Demonizing Loose Women: Gender Roles and Ghost Panic in Contemporary Northeast Thailand

• In Event: 162. Haunting Femininity and Postcolonial Imaginations

Abstract

The ravenous spirit belief tradition in contemporary northeast Thailand, in some cases, instigates an accusation made against certain individuals who, allegedly, host these malevolent spirits. According to the tradition, ravenous spirits parasitically reside within human hosts and wreak havoc on their communities, causing an epidemic of fatal illness and sudden death among human and animal populations. A field research on this belief tradition reveals that the majority of accusation made against women attribute ravenous spirits to the accused’s uncurbed female sexuality and their intimating feminine mystique. Unconventional female roles performed by the accused, such as liberal sexual conducts and their engagement in multiple sexual relations, were construed by their communities as moral defects that engender ravenous spirits. This study speculates that via ravenous spirit panic, belief communities express their aversion to the new ideals concerning female virtues propagated by capitalist, modern Thai society. Within the new social order, female agency and gender equality replace traditional female virtues of submissiveness and devotion to one’s family. As new ideals concerning female roles prevail over the old ones, the latter are preserved and implemented via traditional cultural practices. This study examines the preservative function of the ravenous spirit belief tradition, put to use by the northeastern Thai villagers as they experience the crash between modern ideals and traditional values. This function of the tradition is most apparent when belief communities construe new female virtues promoted by modern Thai society as malevolent, voracious spirits.

Author

• Kanya Wattanagun, Chulalongkorn University