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Buddhism and Postmodern Imaginings in Thailand

The Religiosity of Urban Space

Ashgate
Available December 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7546-6247-1

James Taylor, University of Adelaide

This book presents a rethink on the significance of Thai Buddhism in an increasingly complex and changing post-modern urban context, especially following the financial crisis of 1997. Defining the cultural nature of Thai ‘urbanity’; the implications for local/global flows, interactions and emergent social formations, James Taylor opens up new possibilities in understanding the specificities of everyday urban life as this relates to perceptions, conceptions and lived experiences of religiosity. Changes in the centre are also reverberating in the remaining forests and the monastic tradition of forest-dwelling which has sourced most of the nation’s modern saints. The text is based on ethnography taking into account the rich variety of everyday practices in a mélange of the religious. In Thailand, Buddhism is so intimately interconnected with national identity and social, economic and ethno-political concerns as to be inseparable. Taylor argues here that in recent years there has been a marked reformulation of important conventional cosmologies through new and challenging Buddhist ideas and practices. These influences and changes are as much located outside as inside the Buddhist temples/monasteries.

Contents: Thai Buddhism in postmodernity; Buddhist modernities, heresy and hybridisation: Thailand's Thammakaai movement; New Buddhism: copying, and the art of the imagination; Buddhist cyber-worlds and changing urban space; Nation, embodiment, and the charisma of a Thai saint; Kammathaan monks, tradition and sites of memory; Sanctification of place, power and mobility.

About the Author: Dr J.L.Taylor, author of Forest Monks and the Nation-State (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993) is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, University of Adelaide, Australia. His research and work experiences are in critical theory and practice of planned culture change and the transformation of rural society, the development discourse and anthropology, ethno-ecology, and Thai Buddhism.