CSEAS Friday Forum Lecture Series

Professional spirit mediums in contemporary Bangkok envision themselves as pursuing a vocation of Buddhist piety. As a result, they have reimagined deities, possession, religious ecstasy, devotion, self-mortification, veneration, and rituals of auspiciousness as virtuous markers of a properly pious Buddhist life. And they see their subcultural vision of piety as broadly conforming to conventional normative Thai understanding of what it means to be a pious Buddhist. In many ways, this self-under