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DTSTAMP:20260604T070100
UID:euroseas-2026-embodied-devotion-and-gendered-labor-ritual-healing-and-the-arts-in-thai-buddhism-and-beliefs
SUMMARY:Embodied Devotion and Gendered Labor: Ritual, Healing, and the Arts in Thai Buddhism and Beliefs
LOCATION:Sala J. J. Linz
DESCRIPTION:This panel explores how Buddhist ritual, gendered labor, and ar
 tistic practice converge in Southeast Asia’s living religious landscapes. F
 ocusing on Thailand’s northern and southern regions, the papers examine how
  lay practitioners, healers, monks, and women’s communities perform the sac
 red through bodily discipline, craft, and affective devotion — transforming
  everyday work into ritual art. Drawing on ethnographic and historical appr
 oaches, the panel highlights how ritual action materializes Buddhist virtue
 , how women’s devotional labor sustains community merit-making, and how tra
 ditional healing arts are reframed as cultural heritage in contemporary Tha
 iland.\n\nThe discussion is grounded in three complementary theoretical per
 spectives: Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, Stanley Tambiah’s per
 formative approach to ritual, and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capi
 tal. Following Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990; Bodies That Matter, 1993), gen
 der 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 Th
 ammarat, the naming of Buddha images as female (Phra Mae) and women’s colle
 ctive labor in making ritual sweets constitute performative acts that repro
 duce and reconfigure gendered piety within a communal frame. Many of these 
 women explicitly state that they make sweets because they are women, reveal
 ing 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 ca
 re.\n\nIn Tambiah’s terms (A Performative Approach to Ritual, 1979; The Bud
 dhist Saints of the Forest, 1984), such gestures — mixing, molding, and off
 ering — are performative actions that make merit real, producing both spiri
 tual efficacy and communal solidarity. Through Bourdieu’s framework (Outlin
 e of a Theory of Practice, 1977; Distinction, 1979), gendered ritual labor 
 and embodied skill also generate symbolic and cultural capital: women’s com
 petence becomes a source of moral prestige, while in northern Thailand the 
 disciplined bodily gestures of Lanna massage practitioners ritualize healin
 g and transform technical mastery into institutional legitimacy and heritag
 e capital. Together, these frameworks reveal how gendered performance, ritu
 al efficacy, and embodied knowledge intersect to produce new hierarchies of
  sacred authority and cultural value in Buddhist Southeast Asia.
URL:https://euroseas2026.org/panels/embodied-devotion-and-gendered-labor-ritual-healing-and-the-arts-in-thai-buddhism-and-beliefs
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Madrid:20260902T120000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Madrid:20260902T133000
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