Everyday Care and Precarity: Buddhaghosa and Thai Social Story-Making

ABSTRACT

In this article, Buddhaghosa’s fifth century philosophy provides a productive framework for deciphering contemporary social caregiving in Thailand. In particular, his work and the tradition it inspired helps bring forth a local theory of mind and related narrative forms that, when utilized in examination of group patterns of interaction, illuminate the intertwining of care and precarity in everyday practices of providing for others. In turn, I call for experimentation in anthropological storytelling, including ensemble work, to ensure that habits of professional practice do justice to the care manifest in the precarious conditions in which anthropologists so often engage.

KEYWORDS:

• Thailand
• care
• narrative
• pace
• precarity

Acknowledgments

Research for this study was approved by the Harvard University Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research (Application Number: F16442-101) and the Stanford University Panel on Non-Medical Human Subjects (eProtocol #36980 and IRB registrant #349). Special thanks to Sonya Atalay, Sandra Hyde, Sharon Kaufman, Emily Ng, and Matt Yoxall.

Notes

1. The Mind & Spirit Project took a mixed method, multiphase approach, combining participant observation, long form semi-structured interviews, quantitative surveys among the general population and local undergraduates, and psychological experiments with children and adults. We worked in five different countries: China, Ghana, Thailand, Vanuatu, and the US, with some work in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In each country, we included a focus on an urban charismatic evangelical church, with additional work in a rural charismatic evangelical church, and in another urban and rural religious setting of local importance. For Thailand, the local majority in both the city and the countryside were Theravada Buddhists. While this is far too general a category to be meaningful at face value, in practice we matched Buddhists to their Christian counterparts in age and neighborhood and general class standing. It is worth noting that what have been deemed “spirit cults” are subsumed by Theravada Buddhism in the Thai national imagination (see Endres and Lauser 2012), and questions about God were paralleled with Buddhists largely through questions about spirits and other “supernatural” entities along with other Buddhist religious attainments.

2. Perhaps it is a remnant of a misplaced hierarchy of value that scholars (anthropologists included) can seamlessly draw on Aristotle (384–322 BC), Augustine (354–430 AD), and Kant (1724–1804) to wrestle with contemporary theoretical concerns around the world, but rarely reach in the same way to Gautama Buddha (563–483 BC or 480–400 BC), Buddhaghosa (401–500 AD) and Ledi Sayadaw (1846–1923) as thinkers, philosophers, and theorists of the self and the social world.

3. There is a long tradition of phenomenological anthropology upon which I build (see Desjarlais and Throop 2011). In the continental philosophy tradition, phenomenology is a lineage founded by Husserl in the early 20th century. Husserl (1970) sought to investigate the “anonymous subjectivity” presumed by the natural sciences. Husserl’s “bracketing” (or the “phenomenological epoche”) was conceived as a trained process of suspending judgment of the world from our programmed or preconceived “natural attitude” in order to apprehend subjective experience. I take this as a cue to home in on the processes by which human attention is trained in the social world. Perhaps one could say I seek analysis of “natural attitudes” in particular contexts, in order to decenter Christian and Euro-American ideas of care and intersubjectivity.

4. In a similar fashion overall, Therevada thought is, as Just McDaniel (2008) calls it, a “living episteme”: that its texts are spread unevenly, taken up in different ways and expounded upon variably across time and place, is itself an extension of the philosophy.

5. See Cassaniti (2015) for more on “hot” (rawn) as opposed to “cool” (yen) emotional valence and their corresponding social value.

6. A recent Cultural Anthropology Hot Spots provides a survey of the challenges of the recent sociopolitical landscape (Aulino et al. 2014).

7. Kleinman and colleagues (1997) suggested something similar with their omnibus term “social suffering,” which in part identifies the suffering that stems from systems of care intended, ironically, to ameliorate suffering.

8. Stories from the Dhammapada collection are similarly relevant. Heim reflects their common theme: “In one story of the past from the Dhammapada collection, a king of Benares is said to make a careful examination of his thoughts, words, and deeds to discover if he had been guilty of any fault. He sees nothing problematic but reflects that ‘a person never sees his own faults; it takes other persons to see them,’ and so he roams his kingdom in disguise to learn what people say about him” (Heim 2014:206). The moral highlights the importance of following advice, again suggesting a pattern of following the dictates of those with revered qualities.

9. I am indebted to Heim for rendering accessible the patterning of this historical form of storytelling. Future research might consider a wider swath of Thai storytelling, including its “plurilinearity” (Nakwatchara 2004).

10. Byron Good (1994) footnotes Alton Becker (1979) in regards to plot forms in Javanese shadow theater: “Becker, in an analysis of the ‘textual coherence’ of the Javanese shadow theatre or wayang, defines plot as ‘a set of constraints on the selection and sequencing of dramatic episodes or motifs’ (1979:216–217). He goes on to demonstrate that the constraints that structure the wayang differ quite dramatically from those identified by Aristotle as characteristics of tragic drama. His analysis suggests the importance of cultural differences in narrative structure” (Good 1994:2014, 204–5 fn 16). Good claims this expands the definition of plot beyond what he finds useful for western illness narratives, his central focus. Yet in a Thai group setting, such plot constraints become vital for analysis.

11. Wilson (2008) provides an example of a single-authored work that takes ceremonial group practice and ancestral commitments into primary consideration.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Harvard Sinclair Kennedy Fund, and the Templeton Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Felicity Aulino

Felicity Aulino is a five-college assistant professor of Anthropology based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.