University of Virginia Library

1
INTRODUCTION: THE PARTICULAR
AND THE GENERAL

Fig. 1 Map of Thailand, showing natural regions and place-names

A Thai village is not an island by itself; it is part of a wider network of
social relationships and it is embedded in a civilization.

Following the method of study usually employed by anthropologists, I
describe the religious practices and rituals of the people in a small-scale
universe studied at first hand. But my objective in writing the book is not
simply to give an ethnographic description of the exotic religious customs
of a strange village in a remote corner of the world; it is to use the particular
to say something general. By this I do not mean that the village in Northeast
Thailand which I describe is `representative' of every other village
in the country or some such atomistic statistical assertion, but that insofar
as this village is embedded in a civilization and has participated in history
and has shared cultural elements with other villages, the structural
properties and the processes that characterize its present religious system
may reveal features which are of general import. What I have in mind
is nicely stated by Postan (in his Inaugural Lecture, 1939, p. 34) provided
we substitute `anthropological' for `historical': `Microscopic problems
of historical research can and should be made macrocosmic—capable of
reflecting worlds larger than themselves. It is in this reflected flicker of
truth, the revelations of the general in the particular, that the contribution
of the historical method to social science will be found.'

The procedure by which I identify and describe religion is primarily
through ritual. Essentially I devote most of this book to dissecting and
then relating four ritual complexes that are enacted in a Thai village.
They are: rites performed by Buddhist monks and therefore labelled
`Buddhist'; sukhwan ritual, concerned with recalling the escaped spirit
essence of persons and performed by village elders; the cult of the guardian
spirits or deities of the village which has its own officiants (the cham and
tiam); and rites addressed to malevolent spirits that cause individual
illnesses, of which spirit possession is the most dramatic. These four
complexes dominate the religious field but do not exhaust it.

The anthropologist faces certain problems of contextualization and
delimitation in dealing with these ritual complexes. For example, the
Buddhist rites along with the instittuion of monkhood and the major

religious concepts that go with them, which are observed in the village
today, have a wider generality in both time and space. There is a history
of Buddhism from its origins in India until the present, and there is the
spatial existence of Theravada Buddhism (which primarily concerns us
here) not only throughout Thailand but also in the neighbouring countries
of Ceylon, Burma, Laos and Cambodia. These projections in time and space
also apply to much of the other ritual complexes, though not with the
same depth in time and spread in space as manifested by Buddhism. What
are the implications of this immense backdrop to the anthropologist's stage?

It could be said that the requirements of my exposition are three-dimensional:
to present the religion as a synchronic, ordered scheme of
collective representations; then on the one side to demonstrate how the
system of religious categories is woven into the institutional context and
social structure of the contemporary villagers; and on the other to relate
the same system to the grand Buddhist literary and historical tradition.

Let me deal with each of these aspects in turn.

It is right and proper for the anthropologist to assert that his first and
foremost task is to document the religion as the present-day subjects live
it and to understand it in terms of the subjects' own intellectual, moral
and affective categories (and thereafter to seek to construct a scheme of
interpretation which reveals the principles underlying the ideology and
behaviour he has witnessed and recorded).

In order to present a synchronic picture of village religion I have in
this book tried to see how the four ritual complexes are differentiated and
also linked together in a single total field. In respect of each ritual complex
—and of all four together—I try to elucidate how religious ideas and
constructs are ordered, what the symbolism and message contents of the
rites are, how the officiants are distinguished, and so forth. The focus
is on the contrastive features of the four cults or complexes as collective
representations, and in displaying these features I use four concepts:
opposition, complementarity, linkage, and hierarchy.

The framework and conceptual tools for my structural analysis of
ritual derive from many anthropologists (chief among whom are Radcliffe-Brown,
Lévi-Strauss, Leach, and Turner) and from other fields of
relevance to our subject (such as linguistics and information theory). In two
respects I can claim to have gone further than the previous contributions on
ritual. First, I have argued that, since much ritual includes the recitation
of words, we should perceive ritual as consisting of both `word and deed';
in any case since in Thai rituals the use of sacred words is an important
component, I have tried to interpret their role and the manner in which
they are integrated with ritual action.

A second deviation from the beaten path consists in the attempt to see
myth and ritual as two closely related domains and to examine their
dialectical relationship. Since Malinowski's `charter theory of myth' we
have had virtually no ethnographic analysis, let alone a fertile theoretical
formulation, of the relation between myth and ritual. Lévi-Strauss has
a marginal interest in the problem, but he has progressively become
concerned with myth as an autonomous realm of thought.

The relation between a collectivity of rituals seen as a system in its
own right (in terms of the arrangement of categories and symbols and
officiants) and the social structure and institutional environment of the
people who practise the religion is another matter. This has been in
the past, and still remains, an anthropological task par excellence. It is the
kind of special illumination that an anthropologist can provide by virtue
of his approach and method of study. In order to see this particular
linkage between ritual and society, it might at times be salutary for the
anthropologist working in South-east Asia consciously to ignore the
connections between his field data and the philosophical, doctrinal, and
literary aspects of civilization, so that he can all the better understand the
nexus between religious action and social context. This perspective is
arrestingly conveyed by Leach's phrase `practical religion', by which he
means not theological philosophy, often greatly preoccupied with the life
hereafter, but religion which is `concerned with the life here and now',
religion whose components are meaningful not only because of internal
coherence but also `because of their practical integration with the secular
life of the religious congregation' (Leach 1968b, pp. 1-3). This mode of
elucidation is the second major interest of this book.

The third dimension is the relation between religious belief and ritual
action observed in the field and the corpus of Buddhist literature composed
from classical times, that is, between the religious events of the present
and the grand historical events of Buddhist civilization. The study of
religion from this perspective is quasi-anthropological, in the sense of
demanding the skills and knowledge of other disciplines (e.g. Indology
and History of Religion) in addition to one's own.

Anthropologists have in recent years wrestled with this problem,
especially in respect of India. One school, stemming from Redfield and
his associates, formulated the question in terms of the relation and the
processes of interaction between two levels or entities—between the great
tradition of civilization and the little tradition of the village. This formulation
and others which have replaced it—such as Higher Sanskritic
Hinduism versus Lower Popular Hinduism—have been mistaken in two
important respects: first, insufficient regard was paid to the fact that the

great literary religious tradition is itself varied and has been both cumulative
and changing; secondly, it has for some curious reason not been seen that
contemporary live religion, even that observed in the village, incorporates
a great deal of the literary tradition. Brahman priests, Buddhist monks,
ritual experts and scribes in some measure deal with literary and oral
knowledge transmitted from the past and which they themselves systematically
transmit to their successors. And for the common people at
large such texts and knowledge have a referential and legitimating function,
even if they themselves have no direct access to them.

Thus in this book, wherever I have engaged in relating the present to
the past, I have used two concepts to describe the connection: continuities
and transformations. By continuities I mean the persistence of certain
structures or customs from the past into the present; and by transformations
I mean systematic changes in forms over time, both in the historical past
and between a structure in the past and that currently observed in the
village. A simple example is the institution of monkhood: there are certain
aspects of it which have been transmitted unbroken from the classical
past, and there are others that have shown systematic transformation.
Or again, a myth recorded in the village may have its classical literary
version (continuity); but the same myth seen in conjunction with a contemporary
ritual may show a new relation (transformation) not present
in the classical form.

Although one of my aims is to relate wherever helpful the religious
forms of the present to the literary and historical past, I should make it
clear in order to avoid misunderstanding that such relating is not systematically
followed, nor done in the manner of an Indologist, philosopher
or historian of religion. I do not examine the history of a doctrine for its
own sake, or that of a myth or religious institution. This is the province
of a specialist of a different kind. My primary reference point is always
contemporary village religion. Some aspect of it may be viewed in relation
to a classical institutional form and its changes, or may be illuminated by
consulting an older literary formulation, or its meaning enlarged by
a representation in classical architecture and sculpture. Thus the history
of and changes in Buddhist monastic life have interested me because they
illuminate monastic life in the village today; and the many facets of the
serpent symbol which appears in village myth are better discerned, and
an expansion of meaning accomplished, when its appearance in classical
architecture is scrutinized. It is only in this manner that I relate the
present to the past; the piecemeal nature of the past as it appears in this
book springs from the problems dictated by the events studied in the village.

A few words now on the logic of the sequence in which chapters are

presented. After some thought, it occurred to me that the most effective
strategy of presentation is to begin with the duality of village religion as
a contrapuntal theme—its present intactness and its historical roots—
and to suggest indirectly how the past lives in the present and the present
can at the same time be seen as a transformation of the past. The opening
chapters reveal the dialectical play between the present and the past.

Thus Chapter 2 introduces the village of Phraan Muan and its region
as it is today, and then in the second half paints a historical backdrop,
which tells us something of the grand historical events which must have
affected the region in which Phraan Muan exists.

Chapters 3 and 4 inject the contrapuntal theme in a slightly different
way, with Chapter 3 outlining the Buddhist cosmology as it has been
presented in Buddhist literary works, and Chapter 4 dealing with the
major religious categories of thought in village religion. I also introduce
the point—which will be illustrated in later chapters—that although the
classical cosmology may not be verbalized in the village it nevertheless
makes its appearance in village ritual.

Chapters 5 and 6 are intended to be historical introductions to early
Buddhist monasticism, and to the classical conception of a monk's way
of life and its relation to the way of life of a layman. Chapter 7 provides
the comparison and contrast by plunging us directly into the institution
of monkhood in contemporary village life. Thereafter the subsequent
chapters unfurl the many features of village religion in their variety,
intricacy and colourfulness—like a long Japanese scroll.

Although most of the time I deal with one tiny spot in the backwoods
of Thailand, I want it to be remembered that this spot and the whole
country in which it is located exist in a wider region of South-east Asian
societies which share many things in space and time. Therefore wherever
a comparative point can be appropriately made to aid understanding
I do so by referring to Burma, Ceylon, Cambodia or India. The value
of such a wide-ranging view (combined with a meticulous attention to
detail) was seen in the late seventeenth century by De la Loubère, who
so perceptively wrote about Siam: