09:30
July 29 2009
Seminar Room AStanley Tambiah's legacy and an anthropology of Theravada Buddhism in Thailand
James Taylor (University of Adelaide)
This paper is intended partly as a
festschrift to Stanley J. Tambiah’s contribution to the anthropology of mainland Southeast Asia, and partly to show how Tambiah’s ambitious early research on Thailand gave me a sense of intellectual focus since the 1980s. Tambiah’s last and to me his most significant monograph
The Buddhist Saints and the cult of amulets (1984) was, in his own words, for me a “primary point of reference”[i].
Although not without his critics, Tambiah boldly attempted to unravel some of the underlying structures and dialectic within Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and explore an apparent paradox sourced in Weber’s early thesis; namely, the way that social actors make Theravada Buddhism consequential to their worlds and, correspondingly, how those living in the world impute meaning in a religion intent on renouncing the world. Here I show something of Tambiah’s method and the way in which he elucidates critical historical forces and social practices taking an example from my own field work on reform forest monks and the primitive monks’ charter (Vinaya).
Although much of my own research, a decade after Tambiah’s “Buddhist Saints” attested to much of his earlier observations, in my method I extended the use of biographical sources and a more sustained ethnography over fourteen months and among seventy-two forest monasteries and temporary abodes of wandering monks. Tambiah clearly tended to lean more to the centre then work outwards; while I started in the frontier, in the forests, and worked towards the centre. [I would like to think that we met somewhere in between]. In my work I was concerned with two mutually reinforcing tendencies: a conscious attempt by actors to reproduce the past from memory work, and lived experience of the monks ritually inscribing meaning to practices in the present.
I argue that, [however we read Tambiah], he left an enduring legacy for mainland Southeast Asian scholars in his well known trilogy and numerous papers over a highly productive twenty plus years of research on Thailand that was largely put aside in 1983 with his interest on emergent ethnic issues in Sri Lanka. Indeed, I know of few, if any, courses on the anthropology and history of mainland Southeast Asia that have not cited his work on Thailand.
[i] See 1996 interview conducted with Mariza Peirano, “Continuity, integration and expanding horizons: Stanley J. Tambiah”. Serie Antropologia 230. www.unb.br/ics/dan/serie230empdf (accessed January 3, 2007).
