Embodied Devotion and Gendered Labor: Ritual, Healing, and the Arts in Thai Buddhism and Beliefs

Type

Single Panel

Schedule

Session 6
Wed 12:00-13:30 Sala J. J. Linz

Convener

Chawarote Valyamedhi National Chengchi University

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Papers

Between the Living and the Divine: the ritual embodiment of death and rebirth in Southeast Asian spirit mediumship in Singapore and Thailand Atsuko Fukuura Shiga University
This paper explores the ritual process of death and rebirth as enacted through spirit mediumship in Singapore and Thailand, focusing on the Nine Emperor Gods Festival and Thaipusam. Drawing on Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality and communitas, I analyze how the body of the spirit medium becomes a ritual site where divine and human realms intersect. During the festivals, mediums pierce their bodies with long needles and other ritual instruments — acts that devotees often interpret as demonstrations of pain or devotion. Yet, for the mediums themselves, these acts represent a symbolic death: their personal consciousness is suspended as the divine presence takes possession of their bodies. In this state of ritual non-existence, the body becomes an instrument of the gods. When the festival concludes, both the medium and the community experience renewal — a rebirth that restores social and cosmic order. Through this ethnographic study, I argue that spirit mediumship reveals how ritual pain and embodiment negotiate the boundaries between life, death, and divine transformation in contemporary Southeast Asia.
The Mother Buddha of Southern Thailand: Ritual, Narrative, and Community in Lak Phra Chawarote Valyamedhi National Chengchi University
The Lak Phra procession of southern Thailand offers a distinctive lens for examining the relationship between Buddhist cosmology, material culture, and communal ritual. Although canonical traditions portray the Buddha through the physical ideal of the mahāpuruṣa (Great Man) and praise him in liturgical language as mahākaruṇiko nātho (the Great Compassionate Protector), standing Buddha images in several southern Thai communities are ritually addressed as “Mae” (Mother) and endowed with maternal identities. This paper examines how such maternal personhood emerges despite canonical representations of the Buddha as male.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025 in Nakhon Si Thammarat, Songkhla, and Phatthalung, the study combines participant observation during Lak Phra processions with interviews with monks, artisans, float builders, elders, and laywomen, as well as visual analysis of ritual images and temple materials. The analysis engages Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, Victor Turner’s notion of liminality and communitas, and Stanley Tambiah’s work on charisma and ritual participation.

The paper argues that the maternalization of Buddha images emerges when three conditions converge: female patronage or lineage dedication, narrative frameworks that link the image to stories of female virtue or sacrifice, and communal continuity through the annual Lak Phra procession. Through repeated acts of naming, ornamenting, carrying, and addressing the image as Mae, ritual practice stabilizes maternal sacred personhood across generations. In this process, maternalized Buddha images become important vehicles of female religious agency, allowing laywomen to shape sacred meaning and communal memory within the Buddhist framework of the Fourfold Assembly.
Resurrecting Lan Na Religiosity: Northern Thai Monks and Transnational Devotees Kazuo Fukuura Toin University of Yokohama
This study examines the religious practices of Theravada Buddhist monks in Northern Thailand and their transnational networks, focusing on the performativities of ritual enactments and communalities created beyond boundaries of states and ethnicities. Northern Thai Buddhism has been deeply rooted in the historical Lan Na Kingdom (13-20C): it uniquely integrates ritualistic and magical elements, such as the manipulation of saiyasat (magical knowledge) based on the belief in ‘Spirit of Master’ (phi khu), and these practices continue to shape local religious identity. This study examines how Northern Thai monks engage with transnational devotees, particularly in Singapore and Taiwan, through case studies of their religious communities and ritual practices. The case studies illustrate the dynamic relationships between monks and devotees and the role of charismatic figures such as Khruba Inkham, whose legacy sustains strong transnational ties. Finally, this study aims to shed light on the situated agencies produced by monks and their transnational devotees in the context of religious cultural efflorescence and appropriation in multicultural settings, as well as the influence of global capitalism on the choice of faith to re-evaluate the power and significance of religious practices and ritualism in contemporary Asia.
Thai Massage Lanna (northern Thailand) : Development, Rituality and Performance of a Traditional Art of Healing (kan silapa raksa) Louis Jarrige EHESS (CASE)
This paper examines communities that have developed around Thai massage since the 1960s in the Chiang Mai district, to show how this traditional medical field has been reconfigurated as a site of cultural promotion and is recognized as an art (silapa). The history of the Lanna massage tradition is closely linked to Master Ajhan Sinthom, who trained at Wat Pho in Bangkok and returned to Chiang Mai in 1962 to found the Old Traditional Medical Hospital, the second massage school in Thailand. Since the 2000s, local public policies have helped structure a network of practitioners under the label “Lanna Hub”. This community gathers annually at the Lanna Expo, where the “Lanna Wellness Quarter” stages performances of massage and culminates in a ritual of homage to the masters (wai kru). Drawing on fieldwork among these communities, I analyze the articulation between performances (kan-sadeign) and ritual practices, bringing together different actors : massage workers, political representatives and ritual masters.

At the local level, rituals and perfomances take place in knowledge centers where practitioners honor local masters (kuba ajhan) and perform northern-thai folkloric techniques such as hammer massage (tok-sen) and fire massage (yam- khang). At a broader scale, these practices are staged in public events such as Traditional Medicine Day dedicated to King Rama III and the UNESCO Thai massage celebrations in Bangkok. I analyze the ritual logics of wai kru through the figure of Jiwok (a founding figure of Buddhist medicine), his relation to hermit traditions (rishii), and his association with Ganesh. I argue, therefore, that these ritual and performative configurations contribute to positioning Lanna massage as a specific component of the art of healing (kan silapa raksa) within Thai traditional medicine (phaet-phaen thai).
Sounding Faith: Soundscape and the Cultural Production of Belief in Luang Pho Than Chai Worship at Wat Phra That Doi Kham, Chaing Mai Province Nayos Sartjinpong Bangkokthonburi University
This research aims to study the context of the “soundscape” as a mechanism that facilitates the expression of faith and belief in the divine power of Luang Pho Than Chai at Wat Phra That Doi Kham, Chiang Mai Province. A qualitative research methodology was employed, utilizing observation, fieldwork, and in-depth interviews to collect and categorize data. The study explains the role of sound in worship practices.

The findings indicate that devotees visiting the temple have a strong intention to pray and make vows, offering jasmine flowers upon the fulfillment of their wishes. This behavior reflects a socially constructed and shared belief system, creating a soundscape within the sacred space through repeated practices. The soundscape plays a role in constructing and shaping the experiential perception of faith, comprising key dimensions: ritual sounds, emotional sounds, bodily sounds, sounds from labor and public communication, and environmental sounds. These elements work together to tangibly reproduce sacredness.

Ritual sounds reinforce confidence in prayers; emotional sounds reflect the relationship between devotees and the sacred; bodily and labor-related sounds facilitate the ritual process; and environmental sounds support the overall experience. The findings suggest that rituals, the body, and labor are not separate entities but function collaboratively through sound as practices that materially manifest faith. Sound is therefore not merely an echo, but a crucial condition for the formation and perception of sacred spaces. Without the auditory dimension, faith cannot fully exist at the experiential level.

This research proposes that contemporary Buddhism should be considered through the lens of sound, revealing that faith is a cultural process emerging from physical, emotional, and labor-related practices in everyday life, rather than being solely an internal belief of individuals.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

This panel explores how Buddhist ritual, gendered labor, and artistic practice converge in Southeast Asia’s living religious landscapes. Focusing on Thailand’s northern and southern regions, the papers examine how lay practitioners, healers, monks, and women’s communities perform the sacred through bodily discipline, craft, and affective devotion — transforming everyday work into ritual art. Drawing on ethnographic and historical approaches, the panel highlights how ritual action materializes Buddhist virtue, how women’s devotional labor sustains community merit-making, and how traditional healing arts are reframed as cultural heritage in contemporary Thailand.

The discussion is grounded in three complementary theoretical perspectives: Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, Stanley Tambiah’s performative approach to ritual, and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. Following Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990; Bodies That Matter, 1993), gender is understood not as a stable identity but as a process enacted through repeated bodily and ritual acts. In the Laak Phra festival of Nakhon Si Thammarat, the naming of Buddha images as female (Phra Mae) and women’s collective labor in making ritual sweets constitute performative acts that reproduce and reconfigure gendered piety within a communal frame. Many of these women explicitly state that they make sweets because they are women, revealing gender not as an imposed role but as a felt moral habitus in Bourdieu’s sense — an embodied disposition shaped by Buddhist notions of merit and care.

In Tambiah’s terms (A Performative Approach to Ritual, 1979; The Buddhist Saints of the Forest, 1984), such gestures — mixing, molding, and offering — are performative actions that make merit real, producing both spiritual efficacy and communal solidarity. Through Bourdieu’s framework (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977; Distinction, 1979), gendered ritual labor and embodied skill also generate symbolic and cultural capital: women’s competence becomes a source of moral prestige, while in northern Thailand the disciplined bodily gestures of Lanna massage practitioners ritualize healing and transform technical mastery into institutional legitimacy and heritage capital. Together, these frameworks reveal how gendered performance, ritual efficacy, and embodied knowledge intersect to produce new hierarchies of sacred authority and cultural value in Buddhist Southeast Asia.