match his experience. (“Panic attack” might have helped him, of course—if he had been familiar with the concept.) Ben was not considering Thai cultural norms concerning the “ghost” category. Instead of trying to match the definition with one from the Thai folk lexicon of ghosts, he focused on his own first-person experience of the attack. In recounting his previous encounter over time, the frightening loss of breath was salient. This salience leads him to focus on the inability to breathe and the compression of his chest as central to his own personal understanding of ghost attacks. Based on this predisposition, Ben and his family innovated. When considering this Singaporean ghost, sleep was removed from the calculation; the loss of breath became primary. Then, the other symptoms of the experience—a pounding heart and clammy hands—became part of the definition of the experience of this new ghost. Instead of allowing his semantic

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knowledge of ghosts to shape the explanation of his experience, his experience—now a narrative memory, and part of a slightly reshaped narrative complex—shaped his definition of this kind of ghost. Where the phi-ahm, causing its strange physiological effects, once represented one far edge of the ghost category, Ben’s new ghost represents an innovation, expanding the definition of what ghosts are thought capable of. Instead of moving down the hierarchy to find an appropriate assimilation, Ben and his family moved laterally, jumping into talk of what Ben could experience. Instead of sticking to semantic categories—categories that are shared instead of personally tailored, and therefore somewhat rigid—they accommodated their theory of ghosts to account for Ben’s narrated experience. Although this ghost is not typical, Ben and I have found his spectral explanation for his symptoms acceptable by other Thais. This fact brings us back to a central theoretical question. It may be clear why Ben and his family—steeped in their own ghost narratives, of which there are many—would adopt this explanation. But this does not explain why other people would accept it. Unfamiliar as it may have been, Ben’s explanation fits into a fundamentally important sweet spot, one concerning the nature of what humans can experience, which makes ­perspective-taking possible. Ben’s experience does not allow for an answer to the question, “Which species of ghost did Ben encounter?” because it was, for many Thais, at least, of an unknown species. But that does not mean that other Thais will declare him crazy or wrong. Instead, Ben’s family and the other people he has talked to about this evaluate his claims by asking if this picture of Ben as an experiencer makes sense. The implicit question, then, becomes, “Does Ben’s explanation fit with my understanding of what he can experience?” This taps into their empathic, perspective-taking abilities to see through other people’s eyes, starting from their own first-person predispositions. They can accept or reject Ben’s story not because it fits into a preexisting semantic category defining ghosts, but because the narrative allows them to fit his experience into their own notions of what people can experience. The sweet spot, then, is not about the abstract “ghost” category, but the “human nature” category.

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And there is something important that we can draw from this. The most basic Rortian grammar that allows Thais to keep speaking the same language, even when they branch off into different dialects, involves perspective-taking, and that involves ideas of what humans can experience. Ben’s goal in telling this story—to himself and his family, and then to others—was not to create a new dialect, or to add a new term to the vocabulary of Thai ghosts. He was just trying to make sense of a strange and disturbing experience. It did not become socially acceptable because it was familiar, but because it seemed possible.

What Holds Societies Together? The first part of this book has been devoted to exploring a way of looking at social order that builds on the insights of psychological, moral, and phenomenological anthropologists to describe the ways that people develop their own life-worlds, accommodating and assimilating themselves into synchronized and harmonized visions of reality. I have argued that people negotiate their identities and the meanings they share in processes that start between individuals and within them, and spread outward through society. One’s vision of the world becomes a reflection of one’s understanding of oneself and a particular kind of human nature, and one’s vision of oneself becomes a reflection of an instrumental view of reality. Instead of assuming that humans are able to detect social norms and conform to them naturally, I have argued that they take an active hand in shaping their realities, although they rarely realize it. They bring the power of their emotions, their ambitions, their relationships, and the memories of their experiences to bear as they theorize about themselves and one another, trying to make sense of the worlds they are creating. This form of anthropocentric anthropology works this way—it shows how experiences, identities, and social realities arise with one another. As people learn, they evolve themselves into their worlds not in an orderly way, but through both the well-studied path of assimilation and the relatively unstudied roads of accommodation, developing visions that reflect their own relationships with both experience and social norms.

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My Thai subjects have developed languages of the world and self which (usually) recognize the limits of what one can know about other people, and accounts for the possibility of varying dialects, even among close friends. That is, their languages are able to incorporate models from other people’s dialects. What does an anthropocentric approach that recognizes varieties of dialects do for us as anthropologists? As evolutionary biologists have shown, a few simple rules can give rise to incredibly complex systems. In the same way, there are a relatively small number of notions about human nature that make a wide variety of karma stories and ghost attack interpretations possible and believable. But not all ghost variations—and not all idiosyncratic visions of anything—will be socially acceptable. Just as most organisms have died out over time, so do most new models. While language about ghosts is relatively flexible, and can accommodate new ghosts into the lexicon from time to time, the language of karma is very stable—while the vocabulary of personal symbols varies, people must assimilate their experiences to the grammar; innovation tends to be deemed unacceptable here. What can we take from this? First, experience matters—whether it is common or strange. If we follow Sapir’s notion that “society” is the sum of a vast number of dynamic, ever-changing, overlapping, and intersecting relationships to its logical conclusion, then it becomes clear that we should orient our studies to the interpretations of people’s experiences, and the relationships that people use to work them out. Once people have developed their visions of knowing selves, and come to believe in them—Chatri’s sense of his nature as a karma-sensing being or Ben’s as one that can be attacked by ghosts—they can be applied to new situations and taught to other people. The experience of failing at meditation, of learning about the importance of intuition and of having one’s intuitive certainties validated, of believing one has witnessed a ghost when one hears leaves rustling, of media portrayals of the defiled nature of successful-but-harried businesspeople—these are the sorts of concrete personal and interpersonal experiences that inform my subjects’ senses of what their human natures are, and this is what allows them to understand one another’s stories about experiences with ghosts. Instead of

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depending on a predetermined set of cultural norms, then, people use an acceptable language and develop their own dialects to resolve their problems, some of which emerge from their bodies (as Ben’s did in dealing with the second ghost), and some of which emerge from conflicts among the different languages that shape individuals’ intersubjective realities. (This is something Chatri did in the months after his mother died, and which other people—who will be introduced soon—will undertake in the last chapters here.) Cultural notions, like the ones about karma and enlightened knowing, play an important role in the creation and perpetuation of the idea that members of a society share a common basis of thought, motivation, and habit. But it is a mistake to assume that there is a clean line connecting the discourses in a behavioral environment and their uses. Therefore, social coherence is not maintained only through mutual discipline and punishment, but also through cooperative ­co-narration, empathic perspective-taking, and creative problem-solving. Anthropologists often think of social order as woven from identities and understandings forming a coherent cloth, shared among the members of a group, the same strands passing through many people and keeping them in line. Instead, it makes more sense to think of a society as being like chainmail, a collection of independently forged links, each life-world as self-contained but also bound to its neighbors. They all move together, firmly connected on topics like karma, but influence one another more loosely, in a general harmony, when making sense of one another’s ghosts, or pulling back against the unacceptably unfamiliar. Earlier anthropologists often thought of symbols either as shared, or as divided between shared and personal. Obeyesekere (1981), for example, writes about the distinction between public symbols and private ones. This sort of distinction begs an important question: By drawing a clear line between a shared dimension and a private dimension, these authors invent a shared culture, one which can contain some symbols while leaving out others. What is overlooked is the possibility that personal symbols are easy to share because they fit into familiar patterns of a common grammar. As Garro (2000) points out, societies don’t need a coherent set of models and symbols to function, and as Strauss and

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Quinn (1997) argue, some cultural concepts are more widely shared than others; the point at which something rises to become “cultural” is somewhat arbitrary. We can expand on this: While members of a society often share many symbols, this isn’t strictly necessary to allow people to communicate. This is an anthropological invention. Instead of a set of meanings shared coherently, societies can hold themselves together through perspective-taking starting from one’s first-person predispositions, and the theories people must share in order to take one another’s perspectives—theories about human nature—are actually quite limited. This is, of course, quite different from—and much less than—what people in a society usually do end up sharing. However, my approach here suggests that the minimum necessary for societal functioning may be very low. Further, the fact that people accommodate as well as assimilate tells us that, some of the time, societies are able to absorb and manage a good deal of diversity (as Wallace 2009 points out). Diversity is a central feature of social life, and not a bug to be paved over theoretically. And the fact that accommodations often grow from personal experiences, stored as episodic memories, tells us that, if we are going to understand human social life, we need to focus on social lives themselves and the constant flow of dynamic negotiations that go on as people develop, use, and explore the passing theories that constitute their languages. Moreover, the ability that societies have to handle diversity is very important. Sociocentric theories oriented toward conformity must look at shared information as the teacher of the individuals who end up obeying its dictates. While this is certainly true much of the time, at other times people are forced to make sense of differences. At those moments, anthropologists need to reorient their attitudes toward social forces. They are not just for teaching; when people perspective-take and adopt someone else’s metaphors, social forces become mediums for negotiation as well. If we follow along with the idea that there is value in a person-centered anthropology, then we need to think of societies as doing more than acting as a vehicle for learning preexisting truths. It is a venue for negotiating as well.11

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In the second part of this book, I will explore the cases of several people who make use of their own understandings of human nature to negotiate solutions to the problems they face in ways that are both personally and socially acceptable.

Notes 1. Childlike ghosts are familiar figures in many Thai ghost narratives (e.g., Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2011). 2. Unfortunately, Ben cannot remember the source of this piece of information. 3. In order to maintain the continuity of Ben’s monologue, I have removed my interjections; they added very little but distracted from the narrative. 4. Sapir’s statement, if taken to be correct, is enough in itself to suggest that the hierarchical-categorical approach that Shore and many others employ is insufficient. 5. Hutchins (1995) discusses something similar—the idea of distributed cognition, in which all members of a society have slightly different knowledge and can accomplish their goals only by working together. 6. Cassaniti and Luhrmann (2011) conclude that ghosts are, in Thai conceptions, emanations from one’s own mind and not independent entities. One of my subjects, a monk, made a similar claim—but on further discussion, it seems that he presented this idea because he wanted to appear to be an unusually sophisticated Buddhist, as was befitting his role as a member of the Sangha. It emerged that he believed that ghosts were, in fact, independent, freely existing entities, as did the rest of my subjects. 7. My subjects disagreed on whether they were the product of an autonomic reaction to a feeling of fear or a response to a drop in temperature that often accompanies a manifestation. 8. Not all of these are malevolent, however. The broader category of entities they studied included the protecting spirits of deceased loves ones, and other positive beings. 9. Not all of my subjects believe in this particular ghost. Some view it as a scintillating folktale; what it lacks in historical value for them it makes up for an entertainment.

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10. The definition of “panic attack” in the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2012) includes: An abrupt surge of intense fear or intense discomfort that reaches a peak within minutes, and during which time four or more of the ­following symptoms occur. …1. palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate 2. sweating 3. trembling or shaking 4. sensations of shortness of breath or smothering 5. feelings of choking 6. chest pain or discomfort …. 11. In my reading, it appears that ontological anthropologists are resisting the idea that cultural forces are thoroughly deterministic, and try to restore some power to experiences with reality that they categorize under the “ontological.” It strikes me that the ideas I have presented here move in that direction as well.

References American Psychiatric Association. 2012. DSM-5 Development: Panic Attack: Proposed Revision. Electronic Document. http://www.dsm5.org/ ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=404. Accessed June 26, 2012. Carlisle, Steven. 2015. What Holds People Together? First-Person Anthropology and Perspective-Taking in Thai Ghost Stories. Ethos 43 (1): 59–82. Cassaniti, Julia, and Tanya Luhrmann. 2011. Encountering the Supernatural: A Phenomenological Account of Mind. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 2 (2011): 37–53. Cheyne, J.Allan, Steve Rueffer, and Ian Newby-Clark. 1999. Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations During Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare. Consciousness and Cognition 8 (3): 319–337. Epley, Nicholas, Boaz Keysar, Leaf Van Boven, and Thomas Gilovich. 2004. Perspective Taking as Egocentric Anchoring and Adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (3): 327–339. Garro, Linda. 2000. Remembering What One Knows and the Construction of the Past: A Comparison of Cultural Consensus Theory and Cultural Schema Theory. Ethos 28 (3): 275–319. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1955. Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Hengsuwan, Manasikarn, and Amara Prasithrathsint. 2008. An Ethnosemantic Study of Ghost Terms in Thai. Paper presented at the 18th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Bangi, Malaysia, May 21–22. Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, Andrew. 2013. Progress and Its Ruins: Ghosts, Migrants, and the Uncanny in Thailand. Cultural Anthropology 28 (2): 299–319. Marsh, Elizabeth. 2007. Retelling Is Not the Same as Remembering: Implications for Memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (1): 16–20. McDaniel, Justin. 2011. The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1981. Medusa’s Hair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor. 1989. Detective Stories at Dinnertime: Problem Solving Through Co-Narration. Cultural Dynamics 2 (2): 238–257. Piaget, Jean. 1968 [1964]. Six Psychological Studies, trans. Anita Tenzer. New York: Random House. Sapir, Edward. 1949. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Surtees, Andrew, and Ian Apperly. 2012. Egocentrism and Automatic Perspective Taking in Children and Adults. Child Development 83 (2): 452–460. Wallace, Anthony F.C. 2009. Epilogue: On the Organization of Diversity. Ethos 37 (2): 251–255.

Part II Languages That Shape Thai Worlds: The Manut and the Khon in Bangkok

Societies are built from relationships, and the meaning systems that allow them to hang together are, as Sapir put it, in a constant state of reanimation and creative reaffirmation, or of change. The different sorts of memory complexes that animate social actors also give them the tools to function in their intersubjective worlds. And instead of thinking about people primarily in terms of their abilities to cause one another to conform, we can see them influencing one another in a variety of ways that go beyond the mutual disciplining that many a­ nthropologists focus on—creating or posing problems that others need to solve, supporting social structures that they must navigate, and speaking in l­anguages and dialects that they learn and use to interpret their worlds. They offer other tools with which they can approach their problems, or use to cause trouble for themselves, and adopt, adapt, and evolve their own dialects from. These intersubjective environments, then, function to challenge people to navigate between pressures toward conformity and the need to explore and experiment with ways to deal with them. How, exactly, then, do people live in social worlds where there is no solid cultural grounding? Once we set aside the idea that human lives are shaped entirely by a preexisting order and place many of the

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organizing principles inside individuals, it becomes possible to balance the accommodations that people make as a result of personal experiences with what they have assimilated. Where the previous part of this book explores the ways that these functional visions of reality create themselves, this part explores how people navigate and negotiate within their life-worlds. Bangkok is, of course, a complex cultural environment in which people must deal with a wide variety of challenges using the different Rortean languages available there. This intersubjective world, shaped by multiple languages, I will call a cultural ecosystem. Here, I will look at the two most often used Rortean languages among Bangkok’s Buddhists, slow-to-change and, in their basic grammars, widely shared. When set in Bangkok’s contemporary capitalist environment, the interactions between the language of obligation and the language of solitude cause problems for one another and opportunities for innovation. After establishing the baseline for what Thai Buddhists assimilate here, I will look at some accommodations used to deal with the issues that arise in this environment. It is important to remember here that this book is predicated on the idea that people share similar experiences which inform their narratives. These experiences often filter into shared canonical narrative forms, easy to communicate even though they define their own individual symbol sets—but this does not happen all the time. It is also not always the case that experiences are similar enough to create synchronizable stories. Chatri’s stories of his mother, made more poignant after years of missing her, have a very different inflection from those of Tren, whose mother is alive and healthy at the time of this writing, and might be cooking his dinner at this very moment. As the Buddha taught, all things change. All theories are passing theories—and what I present here are the passing theories that I developed about experiences that produce common heuristics among the Buddhist residents of Bangkok. (Hopefully they will pass slowly.) It is this moving ocean of human lives to which we now turn.

5 The Kohn and the Language of Social Obligation

Later on in the day that Chatri, at twelve years of age, lit his mother’s pyre, he was taken to the village temple. His father had disappeared, and the rest of the family was in chaos enough that it made sense for the boy to be sent someplace where he would be looked after, and where he could make merit to improve his mother’s karma in hopes of a better rebirth or a lengthened stay in heaven. He lived with the monks, trying to learn to convert his grief into insight. In Thai Buddhist tradition, the temple is an excellent place for a grieving child, the best place to make sense of the lesson of his sudden loss: death as proof positive that relationships are transient. The monks treated his mother’s death as an object lesson. He was to understand that life really is suffering, as the Buddha taught, and that the only way to overcome it was to escape the cycles of samsara. His time at the monastery was not an opportunity to experience his pain and work through his grief, therefore, but to become the sort of person who does not feel them. In retrospect, of course, the project appears to have been a d ­ rawn-out failure. But for Chatri, there was one moment of redemption that he still held dear, even after 20 years—one moment of relief from his sorrow. His Dhamma training involved the study of Pali, the dead © The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_5

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liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism. He was a quick study, he says, and he soon mastered a number of chants. He recalls that the abbot saw his ability, and after a few months of study, he gave Chatri the opportunity to recite a lesson on right behavior before the congregation. The crowd gathered and the service began—the communal chanting in Pali reverberating dully in the large hall, the ritual pressing of hands and foreheads to the floor, then silence fell, and the boy began his performance. He chanted as he had been taught, he says—in the calm, liturgical monotone monks use during services. But slowly, he remembers, he became aware of a second sound suffusing the sanctuary—the sound of women weeping, the sound of the congregation expressing the sadness that Chatri was forbidden to show. They were mourning his mother. Were the women really crying for his mother? Were the women crying at all? The echoes in the hall died out long ago, but what is important here is that this is what Chatri heard—and what he has probably always heard—when he recalled that day. Stories grow when they are cultivated, and this is a story that Chatri told himself often. And when stories grow, they pull the truths they carry along with them. Whatever the situation may have been, what is important is the fact that he remembers that the women cried for his mother when he could not. This story was still important to him decades later, as the first relief he found from his grinding grief. This may seem like an odd story to introduce this chapter, and an odd memory for Chatri to hold so close, but it demonstrates an important lesson about the anthropology of Thailand in that it shows the conflict between the two Rortean languages most central to life in Bangkok—the language of nirvanic Buddhism, oriented around one very specific vision of human nature, and the language of the family, structured in terms of a very different set of ideas of what it is to be human. At the temple, Chatri’s familiar, familial way of being—dependent, interconnected, valuing the emotional rewards and comforts of belonging—came into conflict with the articulation of this very different Buddhist way of understanding human nature. In temple thought, connections are defiling—emotions like love and desires for companionship

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and security condemn people to the near-endless cycles of rebirth and suffering until death overtakes them and they are born again. He understood and respected the outlines of this language and was expected to behave according to the standards of the temple, but he had not integrated these values deeply enough to have developed a nirvana-oriented Buddhist sense of self; the grieving son always shone through. The creativity and flexibility inherent in the use of these languages, however, made it possible for him to find a way to reduce the impact of the conflict. The point of Chatri’s story is not just that there was a conflict between these two visions of humanity. The point is that these languages allowed Chatri to hear the women in the hall crying, and that their tears literally took away some of his grief—that these languages provide him with some small ability to deal with the conflict. In order to satisfy the demands of living the life of a child, then an adult, as a Buddhist in Thailand, people have to learn to divide their time between two languages, two sets of memory complexes that give rise to durable dispositions—two different ways of describing the universe, two human natures, two visions of the good and the right, and two ways of being, thinking, talking, and acting. One of them generally faces outward. It is associated with life in the family before it generalizes to other social relationships. The other—usually described in terms of nirvanic Buddhist Dhamma—deals more often with private issues of emotion and desire. These two Rortean languages—the family-oriented language of the kohn, and the otherworldly manut—define the universe in different ways, contain different visions of the good and the right, and propose different ways of being human. When they come in contact—as they do in daily life in Bangkok—they collide as often as they harmonize. At the same time, Chatri—and the other Thais I knew—needed them both. The questions that one poses the other can answer. The problems that one creates the other can solve. Chatri was caught between two incompatible visions of himself and his nature. He was constrained, by the expectations of the monks he lived with, to maintain a collected countenance, and refrain from expressing his grief. It is not hard to understand the stress this situation placed him under—his mother lost from this life, the rest of his family, his friends, and his comfortable routines all removed for the foreseeable future.

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The language of the khon (which translates as “person” or “people,” as in “There are three people in my family”) starts in the home, where children learn to assimilate and accommodate themselves into their Thai Buddhist interpersonal worlds.

Human Nature as Interdependent The dichotomy between disconnection-oriented nirvanic and worldly kammatic Buddhisms extends beyond Buddhist thought. Thirty years before my fieldwork began, Jack Potter found a pair of juxtaposed outlooks similar to the two languages I describe here. He describes his subjects in Chiangmai Village have two different ways of being: “open, friendly, and sunny on the surface but deep, self-contained, and unfathomable beneath” (Potter 1976: 23). He writes that they also have “dark and brooding natures” (1976: 33)—a reflection, I suspect, of the very distinct languages he may have seen them employ. These juxtaposed ways of being solve a number of problems that arise as a result of life shaped by the sorts of wet-rice-cultivating communities found in Thailand. What Potter calls the “open, friendly” face might more accurately be said to reflect a value system that emphasizes cooperation, sacrifice, generosity, and good-natured calmness, and temperaments that tend to be light, kind, accommodating, and, often, funny. I will show that it also values interdependence, conformity, hierarchy, and emphasizes the overwhelming power of love. But in solving the problems that arise when individual desires take a back seat to the needs of the group, it creates a different set of problems: How do people deal with the issues that come when they can’t act in their own best interests? My subjects have worked out a solution by adopting a second language—a language of emotional solitude. The elements that contribute to the creation of the home traditionally extend beyond the nuclear family through networks of kin and into the structure of the village. The language of the khon concerns itself with the conceptions of human nature as they relate to economic and social realities, especially the obligations that come with belonging to a family. In social worlds shaped by wet-rice farming, survival requires cooperation. Many villages in rural Thailand sit on small plots of land,

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surrounded by a much larger area of rice paddies to which farmers must travel. People tend to live in close quarters, in small houses with thin walls. As Chatri told me, this made it almost impossible to keep family disagreements from being heard by immediate neighbors and, often, shared throughout the entire community.1 This was one good reason, he said, to avoid arguing.2 For people like Chatri and Pannee—among the millions of Bangkok Thais who immigrated from the countryside to the cities themselves, and the millions more who are only a generation or two removed—the language of interdependence that goes with wet-rice cultivation lifestyles persists. The methods used in wet-rice cultivation, typical throughout the region, require a much greater amount of cooperation than dry-land farming does. Talhelm et al. (2014) argue that there is a relationship between agricultural styles and personality structures. In regions where wet-rice cultivation is prevalent, people tend to be more interdependent than they are in areas where farming tends to require less cooperation. Talhelm et al. also find that people with interdependent personality styles tend to mark a bigger distinction between friends and strangers than those with independent styles, and to view themselves and their communities in more holistic terms (2014: 606). Although Talhelm et al.’s study takes place in China, the wet-rice farming techniques employed by his subjects are similar to the ones used to the south in Thailand; as Talhelm et al. point out, “you don’t have to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture” (2014: 605). These patterns are common among families like Joey’s, which has lived in the city for a number of generations, as well. It takes many forms—the expectations of parents are conveyed through habits of the body and through stories like Ben’s, and tales of obligation (and failure to live up to obligations) suffuse the Thai media. Potter’s description of agriculture in the Chiangmai Village area may help explain why these psychological tendencies would appear (1976). While a wheat farm can be managed by one family alone, the sort of irrigation required to harness the water to flood then empty the fields involves a great deal of teamwork. Potter describes the frequent building, rebuilding, maintenance, and repair of the infrastructure necessary to redirect water from the river near Chiangmai Village into smaller and

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smaller canals that sit further and further away (Potter 1976: 81–102). It involves a few weeks of shared hard labor after the annual floods, labor that occupies all of the local adults, overseen by what appears to be a well-disciplined and complex local hierarchy (1976: 89–90). Potter makes it clear that cooperation is necessary to lay the groundwork for a successful harvest—but this does not mean that harmony rules. Conflicts over water rights and work requirements spring up, he says— and, at times, these conflicts remain unresolved, even over long periods (1976: 99). In general, the interdependent tendencies work to make survival possible, but they do not create perfect harmony. I have found that there are many ways that a general tendency toward interdependence becomes visible. One evening, after Od had done something he shouldn’t have, he came over to see me. He sat down across from me and he said, “Talk.” “About what?” I asked. It didn’t matter, he replied. My job at this moment—as a friend, as company, as nothing more than another person—was to provide a distraction so that he wouldn’t have to deal with his guilt. This strategy was in common use: Instead of developing internal mechanisms to deal with unwanted emotions, it was generally easier for people to depend on others to distract them for this purpose. The reliance on other people to maintain emotional states contributes to the conception of an interdependent emotional human nature. (This explains, in part, Chatri’s interest in the women crying.) When I told people that I lived alone, the initial response was almost always the same: Something along the lines of, “Aren’t you afraid of being attacked by a ghost?” At first, I was quite confused by this. After all, ghosts are believed to attack groups as quickly as they will go after individuals. Why would a ghost care if I lived alone or not? I asked Pong. He shrugged. At least you wouldn’t die alone, he said. This seemed a small consolation to us both, but the idea here belies an important point about human nature and the ability to detect ghosts. Someone can tell if a ghost is present because it causes her to experience a fear that she cannot explain. When people are alone, they are much more likely to be aware of unsettling feelings. Even if ghosts themselves don’t care how many people they

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attack, a quiet house enables one to hear subtle noises, and an undistracted mind invites people to be aware of the emotions that aloneness raises. In interdependent Bangkok, feeling disconnected is frightening; being haunted, then, is one translation of the idea of being alone. When someone asked if I was afraid of ghosts in my one-bedroom apartment, they were not asking if I was worried about the odds of being attacked; they were asking if being by myself didn’t cause me to feel fear. And the experience of fear when alone can serve as evidence of an i­nterdependent vision of human nature.

Khon: The Language of the Obligated Offspring While the cash economy has largely replaced barter, relatively few Thais had the wherewithal to invest financially for retirement effectively. Like many developing countries, Thailand early in the twentyfirst century lacked an effective government-sponsored social safety net and had lacked one for its entire history. And as in many developing countries, responsibility for care for the elderly and infirm falls to healthy and able relatives. Investing for the future, then, is not usually thought of in monetary terms. This shared awareness leads to a common response. Ton was heir to a small and intermittently prosperous business, which has provided his family of three (including his mother and older brother) with two large, new houses in the suburbs, two BMWs, and college educations of varying success for both sons. At the age of 24, he was worried about his retirement. Once Ton had managed to establish himself in his business—which should support him through his working-life, he thought, but not beyond it—he focused on the idea of securing his future. When I asked about his long-term plans, he did not talk about the real-estate his family owns, or the cash he could invest. Selling the business is not something that he considers, nor is leaving it in the hands of hired help, as employees steal, he insisted. Unless they have a direct investment in success of the business, they need to be watched at all times. This presented a real problem for him:

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I’m scared. I’m scared about the future when I’m old, if I have no family. No money, no work, no family, what do you do? You must have a plan. My children will study. But what if they don’t like me? I need to have money of my own, to look after myself. I think about this. But what if you get married, have a family, have children? What if you try with them and they grow up, is this good? What if you’re not friends? What if they don’t think about you? You need to have a plan. Steve will be OK, he’s American. You work, you pay [social security] taxes. You will have money without your family. You won’t have a problem, because when you’re old, your government will look after you. If your children don’t look after you, it’s not a big deal. But if you’re me – if I get old and my children don’t look after me, the government won’t look after me, I can’t sell things, Steve, I need to think, I need to have a plan. It’s a big headache…. I need to have children who are good people… children who sell things for me.

Like Ton, who tends to take a dark view of human nature, several of my subjects worried that they would not be cared for. Preparing children to take on the task of looking after their parents is seen as essential by most Thais. Because this is so important, it becomes one of the central foci of parent-child relationships, and much of this language of the family is oriented toward dealing with questions of financial support and physical comfort. In order to raise children properly, then, one needs to teach them two things. First, they need to learn to work. This can mean teaching them to be industrious, and in some cases, it also means sending them to college. Simply having educated, industrious children is not sufficient for comfort in old age, however. The children also need to want to support their parents. As a result, raising happy children is not seen as essential—raising good ones is.3 The language of the family, then, bends more toward interpersonal morality than personal psychological comfort and is built around a hierarchical system, with the younger obedient to, and generally lower than, their elders. Exact responses to this widely recognized need for security vary from family to family but in my sample, the different Rortean dialects that people spoke when they talked about their families were close enough to one another to make it clear that they belong to the same khon-oriented language.

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How does one train children to participate in this hierarchy and become responsible, willing providers? Parents usually teach out of ­long-lived habits, doing what their parents did (or did not do), and they draw their articulations about moral behavior—and overt conceptions of what good behavior is—from Buddhist notions of goodness, human nature, and right action. If a parent wants to raise children who will look after her when she is old, she needs to teach them to control their desires. A concept important in Buddhism, it is often articulated and justified in folk Buddhist terms, even if it is not a formal part of the Dhamma. As children learn from their parents’ models, Panyananda Bhikku, a monk who has written about child-rearing, recommends: Never think, say or do any unwholesome thoughts or things in the presence of your children. They should see and hear only wholesome things. To accomplish this, father and mother in any household must train themselves to always have discipline. Never do anything in accordance with your desire. (Panyananda Bhikku 2000: 18) (Bold in the original; I find the unhighlighted sentence at the end most interesting.)4

The goal of promoting contentment is not a priority in Thai ­child-rearing. Insecurity is often used as a tool to induce cooperation in children. “A lot of love tends to overshadow wisdom,” claims the monk (2000: 20).5 This follows from several different conceptions— that love is generally expressed through material means, and that giving into desires, especially material desires, hinders one’s ability to become wise. Love is symptomatic of comfort with the worldly aspects of life, and this comfort removes one from the awareness of suffering that is needed for wisdom. In interviews, it was often noted that one cannot become wise through emotional experiences. This tension between love and wisdom is an important theme that runs throughout my subjects’ lives. Good feeling between parents and children is generally seen not as coming through love, but as coming through guidance.6 Children, the monk explains, naturally lack discipline, so they must be trained to set aside their defiling desires and emotions. Along with the limited ability to see Dhamma, this is a modified version of the Buddha’s teachings about the way to find peace through meditation

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and calm insight, pared down to meet the needs of the unenlightened, worldly family. He advises using methods that train children to be generous, calm, and cooperative, and to avoid forms of discipline that lead them to living in irrational fear, or developing hot tempers. The strategies he suggests, among others, include beating and the withdrawal of love. The idea that a well-respected monk would advocate corporal punishment may seem counterintuitive, but nearly all of my subjects felt that, if used appropriately, hitting was a necessary tool for raising good children and keeping order in school and the home. The idea that wisdom is superior to love is common among my subjects. Wisdom cannot come directly from love, as it is defiling, and the truly Buddha-like do not experience the passions of love; it has been replaced with “loving-kindness,” (mettha ) a disinterested sort of concern for the well-being of others which does not disturb one’s equanimity. Love, therefore, is an acceptable tool in the development of wisdom— and, before children are able to become wise, in inducing cooperation. If children do something wrong, their parents should let them know …that doing such a thing was bad and they become bad persons. You don’t like them to do that again. Do you want us to love you? If you want our love, please do not do such a thing again. (Panyananda Bhikku 2000: 64)7

In practice, how do parents assure that their children will be good? “If children are a little bit afraid, they listen and obey.” This is the wisdom of Pannee, whose daughter was just entering her teens at the time of our interviews. Pannee showed great patience with the students she taught, but she was quite a traditionalist, very concerned about the corrosive effects of technology and television on children, about the increasingly poor manners among men, and the risks of city living. She loved Baw, her only child, and felt that the girl was well-­behaved. Nonetheless, creating a small sense of fear in the child—perhaps b­ etter called insecurity—does not give Pannee second thoughts. She explains her decisions this way: The world is a dangerous place, especially for girls. A person needs either good sense and conservative habits, or unflinching allegiance to someone who knows better. Children lack

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sense, she believes, so they need to be made obedient instead. Her goal was to create a certain kind of environment for Baw so that she will remember stories in which misbehavior results in feelings of insecurity and smallness, and that good things come only from parents. One part of her strategy—and the strategy of many parents in Thailand, including, she said, her own—was to make her daughter uncertain of her love. She worked to imbue the child with a sense of conditional love, love that can and will be taken away if she did not toe the line. What techniques did Pannee use to instill this fear? She was quite direct in answering, as though this was a subject she had considered often, an important skill. As she often does, she answered in list form. “One – hit. Two – I don’t give pocket money. Three – I don’t talk to her when I’m angry.… She likes to talk to her parents.”8 The purpose behind the strategy was to keep the child aware of the importance of her parents, the debt of gratitude she owes her mother and father in the front of her mind. This is done by showing the child how weak she is next to her parents, and how she would suffer without them. The result is an awareness of existential powerlessness that often lasts throughout life, lessening slightly with age and the development of wisdom. (We can hear echoes of the idea of youthful fecklessness and what happens when young people try to act on their own in the lifecycle and karma stories that Ben and Aw told in the first part of this book.) It also results in an uncertainty about other people that comes with the knowledge that even those one loves and trusts the most may not return the love and may not accept the trust. Pannee then demonstrated the physical attitude she attempts to elicit from Baw, the gestures that suggest that she has done her job. She hung her head slightly. She seemed contrite, slightly whiney. One cannot be sure what Baw actually feels when she does this, of course, but after 13 years of intensive and focused effort, Pannee was confident that she had succeeded. (While she loves her daughter, she was able to inculcate an obedient identity in her, Pannee was much less confident about her ability to discipline the identity of a loving child.) Pannee didn’t seem to enjoy treating her daughter this way. There was no pride in scaring her, but neither was there any regret. Her demonstration was of a technical nature; she has to tread a fine line

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between eliminating Baw’s confidence in the love of her parents and destroying her hope of achieving her parents’ love at all. Baw needed to feel her approval was just out of reach, not so far away that she gave up hope and stopped trying to be a good daughter. Having been convinced that she lacked the wisdom to take care of herself when she was a child, Pannee was aware that she saw the same innocence in her daughter, bending the interpretation more toward incompetence and weakness. And, believing it to be for the best, she reproduced the pattern. The enduring sense of powerlessness that comes with obligation to one’s parents and a lack of wisdom is a fundamental building block my subjects use to construct their universes. As children grow more competent, it is a small step to switch the conversation from one of having needs that must be satisfied with one of debts that can now be repaid. One man in his mid-twenties described, with great awe and little humor, his attitude toward his mother: “My mother is my goddess.”9 Although he had lived abroad for several years, far from his parents’ influence and control, and now lived far from his natal home, he still imbued her with an extraordinary amount of power. This virtual deification of parents can take a more literal form: There are businesses that will turn pictures of the deceased into amulets for their survivors to wear. They are treated much like Buddha amulets or images of gods and saints: as signs of protectors on another plane. This unambivalently positive view of parents can be explained in part through the fact that parents and children keep a great deal of emotional and intellectual space between them. Although parents and children secretly admit to deep love, they cannot talk about it, so day to day, these relationships are usually kept on a practical level. Generally, my subjects described their parents functionally—in terms of what they do for one another. Chy describes his father this way: I think he is kinder than my mom. If I want to have anything I will go to my father and ask for it. It’s easier to get. I forgot to mention, he is an engineer. He is very kind.10

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This combination of love and material support appears often in the episodes that typify my subjects’ relationships with their parents. What does Chatri miss most about his mother? The story he tells is very simple. “Every day she would say, ‘Where is Chatri? It’s time for dinner!’” The relationships between parents and children are generally seen on a practical level. The interaction is quite different from the relationships between friends; I have very rarely come across anyone who claimed to be friends with his or her parents. That would involve spanning a gap in authority and age that should not be breached. Lek, a 2­ 9-year-old woman who worked for her family’s firm, explained it this way: “I don’t talk about problems with my parents. I talk with my sister only… because I think my parents don’t understand me. If I talk, I think they [will be] confused. It may be their age.” This is a common sentiment: concern about the generation gap. Children do not always do exactly what their parents want them to do. Love does not imply openness or honesty here. Keeping secrets from parents—having secrets as a part of a second life apart from the family—is quite common as well. At the same time, over the course of thousands of hours of conversations and observations, I have never once witnessed anyone say anything negative about a parent. Fealty to one’s parents is a fundamental element in the language of the family.11 One afternoon Ton was visiting his friend Mick’s shop, debating the possibility that aliens built the pyramids. Mick’s shop was near the one which Ton and his mother ran, so the arrival of Ma Ton, as we called her, was not surprising. She approached our group and began yelling at her son about the price of some goods he had sold earlier in the day. Ton responded that the price was not too low, that there was still some profit in the transaction, but his mother was irate. She grabbed a bunch of little figurines from a basket there in Mick’s stall—small bronze crocodiles resting on giant lingam—and threw them at her son as she screamed. Ton covered his eyes and bowed his head to protect himself but made no effort to stop her or avoid her wrath. She threw handful after handful at her son until Mae, who sold curries a little way down the aisle, a jovial woman about Ma Ton’s age, stepped in and led her away for a coffee break.

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“She is under a lot of stress,” Mick told me as we searched the floor for stray lingam. “Yes,” echoed Ton, “She has had a very hard life.”

Mick elaborated on the litany of her difficulties which contextualized her unusually harsh temper: Her husband died early, after she nursed him through a long illness. He left her with two young boys to raise and support on her own, both of whom can be difficult to deal with. Yes, Ton agreed, he and his brother could be difficult. Part of this affirmative attitude toward parents is manners. It would be considered improper by almost any Thai standard to criticize the people who gave you life and raised you up, no matter how poorly they behaved. Still, there is more to the phenomenon than a desire to avoid seeming gauche. Both Mick and Ton appeared to view the story of Ma Ton’s sacrifices for her boys, and the toll those sacrifices took, as sufficient to justify intemperate behavior that they would criticize in a peer. None of the people I spoke with ever suggested that they had a critique of a parent in mind that they did not want to share, and there were no implicit criticisms or back-handed compliments. Instead, they tended to idealize the parent and rationalize inappropriate behavior. When parent and child did not see eye to eye, the child usually took responsibility for the disagreement and acknowledged that he or she was probably at fault. In a round about way, Ton did this by acknowledging the burden he placed on his mother after his father’s death. More frequently, however, younger adults admitted that their parents were wiser, or that they themselves were acting inappropriately without realizing it. How, exactly, did they come to take their position in Thai hierarchies so seriously?

Stories of Sacrifice: Locking into the Language of the Khon There is a connection, then, between the demands of the physical environment, the structures of Thai society, and the system of values that perpetuates this social system. This value system seems sensible, along

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with its concomitant parenting behaviors, but this reasonableness alone doesn’t explain how Bangkok Thais lock themselves into accepting these behaviors as morally meaningful and personally important, and how they take these experiences as organizing elements of their identities. “It’s the story of husbands and wives,” explained Pannee, making what appears to be a fair generalization. “They can be married all their lives, and they never talk of love at all. The husband will never say, ‘I love you’.” And the wife, she continued, will never say, “I’m angry.” When important emotions like love cannot be expressed directly, there must be some other way to connect the notions of loving and being loved with an emotional “I.” This vision is expressed through a simple, central canonical narrative: Although love may remain unspoken, it can be shown through stoic sacrifice. It is maintained through consistent reminders in movies, books, and ads for life insurance,12 and in more private narratives, like Ton’s explanation of his mother’s anger, and “Where is Chatri? It’s time for dinner.” Convincing a child, small in stature and limited in experience, that he is weak, needy, and dependent upon his parents is not an especially difficult trick. Maintaining this vision of an interdependent nature as a way of locating oneself meaningfully in reality, creating a durable disposition that maintains the growing child’s vision of his parents’ social position as the source of so much support which will eventually need to be repaid, is a tougher one. This narrative form shapes stories about the nature of children, obligation, and knowing one’s role in the family hierarchy, build on the base of insecurity that disciplinary methods inculcate. A lecture Chatri said he gave to a pair of nephews who had come to stay with him shows how he encouraged them to see themselves as irresponsible and needing guidance rather than growing toward maturity by learning from their mistakes. He also emphasizes the debt the boys owe their parents—which is interesting, considering the fact that Chatri had taken over the relevant parental role in this case. The boys had begun to date, and, because their girlfriends had diverted them from their schoolwork, their grades fell. Chatri arranged facts from the boys’ lives to create a specific version of a canonical narrative.

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Their uncle reprimanded them, telling them that they needed to improve their grades not for the sake of their own futures, but because of what they owe their parents. He reported telling them: “Why are you so selfish? Why do your relationships cause trouble for your educations? Why do they bring you down? One thing I would say to you, you are so selfish. Why do I say that? Because you are depending on your parents for support. Why don’t you think about [using] one chance in your life – you have the opportunity to pay them back? But now, you know, you don’t even do that yet, but also, you would like to carry your life [and be responsible only to yourselves]. Do you think it’s reasonable? You think it’s fair enough for them?” And they are crying.13

Chatri’s lecture reflects this underlying connection between sacrifice and familial love. The boys’ parents showed their love by putting their sons’ interests before their own. Therefore, instead of pursuing their own projects, the boys should show their love by doing the same. Chatri took it for granted that the boys love their parents and used that love to leverage them into studying harder. The language of the obligated offspring he uses to discuss this love is oriented around ideas of debt, of the responsibility that these children have to the people who care for them. Teachers, monks, and other caretakers like Chatri often make a point of reminding children about the specific sacrifices that their elders make for them. This reinforces and regularizes the orientation that this language has toward the idea that children are obligated to their parents. When stories about parents are articulated through the sacrifices they make for their children, then any negative emotions that might arise in the relationship, or any ambivalence, can be interpreted as ingratitude and, as Chatri pointed out quite clearly, selfishness. Even acts that a child finds very painful can become symptoms of parental love. Oh said he had learned to see the things that hurt him as a child as signs of his parents’ love, and from this he learned to channel his grief into pleasing them. When he was six, his parents sent him to live with relatives while he attended a high-quality private school in a distant town. At first, he says, he was outraged and dismayed. The boy

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called his parents every day to talk about everything he could think of, including “what is going on with my goldfish.” He put a negative moral valuation on the emotions he felt in those days. “I should not feel… that my parents hate me or whatever,” he says. “I was just very angry: Why did you send me to another house?” His mother told him that they had to separate because she cared enough about him to be sure he got a good education. “I love you that much,” he remembered her telling him. “That’s why I have to do this.” Love in this language is not about emotional closeness. It is about the sacrifices that both of them had to endure to guarantee his success later in life. Ironically, he grew to feel that, if he stayed at home with his parents, this would show that they did not love him enough to give him the best education they could. Oh interprets that distance, and their emotionally hurtful behavior, as proof of their love. He was able to take his feelings of abandonment and turn them into signs of connection. This skill is not his alone. Stories like this are common among members of the Thai middle classes. By adopting his parents’ perspective as the correct lens through which to interpret these events and judging his lonesomeness as a childish reaction, he presented himself to himself and others as someone who understands the ways families work. In the terms of the language of the family, oriented around obligations, he can see his adult self as having learned a valuable lesson, and ironically, feel himself as loved by the parents who sent him away. When Oh tells this story, he is not just assembling a chain of episodic memories from his early life. Just as Chatri’s emotionally motivated retelling of his karma stories locked him into his belief, Oh’s logic is strongly supported by his emotions. The reorientation of this story over time, from a tale of abandonment to one of loving sacrifice, reflects an assimilation from a childish model of parental love (as Oh interpreted it) to a more sophisticated model that fit comfortably within the parameters defined by the language of the khon as obligated to sacrifice. Although the particular steps and phases are lost in Oh’s history, he claimed that this evolution took time. The reward for assimilating to this model, and the impetus for thinking about the story as he does, is that it allows him to feel loved instead of abandoned.

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Oh’s interpretation reflects a choice that is supported by the people around him, and that rewards him when he retells it. But while the immediate impetus to remember the story into truth came from his specific situation, locking himself into this story helped lock him into a larger life-world as well. Oh has not simply chosen a belief because it feels good to him; people cannot choose their beliefs. They can, however, choose interpretations that connect up to meaning systems that they have already forgotten into truth. Although he learned through thinking about specific episodes, what matters here is the value of the larger language he has learned. It helps him think about who he is through the connections it makes between love, sacrifice, and hopes for eventual success. And these have shaped the way he thinks about his emotions, and the way he engages with his education and work life. Instead of focusing on details that structure this narrative as one of loss, as he initially did, he taught himself to reconfigure his grief. Instead of seeing it as a product of his parents’ abandonment, he built it into his life history as a sign of the love they share and as a motivator to succeed for his own sake and theirs. He said that as a small child he would remind himself: “Your education is very important… Put everything in your mind toward your education.”

Beating Is Better Than Yelling: Control Over Emotions As the stories in this chapter indicate, about Ma Ton’s rage and Oh’s resentment, negative emotions play a real role in many Thai lives. But in a society in which expressions of strong emotion—especially anger, but other emotions as well—are heavily sanctioned, this creates a problem. The language of the obligated offspring has plenty of room for conceptions of human nature that involve a variety of negative emotions. These conceptions allow for pain to exist, and they can mitigate it, by allowing Oh to make his loneliness meaningful as a motivator to succeed, for example. But for the most part it does not alleviate those pains completely. When people think about this in Dhammic terms, they explain it this way: Emotions like these reflect attachments, and a human nature

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that allows for attachments is one that is defiled. Since life is suffering, according to the Buddha, connections to loved ones are supposed to be painful. The more intense the emotion, the harder it is to control, and the farther it is from the collected, dispassionate wisdom to which Thai Buddhists are supposed to aspire. Emotional outbursts, then, are embarrassing in themselves. There is a practical aspect to this censoring as well. From an early age, most Thais have learned to control their expressions of emotion and have come to value a calm face, not just for doctrinal reasons but because they lack experience with expressions of intense emotion. The fact that intense expressions are not a common part of most Thais’ social experiences means that they can be hard to deal with; this also leads to views on strong emotions which lack the nuance often found in the West. Here again, this difficulty leads many to avoid situations in which intense expressions will occur. This aversion to strong emotion leads people to attempt to control themselves as completely as possible; the result is that, when one fails to control one’s emotions, it is thought that one has lost control of himself completely. The phrase, cad satdi, which means, idiomatically, to lose one’s temper, translates literally as “to lose consciousness.” To be openly angry, then, is to be out of control. Many of my subjects reported that they believed that they had never expressed anger at all—that they controlled themselves to the point where they had never actually lost their tempers.14 This need for control over the expression of emotion makes it difficult to control the behaviors of others in a number of situations. Absent is the ability, for example, to induce cooperation by indicating that one is growing angry or upset or embarrassed.15 Another issue surrounds the problems that come with disciplining children. Expressive emotional force is not an option. Parents are generally uncomfortable or unable to bring themselves to use it. Discipline, then, is pursued through various combinations of talking and hitting. By and large, my subjects—parents and children alike—endorsed this. “If you love your cattle, tie them,” goes one often-quoted Thai proverb. “If you love your children, beat them.” If done properly,

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it is thought—in a way that does not harm the child while inflicting pain—then this can be an effective form of discipline. In his book on child-rearing, Panyananda Bhikku writes: A clay pot maker uses a wooden slap to beat on a pot in order to make it look nice. The beating and slapping is done just right and not to break the pot, of course. The same is true when punishing a child. (2000: 16)

This reflects the general distrust of intense emotion and the belief that, while a parent can beat a child with a calm heart, one cannot yell without expressing emotion. Given a choice between yelling and hitting, Od decided this way: Both are bad. But yelling is worse… If I have to choose one that is worse, yelling is worse. Because there is no reason to scream out. There is no reason. But if you hit you hit – sometimes when you hit a child, you teach him that what he did was not good. Sometimes you teach children that they [should not] do it any more…. If you scream out, I think that can’t help, can’t change children much…. If you were a child, and somebody screams at you everyday, then you will [become an] aggressive person. But hitting is about good and not good. Hitting has a reason…. If there is a reason, the child will not be scared.

Ton pointed out that when one hits, one can hit hard, or one can hit gently, depending on the situation. If one yells, one simply yells. He did not have a sense that a person could modulate her voice or control her tone when she was angry.

Rieproi Behavior While hiding one’s negative emotions can be very useful in situations where cooperation is valued, the fact that people are unable to gauge one another’s inner emotions also eliminates one route to understanding what they want and need. In its place, a systematic set of assumptions about how people should act has emerged. This system of calm,

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hierarchically oriented behavior that allows people to deal with one another without having to respond to hidden emotions is known as rieproi behavior. In its idealized form, it generally equates to behavior that reflects knowledge of one’s position. A system that depends upon outward displays involves negotiations among social roles—generally pre-set roles that reflect a relatively small number of different axes: relationships between superiors and inferiors, among outsiders and kin (by blood or fictive), and between genders. Rieproi behavior is highly predictable and reflects relative status with minimal reference to individual relationships. (The word is often used in places where an English speaker would use the word “proper,” or even, when referring to objects, “neat” or “orderly.”) What is rieproi between two people is rieproi between all people of the same relative statuses. That is, it involves playing the roles that are expected. It does not involve having a sense of what the other person actually thinks; emotions are held so close to the vest this is often impossible. It requires knowing what people ought to think. It involves awareness of a (sometimes fictional) social consensus about proper behavior. It is, therefore, a rather impersonal way of handling personal relationships. Certainly, rieproi behavior is not employed all the time; there are times when it is necessary and important, and times when it is not. The system creates an important and functional framework for thinking about interpersonal relationships. It takes the guess-work out of relating to others, as one can fit the people one meets into a fairly simple rubric, and calculate appropriate behavior (more or less) from there. While good rieproi behavior involves an acute awareness of the physical states of others, how comfortable they are, and what would make them more content, there is little need to deal with idiosyncratic personal tastes, preferences, and tendencies in others. The system of rieproi often creates a strain in the people who use it. In order to be rieproi, one must defer to those above one, be able to advise those below, be polite, agreeable, helpful, neat, calm, cooperative, generous when necessary, and unobtrusive. In theory, one should be rieproi all the time. In fact, that would be very inconvenient, and on many occasions, it is not necessary. When dealing with friends of roughly equal status, people often behave in very informal ways—they

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tease each other, they use rude language, sometimes they display some of their less attractive emotions, but then only in close personal situations. That these are distinct ways of behaving is clear. People can and do switch back and forth between them. Ton (who was 24 at the time) was entertaining a 17-year-old friend at his shop. The entertainment consisted mainly of the mocking of Golf—making fun of his braces, making fun of the fact that he didn’t have a girlfriend, saying that his thick facial features made him look stupid. (“I know I look stupid,” he told me, “But on the inside, I’m smart.”) There was nothing rieproi in Ton’s behavior. The interaction was clearly taking place in a friendly idiom, until the moment Ton pulled out a 20 baht bill and politely told Golf to go across the aisle and buy drinks for Ton himself and me. There was no provision for soda for the boy. “You’re telling me to do this because I’m younger,” Golf protested. Ton persisted, and Golf protested further, until I got up to buy sodas for all three of us. At this point, Golf grabbed the cash and ran past me to Mae’s restaurant. Golf was willing to resist the definition of his relationship with Ton as rieproi because they had known each other for years, and because Ton was not treating Golf in a way that fits the definition of rieproi at all. However, he was not willing to allow me to buy beverages myself, as he was more comfortable in thinking of our relationship in rieproi terms. Negotiating these different systems poses a challenge, then, but since it can be a choice, it can also provide opportunities. The lack of ways of expressing strong emotions, and of dealing with them when they are expressed, only seems to be exacerbated by these approaches. How, then, do people deal with the emotions the familial language creates then rejects?

Worldly Lives: Interdependent but Isolated The self that pleases parents learns to take care of other people in general. The people I worked with were very facile at making one another comfortable, predicting what needs would arise. When Ton and Mick went out drinking with their friends, everyone’s glass was perpetually filled with beer and ice. Most members of the group, even as they

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slipped into drunkenness, remained alert to the needs of their peers. Room was always made for newcomers and late-comers, even before they knew they were ready to sit down. These young men paid very close attention to physical comfort. And yet, there was little emotional empathy within the group. Although perspective-taking clearly takes place, emotional empathic skills were largely unknown or unused— these young men were much more likely to laugh at a friend’s pain than they were to comfort him. Because of this tendency, I think, personal problems were rarely brought to the attention of the group intentionally, although friends might callously mention each other’s secret problems from time to time, for the sake of a laugh. This particular group of young men were not especially genteel. They had risen recently into the middle class and (with one exception, who will make an appearance in Chapter 7) had no pretensions to sophistication. At the same time, they were deeply aware of the proper ways to behave. They avoided strong displays of emotion (out of fear as well as propriety) and avoided any suggestions of disunity. Anything that would make one person feel left out of the group was avoided. While drinking at brothels most certainly would displease their mothers, the patterns of attention to propriety remained the same, if not the content of what was to be avoided and what was acceptable. Mick and Ton were aware of the strategic value of this sort of friendly, inclusive behavior. Ton describes the reasons behind his general friendliness at his shop: I talk with customers every day…. Unless I talk to them they don’t understand me. They think I set my prices high… This is the way most people think… They think this is bad… they ask for discounts because they think I’m trying to rip them off. They don’t understand that I’m not trying to cheat them. When we talk they realize, ‘OK,’ they understand I’m not trying to take advantage of them.

It is a self-serving sort of friendliness. Most emotional expression is, in fact, proscribed on this level. The emphasis here is on behaving in a way that makes others feel good. Deeper motivations need to go unquestioned, because they are self-interested, and at this level, Ton is trying to

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present himself as ethical, which involves creating an aura of kindliness and generosity. Emotional outbursts can bring censorship and mocking. Many people become uncomfortable in the presence of strong emotion of any kind as it threatens one’s own ability to stay calm. Polite behavior that fits into broadly accepted norms is very common. This does not mean, however, that there is not a second secret level in which socially unacceptable emotions reign. Like the way Bourdieu describes Kabyle social behaviors as remaining “in the game” without being swept up by it (1990: 66), my subjects have a clear and well-defined way of showing themselves. But this single game does not define a complete life. Thai Buddhists may not be allowed to express many emotions on the surface, but they do feel them. As there is limited language to talk about emotions, and little impetus to seek out others with whom to be emotionally intimate, emotions tend to stay private and, often, poorly articulated. This is in spite of the fact that their feelings are vital in the ways that people come to conceive of themselves. This need to remain calm and rieproi and keep strong emotions out of relationships can make communication very difficult among my subjects. Relationships often appear to consist of people close together in space alone. Love tends to be expressed through indirect means: Through the work, one does for others, and for the things one gives away. Pannee taught her daughter the same distancing techniques that she learned as a child, and Baw will probably experience the same distance from her children in her own time. At several points, Pannee spoke at length about her desires to hear others express emotion. But she does not want to express it herself. “In my life my husband has never said, ‘I love you,’ and I have never said, ‘I love you’ to him. I’m very shy.” (She uses “dichan” for “I” in the phrase, “‘I love you,’” instead of her own name, the typical informal way Thais usually refers to themselves. “Dichan” is a very highly formal—almost stilted—way to express anything. For her, it seems, the expression of love would be a rarified thing.) “I think that [if ] I work every day, cook the food, he’ll know already. He’ll already know I love him.” The main medium for the expression of love, then, is not speech or touch but work and material gifts.

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Still, people realize that gifts can be given insincerely, and work can be done out of duty alone, with no love involved; the longing and uncertainty continue, even into adulthood. These indirect expressions are not enough. “Sometimes, I think that everyone has a mouth, eyes and ears,” she told me. “When you have eyes, you can see, when you have ears you can hear, when you have a mouth you can say it.” Although Pannee’s treatment of her daughter created this space, this does not mean that it is something she wanted or liked. While she tries to maintain her cool-hearted, detached, proper façade, sometimes she slips a bit and reveals more than she intends about her relationship with her daughter. Pannee is glad that her daughter behaves with restrained propriety, but (notice the change in the object of the third sentence here): Nowadays, I think, my husband, I think he’s used to it. He doesn’t say anything, but he’d like to hear our daughter say it, like to know. She never says, “Your child loves you the most, mom!” But she doesn’t say anything to me, just like I never said anything to my mother.

As a result of this emotional closedness, my subjects generally feel very helpless in intimate relationships. They lack the ability to apply direct emotional pressure on a loved one and, often, feel unable to mention problems at all. It is commonly believed that anger breaks relationships in ways that can never be repaired. As a result, some people never express discomfort directly. Joey, for example, responds this way when asked if he has ever been in an argument: “No, because I’m very quiet” when he is angry. Note the bluntness of the answers of the normally loquacious Joey: SC: Can you love somebody and be angry? Joey: No. SC: Do you have to stop yourself being angry? Joey: It depends [on] who. If we have a long time together, I try to do that. SC: If you get angry at someone, can you love them again later? Joey: No.

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If the person with whom he is angry is not important to him, he explained later, then he will break off relations instead of losing his temper. If he cannot show his partners that he is unhappy with their behavior, how can he deal with problems like cheating? He must resort to indirect methods. “I try to explain everything, but for more serious problems sometimes I say nothing, just stay quiet.” He tries to show his displeasure by withdrawing. The other person then needs to be able to see his withdrawal and guess the cause. Most of the people I interviewed could list a number of reasons why it is important not to upset loved ones. Anger aside, even discussing problems with loved ones seems to create more difficulties than it resolves. First, there is the fear of sympathy. If Joey is upset and talks to a friend, then the friend may become upset as well, without being able to contribute anything toward a solution. Beyond that, bad feelings can be dangerous physically. Joey kept his problems from his parents in part for a very common reason: “because my parents have lots to think about already, and… their own problems occupy them and they have too much already. I don’t want to cause them to feel stress because they might have a stroke.… I can take care of my problems myself. I’m a good person, I can solve my own problems.”16 In this formulation, part of morality involves resolving problems independently. Still, people feel that some problems—like a wandering heart in a lover—cannot be fixed. “For everyone who is a playboy, I think nothing is going to stop them.” Many of Joey’s relationships have been derailed over this problem.17 Pannee’s husband tends to take mistresses as well. When Pannee found a mysterious number on her husband’s cell phone bill—this happened more than once—she dealt with this by calling the number and chatting pleasantly with whomever answered about how happy her family was. She said nothing about the possibility of infidelity to the other woman and nothing at all to her husband. When she did this, the numbers tended to disappear from future bills, and, to the best of her knowledge, this has ended the affair every time—although her husband has never said anything to her about it, either.

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Indirect measures often work, but not always. In complex and ­ ulti-facetted relationships, however, a partner might not be able to figm ure out the root of a particular problem if it is not made obvious. Many problems cannot be solved adequately without dialogue and compromise, things made very difficult in this context. Pannee’s “story of husbands and wives” is that “they can be married all their lives, and they never talk of love at all.” Many people go through their lives without communicating anything from a more intimate, emotionally close level. This places responsibility for the relationship entirely on the separate individuals. “If I’ve got someone that I love, I do everything that makes him happy. I have never [done anything] wrong, because I want stable love,” explained Joey. “If I do everything [right], they are going to stay with me…” As one might expect, Joey was frequently disappointed; this is an impossible responsibility for one person to take on when dealing with issues that concern two. However, this is how things tend to be conceptualized: Problems that in the West are often placed under the rubric of “interpersonal issues” in Thailand are generally dealt with intrapersonally. The language of obligation and the khon, then, with all the emotion it entails, serves many important functions. It creates the order and cooperation needed for wet-rice cultivation, builds the hierarchies that sustain families from generation to generation, provides the codes that make social life agreeable and smooth, and sponsors the development of the emotions that motivate and sustain these relationships. But it also causes problems that it cannot resolve. The emotions it creates can lead to social stability, but also to broken hearts, misunderstandings that fester into anger and the fear of abandonment. Because of the stigma attached to outward expressions of intense, negative emotions, all of these must be handled in private. A language oriented toward obligation to others, however, has little to say about inner turmoil. A second language, one associated more directly with Buddhist doctrine, is necessary for dealing with the practical emotional problems that khon face.

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Notes 1. Instead of arguing, Chatri and other subjects told me, physical violence was often used as a way to keep order in the home—more often employed by men, but used by women as well. This reduced the noise and kept the specifics of family conflicts out of the circles of gossip. 2. Not all villages in Thailand are built on this model (e.g., Phillips 1966)—rather, houses are scattered among rice fields, providing greater privacy. 3. This is not to say that Thai parents in general are apathetic to the happiness of their children—there is a belief that, if a person is good, he or she will also be happy. So people place emphasis on goodness first and expect happiness to follow. 4. In Thailand from 1999 to 2001, I found only two books on ­child-raising. One of these two was a translation of a book written in the West. Panyananda Bhikku’s was the other. The Bhikku notes that, in his own search for information on child-rearing, he came across only one other book written in Thai. 5. A lifelong monk, he has not had children of his own. Practical experience is not seen as essential to being able to give good advice, however. The world of experience is fleeting, and truer wisdom can be found by removing oneself from the daily bustle. His lack of experience, ironically, gives him greater authority in worldly matters. Many monks speak on issues of family and are taken quite seriously, despite their lack of practical experience. Of course, many monks do have contact with other people’s children from time to time. 6. This is because love is seen as a defilement. Nirvana-like happiness— and the goodness of character that parents need their children to express later on—comes through cool emotions, like kindness and compassion. These can only be learned when hot emotions, like affection, love, and the other intense feelings to which children are thought to be prone, have been set aside. This consistently reinforced connection between feeling love and doing right is, I believe, generalized in maturity as a sense that one can feel one’s karma directly. 7. This confluence of love and discipline is unique to neither Theravada nor Thailand. Tobin et al. (1989) found a similar set of connections in their work in China. Facing the same need to be cared for when they are old, they found that Chinese parents must raise children who are responsible enough to have the means to care for elderly kin, but

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loving enough to want to bother (1989: 96). Spoiling children, then, is a major worry for parents. Wisdom and love are not, apparently, seen as antithetical as they often are in Thai culture, but the idea of discipline is an essential component of parental love. The researchers report that the word guan covers this idea of disciplined love. “Guan has a very positive connotation in China. It can mean ‘to care for’ or even ‘to love’ as well as ‘to govern’” (1989: 93). As a result, the demands placed on children by, for example, pre-school teachers, “are perceived by the teachers, the wider society, and perhaps by the children not as cold or harsh treatment but as an expression of care and concern” (1989: 96). 8. The harshness of the list, I think, belies the fact that this is part of daily life for her. Almost all parents in Thailand beat their children; it is not a question of whether one should beat one’s child, but rather how often and how hard. Technically, this violence violates the spirit of Thai Theravada teachings, but the importance of raising “good” children in the Buddhist way outweighs these concerns. 9. This sort of deification of parents seems to be common in many cultures across Asia. For the Nepali example, see Parish’s discussion of the “web of relatedness” (1994: 176–182). 10. In this case, the utility is financial, following the pattern I have described. Not all the descriptions run toward monetary issues, however—often, descriptions lead to discussions of cooking and cleaning ability, as well as mood. 11. This does not apply so strongly to stepparents, or, in cases rare these days, to one’s father’s other wives. 12. Enter “Thai life insurance commercial” in any search engine that identifies videos. Knowledge of Thai is not necessary to understand these stories. 13. This is a self-reported lecture. While I did not witness this incident, I did see him lecturing these boys using similar narrative forms, applied to different sorts of situations. 14. While no one ever lost his or her temper with me, one of my friends did become very angry with me over a cultural misunderstanding. He responded with an intense and cold sort of passive-aggressive coddling—buying me food and then asking me if I was certain that someone wasn’t trying to poison me. He would not admit that he was angry with me, however, and this meant that we could not discuss the situation. Eventually, we had to separate for several weeks, until his temper faded. He had not “lost his consciousness,” but he had demonstrated his anger.

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15. Expressions of anger are considered to be equally dangerous among the Tahitians, Levy notes (1973: 283), although, unlike Thais, the Tahitians felt that they could release their anger through verbal communication. Further, Levy indicates that they felt this was important in maintaining social harmony and personal equilibrium (286). 16. It is interesting to note that, in some contexts (e.g., Levy 1973), strong emotion is interpreted not simply as the cause of illness, but as an illness itself (e.g., 272). 17. Joey is not particularly innocent on this count himself. When I met him, he was dating two people and courting a third.

References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levy, Robert. 1973. Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Panyananda Bhikku. 2000. Love Your Children the Right Way, trans. Songprasongk Prathnadi. Chiang Mai: Bhuddimakom. Parish, Steven. 1994. Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City: An Exploration of Mind, Emotion, and Self. New York: Columbia University. Phillips, Herbert. 1966. Thai Peasant Personality: The Patterning of Interpersonal Behavior in the Village of Bang Chan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Potter, Jack. 1976. Thai Peasant Social Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Talhelm, T., X. Zhang, S. Oishi, C. Shimin, D. Duan, X. Lan, and S. Kitayama. 2014. Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture. Science 344 (603): 603–608. Tobin, Joseph, David Wu, and Dana Davidson. 1989. Preschool in Three Cultures. New Haven: Yale University Press.

6 Why Nirvana? The Manut and the Language of Solitude

The Buddha taught that enlightenment was the only way out of the cycles of suffering. At the same time, modern monks explain, he also recognized that most people would not pursue the path to enlightenment since it requires giving up life in the world, and all the connections and responsibilities and satisfactions it entails. Therefore, he laid out one set of teachings that are meant to help people live with their defiled, desiring natures—that involves karma, and that connects comfortably with the householder values of the obligated offspring— and a second set that focuses on the path to perfection, and changing one’s nature to eliminate defilements. After two thousand five hundred years, why do both these very different strains of Buddhism persist? Spiro discusses it as the distinction between kammatic Buddhism and nibbanic Buddhism (1970: 12).1 Kammatic Buddhism involves the cycles of rebirth, karma, and the situations in which one finds oneself during repeated appearances on earth, and on other planes as well. Nibbanic Buddhism is about escaping the cycles altogether—finding nirvana and avoiding the inevitable suffering that comes with rebirth. Where karmic Buddhism is about staying in the cycles of the world, nirvanic Buddhism is about escape. Where worldly © The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_6

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karmic thought is about engagement, nirvana is about detachment. And where nirvanic Buddhism involves difficult doctrines and esoteric thought, in many Theravadan societies, karmic teachings for those who want to stay in the world largely reflect secular moral systems. These visions lead to different, complementary lifestyles. On Mother’s Day, the monks at Phra Anarak’s temple-school held a service to encourage lay children to feel obligated to their parents, not to become the sorts of people who want to abandon their obligations. When Chatri became a novice, however, the lessons were aimed at teaching him to renounce his connections instead. It would be hard to argue that these are not contradictory goals—and no one does. That said, no one argues against the idea that the pursuit of enlightenment is the path everyone would be taking if they were wise enough. The surface contradiction is easily dispatched. If one chooses to live in the world (as almost all Thais do), then the best thing to do is to work on one’s karma. But if one truly understands that life is suffering, then attempting to escape through the pursuit of enlightenment is the better option. Becoming enlightened is a slow process, one that takes many lifetimes, and a big step on that journey involves recognizing that seeking enlightenment, with all the sacrifices it entails, is actually a project one would want to undertake. As Tambiah puts it, “A question that puzzles the student of popular religion is how a lay public rooted in this world can adhere to a religion committed to renunciation of the world” (1968b: 41). Tambiah overstates the case; while it looks like Thai Buddhism is oriented around otherworldliness, and its temples explain and portray the desire to escape the cycles of rebirth, almost all lay Thais—and even most monks—have “little to do with nibbanic Buddhism,” as Spiro noted about his Burmese subjects (1970: 13), at least in terms of their overtly religious practices. So why does the broad adherence to the value of renunciation and nirvanic escape persist? This question is even more relevant today than it was when Tambiah first asked it; most Bangkok Buddhists spend very little time at the temple, many going only a few times a year. And as life in this world has generally become longer, healthier, and more comfortable, the foundational doctrine that “life is suffering” has grown slightly

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more remote. And yet my subjects adhered closely to the idea that they were Buddhists, and good Buddhists at that, even while admitting, as many did, that they knew relatively little about the nirvanic aspects of their own faith. Why, then, do both of these different strains continue, when one is so central to everyday life and the other is so obscure? As I have argued before, it is not the Dhamma itself, the belief-as-explained (and, beyond a certain point, generally not explained—it contains a huge amount of information with which most Thai Buddhists are completely unfamiliar), that drives this. And it is not because most Buddhists plan on achieving nirvana anytime soon, but exactly because they don’t. Nirvanic Buddhism does more than just explain what it’s like to be enlightened—it also diagnoses and explores the causes and nature of suffering for those who are not. In doing this, it informs a belief-as-experienced. It provides people with a way to organize and think about intense negative emotions, and give meaning and value to the private pains that they cannot deal with when they think of themselves as obligated offspring. In this way, nirvanic doctrine articulates a language that explains suffering as a part of unperfected human nature. It provides an alternative to the sociable, obligated khon awaiting her karmic returns. While the path to nirvana is very rarely followed with any seriousness, even by monks, it provides a shared vocabulary that my subjects can adapt to talk about human nature in contexts that involve the deep emotions, desires, and attachments that, they believe, lead to suffering. Because this language relates to the way the Dhamma talks about human existence, I will refer to it as the language of the manut. Thais use the word “manut” in contexts where English speakers tend to use “human” instead of “person.” Like the word “human,” in many of its uses it carries with it the suggestion of intellectual treatment and a philosophical approach. The word is associated with Pali-Sanskrit, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, and is generally related to formal Buddhist doctrines concerning human existence. The Buddha’s goal involved teaching people to quell the intense emotions that lead to suffering, so they tend to be pathologized in the language of the manut—but in defining them as problems, then suggesting

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a cure (even if it is almost impossibly remote) it makes those emotions comprehensible. It is not the path to nirvana the Buddha drew through the map of the universe that explains nirvanic doctrine’s persistence, then. It is the detailed picture of the universe that the Buddha described while walking that path, with its troubling emotions and desires, into which Buddhists can lock themselves, making that way of organizing the universe as real as they are. Thinking about suffering this way allows people to orient themselves toward it in a way that gives meaning. Nirvanic Buddhism is not about pessimism or death or renunciation, as others have argued. It lasts because it is about making sense of the darker parts of life.

A Place for Emotions that Don’t Fit in the Life of a Khon It is important that children love their parents or, at least, display the signs of love as they are constituted here—obedience, good cheer, and the like. There are also times when children will be led to distrust and resent their parents and other people in ways that go unexpressed. These unacceptable feelings are held back, acknowledged privately (as Oh did, many years after he was sent to live with his relatives), but not shown. These unexpressable feelings have not been banished from the mind completely. Rather, they have been banished from the relationships that, for example, Oh has with his parents. The separation of these emotions over time causes a split between the self revealed socially, one that would be acceptable to parents, and a private, inner self which houses these negative emotions at first and then later comes to hold many important feelings. It is this complex of thoughts and feelings, I believe, that inspired Od to mention, during the first minutes of our first interview, the “dark side.” He defined it as “thoughts that you don’t show to people.” Does everyone have a dark side? Yes. Does Od have a dark side? “Yes. I will not tell you [what is in it]. Steve has a dark side, too.” What Od calls his dark side contains information that he is ashamed to reveal, except under special circumstances. Potter (1976) found something similar in

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his time in Thailand, although his description of this divided self paints them with a very broad brush that, I think, misunderstands the scope of these more private aspects. He writes: Superficially Chiangmai villagers are charming, colorful, and carefree people, but underneath they have dark and brooding natures, with abiding hates, jealousies, and fears that pass from one generation to another. (Potter 1976: 23)

Od hides his dark side to protect himself from conflict. Ben does this as well—although his secret side is not entirely dark. Ben and I began our interviews about two months before I left Thailand, at the end of my first trip. I had been hesitant to interview him; we had spent many afternoons together—I had joined his and A’s circle a few months before—but during the time I had known him I had learned very little about him. I could tell that he was very observant and spent much time trying to make sure that A felt good. This level of privacy, I thought, made him an unlikely interview candidate. A almost insisted that I interview him, telling me quietly that he thought Ben would be able to articulate his thoughts and emotions well. He was right. Ben was very able to speak through the language of the manut. Ben was quite quiet in social settings, spending a great deal of time working out what people needed him to do in order to be happy. This is his central skill, he told me, a skill he learned when he was young, living under the eye of his “wicked stepmother.” My step mom, when she first came, she was very good. But after she had her… own children, she turned… the other way. I used to stay with my father and her for maybe one or two years, and that was, I found that, um, the thing that you see in the movies, it happened in your life. I had to do all the homework, clean the wash for them, and clean the plates, the dishes something like that, clean the house. I was 8 or 9 at the time, maybe 10. I had to do everything for her… If I wanted to stay with her, I had to help her, most of the work I had to do. But it’s good for me, I think, because I can learn how to take care of myself.

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Note the value he places in finding the good in the situation in spite of the insecurity that grew from his tenuous place in the household and his fear of losing his home. He explains the benefits of this rather harsh arrangement this way: SC: What skills did you learn that you still use now? Ben: Take care of myself, stay away from… trouble, and I learned to try to find a way to try to make people happy. SC: That’s the second time tonight you’ve talked about making other people happy. Ben: For survival in the adult world at that time. Even though you don’t agree with them, you have to follow them. You have to pretend you like it, what they say, or you like what they order you to do, you have to do that.

Ben’s discussion here gets at the importance of splitting his identity between outside and in, the need to hide his feelings and serve others for the sake of his own well-being. This division is not made for the sake of politeness; it is made because other people are threatening. They can hurt him by raising emotions that he has no easy way to cleanse himself of while maintaining his proper khon face. Even his closest friends, like A, he said, get a small portion of his story. “It’s been this way since I was a child. I lived alone. I have a world of my own. I’m used to its ways, the ways of my own world. I keep it in. I’ve been like this since I was a child. I don’t think I’ll change.” Then, “I need a space to keep it in from the outside world.” It is not just a matter of privacy for Ben. Since his sense of interpersonal space is dominated by other people, he needed to be able to leave it entirely. The space he took, the private “world” he created, allowed him to live comfortably. Without that space, he felt he would drown in the needs of others and in his own discomfort. This sense of the existence of a private world into which he could retreat is not unusual. This sort of place where Ben could experience his negative feelings when his stepmother mistreated him could also serve as an outlet for Oh, allowing him to present a brave face to his parents until he could finish lamenting their separation.

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Several of my subjects were willing to share the contents of their secret lives with me. They were as varied as I could imagine—the only thing they had in common was the fact that they were almost never spoken of.2 One woman told me that, as a young girl, she resented her younger sister so much that she wanted her to die. One day, when they were alone, she pushed her into a pond. She watched her struggle until her conscience got the better of her and pulled her out. Focusing consistently on the fact that she pushed her sister in, and overlooking the fact that she saved her again, this guilt shaped her self-image for decades. When I suggested this alternative way of looking at the story, she seemed shocked that someone could hear it and still find redemption in her character. The fact that she had kept it entirely secret meant that other people could not present her with other perspectives. A young man shared this secret he had kept from the rest of his friends: Sometimes, as he rode the bus home from work, he would imagine the conversation he would have with his late father about his day. Very different stories with very different meanings, they both live in the darkness of their tellers’ private lives. How, then, does someone talk about the unspeakable? The hypothesis that people behave differently in public contexts than they do in private should come as no surprise. Among my subjects, however, there is a marked difference between the norms that guide most social behavior and those that govern inner reflections. These different standards are not just variations of one another; they emerge from distinct languages. The language of the obligated offspring, which draws initially from family interactions, but sets the standards for other relationships as well, finds its complement in the “dark side” language of the solitary sufferer. It cannot be spoken of in the home, so it takes its articulation from Buddhist psychology instead. The familial language deals with friends, family, and external realities; is, thus, susceptible to the rigors of karma;3 is interpreted in historical terms; and gives rise to worldly conceptions of self. This language does not derive from kammatic Buddhism alone, of course—but the language of karma and the language of the family are related closely enough that, in many ways, they have blended. The private face, marked by awareness of suffering and the negative emotions that cannot be expressed elsewhere, matches

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relatively closely with nirvanic definitions of human being, closely enough to be understood as, and talked about in terms of, that vision. When the language of the khon reaches its edge—when it stops being able to deal with the emotional issues that love and obligation raise—then good Thai Buddhists have learned to switch to a different language, that of the private, suffering manut.

The Unenlightened Manut How can a khon learn to think about things he has little experience talking about, the things that fall outside of his language? How do Thai Buddhists organize thought about what Od calls his “dark side?” As the language of the khon makes little space for this, Thai cultural environments offer a complementary language, encompassing its own vision of human nature, and along with that its own vision of the value of relationships and the meanings of emotions. There are several reasons that discussing Theravada Buddhism as a set of languages is different from discussing the meaning systems that order and structure Thai Buddhist thought and Thai family life. First, while Thais acknowledge that families are all different in some ways while also being the same, there is no authority who can say what a Thai family is. However, there are people who can reasonably make claims about the definition of Theravadan orthodoxy. That said, this sort of Buddhism has lasted for many centuries and is practiced in a number of different societies. Although it shares a name and a sense of community that reaches from China to Thailand, Sri Lanka to Cambodia (to say nothing of diasporic communities around the world), there is no Theravadan Pope, and the practices found in these places vary. Even within Thailand, the dialects of Theravadan Buddhism range from the highly elaborated theologies of the academic philosopher-monks to the moralities of many of the preaching-oriented monks, to any number of versions practiced—some sophisticated, others very simple—by the laity. Most members of the lay public have harmonized or synchronized a basic set of shared principles, including the idea that desire is a sign

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of a defiled nature, and that, in order to escape from the cycles of reincarnation and suffering, a person must shape her psychology so that she no longer wants. Like the Kaluli Schieffelin studied, lacunae exist in areas that elude discussion. Spiro (1970) and Obeyesekere (1963) were two of the first anthropologists to emphasize the importance of everyday Buddhist practices as well as formal theology. Where Spiro wrote about the religion as a “Great Tradition” and its vicissitudes, I will approach Theravada Buddhism in a slightly different way. Instead of thinking of it as a coherent body of thought, I will look at it as the sum total of vicissitudes—a series of dialects derived from two languages, each with its own emphases and areas of sophistication. (At times, Spiro refers to kammatic and nirvanic Buddhism as two distinct religions within the greater tradition, e.g., 1970: 26.) Like all other languages, I will treat Theravada Buddhism as a set of heuristics—but heuristics that, in many cases, have become quite stable and widely shared—without ignoring the possible presence of idiosyncrasies. Since this is not a book on theology, however, and since I have already addressed some aspects of Theravadan doctrine, I will keep my discussion short; for our purposes here, it makes sense to focus on some of the ostensibly more stable elements among the Thai dialects like karma and suffering. The goal will be to lay out the broadly shared, slow-changing conceptions of human nature that anchor communication among Thai Buddhists and hold its dialects together.

Dependent Origination, Defilement, and Solitary Suffering In the eyes of most Thai Buddhists, the Dhamma, in the form of beliefs-as-explained, describes the universe and human activities—even those that fall short of the ideal laid out by the Buddha. This theology has been adapted to explain the reasons behind the inner darkness my subjects discuss and, more than that, to organize the ways people think about the experience of emotional suffering.

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Resting on the idea that everything is the result of the causes that precede it, the Buddha’s theory of dependent origination states that existence is best described as a series of interrelated causal processes (Gombrich 1996). If something exists, it exists because of the things that came before it, and it is shaped entirely by those causal contexts. Everything changes, therefore, and nothing is free. This means that all things are impermanent, unsatisfactory to minds that desire permanence, and, because they simply represent a momentary conjuncture of conjunctions, they lack a lasting essence (Buddhadasa Bhikku 1956: 40). This truth leads to a central fact of human existence among the unperfected: Suffering is endemic. All good things must come to an end, and this proves that they were not especially good in the first place. In their unimproved state, human minds are defiled by cravings, ignorance, and hatred. The Buddha taught that there is one possible escape from samsara, this endless succession of experiences of dissatisfaction through rebirths in the world: One can free oneself from the cycles of causes and effects. This can be done by quenching desires, thereby ending striving, and freeing oneself from defilements—that is, by removing from one’s character those aspects of personality that tie a person to things, people, and, finally, the things that define oneself (Buddhadasa Bhikku 1956: 57–66). Nirvana, this freedom from defilement, bringing with it the end of the cycle of rebirths in the ever-changing, never-satisfying world, comes only when one is able to see reality through unclouded eyes. According to doctrine, this is the proper goal of each human. One who sees clearly understands that there are no things to desire—that they are simply temporary intersections of different causes, not worth having, and that, in any case, one’s own wanting self is equally temporary. If one can manage to step outside of the desires and thoughts that constitute a mind—seeing the self dispassionately and clearly—then he has become enlightened (Buddhadasa Bhikku 1956: 54). The goal, then, is to step back and remove the “I” from the statement, “I’m angry,” and to realize that there is no essential self. Instead, this confluence of causes has created anger in this temporary body and mind.

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Suffering Alone: Nirvanic Narratives in Everyday Life Where the khon sees her relationships, ideally, as a source of good feelings, the manut sees them as obstacles to greater happiness. The theory of dependent origination is an abstraction that describes the workings of the universe as a whole, but it becomes something more than a ­belief-as-explained—something more personal—when it gets connected to real-life experiences. This happens by providing and defining the terms through which people experience suffering. It does not come to feel true because people understand semantic facts about the confluences of causes, or the history of the universe; rather, the belief-as-­experienced gives Buddhists a way to narrate, make sense of, and deal with the experiences that they cannot deal with as khons. The emotions that are part of the experience of Od’s dark side and Ben’s private world are not partitioned off from the public reality of the khon and felt privately just because they have no place in their relationships. To be a good khon, one will inevitably experience suffering that he has no way to deal with. Therefore, it falls to the manut, with his perspective on private suffering, to make sense of this. The habits that surround this language support that construction, creating narratives of solitary suffering that reinforce it. Again and again, I found a relationship between the belief-as-explained—the Dhamma as Buddhists talk about it—and the belief-as-experienced. This appears in talk about emotional experiences in which we can see an orientation toward nirvanic thinking applied not to detached enlightenment, as the monks might have it, but toward living in a world of pleasures and pains. Exploring those connections, then, is important. The journey to nirvana is one that must be taken alone. A monk explained it using this simile: If I am hungry and you eat rice for me, will I become full? No—you can teach me to cook, but I have to eat for myself. These ideas contribute to this sense of human being: People are creatures with feelings, and the focus is on feelings connected with suffering. Although they may be surrounded by other people, they must,

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by their natures, suffer for themselves. This belief-as-explained finds an easy parallel in everyday experience through the fact that the expression of strong emotions is sanctioned—and this leads to the belief that, not only should strong emotions be kept to oneself, but that there would be very little good done by sharing them. The idea that a burden shared (through stories) is a burden lightened is rare here. Instead, many Thai Buddhists choose to keep their sorrows to themselves, as they believe that sharing troubles with their loved ones would only cause them to suffer as well. This, of course, is exacerbated by attitudes like Joey’s, who holds that interpersonal conflicts can be nothing but damaging. Sharing problems is often thought to be more than unhelpful—it can be dangerous. Joey was unwilling to share his problems with his parents for another reason as well. Many of the people I spoke with worried about the physical effects of unnecessary stress, especially the possibility of stroke, in older parents and relatives. This is one of the great ironies of many Thai lives: The more one loves one’s family, the more secrets one must keep hidden to protect them. Keeping the contents of a dark side in one’s own private dark, then, makes sense. Modeled on the journey to peace that one must travel alone, the journey to the resolution of worldly grief takes place internally. Because of the belief that people all must suffer alone, many Thais have only very limited experiences of sympathy or empathy. Chatri did not have the sense that talking about his problems with his family would make him feel better. Many people considered empathy, sometimes called “psychology,” (jit-witaya) to be quite a new innovation in 2000 and 2001, when I began interviewing people on this topic. And as its academic name suggests, it was often seen as a very sophisticated technology. This is an alternative to a rieproi approach—attention to the body and social status—which appears more commonly. But where rieproi behavior can make others comfortable, it cannot help one know them deeply. When I first met Chatri, the business he had started was facing a serious financial crisis. He would sometimes stay late at his office, after his partner had left, to cry, because he wanted to be sure that he did not expose his relatives to his pain. His family would pull through, of that he was sure. But his relatives were all uneducated and far removed

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from the office job he had created for himself; there was nothing Chatri could imagine that they could do to help. All sharing would have done would be to make them feel sad as well. Increasing suffering in others is, of course, morally wrong—and because they loved him, his relatives were sure to feel bad if they saw him crying. (They might inadvertently end up with a piece of his pain, something he wanted to spare them— although there are times when this is seen as appropriate. The idea of a piece of pain is not a metaphor, by the way—this will be addressed soon.) He was able to express some of his worries and sadness to me, however, because we had only recently met, and at that point, he believed we lacked the bond of love that would have caused me grief in seeing his. The result of the idea that everyone must suffer alone could be what Spiro labels “pessimism”—a cultural tendency to see the negative in all things, the tendency for life to bend toward suffering. Tambiah also notes a philosophical “death orientation” (Tambiah 1968b: 88). But they are both careful to distinguish the doctrines of the theologians from the beliefs of the laity. If people spoke the language of the ancient teachings about nirvana all the time, they would see all of life as chronically emotionally dissatisfying. But they don’t. There are two reasons for this. First, most of life is lived in the language of obligation and the khon—the language of friendship, of business, of pleasure, entertainment and generosity, of interdependence. If obligation is the default language, then the language of solitude and the manut is a dependable fallback—used often but not constantly. Therefore, this pessimistic language does not dominate existence. There is another reason this pessimistic doctrine does not translate only into pessimistic experiences: It can be useful and, on rare occasions, hopeful. Because the language of obligation does not make room for emotions that are often thought of as anti-social and embarrassing, many Buddhists tend to see their emotional dissatisfactions in terms of the language of nirvana. They use this language to explain and, to some extent, deal with, the suffering that arises naturally from the language of obligation, but with which that language cannot cope. People can use Buddhist practices to reorient themselves away from worldly connections and desires preemptively. One day after a

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meditation lesson, the monk who instructed me, Phra Virasak, pulled a little book from his bag. He had carried it—or something like it—with him from the age of 12, when he became a novice. When he was young, he explained, he would see a particular girl, “and I would go like this.” He raised a fist in front of his chest and then slowly uncurled his index finger until it was fully erect, pointing toward the ceiling at an angle of about sixty degrees. When that happened, he said, he would look at his book. He offered it to me: inside, page after page of photos of corpses. Autopsied bodies with their ribs spread, organs exposed. A bloated body in a pond. An accident victim discovered by the side of a road, and finally, a no-longer-human-seeming pile of bones. He was taught to ask himself: Why would he desire something that would end up like that? The images were not just meant to encourage his desires to pass, but to allow the lusty young monk to grow a little bit wiser, recognizing the unsatisfactoriness of all things, putting his earthly desires in the context of his quest for perfection. Then: “I would go psssss,” he said, hydraulically deflating his finger. This combination of humor and the unflinching confrontation of grim realities is something I have encountered often in Thailand, and reflects this view of life. The book was a product of the Thai monastic system; as the assistant abbot of a large monastery, Virasak had a whole shelf of copies, which he gave to his novices as they approached puberty. This sort of practice provides a model for a canonical narrative for dealing with private suffering. It tells a story about the mind, in which the teller intentionally reinterprets her experiences in nirvanic language. It takes this form: 1. It starts with a personal experience that illustrates the teller’s defiled nature—that desire, anger, or ignorance has caused trouble. 2. The teller acknowledges the fact that her suffering is related to her imperfect, desiring nature. This allows her to shift the context of the event: It is no longer about a relationship or a job or some other aspect of worldly life. Instead, she reinterprets it in terms of the idea that suffering is endemic and life is dissatisfying, giving it a meaningful place in a nirvanically defined universe.

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3. In viewing the situation this way, she converts her experience to a religious object lesson and redeems the experience as a small but meaningful step toward enlightenment. Because this involves changing one’s perspective, pulling an experience from the language of the khon into that of the manut, forgetting would be unhelpful here; instead, awareness of the reinterpretation matters. One muggy evening at a family birthday party, Neung, Mick’s older sister and the owner of the shop in the market that he managed, pulled me aside and began probing for information about her brother. Eventually, she revealed her motive: “He steals from me,” she said. (I was unaware of the situation at the time, but I later learned that he had, in fact, been selling expensive goods, pocketing the money, and telling his sister that they had been stolen, which, in a way, was true.) “Why do you keep him on?” I asked. “To teach me forbearance,” she said. (She used the word odton, which combines the virtues of tolerance, patience, and sufferance as well.) I seemed a bit confused, so she pulled over her son, who was 5 at the time, and said, “Pretend to annoy me.” The boy danced around her and made little mocking gestures and funny noises while trying not to giggle. Neung closed her eyes and raised one hand in the gesture that, in Buddhist iconography, carries the message, “stop craving and desiring.” Eventually, she would deal with her problem by sending Mick to a temple for a few months; she was sure that a rainy season spent as a monk would naturally make him a better person. But at this moment, she was teaching herself a lesson of the manut instead: Suffering is inevitable, but if she tried, she could learn to step back from her emotions and make sense of it as a lesson about the nature of life that would eventually, with enough practice, during some incarnation in the future, free her. Od called this narrative approach “hardening the heart.” He and his friends encouraged one another to apply it when a romantic relationship failed—interpreting himself not as a lovelorn khon destined to miss his ex, but as an educable solitary sufferer. This narrative did not lead to thoughts about how to be a better boyfriend or how to

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find a more compatible mate. Instead, it dulled the pain temporarily and gave it a meaningful place in a narrative about the manut’s solitary self-improvement. The path to enlightenment, as the Buddha defined it, is only effective if one is willing to shed all of the old language of obligation and adopt entirely the new meaning systems and identity of the solitary sufferer. While the monks I spoke to said that focusing on the ­dissatisfying nature of life is an important step on the path to enlightenment, they all agreed that this is only useful as part of a long-term, rigorous program—one that extinguishes one’s identity as a desiring khon over the course of years of practice and slowly replaces it with the perfected version of the manut. For someone who is unwilling to commit himself completely to finding nirvana by giving up his khon habits, connections, and lifestyle and become a meditating monk, this approach to resolving grief comes with a rather significant drawback. Od was usually able to maintain his discipline for a week or two, consistently reminding himself that connections meant suffering. By denying the interdependent aspect of his khon nature and remaining disconnected, he would make himself very lonely and even more vulnerable to jumping into new and often ­none-too-well-conceived relationships which would lead him back to the beginning of the heart-hardening cycle. This narrative approach resembles Foucault’s notion of the problematization of the self (1985), but this is only a partially appropriate analogy. Although this is talked about as a self-training practice, I have never seen it result in true change; instead, this short-term form of intellectualization (a psychological defense mechanism, described well by Vaillant 1977) usually serves as a quick fix that is soon abandoned. Using “hardening the heart” to assuage pain temporarily as one continues to look for lasting love is not the problematization the Buddha prescribed.4 And yet people still do it. If it doesn’t resolve the problem of grief, then why? “Hardening the heart” does not fall in line with the doctrinal belief-as-explained as expounded in the monasteries. To make sense of this, we need to separate the immediate problem from the larger picture. The language of the obligated khon creates connections that ­sometimes break, but it has no solution for heartache. The alternative

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is the language of solitude, which draws from Buddhist conceptions of human nature in a Buddhist universe. Even though it is not accepted in the dialect of the monks, “hardening the heart” is a way to practice being a nirvanic Buddhist creature. The work of being human—in this case the work of being a manut—involves negotiating oneself into a reality, connecting personal experiences to the larger picture. But even if the immediate story Od (or Neung or Virasak) told did not solve the problem, it locates him in a universe in which suffering matters, and in which his attempts to harden his heart contribute just a tiny bit to his wisdom as a manut. Because of his instrumental understanding of himself as a being who is prone to suffer from the loss of love, he can experience himself through this belief. Although he thought he had adopted a formal Buddhist practice, and strengthened his resolve against future painful relationships, he has done neither of these. What he has done instead was to find a place in a universe in which his own personal suffering makes sense—in which he can find meaning and value in it. It is not the abstract, doctrinal path to nirvana the Buddha drew on his map of the universe that counts, then. It is the mural of human existence that he described around that path—a mural in which Thai Buddhists can find images of themselves and the struggles they face. Thinking about the world this way orients one’s suffering toward meaning and self-improvement, even if it cannot resolve it. This returns us to the problem laid out by Spiro and Tambiah: Why do many Theravadan societies maintain a set of doctrines that explain the path to enlightenment if virtually no one wants to go down it? For most Thai Buddhists, the value of nirvanic Buddhism is not that it will lead them toward enlightenment. Instead, it allows them to think and feel about what their private thoughts and feelings mean as they lead their unenlightened lives.

Khon and Manut as Interconnected The relationship between these two languages creates an interesting self-perpetuating synergy. The language of obligation creates circumstances and relationships that lead to emotional suffering. The language

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of nirvanic Buddhism encourages people to see themselves as suffering not as accidental or incidental, but as a basic part of the Buddha’s description of human experience. The language of the khon allows people to live and work together, to find pleasure for themselves and in one another, but it has no space for the negative emotions that those lives produce. The language of the manut can organize those feelings and provide people with a way to deal with them outside of the realm of the khon. Of course, a language that focuses on suffering and its cure by discouraging desires and relationships is not one that can exist by itself in a world in which rice paddies need to be tended, children raised, and the elderly cared for. As plants need animals to produce carbon dioxide and animals need plants to produce oxygen, these two languages need one another. It is also important to note that, unlike some dialects of the languages of science and religion in the West, neither the language of the manut nor the language of the khon claims to be able to answer every question. When Od (as the heart-broken khon) wanted solace, he eventually learned to seek relief in the language of the manut. And when the monks at Phra Anarak’s temple prepared their Mother’s Day program, they did it knowing that the language that produces well-behaved khons also creates a society in which solitary manuts can live and experience their desperation quietly. These languages, then, are built with toggles that allow people to switch between them. These two distinct truths do not cancel one another out as Bourdieu suggests they might, assuming that people could only hold one set of truths. Quite the opposite—they do more than just coexist in social space with one another, and more than yield to each other on various questions. In several different ways, they support and nourish one another, and create an environment that makes the other possible and useful. It is important to note that there is no pre-linguistic structure that decides when someone should live through the language of the manut and when to live through the language of the khon, no essential self in the background. Rather, it is the language of the khon itself—when a khon experiences emotions that fall outside his khon-based abilities to deal with—that leads to the switch to the language of the manut. And it is the

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language of the manut, when subjects of interpersonal responsibilities and dependencies come up, that points him back to the language of the khon. As an adult, Chatri cried at his desk as his business slowly failed, and into my sofa as he remembered his mother. He was certainly different from the sort of manut the monks attempted to teach him to be. It could be no other way. If a mature, rationally oriented mind, committed to the project of disconnecting from the world, cuts off social ties and undertakes the program of rigorous self-analysis laid out by the Buddha then, after many years of practice, a person can rehearse a ­different vision of what it means to be human, sincerely believe a different set of stories about life, and find relief from the pains of living. For the traumatized 12-year-old Chatri, though, enlightenment didn’t really matter. Deep understanding of the doctrine of no-self is not what happens when grief-stricken boys spend a few months in a temple, aiming mainly to make merit for a loved one lost. By practicing his awareness of loneliness, by rehearsing the lesson that life is suffering, then leaving the temple long before he had completed the project of remaking himself, he turned himself into something else, something very different: not the sort of person who is immune to grief, but one who is steeped in it. Thai Buddhist psychology is not wrong when it teaches people that they can learn to perceive themselves in a way that indemnifies them against suffering—but so much of that program’s success lies in the proper application of the theory, the right sort of practice, for the disciplined, committed mind. The youthful, confused Chatri was never a good candidate for the process. At the same time, ironically, his commitment to his relationships and desires, the products of the language of the khon, has probably made him a better nirvanic Buddhist than he would have been—more attuned to and thoughtful about his suffering—than if he had never entered the monastery in the first place.

-Instead And this brings us back to the anecdote that started the previous chapter: Chatri’s memory of himself as a recently abandoned boy, preaching in Pali in the temple, to an audience of women who cried when he could

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not. This memory—of adopted emotion—involves a phenomenon that I encountered a number of times in Bangkok. It was first described to me by Joey. It came up shortly after his boyfriend left him for another man. They had been together for about two years, and his ex had integrated himself into Joey’s circle of friends. Shortly after the breakup, Joey received a letter from the man, asking him to tell his friends not to be angry with him. He knew that Joey was “quiet and [didn’t] like to argue,” so he wasn’t worried about him, but the others in his group posed more of a threat. Why would the jilter’s concern be directed at his friends’ feelings, and not at the emotions Joey would feel himself? This was because Joey didn’t have to be especially angry. Although his friends may have been angry, anger was going to be less an issue for Joey himself. The very knowledge of the fact that his friends had taken on his anger was enough, he said, to make him feel somewhat better. What he felt from his friends may appear to be sympathy or empathy, although those emotional skills are not often well-developed here—but this has a second sense as well. As discussed in the previous chapter, Thai habits of interaction encourage emotional interdependence. It is the friend’s role to take on the emotions that other people do not or cannot feel for themselves. Aw (who did not know Joey) claimed that friends are frequently angry not just out of solidarity with one another, but literally in place of one another. “Someone will forgive, but their friends will be angry-instead. I don’t know why.” She said this in a matter-of-fact way, as did everyone else I spoke to on the subject. Mick said: “If Steve teased Ohm, Ohm would say, ‘No problem, I forgive you,’ but Mick would be angry.” The Thai phrase used here is grot taan, literally “angry-instead.” The instead here indicates a definite relationship with an implied subject. The Thai word for “representative” (as, for example, a member of Parliament) contains the same root: poo taan could be translated literally as “instead-person.” The idea of being angry-instead works the same way that representation does; just as an MP is supposed to be her constituents’ voice, one friend can literally be angry for another. The phenomenon does not apply strictly to anger. Pannee claimed that it was possible to take on almost all negative emotions for another. One can be broken-hearted for another, depressed-, outraged-, grieving-, or

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heavy-hearted-instead. This is not simple empathy; the friend displays a reduced version of the set of emotions which the aggrieved person then does not have to feel. It reduces the burden of feeling by displacing it (literally) into another heart. This happens often among my subjects— often enough, at least, to be a recognized phenomenon. It is as though a chunk of anger or grief can be broken off and carried around by someone else. But why have many Thai Buddhists (and, perhaps, others as well) developed a conception of human existence which allows them to feel one another’s emotions instead? On the level of self-conscious explanation, there is a need to alleviate intense, negative emotions quickly. Excessive frustration is thought to cause strokes and other physical ailments; many view emotional stressors as a major cause of mortality in Thailand. But there is a second danger as well. Desires last from incarnation to incarnation. Dying with profound unresolved emotion can have dire consequences: If one dies with too much anger or jealousy or lust, one risks being reborn as a ghost, an unhappy and tortured creature with desires that cannot begin to be sated. (The tiny-mouthed “hungry ghost” is an example of this. Ms. Nak, the woman who died in child-birth and became one of the most dangerous spirits in Thai ghost-lore, is another.)5 These stories of death followed by damnation to existence as a ghost reflect the importance of remaining calm-hearted. In this light, it seems better that Joey’s friends should distribute some of his sorrow among themselves. The ardor that Joey would feel at being left after a two-year relationship might be too much if he died in the immediate aftermath of the breakup. His friends, on the other hand, could be angry in a more controlled, moderate way—angry enough to make digging comments, perhaps, but not angry enough to cad satdi, to lose control of their feelings, and not so angry that they would have strokes and die and be reborn as hungry ghosts. Joey could set aside his emotion to some extent, knowing that his problems had not been forgotten. Instead of involving himself directly in the expression of his outrage, he was able to release some of his anger through them.6 It also demonstrated the bond that he shared with his friends, which is, of course, important to a khon, especially in times of crisis.

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This process reflects the interactions between the two languages and their conceptions of human nature. If harboring intense anger is seen as a reflection of one’s imperfection, then accepting someone else’s pain can be both a form of generosity and a way of helping the aggrieved person return to a pro-social, khon-like equilibrium by providing some immediate, short-term relief. But this poses challenges for the possibility of longer-term help. Angry-instead can promote group solidarity while also promoting the manut’s emotional isolation. This form of sharing (in giving emotions to others to hold) may actually reduce the potential empathic effects of the other forms of emotional sharing, like the improved self-awareness that comes through conversation, and the strengthened bonds that deep knowledge of another can produce. At the same time, it produces a heightened sense of social unity and reaffirms interdependence. In this case, Joey and his friends acted as an emotional unit, Joey deciding that he had partially forgiven his lover, his friends holding the grudge instead. In this way, the emotions are handled through the strategies employed by the meaning system native to the khon—but those feelings are shunted away from discussion, empathy, and communal problem-solving, allowing the private realms of Joey’s friends’ manut natures to remain private. The phenomena discussed here shed some light on the ways that emotions are conceptualized. In the terms of the language of the khon, it makes sense that Thai Buddhists often depend on one another for distraction from negative emotions. The common fear of being alone (expressed, for example, through the fear of ghost attacks) suggests that they see themselves as connected to their worlds through their emotions. Emotional intuitions can be important sources of knowing when they are taken to be reflections of the objective reality of things like ghosts and karma. Emotions can be shared in a way not completely different from the ways that many Americans conceptualize reason: as objective and shareable.7 In this conception of human nature, then, emotions are not bound especially tightly to the individual. Although it might feel counterintuitive to many Americans, the idea that emotions can be objects, moveable from one person to another, fits easily within the model of the emotionally interdependent khon.

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It was this sense of looseness of the boundaries that keep one person’s emotions separate from another’s which also made it possible for Chatri to experience relief from his grief when the women grieved instead during his speech. But why did this last with him for decades? Why is it important that these women cried during his sermon? Because to be a good manut involved recognizing that his grief was a sign of defilement. With no one in the small world of the temple to support him in his time of need, the only solace he found in those months—the only human warmth, kindness of the sort he had known in his life with his family—came from these women who took some of his pain and grieved instead when he could not. There is good reason, then, that these two languages share their cultural environment—but they do not coexist in harmony all the time. The conflict between these two languages, and the value systems they entail, grows more important as Thailand’s economy develops, and the contradictions between consumerism and detachment sharpen. The next chapter explores the importation of a new language—a l­arger-scale cultural innovation—that cannot resolve it, but does reduce its discomfort.

Notes 1. Spiro also identifies a third aspect—what he calls the apotropaic, which concerns magical protection from danger (1970: 140) an interesting topic, but a relatively minor one that will not be covered here. 2. In both of these cases, my subjects told me that they had never told these facts to anyone before. 3. Private contemplation is also thought to be susceptible to karma, as it has causes and yields results. My subjects, however, spent relatively little time thinking about their thoughts this way; negative ideas have some small karmic repercussions, but they are generally slight compared to those that follow deeds, they believed. 4. While the books passed out that the temple could be used to this end, they were mostly meant to discourage masturbation. 5. To make matters worse, ghosts can do very little to improve their karma; the odds are good, then, that one will be reborn a hungry ghost lifetime

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after lifetime. Why ghosts? The Buddha’s warnings about the danger of intense connections and the strong emotions that go with them have been translated into the idea of being reborn as a creature obsessed with desires—in this way of seeing, a horrible prospect. 6. He felt the pain acutely in private for some months. It manifested itself, he said, in insomnia and depression. 7. This is not a perfect parallel in that the nature of sharing is quite different—but this parallel might make it easier for someone who does not share emotions to make sense of the idea.

References Buddhadasa Bhikku, 1956. Handbook for Mankind. Bangkok: Dhammasapa. Foucault, Michel. 1985. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Gombrich, R. 1996. How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings. London: Athlone Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1963. The Great Tradition and the Little in the Perspective of Sinhalese Buddhism. The Journal of Asian Studies 22 (2): 139–153. Potter, Jack. 1976. Thai Peasant Social Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spiro, Melford. 1970. Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tambiah, S. 1968a. The Ideology of Merit and the Social Correlates of Buddhism in a Thai Village. In Case Studies of Spirit Possession, ed. V. Crapanzano and V. Garrison. New York: Wiley. Tambiah, S. 1968b. The Ideology of Merit and the Social Correlates of Buddhism in a Thai Village. In Case Studies of Spirit Possession, ed. V. Crapanzano and V. Garrison, 41–121. New York: Wiley. Tambiah, S. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaillant, G. 1977. Adaptation to Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

7 Transnational Solutions to a Local Problem: The Human Natures of Buddhist Consumers

The presence and, at times, pervasiveness of the strange, the new, and the unusual in social worlds—metaphors, in Rorty’s terms— demonstrates that social worlds are not just incubators for conformity. Mattingly conceives of cultural worlds as laboratories for innovations that can resolve moral problems (2013), calling into question common assumptions about the prevalence of standardized moral norms. I would add that cultural environments are laboratories for other sorts of innovations and solutions as well. They are active ecosystems, locations for experimenting with many forms of interpretation and meaning. Cultural environments lay out a number of guidelines that allow people to assimilate information to old models, or to accommodate their models, altering them so they can absorb what is new. More than this, because people are working on their own projects, they provide contexts that allow people to throw new conceptions out into their cultural environments to thrive and be accepted, or to die forgotten. This means that the people anthropologists study are often unusual as individuals—innovative experimenters, not simply people seeking the best-trodden path to follow. When Ben and his family developed/ discovered a new species of ghost, for example, they accommodated an © The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_7

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old category to absorb new information, expanding the preexisting class of “ghosts” to match what, after Ben’s attack, they understood about human nature and its susceptibility to ghosts. Cultural laboratories also serve as venues in which people can share the results of diverse experiments as they vary from expected interpretations. This is possible because people need relatively little in the way of common “culture” in order to make sense of one another. I have argued that, in a world in which understandings are built on heuristics with varying levels of stability, what people need is a basic, shared sense of what it is to be human (at the very minimum) to communicate. Variation becomes a part of the life-worlds anthropologists can study, then, and as successful innovations fade into the structure of intersubjective reality, they become parts of the languages that shape people’s life-worlds. This chapter discusses a different sort of accommodation from the ones involved with Ben’s ghost. Since notions of human nature are heuristics as well, they are also susceptible to some amount of change. Instead of accommodating new information to a stable vision of human nature, the people discussed in this chapter responded to an unpleasant picture they saw of themselves by introducing a new way of thinking. Instead of redefining the “ghost” category in relation to ideas about human nature, as Ben’s family did, they redefine their visions of human nature itself. They borrowed a foreign story about human nature and revised it to create a new metaphor for thinking about what it is to be human. They reinterpreted themselves, and, thus, the worlds they experience, in its light. What this chapter explores is the flexibility of conceptions of human nature. In this case, it looks at the possibility of reinterpreting them in the face of unpleasant realities. I have already argued that people understand their worlds through the lenses of their ideas about what they are as humans—so changes in ideas about human nature can represent the most fundamental of cultural changes. The basic point here, and the final argument of this book, is that all conceptions—even these most basic notions of human nature—are heuristics and at least subject to a certain amount of change. There are no necessary substrates of meaning that hold societies together, then.1

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Instead of some basic “culture,” Thai society remains coherent even as people continue to innovate, through the ability to make sense of one another’s innovations. There are times when cultural environments serve as jumping-off points for innovations. They create discomfitures that need to be resolved and lay out the parameters in which people seek resolutions they can share. As Thailand has developed economically, a problem that had long existed in Thai Buddhism took on an intensified significance. A good manut is relatively detached from the world and is certainly not concerned about material goods beyond basic necessities. A good khon, however, loves and is loved, and, often as not, expresses that love by giving and receiving things. As the middle classes in places like Bangkok developed, it became possible to give gifts that were luxurious, ostentatious, and completely unnecessary for sensible living. But they did demonstrate love and the value of relationships they carried. At the same time, they also demonstrated a level of deep defilement in the manut. How could someone reconcile this conflict without resenting either the manut, who consistently reminds the khon that she is mired in her defilements, or the khon, who really enjoys them? One innovative resolution was introduced to me by a young man named Biyek. His innovation was not unique. At the time, many wealthier Thais, as well as a number of Buddhist thinkers, like Sulak Sivaraksa, were pioneering a resolution that involves a bit of transnational borrowing: They adopted a third vision of human nature, innovated by academics in the West and popularized by public intellectuals in Thailand. This allowed them to recognize the conflict they experienced, but lay the responsibility for it on someone else. The first time Mick brought me to his house, a comfortable, unpretentious place in a working-class suburb far from the center of the city where he managed his sister’s shop, it was for his 29th birthday party. He retreated into the kitchen to cook as twenty or so young bachelors soaked themselves in imported whiskey. Early in the evening, a piece of paper—the transcript of someone called Biyek, someone I had not yet met—appeared and circulated through the crowd. Biyek had, apparently, done quite well. He had graduated from Thailand’s top law school several years earlier and had mostly gotten A’s.

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Everyone else knew Biyek well and had no need to see his transcript. They had all gone to high school together, before most of them went off to work or trade schools. It seemed, then, that his transcript had come to visit me specifically. And, in fact, once word got back to him that I had had the opportunity to be impressed by it, Biyek himself appeared. (I recognized him by the picture affixed to the form.) His first appearance was just to remove the transcript back to his BMW. Official transcripts were expensive and hard to replace, and he didn’t particularly trust his friends to keep it unsmudged and flat. When he returned, Biyek greeted his friends and settled down to engage me in a discussion of life in Thailand. First, he had to make one small change. “If you want to understand Thai culture,” Biyek told me, “you need to take off your shirt.” No one else seemed to be feeling the need to undress, so I declined. He insisted, but when it became clear that I was going to stay fully clothed he pulled his own shirt up and over a rather well-nourished torso, and began lecturing me on the problems with the United States. All Americans were capitalists, he explained. We all had exported our greedy, consumerist soullessness through our goods and businesses. It was corrupting not just Thailand as a society, but, just as it had destroyed the American personality, it had now infected the Thai character as well. Thais were no longer slow-moving and ­relationship-oriented, he went on. They spent long hours hustling for money they did not need, neglecting their friends and families, as well as the Buddhist values of simple living and the rejection of worldly goods. This was not entirely true, of course. But it also wasn’t an especially unusual interpretation of life in Bangkok. Several hours later, as he prepared to drive home, Biyek put his shirt back on, and I understood why he had chosen to remove it in the first place: It was a brown polo shirt, the sort that might be handed out at an office retreat. Over the breast pocket, embroidered in cream colored thread, was the name of a major American consulting firm. He worked there, he explained sheepishly; he made his living as a corporate lawyer, defending the multinational corporations he had spent the last few hours decrying.

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Biyek’s car, his transcript, and his shirt were symbols that carried conflicting meanings. To his apolitical, not-especially-religious friends, they represented the sorts of success many khons sought. But this did not mean that he didn’t suffer from the same conflicts that many ­middle-class Thais did, and, like many others, he had reconceptualized his nature as one that was susceptible to the ravages described by a theory of capitalist colonialist psychology. It was clear that the source of Biyek’s success was also a cause of conflict. As much as he enjoyed the economic and social benefits of what he thought of as American capitalism, he espoused a deep resentment of a system that had made him at times as greedy and c­ onsumption-oriented as he imagined Americans were. Removing his shirt wasn’t just an attempt to hide his job from me. It was an unintentional symbol of his desire, in that moment, to pull off the Americanized capitalist skin that he felt he now inhabited. He was drawing a bright line between consumption-oriented Americans and his sense of himself as a Thai who did not fit naturally into that system of corporations, markets, and values. Some of this was done for show, but later conversations would convince me that his concern was real. Although no one else would make a stand quite as dramatic as Biyek did that night, the conflicted configuration of values and ideas that he expressed would become increasingly familiar to me during my time in Thailand, portrayed on television and conveyed through subtle comments among those who had achieved material success. All the while, others like Mick and his lower-middle-class friends still strove for worldly success with less ambiguous attitudes. In part, Biyek was employing a vision of human nature borrowed from one of a number of Thai thinkers who were themselves referencing an academic social theory developed originally by Marx and elaborated in Western universities. Biyek was the only person to confront me directly, as an American, about the impact that Western consumerism was believed to have on the Thai national character as it was variously constructed, but he was not the only person in Thailand to employ commodity fetishism theories in support of arguments about what it means to be Thai—and also about the need to preserve traditional Thai ways, constructed in contrast to that critique—at a time when Thailand

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was becoming part of a larger cultural and economic world. A variety of thinkers have put forward versions of this argument. One of the clearest and most complete forms has been set out by Sulak Sivaraksa, whose work will be considered here, but his is not the only one.

The Problem of Consumerism in Bangkok’s Cultural Landscape The problem as Biyek described it—and which Sulak Sivaraksa has elaborated more fully—appears as a clash between two well-articulated dogmas. The Dhamma emphasizes otherworldliness, which requires disconnection from material things. A good Buddhist layperson is one who understands that caring about consumer goods indicates a defiled nature; she pursues a simple life, unencumbered by the pursuit of wealth and what it can buy. At the same time, as the ads that pock Bangkok’s urban surfaces spread further from the city center and expand onto jumbotrons that recolor the night sky, they broadcast another message: Consumer goods will make your life better. It was no coincidence, writes Sulak,2 that as the Thai middle classes became wealthier, they also became more and more consumption-oriented. The conflict as he and Biyek saw it was between the ancient, indigenous traditions of Buddhism and the capitalist colonization of Thai minds by mostly Western marketers. It is easy to see the appeal of this interpretation of the conflict for Biyek and Sulak, then, as it pits two beliefs-as-explained against one another, one seen as traditional and moral, and the other easily painted as invasive and destructive. In this telling, the Thai way is righteous, and foreign forces play the villain. This vision oversimplifies the cultural landscape, however. It gives power to capitalist forces without looking for underlying experiences in Thai lives that might be working in concert with them. Many ­consumer goods and marketing techniques come from the West, but the orientation to consumer goods that Biyek and Sulak critique does not come entirely from there. While patterns of consumption have changed for many middle-class Bangkok Thais, the underlying desire to buy

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reflects relationship patterns which predate the development of the current consumer economy. While Sulak argues against Western marketing techniques—and in doing this reifies them as independently powerful and controlling—much of the root of the issue of consumerism among middle-class Thais lies not in their identities as Americanized consumers, but rather in the fact that they follow the ancient, homegrown patterns of the interdependent khon, a modern version of the habits of the householder that the Buddha described (see, for example, Tambiah 1976). Where Sulak sees a conflict between two beliefs-as-explained, nirvanic Buddhism and commodity fetishism, the actual heart of the problem can be found in the conflict between two selves—the manut and the khon. The conflict looks different, then, in the context of the larger cultural landscape. When people speak the language of the khon, they see consumer goods as necessary for maintaining the relationships around which they build their lives. If a person wants to be the best possible Buddhist, foreswearing material attachments, she will have to neglect her duties toward her parents, her spouse, and her children. But if a person wants to be a loving wife or dutiful daughter, the fact that she cares about giving and receiving gifts shows her to be, in a small way, a poor Buddhist. When these habits are evaluated in terms of the language of nirvanic Buddhism, the result is an interpretation of these habits of buying, giving, and receiving that demonstrates the problems of the defiled manut, indulging in worldly, materialistic (now read as capitalistic) practices. Middle-class Thais, then, often see themselves as greedy, work-oriented, and hasty, and often feel a little bit bad about it. A way to resolve this tension—the hard way—would be to get rid of one of the elements that create it. One could maintain two of these, but not all three: Buddhist ideals, family values, and middle-class p ­ rosperity. For most Thais, none of these makes an appealing candidate for elimination. Instead of recognizing the conflict as a natural result of living lives in which the language of the manut must coexist with the language of the khon, it can be recast, in a way that is emotionally satisfying without sacrificing one’s lifestyle, as a conflict between East and West, tradition and modernity, greed and simplicity.

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There is a ready-made set of narratives that support this contention, complete with a vision of human nature, that can be adopted from Western academic thought and applied rather easily, adapting a form of commodity fetishism theory. The theory takes the form of narratives about the neediness of human nature, the history of economic colonization, and the impelling force of the tools of alienation that multinational corporations and their armies of marketers can use to capitalize on it. This leads to the final irony in this story: By choosing to interpret consumerism as a discourse imposed from the outside on people unable to resist, people like Biyek made a choice to see themselves as the sorts of people who cannot choose.3

Commodity Fetishism: Theory and Transnational Applications Sulak Sivaraksa describes the problem this way: Descartes formulated his knowledge of existence in the statement “cogito ergo sum ”; “I think, therefore I am.” I feel that he started the Western dilemma that has now come to the core concept of consumerism, “I buy, therefore I am.” Without the power of purchasing, modern people become nobody. [1999: 120]

In order to better understand Sulak’s and Biyek’s thinking, it will be helpful to contextualize their ideas in the context of general notions about commodity fetishism as they existed at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many social thinkers argue that capitalism has created a system which has permeated the minds of consumers, minds weakened by life in a blanched-out capitalist culture that imposes a sense of need on the individual. These needs can be satisfied only by the purchase of goods which have been endowed, through marketing programs, with the traits that people think they need to find fulfillment. In this way, consumer goods appear to take on personalities of their own, as being cool, elegant, or

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serious—personalities which psychologically limited consumers can borrow to complete themselves and fill their deficiencies. These commodity fetishism theories have taken on a number of different forms since Marx’s work first introduced the idea in 1846 (Marx 1938), but they generally fit this basic outline. The forms discussed here (chosen because of the similarities to many aspects of Sulak Sivaraksa’s writings on Thai consumerism, discussed in the next section) are drawn from academic publications that generally focus on the impact of consumerism on indigenous populations (e.g., Taussig 1980; Ewen 1984; Foster 2002; Deakin 2012) and on the role of market capitalism in developed economies (e.g., Haug 1986; Horkheimer and Adorno 2000). In Thailand as well as other countries, these theories have become popularized and found their ways into nonacademic discourses as well. Adorno, for example, argues that modern capitalism has created a system in which workers and consumers are held in a state of chronic immaturity. They cannot be allowed to become emotionally and intellectually self-sufficient, as this would immunize them against marketing schemes, and prevent them from continuing to work comfortably in meaningless, mind-numbing jobs. Therefore, the culture industry functions to provide a source of conformist values and escape from the stressors of work (Horkheimer and Adorno 2000). The power of ­culture-producing industries, like film and fashion, lies in the promotion and exploitation of the ego-weakness to which the powerless members of contemporary society… are condemned. … It is no coincidence that cynical American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the level of eleven-year-olds. In so doing, they would very much like to make adults into eleven year olds. [Adorno 2001: 105]

The stultifying effect of ordinary experience in the capitalist world has prevented people from accessing the experiences which would allow them to deal with what Adorno thinks of as deeper, richer emotional experiences. Instead of facing their alienation, which would allow them to find ways to alter the textures of their lives, they are reduced to relying on escapism—on shallow cultural products to help them avoid the

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pain of existence. This is about the relationship between the individual separated from any deeper source of meaning and escapist leisure. It provides a picture of a stunted humanity, built by a social structure in which most people are similar psychologically because they are raised on the same diet of conformity-inducing entertainment. This also keeps them from interacting deeply with, and teaching, one another. In this vision, the humans created by capitalism are naturally needy, immature, seeking completeness, and alone. Since their lives are oriented around shallow mass experiences, these people lack deep personal experience of themselves. They have no way to define themselves in non-capitalist terms. Therefore, they must rely on the things around them to determine the value of their lives and beings. In order to be the people they have been taught to want to be, then, Adorno believes that they come to feel the need to buy particular commodities. Who one is becomes a function of the money one spends. The use value of a thing, its practical value to the person who uses it, has been subsumed by its exchange value—how much it costs. A person’s taste, as a measure of his worth, is now equated not with the quality of a thing he likes but with its price and his ability to show his wealth to himself and others. Stuart Ewen discusses the ways that American capitalism has led to the commodification of personality traits for commercial purposes, while at the same time presenting the consuming public with images of impossible human perfection (1984: 83–90), which results in an insecurity which leads to “the dream of identity, the dream of wholeness ” (1984: 94—italics in the original). It is this practiced and repeated sense of imperfection, and the lack of completeness, which causes people to consume, to purchase the goods that they have come to see as completing their personalities with rebellious colognes, innovative shirts, and the like (1984: 102, 104), lending them the assertiveness, the excitement, and the attitude that they lack (1984: 108). It is important to note here that this theory suggests the creation of a feeling of need, not an absolute need in and of itself. If those engaged at the highest levels of capitalistic enterprise (however they are defined) want to create a sense that, to be a complete person, one needs to own certain things, then an essential part of the project will involve working

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with (and often changing) the definition of what it means to be “a complete person.” This, of course, relates to notions of human nature. Commodity fetishism theories can only truly apply, then, when social structures built by capitalism have a monopoly over that definition. It is worth recognizing that the vision of human nature employed in these fetishism theories is somewhat similar to the ones described in the languages Thai Buddhists already speak. The idea of a nature defined by its needs and desires is discussed every day in the temples. The idea that desires can be implanted in someone’s mind by playing on their unhappiness is a fundamental element in the definition of the defiled manut. The fact that these desires are directed by advertisers toward material goods is not incompatible with the Buddha’s vision; it is merely an updating that makes it consonant with twenty-first-century economic and cultural environments. And the assumptions that both unenlightened manuts and khons make about comfortable living are compatible with the idea that they might see material goods as a viable temporary solution to suffering. In the Thai Buddhist context, however, consumerism must be seen as an incomplete solution. It cannot eliminate suffering rooted in desire, as the Buddha’s long-term program for the manut promises, and it cannot provide human connection, which is a central accomplishment of the khon. So this class of commodity fetishism theories encounters a problem when it comes to application in Thailand. Where Adorno argues that the language of capitalism must have hegemony in order to redefine human nature, in Bangkok it must compete with two very robust ­preexisting languages which already provide strong visions of human nature, organize experiences which shape different kinds of characters, and answer many of the questions it purports to solve. This does not mean that this ecosystem cannot support this ­consumption-oriented vision; those basic compatibilities make it viable and comprehensible. If it is to survive, however, it must find its place in a vibrant and active cultural environment. But it cannot dominate that environment by itself—at least not until both the languages of the manut and the khon are extinguished.

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This raises an important question: If commodity fetishism theories are relative newcomers competing with long-established visions of human nature, then what explains their relative popularity in Thailand? The perspective on social life and human nature set out in commodity fetishism theories is better at resolving a series of emotional conflicts inherent in contemporary Thai social life. By reducing conceptions of human nature (as it relates to human needs) strictly to economic relations, Thai commodity fetishists can recontextualize logical and emotional problems that stem from conflicts between religion, family life, and the increasing availability of consumer goods, as well as questions of changing conceptions of national identity in a globalizing world. While these resolutions tend to oversimplify the situation, commodity fetishism theories can provide solutions that are politically and personally satisfying. However, they only exist on the level of beliefs-as-explained, without making the connection to the lives of khons and manuts as they are experienced. As simply accepting the explanation offered by commodity fetishism theories produces an incomplete solution, the next step involves expanding the context in which we talk about consumer goods in a way that goes beyond both economics and ideology, and explore the ways they fit into the lives of manuts and khons.

The Social Lives of Commodities In his seminal work on commodities, Arjun Appadurai (1986) describes the varieties of different sources of value that they can acquire, providing a different vision of the relationship between people and things. Appadurai asserts that value derives from the process of exchange and not the other way around. To understand the process of valuing an object, one must understand the politics of the contexts into which those commodities enter, where value is set (1986: 57). His ideas, therefore, differ from those that assert that the meaning a commodity takes on derives from an often-monolithic program of marketing. Appadurai claims that the “interests of any two parties in a given exchange [may not be] identical” (1986: 57). We can take this further.

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At times, the interests of any one party are not necessarily identical; the motives behind assigning meanings to commodities within a society, within a relationship between individuals, and within a consumer herself (as someone who is not just a consumer but also a manut and a khon) may be entirely different from one another. The meanings vary as the user’s role varies, switching among Rortean languages and the visions of self and reality associated with them. Although Sulak borrows from commodity fetishism theories, his explanation for the psychological weakness he sees among Thais also reflects interests that go beyond those described by economics alone.

Sulak Sivaraksa and Commodity Fetishism in Modern Thailand Sulak Sivaraksa has spent much of his life as a relatively loud voice on the Thai political stage, charting a course that has been dependably aligned neither with the liberals nor with the conservatives, or with the NGOs, but firmly and insistently in favor of what he sees as a Siamese Buddhist identity. He is relatively well known and polarizing. Among the people I spoke to who knew of him, about half thought well of his work; the rest most definitely did not. Sulak is an activist and a public intellectual, but that said, he is not an academic, and, as Donald Swearer points out, the reader “should approach Sulak as an advocate rather than a scholar; a prophet rather than a philosopher” (1996: 212). For our purposes, Sulak will be taken this way: as an able thinker and an articulator of an important and relatively widely shared view in Thai society around the turn of the twenty-first century, but not as its originator, nor its only central proponent. (These are also not the only ideas in which Sulak is interested.) Sulak presented his critique of the impact of consumerism to me one day in 2002.4 During our interview, he expressed a notion of human life which was being corrupted in the Thai context, converted into something similar to what Adorno described. The tension with which he was most concerned was not between Siam and the Western influences which inhabit its public spaces, but rather between the “spiritual” sense

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of interconnectedness among all sentient things, which he juxtaposed against the forces which replace connection with alienation. This alienation created needs which demanded to be fulfilled. He explained: ‘Spiritual’ means something we have in common beyond the material. If we follow that, and you have time to regard others not to be exploitive, but become friends, in the Buddhist context we are interrelated. Without you, [I] could not be. Without trees I could not survive [because they produce oxygen]. And then you value everything.

Given this view (a well-supported reading of the Thai Dhamma adopted by many engaged Buddhists, but not widely propounded within the broader Thai Buddhist community), the individual does not need to suffer alone. Goodness involves deepening connections with other ­people and things in the living world. The juxtaposition of spirituality against consumerism, in Sulak’s thought, follows naturally. Put simply, the problem involves placing value on non-sentient things, not simply things one can touch (as one can touch other people and parts of the environment) but on things that serve to alienate creatures from one another—the absorbing solipsism of video games, fashion products, and cars. (He differs from many Buddhist thinkers, then, in that he recommends a selective, partial disconnection from worldly living while endorsing, for example, traditional village organizations built around producing agricultural products.) Sulak claimed that “Western cultures” turned away from the spiritual several hundred years ago. “The Age of Enlightenment threw away most of the indigenous Western cultures. Western cultures used to have a spiritual base, although the Church destroyed so much of Christianity,” he noted. The focus on rationality, technology, and economic development resulted in the loss of a sense of connection. This loss has made people vulnerable, able to be convinced by others that they need certain things. Sulak writes: The twin forces of technology and capitalism are tearing people away from each other by destroying traditional communities. Human relationships are replaced by impersonal commercial, technological, and bureaucratic connections. [1999: 118]

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Once the juxtaposition is defined, sides can be drawn. Sulak saw human personalities as being vulnerable to the institutions that surround them. He wanted to move Thai society away from a context like the one Adorno described, to what he thought of as an older, simpler way. What Sulak considered to be traditional Thai culture, emphasizing simple living with minimal technological mediation, stood against the powers that endorse alienation: often the multinational corporations and the advertisers who work for them.5 “Modernization has increased alienation, distrust, and fear among people, making it easier for multinational corporations and international agencies to manipulate and control them” (1999: 118). This alienation has opened the door for the psychological mechanizations of the marketers, who then redefine the needs of their prey. The purpose of advertisements is to use this alienation to create a feeling of need, Sulak said, which products can then satisfy. “Advertisements always advertise something to create a sense of lack. If you have a sense of lack then you need to [satisfy] your lack somehow.” Advertisers can do this by examining the present state of affairs and trying to convince the public that it needs to be improved. In Thailand, he said, European looks were considered better than Asian looks; this sense was created in the media. “Our stars in our television obviously give that image. Talk shows and soap operas are linked directly or indirectly to advertisements. We feel inferior because we don’t look like Europeans. You see,” he said, “That’s the idea.”6 Further echoing the commodity fetishists, he writes that, lacking the old forms of connection to ground it, identity comes to be drawn from media and oriented around consumption. “Without the power of purchasing, modern people become nobody” (1999: 120). Advertisements give false hope, but it is, in fact, hope. Alienation then comes full circle: Instead of seeking connectedness through relationships, people turn ever more strongly to commodities, and the disconnection-borne sense of lack continues to grow. The developing consumer culture acts as the source of alienation, driving children away from their parents and neighbors apart from each other as people come to value the alienating over those entities which can form connections with one another. This leaves unanswered an important question: Why can’t people resist? If Thai tradition was truly spiritual, how has it come to pass that

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consumerism poses such a grave threat to Thai ways? Sulak did not explain why they can’t; he explained that they don’t. In 1999, he said, corporations spent $348 billion on advertising. If advertising did not work, he reasoned, the money would not have been invested. This is an important point, but it does not address the question directly. It is clear that advertisements work to sell things; exactly why they work—by creating new identities, or linking into older ones—is another question. An explanation of the mechanism on a personal or psychological level is missing. A mechanism of this sort is available, however, if one follows the lead of thinkers like Adorno. The parallels between those arguments and Sulak’s are clear: A state of want is seen as being produced by capitalistic forces and imposed upon the populace through the ­identity-shaping influence of a therapeutic discourse provided by the media. People lack the ability to resist because, in both Adorno’s and Sulak’s thinking, of the weakness of the individual ego, unable to relate directly to other humans. When Thais accept this train of thought, then, they make a deal with the devil: In exchange for easing the discomfort over their desires for material goods, they surrender their sense of their ability to control those desires to an overwhelming power. When Sulak asserts that globalization is “demonic” (1999: 98), it seems that he means it in just this sense. In these cases, the objects do become fetishized, if we take that to mean that they can appear to have meanings and values, or even compelling force over people, in spite of the suppressed desires of the consumer. There is an important difference between Ewen’s work and Sulak’s: Where Ewen described a situation which develops within a society, Sulak described an imposition from without. Instead of being an issue concerning members of one society, Sulak framed the debate in terms of a conflict between a consumerized, Westernized identity and what he considers to be an authentically Siamese, Buddhist way of being. In the vision expressed by Sulak here, and by many other Thai thinkers as well, it is a conflict between traditional Thai ways of being and an ­imposition by an external political and economic entity which has stripped the Thais of their volition: That is, this is a version of the

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struggle against colonialism, and his approach could be described as a sort of Buddhist nationalism. But these meanings are not, I will argue, imposed from without. They reflect thoughts and desires presented from outside the individual, but they gain their compelling force as by-products of lives lived as manuts and khons.

Understanding Thai Consumerism We can find similar visions of the potential damage done by consumerism and the power of advertising expressed through a variety of different Thai voices. Many of these voices share several common themes. They decry the power that economic colonists appear to have over the consuming public. They also consider the issue primarily from institutional perspectives. While some do recognize the power of the individual to question the values presented to her by marketers, a substantial portion of the responsibility for problems caused by consumerism is laid upon the consumer goods and their promoters themselves. The Buddhist scholar P. A. Payutto, for example, writes: Employing social psychology, advertising manipulates popular values for economic ends, and because of its repercussions on the popular mind, it has considerable ethical significance. The volume of advertising may cause materialism, and unskillful images or messages may harm public morality. The vast majority of ads imbue the public with a predilection for selfish indulgence; they condition us into being perfect consumers who have no higher purpose in life than to consume the products of modern industry. [1994: 25]

Mulder (1997) cites a variety of scholars who perceive a crisis in Thai culture deriving from that nation’s rapid modernizing. Consumerism is not the only problem facing Thais, they believe, but it is an integral aspect. He cites, for example, professor and social critic Prawase Wasi’s assertion that the “real Thai community and its ways” derive from traditional forms of production and Buddhist principles. There are

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four main causes for this: Western market penetration, inappropriate emphases in public education, economic development, and “the message the commercial media spread[s],” which “can best be labeled as ­anti-Buddhism,” in that it causes people to seek excitement instead of serenity and the satisfaction of desires (1997: 161–162). Mulder himself asserts that styles of consumption in Thailand “may dull the public discourse” because they focus the consumer’s attention on his own personal affairs and away from those of the broader community (1997: 322). Payutto approaches this issue from a slightly different angle—concerned more with the destruction of community wrought by the stupefying power of modern inventions. “With the development of technology, and in particular, so-called ‘high-technology,’ which deals with information and communications,” he writes, “greed and hatred have acquired much more effective tools to work with” (Payutto 1994: 64). Technologies have been used to: lull humanity into heedless consumption, dullness and intoxication, rather than for the development of the individual or quality of life… as tools for seeking objects of desire, and in so doing have fired hatred through the contention they generate. [1994: 65]

At the same time, it is not entirely clear that Buddhism and the acquisition of wealth cannot go together. As Scott (2009) points out, there are many schools of Theravadan thought that do not set wealth against Buddhism, some of which preceded the rise of capitalist societies in the West. What she calls “neo-Orientalism”—the idea that Buddhist values, focusing on simplicity and moderation—exists in contrast to the capitalist, consumerist West (2009: 158). In spite of this tendency, she shows that Buddhism has historically been heterogeneous. She cites a fifth-century Vinaya, for example, which begins with the assumption that monks would have wealth, and that that policies must be set to deal with it (2009: 25).7 Why, then, would a relatively broadly accepted picture of Thai national identity include the idea that Thais themselves are utterly powerless to resist insidious foreign domination in the form of commodities?

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One possible explanation derives from the idea that this is how many Thais like to see themselves. Defining themselves as victims of outside forces does carry some weight. However, there are a number of strong countervailing discourses circulating in Thailand which depict Thais as independent, free, and resistant to domination.8 There are many stories of compromise with colonial powers in Thai educational and political narratives, but many Thais take great pride in the fact that their country has never been formally colonized. Another story is built on the idea that the picture is completely accurate: that Thais cannot, in fact, resist; that they have been co-opted completely by capitalist exchange values. Of course, for this to happen, according to Adorno, it would require that Thailand has become a “completely capitalist society.” These stories are too simple and describe cultural environments that lack the interplay of multiple Rortean languages. They also overlook the importance of the difficult, conflicted relationship between the manut and the khon.

An Incompletely Capitalist Society: The Khon and Sacrifice Value If we look at the standards which Adorno lays out, Thailand—even in its capitalist centers in Bangkok—is not a “completely capitalist society.” Commodities do play an important role in middle-class cultural life here—and even in intimate relationships—but their role is not like the one Adorno describes. Where Adorno’s approach requires personalities weakened by capitalist alienation, in Thailand we find many lives built around important interpersonal connections. Although consumer goods often play a vital role, relationships among khon are not oriented around them. People do not, as Adorno suggests, feel disconnected from others and try to make contact through mutual valuing of commodities; often, they do just the opposite. Commodities do not bear relationships between people; instead, they symbolize and mediate relationships that, in the language of the khon, exist independently of those goods. While living with earbuds in can separate people, one can also argue that consumer goods are not what drives people apart, as Sulak postulated. Instead, the demand for

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goods results from certain habits about the ways that personal relationships get expressed. In other words, exchange value has not managed to subsume use value and create relationships around it. Rather, exchange value—what something costs—frequently comes to be seen in terms of the value of labor and sacrifice. And often, it is through the value of blood, sweat, and tears, translated into the forms of food, clothes, and computers—what I will call sacrifice value—that relationships are measured. The meanings suggested in the markets do matter, but in many cases, the most important source of value is neither its exchange value nor the value the user gets from it. For the obligated, interdependent khon, of paramount importance is what the object tells the possessor (we cannot always call her the owner because very often it is meant to be given away or shared) about her relationship with another person. While relationships are vitally important to the khon, the social sanctioning against the demonstration of strong emotion caused most Bangkok Thais significant discomfort with overt expressions of affection, so love must be expressed in other ways. There are several reasons for this—the importance of appearing calm at all times, for example, or the fear of being teased. Od refused to hug his mother: It would be too embarrassing, he said. He would, however, buy her gifts. In the same vein, Pannee shrank at the idea of embracing her daughter, or even mentioning love: “We don’t talk about our feelings. We keep love deep in our hearts, talking about it is a bad thing. Because, in fact, we aren’t taught – it’s not in our tradition – to show our emotions… we’re taught to keep it in. Show 1%, 2%, 3% of emotions.” In some cases, even pushing someone away can be taken as a sign of love, as Oh, the boy who was sent to live with relatives for the sake of his education, understood. He remembered his mother telling him that they both suffered from their separation, and he took these confessions of suffering as proof that his parents loved him. If they did not love him, he believed, his parents would have kept him home and let him have an inferior education. So even distance can become a sign of connection. It is not intimacy or closeness that serves as the measure of the bond here; it is the depth of the sacrifice that proves the depth of the feeling. Remember that stories of sacrifice for the family are part of the Thai narrative canon. They are about love and proof of love.

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When asked how people knew their parents loved them, the most common answer involved financial sacrifices. Od, for instance, thought about his parents’ love in these terms: “When I was a child, when there was something I wanted, something I thought was good, sometimes they would buy it for me, even though it was expensive.” For him, material goods showed the sacrifice his parents made through years of hard work. The computer he used to write his term papers, for example, reminded him of his connection to his parents, of the affection that would never be expressed directly between them. In Od’s case, like the other cases described here, his computer is not fetishized as a substitute for the love of his parents—something like the reverse is true. Aside from its (significant) use value, his computer gains value and meaning because it suggested an unspoken (and almost unspeakable) affection. It told him and the people who knew him that he was valued not so much because of the class status it represented but because he was part of a loving family. This symbol was made more important by the fact that he couldn’t show it or talk of love directly with his parents. It is not his alienation from his family that gives his things value, but rather the fact of this connection, a connection expressed through the purchase of things like the computer. Sacrifices need not be large enough to be important. In ­exchange-value terms, a computer is worth much more than, for example, basic meals and shelter in a simple house. But it is not the monetary value that matters here—it is the size of the sacrifice. We see this in Chatri’s memories of his mother: “Every day she would say, ‘Where is Chatri? It is time for dinner!’” His family was poor and the means of expressing love were simple; it is often the small, steady, use-value-based gifts that create the sense of dependable, durable connection between people. Recall Pannee’s affirmation of this: “In my life my husband has never said, ‘I love you,’ and I have never said, ‘I love you’ to him… [if ] I work every day, cook the food, he’ll know already…” The things she bought her husband and daughter with the money she earned at work each day and the work she did for her family to produce the things they needed (to say nothing of the money and things her husband brought home to her) served as expressions of deep emotional connections, in lieu of the verbal or physical demonstrations often found in other societies.

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In these cases, exchange value is important, but only if a very limited definition of exchange value is employed—as a measure of sacrificed time that one person gives another. At times like these, exchange value is not a way to broadcast one’s worth to a world of strangers—often, its importance is measured within the context of the size of a sacrifice. This fact could be problematic for commodity fetishism approaches. While the ability to demonstrate wealth is certainly present in Bangkok, a bespoke suit that might take a few hours of Biyek’s work to buy for a friend has the same sacrifice value as the bowls of rice that it took Chatri’s mother hours of equally hard work to tend, harvest, shuck, and cook. It is the value within the relationship that matters, not just those values imposed from without. This is an essential point. For many middle-class Thais, commodities do carry a cachet of stylishness, and a great deal of importance is placed on the appearances and commercially imbued attitudes that are often associated with consumer goods as well as their use values. However, when these goods are gifts, or when they were bought from the allowances that wealthier family members often give their l­ess-well-off relations, or when those poor relations respond with gifts of their own—and this sort of sharing among family members appears to be nearly universal among Bangkok Thais—these objects also have sacrifice value, a value that is important because it tells the possessor that he is loved and valued enough to be sacrificed for. The emphasis here is not placed on specific exchanges, but rather on a sort of state of being that cannot be translated into monetary terms (although it can be suggested, uncertainly, that way): the state of being connected to other people, the state of being loved or liked, the state of being a valuable person, completely independent of net worth. Commodities, then, are essential for filling holes in the lives of both people who speak the language of the khon and those who speak Adorno’s language of capitalist consumerism. But the similarities end here. These visions of human nature are quite different, as are the meanings of the goods people buy. In the language of capitalist consumerism, the need arises from the fact that people are alienated from others and must have objects to make themselves feel complete. The khon, on the other hand, is anything but disconnected from the people around her; she needs these goods to affirm and support the connections she

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has with her friends and family. While Adorno’s consumer starts by being disconnected from everything but the goods of capitalism, the khon is inherently interdependent. Products don’t replace relationships, they affirm them. Where Appadurai argues that things have different values to the different people involved in an exchange, then, I would like to add that, in the situations I have described here, one single individual could look at an exchange in three different ways. Building on Appadurai’s notion that goods have more than one meaning, then, we can imagine moments in which a gift could oscillate between three different meanings—its use value, its exchange value, and its sacrifice value, as its owner thinks about her relationships from different angles and through different languages.

Love and Money: Related but Distinct At this point, a concern might arise. Clearly, gifts of goods are important in mediating relationships here. One could argue that they do more—that they actually create them, like those relationships created, as Mauss saw it, in the Trobriand Kula ring (Mauss 1990). If consumer goods are indispensable for maintaining relationships, if Od could know his parents love him only because they gave him a computer, if love were necessarily measured through giving power, then there would be no way to be sure we could separate the relationship from the gift. Is love borne in the objects, or just expressed by them? And if love were born in them, wouldn’t it be fair to say that people like Od and Pannee conceptualize love only in terms of exchange? I can answer this by pointing out that, to Pannee and Od, love and gift are different. Gifts are important expressions of love, but at the same time, there is uncertainty in these expressions. Talking both about her relationship with her mother and her daughter, Pannee says: We never hear, ‘Mother loves you, mother loves only you, mother loves you totally,’ she doesn’t really ever say it. She doesn’t tell them. But mother does everything good…. But sometimes, you think, 1 or 2% [doubt in your mind], ‘Does mom do good things because it’s her ­responsibility? Why doesn’t she ever say she loves her child?’

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Love is, in her conception, something completely different from the things that represent it. Gifts can be given with love; gifts can be given without it. Often the best way to show love is through gifts, but while this is the generally accepted convention, it is also generally accepted that this is not proof positive of love. In Pannee’s way of seeing things, love is very important, and material support is also very important. But there is a disconnect between the two: Since people want to look after the ones they love, these two are associated, but they are not identical. This relates to the split between the manut and the khon—the khon can work and buy and give gifts, but the feelings that must be kept hidden are the province of the manut. This reveals a terminal flaw in commodity fetishism theories as they are applied to Thailand (although, of course, not necessarily elsewhere). Many Thais do feel a sense of lack; they worry that the love they think they perceive is simply role-based behavior, fulfilling the obligations of the khon. But no commodity can satisfy this need because no material good or gift of labor by itself can transcend its position in the ­role-related, rieproi-oriented world and prove that the connections which goods and services represent are more than skin deep. (This was evident in Tren’s questions about love the night we walked to the river.) In relationships between close kin, material goods, however important, do not represent a prestation totale, involving the entirety of the participants’ social personalities, as common Thai notions of personality recognize aspects of human existence which are not predicated on exchange. My subjects were clear about the sources of their consumer goods’ power: They do not embody the givers’ essence (as Mauss [1990: 12] describes), but they are essential to representing their concern for one another. Here, economic relationships as Adorno describes them are reduced: Commodities (among other things) mediate relationships among people. Not only do these things work as symbolic representations of relationships, but people use them—exchange them and respond to them—in ways that make them useful in interpreting the strength, intensity, and significance of a bond.

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Commodities in the World of Khons and Manuts This brings us back to the fundamental conflict between two central conceptions of what it means to be human. Manuts are capable of feeling emotional lack—and are, in fact, greatly predisposed to feel it. This, they are taught, is what the Buddha thinks people do best. As long as nirvanic notions of what it means to be a person continue to involve the idea that peace can only come from escaping the world instead of buying parts of it, then the language of capitalist consumerism will not be able to replace it. On the other hand, being a successful, ethical khon involves building connections through which one is supported by and supports others, and among the middle classes, this sort of success generally finds expression through material means. (Remember Ton’s fears about the future and his desire to have good children who will sell things for him.) This makes the khon vulnerable to the definitions of the powers that produce and give value to consumer goods. To do well in the world of the khon, then, a person must be deeply attached to things of the world—vital are relations with other people, and these are mediated through material means. This sort of success as a khon, however, brings with it the recognition of failure as a manut. Here, then, we see the complex social considerations that give meanings to consumer goods beyond those assigned by people who want to sell them. It is entirely possible that the khon will succumb to the definitions laid out by marketers; the attitudes assigned to commercial goods might add nuance to the role-oriented persona adopted by the khon. But in the final count, the language of obligation—one that describes the interdependent khon that seeks to assuage or prevent isolation—is quite different from what Sulak calls the “modern” consumer (on the fetishized Western model), who begins existence as fundamentally disconnected in the first place. What Sulak saw was partially true. Many Thais have become less connected in some ways—driving alone instead of sharing transportation, focusing on the phone instead of the other passengers on the boat, and spending time with YouTube instead of family. Commercialism is unavoidable in Bangkok. In some Skytrain stations, it is hard to find

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a surface that is not plastered with ads. Advertisements on the walls across the tracks are periodically obscured by the ads on passing trains; some of the banner space in the trains themselves has been given over to screens that play a greater variety of ads (and, every now and then, provide a little information about the train’s progress). And if you can’t read the ads on ceilings and floors of the station, or on the giant screens that face the track on the outer walls of the malls in the central parts of town because of the travelers in your line of vision, you can always look at the ones printed on their clothes instead. Consumerism, then, plays an important role in the lives of many Bangkok Buddhists. But while many consuming behaviors may line up, superficially, with the ideas expressed in commodity fetishism theories, they do not line up with an underlying change in the first-person predispositions that shape the stories and inform the decisions people make. Commodity fetishism theorists predict the rise of a single monolithic language of consumerism spoken by people who only experience the world as consumers, a new meaning system that will squeeze out all the other languages in a cultural environment. But the very visible capitalist economic landscape that residents of Bangkok pass through every day is not proof each middle-class Thai has been co-opted into a creature defined by capitalist consumption. They haven’t. Instead, proponents of the new approach tell stories that explain, after the fact, Thai consumerism. But these stories lack roots in the first-person predispositions that shape interpretations and responses moment by moment. When most Bangkok Thais buy things for their families or receive gifts from their friends and partners, the experiences they have in the moment continue to call on the meaning systems of the khon. These commodity fetishism narratives, then, reflect a ­belief-as-explained about modern capitalism that provides a c­ omfortable resolution to the conflict between khon and manut. In this ­rereading of human nature, the meanings of stories have been changed as well. Narratives about sacrifice value have been reinterpreted as exchange-value stories. What had been seen as commitments to loved ones can be read (or misread) as commitments to the products themselves. More than this, this psychological satisfaction lends itself to political utility.

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Commodity Fetishism as Therapy Through Stories Even if notions of a commodity-fetishized self fail to stand up to scrutiny, they can be psychologically and socially useful. To get a clearer understanding of the complex interplay between the preexisting languages in Bangkok’s cultural environments and the newer one of commodity fetishism, we must translate this into anthropocentric and narrative terms. Commodity fetishism approaches cannot work here because they require a clean slate onto which marketers can project an image of a human nature that is needy and isolated. People understand who and what they are in large part through the stories they tell and the narrative complexes that support them, so there are new narratives marketers would like to make fundamental and canonical—about how life is improved by buying. But these stories have not gained a deep, ­life-defining purchase on consumers who still look at material goods as khons. Instead, marketers found themselves competing in a cultural environment with two other dominant languages with their own stories about human nature. Many ads, for example, play on the emotions raised through stories about sacrificing for family—leaning on the language of the khon to sell rather than attempting to replace it. Commodity fetishism theory by itself, then, does not provide a final explanation for Biyek’s behavior and Sulak’s philosophy. Rather, it acts as a sort of mediator in the conflict between the manut and the khon. Instead of providing a resolution to the conflict, it moves the blame from the conflicted individual to Western capitalist habits. In this way, it provides Biyek, caught in the conflict, with a way to live with it. To make sense of this, we need to look at two questions: Why did the explanation of consumerism that came from Sulak’s and Biyek’s cultural experiment work well enough to find a place in Bangkok’s cultural environment? And what does that explanation do for the people who accept it? First, why did the narrative of the colonized, consumerized Thai identity work well enough to gain some purchase in Bangkok’s cultural environments and spread? This accommodation is possible for several reasons:

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1. There is a niche for it because it provides a solution to the ­manut-khon problem that exists for some people in this cultural ecosystem. 2. It related to a version of a vision of human nature—as controlled by desire—that Thai Buddhists were familiar with. 3. It could be assimilated to a canonical narrative about colonialism of which most educated and politically minded Thais were aware. Around the time I met Biyek and Sulak, researchers were finding ­evidence of urban, middle-class discomfort with the hustle and bustle of modern life, linked to the idea of the prosperous urban khon. One study of stereotypes found that both urban and rural Thais have a vision of Bangkok residents that includes, among other things, selfishness, greed, and hastiness (Evers and Korff 2000: 93).9 A stereotype is, of course, only that: Many urban Thais prided themselves on being generous and careful. But there was a sense that people who lead lives like those of the Bangkok middle classes are lacking in these particular traits. The relatively rapid pace of life, the focus on work, and the concomitant attention to acquisition were regarded as negative and un-Thai traits while, at the same time, taken to be realities of modern life. How, then, can people find peace with this? Neither way of being Thai was expendable, but as the economy developed the conflict between them grew increasingly visible. As the constructivists would point out, differences that remain separated in the mind do not necessarily lead to conflict. But two ways of being can create trouble if they point someone in two different directions at once. In the conflict over consumerism, it doesn’t matter whether a person is behaving and thinking as a manut or as a khon; he still has only himself to blame. There is no outside entity onto which responsibility can be placed. In the new language of commodity fetishism, however, the conflict is not between one person’s khon nature and their manut nature, but rather between the manut and the external power of giant, impersonal, and generally foreign, corporations that have infiltrated and edited the individual. By casting the conflict as one between the manut and the individual as consumer-influenced-by-transnational-corporation, one can shrug off the burden of responsibility for one’s greed, speed, and professionalistic orientation.

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Laying blame on the transnationals is especially easy as Thailand has had a long history of dealing with the invasive, self-interested actions of foreign capitalist powers, dating back beyond the Bowring Treaty of 1855. At that time, Thai students learn in their history classes, the Siamese government was forced to choose between opening its markets to British traders and having what was left of its lands (those that had not yet been taken by the British and the French) forcibly opened by British troops (Wyatt 1982: 183). In no way is the intention here to exonerate foreign countries or companies of responsibility for their actions in Thailand. My goal here is to point to a narrative about history, current among people who have been through the Thai educational system, which makes them aware, based on well-studied historical fact, of the possibility of interference from without. Building a story about commercial imperialism on the model of this canonical narrative makes sense because it is supported largely by economic and political realities, if not the psychological realities commodity fetishism theorists might suggest. There is a therapeutic element to all this, then. It provides a diagnosis for a problem that can be solved, and presents possibilities for finding that resolution. Blaming external powers provides a good deal of aid to people like Biyek who suffer from ambivalence about their identities. Instead of reproaching himself for his conflicting desires to be a successful corporate lawyer, with everything that comes with it, and also a good Buddhist, he could displace his frustrations onto the source of his wealth and success: the American company that pays him. Self-loathing becomes indignation aimed at something far away—a much more pleasant attitude to live with. Furthermore, indignation, when aimed at a proper subject, and placed in the proper context, can become a virtue. Biyek could focus his indignation on modern, materialistic culture and, in doing this, align himself with any one of a variety of oppositional ideologies that emerged and sought niches in that quickly shifting cultural environment. He could choose—and did intermittently choose, improbable as it may seem, for a corporate lawyer—to claim to be a communist, set on eliminating the capitalist scourge. By turning it into an external conflict, and a project he could work on, this could result in a durable

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solution to Biyek’s internal conflict. Similarly, Sulak used his concern over the conflict to create a modern conception of an anti-Western Thai identity.10

Narrative Reconstruction as Cultural Psychotherapy By reimagining human nature in capitalist-consumerist terms, Thais who accepted commodity fetishism theories were able to reconfigure the facts available to them from preexisting stories in a new way. This reinterpretation caused them to leave some information out of their narratives. What was interpreted as a shallow, self-serving exchange value in one story form can be seen as loving, relationship building sacrifice value in another. But the advantage of displacing the blame, of course, is that it eases the conflict. Reimagining the story becomes therapeutic. Narratives play an important role in the ways people respond to problems. Some of these problems are widespread, like the manut-khon conflict in Thailand; others affect individuals. For these cases—where solutions are not crowd-sourced—a form of narrative-based psychotherapy has been developed. For example, Capps and Ochs (1995) explain the ways that personal narratives shape the attitudes that lead to panic attacks in Meg, an American woman. Meg understood her panic attacks in the way that clinical psychologists understood the disorder: as sudden, unexpected, and, she thinks, unwarranted by her situation (1995: 46). The way she constructed her concept of her panic attacks matched the definition presented by the experts she has consulted and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychologists. This information contributes to what Capps and Ochs call Meg’s psychologist-sanctioned “master narrative” about panic—an anxie­ ty-provoking event occurs, she experiences panic, then attempts to escape the situation, and avoids it in the future (1995: 46). Because other people do not experience panic in the same situations, she saw her personal nature as one that was disordered and disconnected from a true reality that was much less scary (1995: 22). By situating herself in a larger narrative context—one that involved the reactions of her friends

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and family—she came to define her own personal nature as irrationally troubled and her world as unrelentingly troubling to someone like her. Capps and Ochs, however, argue for a different narrative interpretation of Meg’s experiences. Her master narrative played down some facts in her stories while placing too much emphasis on others. In Meg’s social world, they point out, women are taught to take care of the needs and desires of others, often at their own expense. Meg had a willingness to set aside her own needs without complaint. In the first acts of Meg’s panic attack stories, the authors note, she always agreed to do something about which she has private reservations (Capps and Ochs 1995: 84). They find a second narrative buried in the first—one of social claustrophobia, as opposed to personal anxiety, which leads to panic. This creates a slightly different narrative which does not conform to the general terms set out by the DSM. Instead of focusing on Meg’s anxiety in contexts in which her family and friends were calm, it recognizes the importance of social roles, in this case the centrality of Meg’s role as an uncomplaining woman. Something similar happened in middle-class Thai contexts. There was a master narrative sanctioned by experts—not by the American Psychological Association this time, but by religious authorities—that connects the idea that buying and having things feels good with the idea of excessive defilement. And like Meg, when Thais develop this narrative, they play down important facts that therefore remain in the background—like the connections between consumption and khon relationships. In psychotherapeutic settings, the idea of interpreting and recontextualizing personal narratives is nothing new; this technique was used by Freud in the early twentieth century (Capps and Ochs 1995: 19). More recently, it has become the center of certain forms of therapy. In their seminal work on narrative therapeutic practice, White and Epston (1990) outline a process very similar to the one Capps and Ochs use. The information that creates a narrative can be organized in a variety of different ways, they argue, but cultural tendencies often usher that information into standardized forms (1990: 13). Narrative therapists seek information that contradicts problematic master narratives, information that has been selected out of stories but has not yet faded from

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memory completely. As a result, they identify two kinds of narratives in therapy—dominant stories, similar to Capps and Ochs’s master narratives, which reflect the client’s ordinary constructions, and which often cause the problems that bring them to the therapist’s office, and unique outcomes, which involve the therapeutic reworking of information into new, non-canonical, personally tailored forms that reconceptualize a person’s nature, identity, or social standing (1990: 15). Similarly, Biyek experienced a conflict in what we might think of as one of the manut’s master narratives that portray desires as both inherent and defiling. Sulak’s and Biyek’s outcomes (common enough that calling them “unique” would be inappropriate) involve reworking their conceptions of Thai ways of being by drawing in details about invasions and colonizations, familiar in stories about politics and economics but rarely found in narratives about everyday life. The therapeutic process involves externalization,11 which comes about as the therapist asks the client a series of questions that allow them to see their narratives as stories that can be reinterpreted and not as direct expressions of objective reality (White and Epston 1990: 42). In other words, the therapist introduces the client to a new meaning system, a new dialect for reflecting on their lives. Using the information already present in their realities, they recontextualize their worlds and ­reinterpret themselves in relation to it. Here, we find a similarity and a difference to the Thai situation. While both commodity fetishists and narrative therapists introduce new languages, with new ways of conceptualizing a human’s nature or social position, part of narrative therapy involves familiarizing the client with the idea that she can, to some extent, choose her own interpretation and therefore choose her own conception of her nature. In this way, ­narrative therapy is self-consciously anthropocentric. Where the goal of therapy is personal empowerment, however, commodity fetishists differ by taking a sociocentric approach; it is seen to work specifically because it defines human nature in a way that disempowers the people who accept it by describing them as passive victims of a powerful external force. In accepting the benefits of this reading of their lives, they give up responsibility for both the process of reading itself and, to some extent, their ability to make their own decisions.

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The dialects of psychotherapy represent the rather unusual kinds of languages Rorty focuses on in his work—ones that have been intentionally and self-consciously evolved by the people who use them. If these are uncommon, though, they are not unique; the meaning systems of the sciences and arts are all in a constant process of intentional evolution, changed by thinkers and writers exploring human existence. But what about meaning systems that aren’t viewed as subject to individual innovation? The Thai languages of obligation and solitude are not usually thought of as changeable or flexible. Reflecting what Stromberg calls the referential ideology, they are grounded in social realities and Buddhist doctrines that are seen as immutable. And yet, long after the death of the Buddha, evolutions in ideas about human nature occur. Biyek’s adoption of a new conception of human nature—in his mind the revelation of a preexisting truth and not an innovation—is one such evolution. So is Ben’s discovery of a new ghost and the development of a new dialect for talking about it. This problem-solving reflects a more self-conscious innovation, but these solutions are seen as discoveries of truths about a preexisting order rather than inventions that create realities. Ben could not, of course, invent a type of ghost. But he could discover one. Unless he borrowed his ideas wholesale from someone else, Biyek must have made use of the abilities anthropocentric anthropologists ­recognize—experimentation and negotiation—to define himself as a colonized modern consumer who had no choice but to buy what he was told. In this way, he chose to adopt a sociocentric theory of his own existence. This leads to the final irony here: In borrowing ideas about commodity fetishism to resolve their own problems, people who accept this formulation develop and pass on approaches that involve rewriting their languages to deny their natures as problem-solvers and interpreters. They create heuristics that suggest that they lack the ability to create their own heuristics. They choose to see themselves as the sorts of people who cannot choose. If Biyek presented himself only as someone who had no ability to find meaning beyond the things that he bought (a reality that, as a “communist” with his critique of capitalism, he both accepted and rebelled against), then he would deny his own difference from the people

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around him and, as a result, his own ability to contribute something new—and possibly better—to the languages of his community.12 In taking this anthropocentric approach, I argue that Sulak and, perhaps, Biyek were creative in resolving the khon-manut conflict—and I may have ended up giving Biyek credit for being more innovative and creative, in the way he reimagined aspects of his own existence, than he gave himself.13 The kind of re-narration he undertook is not the work of the intellectually disconnected, emotionally stunted, 11-year-old adults Adorno describes.14 This reflects a problem with sociocentric forms of anthropology in general. By assuming that the social order will shape human identities and natures without accounting for individual experience and experimentation as mediating factors, anthropologists may overlook the complex interactions I have described here, and the people they work with can end up looking like the least interesting kind of 11-year-old. This brings us back to the questions set out in the first chapter. If Biyek’s vision prevented him from seeing his fellow Thais as individuals able to experiment, what does that say about anthropologies that accept theories that focus on conformity, and overlook thoughtful and ­innovative ways of being as well?

Notes 1. I am specifically not commenting on social structures, however. 2. According to generally accepted Thai custom, first names, not last, are used in formal and polite reference. 3. In this way, these fetishism theories themselves become fetishized. It is worth noting that, like a part of the Thai population, many social scientists tend to assume that commodity fetishism theories will have explanatory power in a particular context, and therefore do not seek to explain the mechanisms through which they work. Unlike some (e.g., Haug 1986 and Adorno 2001), many anthropologists take a simpler path (e.g., Taussig 1980), examining the situation thoroughly on a social level, but failing to explain the compelling force’s action on the individual. Similarly, Curtis (2004) asserts at the start that the theory will be assumed to hold, and begins her analysis from there.

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4. The argument presented here is drawn mainly from an interview conducted with Ajan Sulak in 2002 and is supported by information drawn from published interviews, essays, and critiques. 5. This vision is not unlike the project outlined by Gandhi (e.g., Sulak 1999: 89–100) 6. It is true that standards of beauty often place value on light skin and what Thais call “round” eyes, a shape common among people of European ancestry and also fairly common among Thais. This preference does not appear to be new, however, and it is not clear how much of this preference relates to advertising and how much could be traced to other sources. 7. This neo-Orientalist view has become popular in Thailand. Schools of thought like the one espoused by the followers of the relatively new Dhammakaya tradition, which argues that seeking wealth is a virtuous Buddhist goal, appear less heterodox than one might expect (e.g., Scott 2009: 96–98). 8. Note, for example, Thongchai Winichakul’s analysis of Thai national identity as being a united whole opposed to external enemies. In the recent past, the most disliked countries were Thailand’s communist neighbors (1994: 166–169). But the threat of communism waned while trouble on the Burmese border created a new vision of the enemy, expressed, for example, in the nationalist, anti-Burmese blockbuster film, Bang Rajan (2000) which recounts a mythicized version of the heroic stand of a Siamese village against an invading Burmese army almost two and a half centuries before. Shortly after it came out, I saw a musical version of the final battle being performed for the parents at a temple elementary school in my neighborhood. 9. A word on “haste”: Many Thais consider this to be a very negative trait. Hasty people are generally considered to be oriented toward work and not toward personal relationships, and lack care in what they do. Haste is frequently seen to lead to impropriety and bad manners. 10. It is worth noting that Sulak’s approach to consumption represents only a small corner of his thought. This is one path into his way of thinking: He is attempting to connect a set of new ideas—new metaphors—to one aspect of the language of obligation by promoting a form of Thai Buddhism, less popular than the ones to which most Thai Buddhists adhere, which emphasizes interdependence as a doctrinal Buddhist value. His greater vision provides a different sort of response to a variety

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of social ills: a vision of life which rejects Western rationalization and embraces a Buddhist-based communitarianism, returning Thailand to what he envisions as a large set of small communities in which public life is based around individuals’ relationships with one another and not around individuals’ relationships with centralized institutions. Sulak has a clear and well-articulated positive program—but, as one would expect of a perspective which plays on people’s discomfort with their own social identities, he often expresses it in negative terms, offering his vision as a critique and alternative. He asserts, for example: In the case of Thailand, the use of the old name, Siam, signifies something old-fashioned and “underdeveloped” although not by shaking off the vestiges of a past colonial power, as Siam has never been colonized – not politically, at any rate. Buddhism teaches the people to be content and to live simply, in villages, surrounded by nature, our people did this and related to each other fraternally, almost equally, with the common ultimate goal of liberation from greed, hatred, and delusion. The name of our country had to be changed, as a symbolic gesture of a departure from those past principles, to Thailand – an Anglicized hybrid word, symbolizing the country’s desire to embrace the process of development or westernization in the American image. (1998: 90) The elements which would appeal to those seeking to eliminate the conflict are clearly present here: the idea of change being imposed (albeit with indigenous complicity) from outside, and the invidious juxtaposition of Buddhist ways as being against Western ways, which suggest the return to a morally superior, traditionally Siamese way of life. By proposing a language of consumerism that overlooks the importance of interdependence among the khon, he is able to paint a picture of isolated lives, and juxtaposes that image of human nature, and the social system that goes with it, against a Buddhist alternative. But where most Thai Buddhists think of interpersonal relationships in the more secular terms of the khon, Sulak proposes to rewrite the language of Buddhism in a way that emphasizes interconnection instead. He has argued, for example, for development based on a Buddhist model derived from the three components which, the Buddha taught, were necessary in reaching nirvana: wisdom, moral conduct, and meditation (or “concentration”). To satisfy the need for wisdom, he discusses the value of education: “For any structural improvements to be made to society, is

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the fundamental need to build the capacity of each individual and each community in a way which balances head and heart, independence and interdependence, and quantity and quality.” To satisfy the need for moral conduct, he discusses the need to change political culture: “For ‘development’ to engender healthy societies, all facets of a society must be addressed, not simply the economic….” In the place of meditation, he discusses the importance of the “dynamics of interrelation or politics,” asserting that “[m]ore must be done to bring out cooperation and proper monitoring in political systems” (1998: 36–37). 11. White and Epston are, of course, using the word “externalization” in a different way from the way it was used in Chapter 2 here. 12. He did not, however, want to go that far; he continued to use the other languages that define most middle-class Thai lives as well. 13. Sulak, however, was aware of the importance of divergent thinking. His autobiography is entitled Loyalty Demands Dissent (1998). 14. The difference between a sociocentric anthropology and one that is anthropocentric does not lie in the fact that one assigns people free will and the other doesn’t; neither of them necessarily engages this question. But anthropocentric approaches bring with them the sense that people have the potential to be innovative and individual experimenters.

References Adorno, T. 2001. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. Bernstein. London: Routledge Classics. Appadurai, A. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Social Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capps, Lisa, and Elinor Ochs. 1995. Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Curtis, D. 2004. Commodities and Sexual Subjectivities: A Look at Capitalism and Its Desires. Cultural Anthropology 19 (1): 95–121. Deakin, Wayne George. 2012. Thailand, Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism. Electronic document. https://www.academia. edu/5146413/Thailand_Occidentalism_and_Cultural_Commodity_ Fetishism. Accessed Jan 5, 2019. Evers, H., and R. Korff. 2000. Southeast Asian Urbanism: The Meaning and Power of Social Space. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Ewen, S. 1984. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. New York: Basic Books. Foster, R. 2002. Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua, New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haug, W. 1986. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. R. Bock. Cambridge: Polity Press. Horkheimer, M., and T. Adorno. 2000. Dialectic of the Enlightenment, trans. Herder and Herder, Inc. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. Marx, K. 1938 [1967]. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling. London: G. Allen and Unwin. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2013. Moral Selves and Moral Scenes: Narrative Experiments in Everyday Life. Ethnos 78 (3): 301–327. Mauss, M. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton. Mulder, N. 1997. Thai Images: The Culture of the Public World. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Payutto, P. 1994. Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place, trans. Dhammavijaya. Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation. Scott, Rachelle M. 2009. Nirvana for Sale? Buddhism, Wealth, and the Dhammakaya Temple in Contemporary Thailand. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sivaraksa, Sulak. 1998. Loyalty Demands Dissent: Autobiography of an Engaged Buddhist. Bangkok: Thai Inter-Religious Commission for Development. Sivaraksa, Sulak. 1999. Global Healing: Essays and Interviews on Structural Violence and Social Development and Spiritual Development. Bangkok: Ruankaew Printing House. Swearer, Donald. 1996. Sulak Sivaraksa’s Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society. In Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, ed. C. Queen and S. King. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tambiah, S. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taussig, M. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. White, Michael, and David Epston. 1990. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: W. W. Norton. Winichakul, Thongchai. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Wyatt, D. 1982. Thailand: A Short History. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.

8 The Meanings in Lives

If the world really is as chaotic as the ancient Greeks thought and as messy and complicated as I have presented it here, then the human abilities to experiment and explore, then empathize and communicate with one another across the barriers between minds, become essential survival skills. And anthropocentric approaches become necessary for anthropologists to understand societies made coherent through these. Societies act as laboratories, laying out social rules within which, and with which, people like Chatri and Pannee can experiment, and roles with edges they can probe and push. When people tell stories, they often explore the meanings of events—and create them as events—by drawing disparate elements together into narrative frameworks. When Aw told her karma story, she described her own personal set of symbols, connecting eyes and crabs. Tellers tinker with the definitions of categories, as Ben and his family did as they reimagined the idea of the ghost. Sometimes different conceptions of self, which connect to different narrative complexes and are communicated and supported through their associated narratives, exist cooperatively. People use the manut to pick up the slack for the khon and use the khon to compensate for problems left by the manut. At other moments, they are antagonistic, © The Author(s) 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0_8

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pushing people to experiment further. Occasionally, both human nature and the nature of the world itself are up for negotiation, as Biyek and Sulak found, introducing the notion of the hegemonic capitalist world, and its concomitant consumerist self, into Bangkok’s cultural ecosystems. The different languages (made of the webs of conceptions and motivations built largely into narrative complexes) that populate cultural ecosystems share something in common. They can be used, and are used, again and again and again, to seek the answers to the problems those same linguistically shaped cultural ecosystems present. These environments, then, are not just the places where people discipline one another into conformity, they are also places where people help each other solve problems and teach one another difference. Rorty points out that the search for the ultimate meaning of life is futile because meanings are created within systems, built up from the cultural elements that create the contexts in which people live. This is a good thing. Instead of seeking right-or-wrong, cut-and-dried answers about existence, the processes of working out how to be human create the kinds of humans that live in the world.1 This book is built around two questions: How do people negotiate their visions of what the world is, how it works, and how they fit into it? and How should we approach the question of social coherence without reifying a solid underlying stratum of shared understandings? The answers can be found locally, experientially, and relationally, by looking at the work Bangkok’s Buddhists do every day to manage their lives. The answers lie in the processes of making karmic decisions that might improve one’s chances at love, of choosing which thoughts and feelings to share and what to hide, of disciplining children and honoring parents—all the time talking, negotiating, and cooperating in the creation of meanings. Because people respond to conceptions of reality built around their own first-person predispositions rather than refer to a pre-defined set of rules, the life-worlds people create appear objective and solid while also being supple, subjective, and flexible. Life-worlds are personal while also being shared, individually discovered and also socially negotiated, the sources of pain and at times the laboratories for solutions. They are built using different kinds of rationality, but also through emotions.

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Instead of seeking the ultimate meaning of life, then, it makes sense to seek the meanings in lives. I have tried to demonstrate that meanings in life are products of the processes of living as a human of a p ­ articular kind (as a manut, a khon, a consumerist, as a karmic being, or one susceptible to ghosts). The fact that meaning is created in lives means that, as humans, we are forced to undertake the work of being human to create it. This same work motivates action and animates relationships. It creates the active, dynamic social realities that shape the cultural ecosystems in which people exist. As people pursue their projects, both individual and communal (because of the empathic nature of communication, the line between these is often very unclear), they are held together, chainmail-like, by bonds strong enough to make cooperation possible but not so rigid that they break as people respond in their own experience-informed ways. In important ways, people live through the selves that draw on narrative complexes and shape and are shaped by the stories they tell and hear.

The Limits of Flexibility I have argued that the flexibility that allows for experimentation comes from three different sources: the incompleteness of satisficing, the limited amount of information needed to take a perspective, and the expansive, connective logic that guides narrative thought. When it comes to satisficing, people do not need to understand one another completely to develop effective passing theories about one another. Second, I have argued that, in order to empathize effectively, one does not necessarily need a huge repertoire of cultural knowledge. At minimum, one needs to share enough of a conception of human nature in order to think and feel oneself into another mind and body. Since ­different stories run on different logic, there might be no end to the connections that might be acceptable. Some readers may interpret this as an argument against the power of social forces in human life and in favor of an unbridled freedom. This is not the case.

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As I pointed out previously, a shared vision of human nature may be all that is absolutely necessary—but significantly greater knowledge usually exists, and often comes into play. And while it was possible—and very, very common—for Thais to insert personal symbols into familiar story forms that can be satisficed, they were often quite uncompromising when it came to upholding the rules that governed the stories themselves. While people may accept stories that don’t follow established forms of logic (e.g., when Americans retell their dreams to others who lack a sense of their logic), this doesn’t make those stories meaningful or open to social negotiation. They may not even be “stories” in a strict sense, as stories involve understandable connections. There is a good deal of flexibility, then, but it is still quite limited. It is also not my intention to suggest that Thai society is free of social forces that bind people into particular roles and perspectives. My goal has been to highlight points where negotiation, innovation, and experimentation matter. I hope to help rebalance the conversation, not to deny that important elements of “unfreedom” exist here as well.

Cultural Experience as Narrative Therapy One of the results of Durkheimian “unfreedom”-oriented approaches to anthropology has been the sequestering of personal, psychological ­problem-solving from socially shared problem-solving. If cultural forces are the disciplinarians that teach people how to behave, there is little room for discussion of shared psychological work. In the West, this has often resulted in social issues being exiled to the realm of the therapist’s office. But as many of the anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers discussed here demonstrate, societies do not simply impose information onto their participants. When people assimilate information, they learn from their environments—but people are not just assimilators, and social forces are not strictly teachers. Accommodation involves negotiating new ways of thinking, acting, and seeing. Understanding this forces us to take another look at the relationships between people and societies. It is not a one-way relationship in which everyone’s role is

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as a learner. Rather, it is an active environment where everyone teaches and learns from everyone else. But if societies do run like this, then we need to ask: What are the people we study learning and teaching about? What do these changes in meaning systems mean? Instead of assuming that large arrays of shared symbols shape our stories, we must also recognize that narratives help build semantic categories, placing the structures that shape episodic memory and ­story-building on a par with semantic categories. Then, autobiographical narratives give us insight into the range of life-world-creation. If the therapist’s office is the place where psychologists who practice narrative therapy and their clients negotiate the stories of their realities, then the external world is the space where everyone negotiates the stories that build the complexes that build their life-worlds. It should come as no surprise, then, that this form of psychotherapy has a lot in ­common with the ways people resolve some of their problems through their environments; they are using the same tools, after all. The ideas behind narrative therapy can help us think about reality without falling into one of the big dualisms Rorty writes about: the distinction between self and world. When a client’s narratives change, both the client as a person (as the client sees herself ) and the client’s world (as she constructs it) change. In a similar way, people like Ben and Biyek can deal with their problems not by changing the world around them but rather by changing how they see themselves and interpret their worlds. Eliminating the conflict between capitalism and otherworldly Buddhism is no easier than banishing ghosts from the human realm. Interpretations are often topics of conversation; they evolve as they spread from person to person. What psychologists have often attributed to the work of individual minds are often also the products of social negotiation. From a person-centered perspective, these forms of interpretation and reinterpretation can look a lot like psychological defense mechanisms in that they both involve reinterpreting and re-narrating events, and both are used to deal (for better or worse) with situations that arise in the course of daily living. There are important differences, however. As psychodynamic anthropologists describe them, defense mechanisms often require the

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repression of some painful aspect before it can be reinterpreted. To some extent, however, the constructivist approach recommended by Hollan (2000) eliminates this difference by looking at the issue in a way opposed to Freud’s, saying not that people have to work to repress to become unaware of things, but rather that it takes work to connect ideas.2 Instead of working to repress unwanted realities, then, at times people simply rewrite the narratives that describe them, and, in the ­revision, remove reference to those troubling realities.3 And so what began with a discussion of the ways that ideas in the broader cultural environment become a part of an individual’s own ­personal landscape (in Chapter 2) has ended in an explanation of the ways that personal landscapes, driven by their own language-born ­motivations, come to shape their experiential environments. After Aw cut the eyes of the crabs she bought when she was a child, she became aware of the harm in what she did. The languages of her life both made her think that she was guilty, and pointed, at least vaguely, toward what she could anticipate as a result. If we borrow from the dialects of psychotherapy, we can see her eye problem as an externalizing of her guilt out onto the karma-ruled universe. In the end, the universe reacts and resolves it, restoring her eye and absolving her of her crime. Changing “I feel bad about my actions” to “The universe feels bad about my actions” (in a very rough sense, since karma has no consciousness) is a culturally created system of projection. In response to his frustration with his consumerist urges, Biyek revises his sense of himself to redirect his frustration from his own obligated nature onto the United States. This looks very much like a system of displacement— he rereads “I’m frustrated with myself ” as “I’m frustrated with another country.” And the widespread “hardening of the heart,” draining the emotion from romantic failures by making them a lesson in the value of detachment, is a culturally defined system of intellectualization. Instead of repressing painful experiences, my subjects reinterpret themselves in ways to separate themselves from the full thrust of their negative feelings, becoming insightfully ignorant of the possibility of the complete discomfort. My point here is not to show how psychodynamics can be interpreted into cultural systems. Instead, it is an exploration of the

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anthropocentric tools we can use to see our subjects more clearly as they interact with their cultural environments. If we look at cultural lives this way, sociocentric models (with social normativity identified and defined for broad swaths of society by the anthropologist) give way to models built from the defining power of experiences preserved in narratives, even when they are idiosyncratic. The social and the personal, the shared and the individual, the sincerely believed and topics that get lip-service, exist on their own spectrums. They aren’t opposed to one another or collapsed into one another as the same thing.

A Note on Perspective-Taking and Heuristics in Ethnography What I have tried to do in this book is to present a vision of social life that can help orient studies somewhat away from the forces that give rise to conformity and more toward a vision of structures and forces that allow society to function as groups of individuals pursuing their own ends and agendas, based on their own heuristics. What makes these individualized worlds coherent with one another is the fact that they share an intersubjective environment in which things happen, and people talk about them. If there is no central culture to refer to, what allows Thais to comprehend one another? Instead of thinking of “culture” as a cloth knit from a single thread, the picture painted here describes it more as an animated chainmail mesh. Each link is independent, but connected to those around it, each pulling her connections in her own direction as people explore and interpret their worlds, her neighbors preventing her from moving too far out of line. This approach relies on a great deal of perspective-taking, and it raises questions about the relationships between ethnographers as perspective-takers living among other perspective-takers. When anthropologists arrive at their field sites, they participate in those environments themselves, seeing only the corners they are let into, hearing only the conversations they hear. Instead of entering a world defined by discourses that a well-trained social scientist can sniff out,

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they develop their own heuristics—usually based on a very different set of experiences from those of their subjects—and begin trying to figure out their new world using many of the same skills and tools that their subjects use. Of course, as many anthropologists have pointed out, there are generally enormous differences between ethnographers and their subjects, and those differences matter. The politics that play a role in anthropology continue to be explored. But focusing exclusively on the differences can produce a distorting effect in the ways that anthropologists think about their relationships with the people they study as well. Some ontological anthropologists, for example, argue that the goal of the field is to study the “radical alterity” of our subjects (e.g., Henare et al. 2007: 10). One way to read this claim is to say that we should be open to seeing entirely different ways of being from what we expect. But another way—one that has been employed often in recent years—is to assume that human existences are constructed so differently from one another that mutual comprehension is not possible. And yet, as Vigh and Sausdahl (among others) point out, anthropology is always based on the idea that anthropologists share some aspects of their realities with their subjects (2014). The emphasis on difference, maintained by imposed conformity to different standards, has done something interesting to the practice of anthropology. Although perspective-taking is necessary for our research, the field has given ­ ­preference for the idea of radical difference. As a result, we have ended up with a tendency to place a high value on the sorts of ethnographic skills that produce the political and structural insights that come from Foucauldian and Bourdieuian analyses, while downplaying the importance of cognitive empathy both among the people anthropologists study and among anthropologists themselves. The differences between most lifelong residents of Bangkok, when compared to the difference with anthropologists from the other side of the world, must be very slight. But ethnographers rely on the commonalities, and the ability to learn to take other perspectives, that make ethnography possible, even if complete comprehension is not. The abilities to read classrooms and teach effectively, to write clearly for an audience, to understand different views among members of our own societies (as this is necessary, at

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the very least, to understand how to respect them in terms they find meaningful), and to bring the perspective-taking skills that make good research possible into their own lives may be valuable on the personal level and should, ideally, carry more weight in the field as well.

The End As far as I know, Chatri’s search for the solace his family could not give him continues unabated. When we last spoke, he had turned largely to foreigners to find love and then turned away again. Instead of hoping others would offer him the empathy he feels he needs to alleviate the pain that stays just below the surface, he decided to adopt some of what he saw as “Western” ways himself. At that point, he was beginning to rewrite, self-consciously, his narratives about the good life. Instead of seeking a Westerner to comfort him, he had decided to attempt to Westernize himself. The evening before I left Bangkok and returned to live in California, Chatri put on a little going-away party. Shortly before, he and the six or seven nieces and nephews whom he supervised had bought what must have been a very large amount of plywood and crème-colored paint, and rented, for 24 hours, some power tools. Making due with the materials he could find and the models he knew, he and his family had stayed up all night and half the next day and built a suite of ­Western-style furniture: a cupboard, a number of shelving units with small cubbies, not unlike the ones one finds holding folded shirts or travel accessories in department stores, and his prize possession—a dining table, which was surprisingly sturdy, considering it was made entirely of plywood. He served snacks (his favorite, “Fishy Nuts,” a commercially produced combination of peanuts and dried anchovies) as we sat at the table (and not on the floor, as Thais often do at home), drank wine (and not the whiskey that many Thais prefer), and he talked about the Dhamma. That evening, the notes he had prepared for the teenage nieces and nephews in his care took the form of a cautionary tale on the moral virtue of moderation. Excess and hubris opened one up to possession by ghosts, particularly the phi bop, which would devour one’s organs.

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Chatri was always trying new dialects and metaphors for solving his problems. Just as he built the objects in his room from plywood sheets, Chatri was trying to build his own life—placing and replacing the objects that filled his cultural environment, reconstructing his narratives by moving emotion and altering interpretations, and seeking a configuration that would end the train of suffering that was set in motion long before the day he washed his mother’s face and lit her pyre. He never finished the Dhamma talk, as the world continued to change. A substantial fire broke out in an illegal still behind the shanties in the lot next to Chatri’s building. As we attempted to reach different fire departments by phone from six stories up, the brewers and their neighbors doused and stomped it out. Gathered by the window, we all watched, silently, for once, as the last traces of smoke drifted up into the darkening tropical sky. Where his stories go next, I can’t say. At the time, though, the outline of his life was clear. When we last spoke, he was still going strong—still editing his stories and his dialects, still working, looking after his family, and still seeking that elusive concatenation of attitude and circumstance that will wash away his pain there in the never-ending, ever-changing heat, and the sound, and the light that is Bangkok.

Notes 1. If we could find one objective, verifiable answer, I would suggest, then the processes of seeking-and-creating meaning would be short-circuited and we would not actually be “human” in any way we would recognize today. 2. I am not arguing that the unconscious does not exist, or that it is irrelevant; that goes far beyond the scope of this book. The existence of the unconscious is a question I don’t want to take up here. 3. The second difference has to do with the frequency of a non-normative interpretation. The difference between a culturally constituted defense mechanism—a defense mechanism built into a culture, as Spiro defines it (1997: 90–135)—and a neurotic symptom is that, while neurotic symptoms are not accepted within a cultural environment, culturally

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constituted defense mechanisms are. This difference may or may not be significant to the individual—and it is up to the anthropologist to figure out how widespread and how significant such a reinterpretation is. Spiro developed the concept of the culturally constituted defense mechanism several decades ago and elaborated it most thoroughly in Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality (1997: 90–135). Spiro’s conception is quite similar to the conception of culturally sanctioned coping mechanisms employed here. Culturally constituted defense mechanisms are examples of coping strategies, but there are other strategies described here that would not fall into that category.

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Index

A

Accommodation 6, 126, 130, 132, 215, 256 Adorno, T. 223–225, 227, 230, 233 Advertising 239, 241 Alcoholics Anonymous 8, 74 Anderson, B. 107 Anthropocentric anthropology 49, 136, 253, 258, 259–260 definition 5 Appadurai, A. 226 Apperly, I. 131 Argument of the book-summary 31–34 Assimilation 6, 126, 256 B

Bader, C. 4 Bangkok 1, 218, 262 and advertising 220

and Buddhism 145 as incompletely capitalist 233 class system 145 Bartlett, F. 102 Behavioral environments 139 Belief 96, 106, 108 Belief-as-experienced 193 and suffering 201 vs. beliefs-as-explained 109 Belief-as-explained 112, 193, 226 in competition 220 vs. beliefs-as-experienced 109 Bourdieu, P. 6, 17, 18, 31, 45, 56, 91, 92, 104, 146, 184, 208 and procedural memories 19 practice theory elements 19–22 Bowring Treaty 243 Brahma 79 Briggs, J. 69

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. G. Carlisle, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change, Culture, Mind, and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49548-0

275

276     Index

Bruner, J. 23, 24, 29, 31, 35, 67, 71, 73, 87 Buddhadasa Bhikku 114, 200 Buddhist doctrine 66, 191, 198 and dependent origination 200 and emotion 178 and interrelation 77 and nirvana 200 and samsara 200 and wealth 232 Buehler, R. 102 C

Canonical forms 23 Capitalism 223, 224 Capps, L. 16, 71, 244, 245 Carlisle, S. previous works 5, 43, 54, 72, 76, 96, 103, 109 Cartesian dualism 37, 56, 107 Cassaniti, J. 155 Chainmail metaphor 153, 255, 259 Cheyne, J. 127 Chiang Mai 143 Child-rearing 169, 171 Coleman, S. 99, 106, 110 Commodity fetishism 222, 223, 247 and the culture industry 223 as a belief-as-explained 242 narratives about 222 problematic 225 Thai context 226 Constitutive model of reality 93 Constructivism 102, 242, 258 Consumerism 218, 222 Conway, M. 101 Corporal punishment 170, 179 Cultural ecosystems 160, 254 Cultural laboratories 10, 215, 216, 253

D

D’Andrade, R. 78 Dark side 194 Davidson, D. 40, 188 Dawkins, R. 107 Deakin, W. 223 Declarative memory 19 Defense mechanisms 243, 257 Dependent origination 200 Desjarlais, R. 9, 13 Dhamma. See Buddhist doctrine Dhammakaya 249 Dialects 124, 132, 137 Discourse theory 56 Displacement 243, 258 Dominant stories 246 Doxa 20, 92, 105 DSM 16, 156 Dunbar, R. 71 Duranti, A. 13, 54, 138 Durkheim, E. 4, 9, 119, 125, 256 E

Emotion 103, 114 and danger 211 and expression of 178, 234 and intimate relationships 185 and knowing 78 and self control 179 Episodic memory 22, 257 as feeling true 23 Epley, N. 17, 131 Epston, D. 16, 30, 245, 246, 251 Escapism 223 Evers, H. 242 Ewen, S. 223, 224, 230 Exchange value 224 and sacrifice value 234

Index     277

Experienced-propositional beliefs 96 Experimentation 10

Grand Hyatt Erawan shrine 79 Greed 221

F

H

Farrell, F. 55 Figured worlds 8 First-person predisposition 150, 240 and selves 32 Forgetting 101 Foucauldian, M. early thought 57 Foucault, M. 16, 57, 206 Froese, P. 4

Habitus 19 like narrative complex 31 Halbwachs, M. 101 Hall, S. 56 Hallowell, A. 138, 139 Hardening the heart 205, 206 Harmonization 125, 132 Hastiness 145, 221, 242, 249 Haug, W. 223 Heidegger, M. 56 Henare, A. 260 Hengsuwan, M. 142 Heterodoxy 21 Hexis 19 Hierarchical categorization 132 Hirst, P. 56 Hollan, D. 4, 9, 11, 47, 102, 116, 258 Holland, D. 3, 7–8, 57, 74 Horkheimer, M. 223 Hornborg, A. 57 Human nature and capitalism 224, 225, 236 and -instead 211 and sharing emotions 166 as heuristic 216 as intuitive and emotional 144 complimentary conceptions of 212 in Nirvanic Buddhism 201 redefining 149 used to evaluate stories 150 visions of as social products 152 Hungry ghost 143

G

Garro, L. 8, 153 Geertz, C. 119 Ghosts 2, 140 and emotion 211 and fear 166 as perceptible 141 attacks 166 childlike 123, 130 how to identify presence of 142 Mae Nak 143 phi-ahm 128, 130 phi-bop 36, 142 phi-braed 143 phi tai hong 143 phi tai hong tong klom 143 Thai ideas of 141 Ghost stories 126, 147 Gombrich, R. 200 Grammar 42, 151 Grammar rules as unspoken 82

278     Index

Hutchins, E. 155 Hypnopompic paralysis 127 I

Idealism 57 Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds 7–8 Insightful ignorance 139 -Instead angry 210 grief 162, 213 sadness 203 Internalization 69–71, 107, 117 Intersubjectivity 13 Intuition and knowing 114

grammar of 75 limited through negotiation 75 narrative reasoning 67 types 72 Khon 51, 163, 176, 177, 193, 197 and capitalism 233 and consumerism 221 and rieproi behavior 180 and wet-rice cultivation 164 as complimentary to the manut 208 definition 164 described 164 Kondo, D. 57 Korff, R. 242 Kundera, M. 100 L

J

James, W. 11 Jit-witaya (psychology) 202 Johnson, A. 143 K

Kaluli 74 Kammatic Buddhism 191 Karma 66, 143 as just 67 as personal and universal 86 as self-evident 67 Karma stories 42 and balance sheets 94 and buffalo 65 and crabs 76 and emotion 103 and money 98

Laidlaw, J. 4, 9 Lambek, M. 87 Languages and metaphors 44 and vocabulary 43 as constitutive 68 as evolving 43 as ostensibly referential 69 as self-perpetuating 68 definition 38 grammar of 42 Levy, R. 190 Life-worlds 13, 111 Chatri’s 27 Lindquist, G. 99, 106, 110 Loftus, E. 102 Loftus, G. 102 Love 12, 25, 169 and emotional distance 187

Index     279

and gifts 238 and sacrifice 176, 177 Luhrmann, T. 155

Nirvanic Buddhism 163, 191 function 194 Nisbett, R. 78 Non-declarative memory 19

M

Mae Nak 143 Manut 51, 193, 197, 205 and consumerism 221 as complimentary to the khon 208 as defiled 217 in conflict with khon 162 Marsh, E. 18, 101, 138 Marx, K. 219, 223 Master narrative 16, 244, 245 Mattingly, C. 3, 9, 10, 47, 215 Mauss, M. 237, 238 McDaniel, J. 143 Meditation 77, 114 Metaphors 44, 215 Monastic life 161 Mulder, N. 231 N

Narrative definition 22 Narrative complex 71, 109 and selves 33 as constitutive 29 definition 24 example 27 like habitus 31 Narrative therapy 257 Narrative thinking 30 Needham, R. 106 Neo-Orientalism 232

O

Obeyesekere, G. 70, 84, 153, 199 Obligation 249 Ochs, E. 16, 44, 71, 128, 245 Ontological anthropology 260 Orthodoxy 92 P

Panyananda Bhikku 169, 170, 180, 188 Paradigmatic thinking 30 Parish, S. 9, 10, 189 Passing theories 35, 40 significance of 41 Payutto, P. 77, 231, 232 Person-centered anthropology 7, 9, 257 and anthropocentrism 9 Perspective-taking 15, 17, 131–132, 135, 151, 154, 255, 259, 261 vs. radical difference 260 Phenomenological anthropology 13–14 Phillips, H. 188 Piaget, J. 57, 125, 126 Pinch of destiny 11, 25 Pleydell-Pearce, C. 101 Potter, J. 164, 165, 194 Pouillon, J. 110 Prasithrathsint, A. 142 Prawase W. 231

280     Index

Procedural memory 19 cognitive vs. motor-skill 21 Projection 258 Q

Quinn, N. 11, 153 R

Rajsuddhinanamongkol, Phra 81 Referential ideology 247 Referential model of reality 93 Rieproi 181 Robbins, J. 9 Rorty, R. 3, 45, 57, 73, 107, 215 and objective truth 44 criticism 39, 55–57 summary 37–40 Ross, M. 102

Sleep paralysis. See Hypnopompic paralysis Smith, R. 44, 128 Sociocentric anthropology 5, 11 Sperber, D. 110, 111 Spiro, M. 70, 191, 192, 199, 203, 207, 213, 262 Strauss, C. 11, 153 Stromberg, P. 4, 92, 112, 116, 247 Sulak, S. 217, 220–223, 227, 229, 231, 239, 249 activism 227 plan for Thailand 249–251 Surtees, A. 131 Swearer, D. 227 Symbols personal and public 84 Synchronization 71–72, 117 T

S

Sacrifice value 51, 234 and exchange value 235 Samsara 200 Sapir, E. 44, 137, 155, 159 Satisficing 131, 132, 255 Sausdahl, D. 260 Schieffelin, E. 4, 6, 74, 116 Scott, R. 232 Seeing Dhamma 114 Semantic memory 19, 257 and the habitus 19 as iffy proposition 23 Shore, B. 54, 69, 132, 135, 149, 155 Simon, G. 96, 119 Sincerity 97

Talhelm, T. 165 Tambiah, S. 192, 203, 207, 221 Taussig, M. 223 Taylor, C. 44, 106, 114, 128 Teenagers 129 Thongchai W. 249 Throop, C. 9, 13, 69 Tobin, J. 188 Tulving, E. 18, 21–23 Turner, V. 69 U

Unique outcomes 246 Use value 224 and sacrifice value 234

Index     281 V

Vaillant, G. 206 Vigh, H. 260 Vygotsky, L. 69

White, M. 16, 30, 245, 246, 251 Wu, D. 188 Wyatt, D. 243 Z

W

Wallace, A. 4, 154 Wet-rice cultivation 164 and interdependence 165

Zigon, J. 11, 47, 54, 56, 138