Morris, Rosalind C.
2000 In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Body, Commodity, Text series. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Notes: ISBN: 0822325179Reviewed 21 Apr 2005 by:
Jim Taylor <james.taylor@adelaide.edu.au>
Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide, AustraliaMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Mediums - Thailand - Chiang Mai Region
Ethnology - Thailand - Chiang Mai Region
ABSTRACT: The place of spirit mediumship in Northern Thailand is located in the context of modernity and enduring signs of tradition and authority. Contrary to many accounts of increasing securalisation and rationalisation there is another side to modernity's experience marked by new forms of representation and changing subjectivity, the location of magic, and its intense religiosity in relation to secular and religio-political forms of power.
Recently I spent two years in Bangkok on a new project concerned with everyday forms of urban religiosity; exploring the variety of religious beliefs, practices, and related ôpractico-socialö arrangements (the term is LefebvreÆs). This interest started after a near-miss I had while driving in one of BangkokÆs new ôvillageö housing estates. As I was returning one day I drove into a small lane to encounter an oncoming Mercedes and only my quick-footed response averted a head on collision. The middle-aged, well-dressed resident fl‚neuse had both her hands well off the steering wheel in a two-handed praying gesture (wai) as she passed the housing estateÆs newly refurbished Brahmin locality shrine.Such an innocuous everyday event led to ongoing work on the significance and meaning of a (post-) modern urban religious context, where many writers argue in terms of increasing secularisation and rationalisation. But, as Morris correctly argues in her new book, if anything the opposite has happened. Since the 1990s there has been a resurgence of interest in the sacred and place-makings in tune with an increasingly dislocated contemporary society, a culture-on-the-move rethinking locality and meaning. This is reflected in the explosion of intense religious kitsch in recent times; religious imagery marked by an explicit and ordered or hierarchical difference imposed between reality and representation.
The ethnographic site of MorrisÆ book is Chiangmai û ThailandÆs second largest city û where feudal-like, modern and post-modern systems of production and consumption seem to co-exist, reflecting complex social formations that intersect in a unique cultural pastiche that for some is definitively (cultural) Lanna-thai rather than ôNorthern Thailandö. Historical representations, as ensconced in PhayaphromÆs nineteenth century love poem, are never far from the imagination. It is the new nature of ChiangmaiÆs centrality in relation to the state that is crucial as a background to the discussion. The city (and urban spatiality) is contrasted with the ensemble of ideas and practices of the countryside (or rurality), though there are continuing mediations at work redefining the relationship of urban life to country life through various symbols and representations (ideological and imaginary).
For those readers not familiar with the text of PhayaphromÆs love poem (this reviewer included), its inclusion would have been useful at the beginning of the discussion. The reader gets a strong impression of the person, not so much what he has to say in the poem and its recurring themes. It is only as the narrative progresses towards the end of the first chapter that the discussion starts to come together and PhayaphromÆs loss, his displacement (out-of-place), and nostalgia, are more clearly understood.
In the post-modern reading of Thai society, it could be argued that much of its religious tradition and history has become increasingly redundant (Morris, p.216). In a reinterpretation of tradition and history, time, as Benjamin noted, has been radically spatialised û even arguably now made redundant. This decoding of taken-for-granted systematic linear matrices was undertaken in order to reclaim, demystify and re-present tradition and history as montage. Morris clearly does this with full effect challenging assumptions about the real/original. Indeed, todayÆs world presents the ultimate in copying, imitation and reproduction. In a cultural milieu where reality is increasingly undermined, nostalgia becomes significant, causing a frantic production of the real, and of the referential. As Morris shows, nostalgia and parody may well be all that remain.
Chiangmai, like Bangkok, is a mega-site for the bodyÆs cultural saturation, imploding in the religious domain in a multiplicity of everyday encounters and experiences that æholds us intimately, from the insideÆ (Leulliliot in de Certeau, et. al. 1998, p.3). But the culturally unique Chiangmai, as Morris points out, is also a dissociated and dislocated place, where modernity fleetingly meets an oft-revoked historical consciousness, and then recedes, in a nostalgic reworking that is both loss and imagined cultural reconstitution.
The centre stage is around the spectacular performances of contemporary mediums in simulated and seemingly over-coded contexts. Mediums are the most spectacular example of resurgent magic practices in modern times (p.236). But Morris does not see them as ôcopyistsö (p.84), rather as simulating actors involving new technologies of transmission in which the ôdiscourses of loss and return find their most fertile groundö (p.7). These practices invoke a selected use of the past in the present, affected by the forces of mass mediatisation. Morris goes into the radical use (and risk) in particular of photography where ômediumshipÆs modernity finds its (new) formö (p.189). It is a new means of representation, a metonymic device that for the medium ôtranslates what cannot be directly transferredö (p.192).
There is however little discussion of the relationship between mediums and other forms of popular religiosity û despite promises in the introduction, with only passing comments on Thai Theravada Buddhism (and then only selectively referenced in relation to the modern tradition). The historically conservative Thammayut-Nikai (sect) is not monolithic and neither is it ôvociferously anti-ritualö (p.277) as such; its own rituals are scaled consciously on normative doctrine and occasional vernacular forms. There again, generalities obscure overlapping tendencies between both sects in Thailand and for this reason in relation to religiosity it is better to speak of Thai Buddhisms (plural).
Morris describes an ethnographic site and representational practices where simplistic moral-logical ethics and world-view do not always gel well with modern Thais. Today individuals are struggling at the intersections of an atomistic, rapidly changing and hyper-rational urban milieu (with its ômechanical reproductionö, hyper-information [sangkhom-khaosaan], and teletechnics û techniques and instrumentalities that have reworked a sense of place and its subjectivities). Morris claims that the significance of sanctified places has not disappeared by ôspatial and semiotic indeterminacyö û instead it has been revaluated, given new meaning (p.245). Indeed, Chiangmai has been changing rapidly in the past few decades, impacted by the developmental and tourist gaze, and connected to certain fundamental æurban problemsÆ such as those of globalisation (see Lefebvre 1996).
Clearly, the space of performance as lived or representational space relies heavily on the use of symbols and images (see especially Lefebvre 1991). The potential for engendering radical ôthird-spaceö in contesting the stateÆs place-based ideas or trans-national capital, for instance, and the subsequent transformation of knowledge into action, could have been considered more fully. This kind of thinking does not threaten MorrisÆ concern with ritual place-making.
The clearly Benjamin-inspired narrative is persuasive, except that the presentation in places lacks consistency and discursive fragments are mixed almost as an aside. Even the lengthy discussion on AIDS (in relation to medium Khun Daeng) could have been reduced without much loss to the argument. But then again, the creation of numerous discursive breaks and the transection of time is in-line with the authorÆs general attempt at rearranging and recoding narratives, and in articulating a ônonlinear historiographyö. The text is interjected with occasional and intriguing vignettes on lives and experiences of mediums; but in terms of subjectivities, little is really heard of their own voices.
A fantasy of being in a ôplace of originsö is re-presented as unreal, or perhaps even more real than real (BaudrillardÆs concept) one that is interrupted by material spatial practices and systems of rapid communications. But this discussion could have been extended to electronic spatial networks, specifically changes in social space brought about by cyber-technologies or the digitization of space and its implications for mediumship û one can even go on-line to a Chiangmai medium (see for instance http://www.pothiyalai.com/mediumtours.asp). Many mediums now communicate to their clients through this ôthird-natureö space, virtual ôOtherö places quite familiar to the modern day æcyber-fl‚neurÆ. It is here that the imagination has no limits.
Morris talks about the dissolution of time (annihilated by simulation) and the disordering of sequenced events. This gives the appearance of immediacy not unlike the ôhere and nowö sense in AuerbachÆs sacred communities. For this reason Morris gives much attention to the implications of a ômediascapeö (my use of BaudrillardÆs term) that has been suffused with the simulacra of regulated national history. But Morris is clearly not proposing a radical end to history, only the possibility of continuation, ôThe story does not end, of course, at least not here. There is no single line of historical progression here, no final resolution to the negative dialectics of historyö (p.348). Nonetheless, this may be a history lacking a sense of a unified tradition. Morris' modernity has effectively decoded and potentially de-territorialized (Deleuze and GuattariÆs term) social life and made everything regarded as sacred or traditional in need of re-evaluation.
A number of new religious movements in Thailand have also been able to capture the sentiments of the immediate present in an atemporal conception of Being-in-the-world, appearing almost counter-logical, non-rational and clearly a-historical. Mediums, as with new religious movements, do not deny history; they reappropriate it invoking new imaginings or representations.
In the current context of fear in the outside forces of globalisation and the displacement of locality, Chiangmai Thais, as one informant told this reviewer, metaphorically hold their breath until the threat has gone. They risk death in the act. This regional body-socius is in need of coordination as the left foot lingers in the nostalgia of the past, of kindred and community (utopic values), while the right foot then steps forward into an uncharted and uncertain individuated future (mapped from outside and marked by increasing heterotopias), questioning authenticity and the need for new values. The present is seen to be so full of woe compared to an imagined and idealised past), that in the concern of ThaisÆ nostalgia there is an actual flight from the present. Mediums, as Morris shows us, are able to mediate that flight into history û if only for a moment. For many Thais unable to connect with a real sense of the past, they can seek through images and stereotypes to replace historical narrative by spectacle.
Maybe, as in the case of Medium Chuchad, it is all simply an illusion. It is a spectacle that works through specific social and cultural mechanisms to produce illusions and pseudo-forms, abstracted and enticing for his followers and tied in to a specific system of consumption. In this regard, the preface to the second edition of FeuerbachÆs The Essence of Christianity is worth quoting here:
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.Morris makes possible a (reû) reading or recoding of sacred space and mediumship; its uncanny modern urban imaginary is defined by its often ambiguous and recast historical links to the centre. These connections were intensified during the period of modernisation since the late 1970s, while the cultural and ideological transition after the 1976 student uprising and the bourgeois protests in 1992 are well-handled by the author.The lengthy and somewhat repetitive Derrida-inspired discussion on the poetics of writing at the beginning could, arguably, have been made friendlier for the non-initiated reader and in fact this limits the bookÆs broader appeal. It may also leave the reader wondering where the discussion is headed. Reading the whole book and then returning to the first chapter may help in this regard. The last chapter, ôAfter All Elseö (or maybe it could be ôBefore All Elseö?) leaves openings rather than closures û a new beginning of mediumship in response to changes outlined in the text, rather than its end.
In terms of transliteration consistency û there may be limited value for the reader in presenting two stylised forms, such as Thai ôCheddiö (usually written elsewhere as ôChediö) and its Palicised form ôChetiyaö (usually written as ôCetiyaö).
In general, it must be said, this is not an easy read for those unfamiliar or unsympathetic to the post-structuralist genre of ethnographic writing. But those who persevere will be rewarded with a refreshing, challenging, and original look inside contemporary Thai social and cultural life. Perhaps we can all then have good reason to rejoice at PhayaphromÆs ôreturnö.
References:
De Certeau M, Giard L., & Mayol P., 1998 The practice of everyday life. Volume 2: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre H. 1991 The Production of Space (trans. Nicholson-Smith D.) Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Lefebvre H. 1996 Writing on Cities (trans. and edited by Kofman E. and Lebas E.). Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1957 (1841) The Essence of Christianity. New York: Harper and Row.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Taylor, Jim
2005 Review of In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Anthropology Review Database. April 21. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=1750, accessed February 9, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)