A Spirit Map of Bangkok: Spirit Shrines and the City in Thailand

Authors

  • Andrew A. Johnson Yale-NUS College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.v28i3.28434

Keywords:

Buddhism, Thailand, urban religion, hybridity, the city, mediumship, spirits

Abstract

As many scholars of Thai Buddhism have shown, Thailand’s religious sphere incorporates animist and Brahminist elements into a new fusion. But this religious system is not seamless, rather it rests upon internal contradiction and division, between upper and lower class, rural and urban. Alongside the of?cial spirit shrines devoted to the Thai state and the continued progress and expansion of the city, via an analysis of urban spirit cults, I address the unexpected irruption of nature, death, and accident into the planned urban cityscape. Here, I examine one nocturnal pilgrimage by a spirit medium and her devotees across Bangkok’s spiritual cityscape. I ask what this ‘spirit map’ of Bangkok opens up for analysis in the context of those areas of Bangkok swallowed up by its continuous expansion, and address the nature of urban religious aspirations for her and her spirit’s devotees. Ultimately, drawing from Bhabha’s idea of hybridity, I argue that this medium’s Bangkok presents a challenge to established hierarchies of power, a challenge that focuses on the unusual (e.g. accident sites) as evidence for the appearance of the transcendent.

Author Biography

  • Andrew A. Johnson, Yale-NUS College
    Andrew Alan Johnson is one of the inaugural faculty members of Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He writes about Thai popular religion, non-Western urbanisms, precarity and migration, and his work has been published in numerous journals including American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology. He is the author of Ghosts of the New City (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), and as he wraps up his fieldwork on the dams in the Mekong, he is beginning work on his second book, The Shadow of Sayaboury. Outside of academic work, he has served as a translator for Pratchatai magazine, and his commentary has appeared in the Straits Times and Harpers Magazine.

Published

2016-01-18

How to Cite

Johnson, A. A. (2016). A Spirit Map of Bangkok: Spirit Shrines and the City in Thailand. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 28(3), 293-308. https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.v28i3.28434

Most read articles by the same author(s)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 > >>