Stranger diviners and their stranger clients: Popular cosmology-making and its kingly power in Buddhist Thailand

Abstract

Marshall Sahlins argues that kings are ‘stranger kings’, as they typically originate from outside their kingdom or from the celestial realms. He advances that kings draw authority precisely from an ability to appropriate a geographic and cosmological Other for the benefit of their subjects. With this article, I propose that, in contemporary Thailand, a kingdom ruled by a Buddhist monarch, this defining ability of kings spreads to commoners. An ethnographic study of diviners (mo du) and their clients (luk kha) in Bangkok reveals that Thai Buddhists routinely make cosmologies. Such cosmology-making entails appropriating foreign and divine forms of knowledge in the manner of kings. I argue that this phenomenon allows commoners to master the idioms of power of Thai Buddhist kingship. This results in tensions between commoners, and places them in an ambiguous relationship with the monarchic state.

• Buddhist kingship
• kingship
• religion and neoliberalism
• Sahlins
• stranger kings
• Thai astrology

Notes

Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article draws from research conducted during my doctoral studies at SOAS, University of London. This received generous financial support from SOAS, University of Cambridge, École Française d'Extrême-Orient and Chulalongkorn University.

1. For an exhaustive discussion on the epistemological and ethical implications of this methodological choice, refer to Siani (2017: 10–18).

2. Borrowed from Thai academic contexts, the title ‘ajan’, ‘teacher’, is widely used by divination practitioners in Bangkok.

3. My role as a foreign divination practitioner is less exceptional than one may expect. During my period of fieldwork, I met two India-born and one China-born diviners, who live and operate in Bangkok. I also learned of an American ‘marketing guru’ on a tour to Thailand, who included tarot card readings in ‘personality development’ seminars organized in a hotel in the downtown.

4. Writing about the Ok of Highland New Guinea, Barth (1987) argued that factors that contribute to ‘cosmological variation’ are: the secrecy that characterizes the transmission of knowledge from master to pupil during ritual, which makes it necessary for the latter to fill in the gaps creatively; the ways in which different pupils interpret the information, on the basis of their own sensitivity and knowledge; the empirical trials by which pupils perfect their own cosmological views; and the dynamics of personal trust and affiliation that form between pupils and charismatic teachers.

5. I suspect that rural Thai Buddhists are equally exposed to ideas from the ‘outside world’, also through labour abroad and romantic relationships with foreigners (see Keyes, 2012).

6. Predictably, the canonical division of the Buddhist cosmos into three worlds and various other realms, prescribed by cosmological treaties like the Trai Phum (Reynolds and Reynolds, 1982), is not held by my research participant.

7. Taming the skies for ensuring an abundant rainfall is of course another classical ability of stranger kings (see Sahlins, 2014: 153–154).

8. Thai astrology uses, for instance, the 12 Houses (phop) of the Brahminic tradition. Different schools have recently included Uranus and, in some variations, Neptune and Pluto from the Western tradition.

9. See Siani (2017: 70–92). For an overview of the stigma connected to claims of embodied divinity in the context of Thai spirit mediumship, see White (2005).

10. My teacher opened up regarding the existence of embodied deities to me only after my formal training as a diviner, and as I began taking on clients (see Siani, 2017: 81–84).

11. An exception to this is the yi-jing practitioners that were studied ethnographically by Matthews (2016) in urban China, who claim to divine uniquely by means of a learned technique.

12. Cook (1989: 29) also notes that, in the 1980s, the most popular divinatory disciplines following astrology were numerology and palmistry. There is no mention of cards-based techniques in her doctoral thesis on Thai astrology, nor in Wales’ (1983) overview of divination. Rujikarn (2016: 286) found that today palmistry is clients’ most preferred discipline, followed by Thai astrology, ‘Lek 7 Tua’ (a discipline that uses the ‘100 years’ Thai lunar calendar), tarot cards and feng shui.

13. As noted by Cook (1989: 53), Thai astrology has long been part of the court education for princes.

14. The charges were dropped by the public prosecutor in 2012 ( Prachathai, 2012).