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Reassembling the Stupa: Temple Renovation and Religious Networks in Chiang Rai, Thailand

Sat, March 18, 8:30 to 10:30am, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 4th Floor, Rosedale

Abstract

When Chiang Rai, Thailand was resettled in 1844 the city and its surrounding territory had been abandoned for forty years. As new communities sprang up over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people found themselves living among scores of abandoned Buddhist temple sites. Still today, stupa ruins stick up in the verdant river valley like the stumps of great trees, and tumbled piles of bricks punctuate karst cliffs that rise into the surrounding mountains. The presence of this abandoned Buddhist material has been central to the motivations and techniques behind Buddhist construction in Chiang Rai. Many of the active temples throughout the city are built over older sites, and current Buddhist construction often incorporates older material into new structures.

This paper highlights how the renovation and reconstruction of these spaces facilitates the collective construction of meaningful community networks that include monks, villagers, patrons, and craftspeople. It forwards the indigenous notion that individuals are reborn in certain communities, and/or find themselves patrons of certain temples, in order to serve as stewards of abandoned religious sites that they built during previous rounds of rebirth. Through temple reconstruction, monks, villagers, donors, and craftspeople reify religious networks that span cosmological time and are anchored to specific geographic sites. Instead of focusing on how monks and laypeople collectively create temples, I aim to show how the accepted agency of temple material and space itself operates in indigenous conceptions of what Buddhist communities are, how they come to be, and what their ultimate goals are.

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