The Ambivalent Cultural Capital of Trance and Ecstasy: The Stigma of Possession in Thai Buddhism

• In Event: 192. Religious Spaces, Identities, and Transformations in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Possession, trance and ecstatic experience can be observed widely across the contemporary Thai religious landscape. Spirit mediums within the ethnic Thai, Chinese and Indian communities are the most prominent example of this phenomenon. However, the authority of many religious actors other than spirit mediums also relies upon a discourse and experience of intimate, enduring social ties and communication with benevolent gods or divine powers. Consequently, trance, ecstasy and possession remain foundational techniques for claiming spiritual prowess and sacral potency across a much wider variety of valorized Thai religious virtuosos than is typically recognized.

At the same time, possession, trance and ecstasy are consistently stigmatized as either misguided primitivism, dangerous irrationality or immoral superstition from a modernist Buddhist perspective. Other voices and actors, however, display more ambivalence. From their perspective, while certain forms of trance, ecstasy or possession are malevolent and should be avoided, other types are benevolent and thus worth cultivating. These religious actors, therefore, must preserve the cultural capital associated with certain types of ecstatic trance while nonetheless inoculating themselves against the general criticisms of Buddhist modernists.

Drawing on ethnographic data, archival sources and existing academic scholarship, this paper will examine how a variety of Thai Buddhist virtuosos seek to make trance and ecstasy religiously legitimate. It will analyze how visionary experience, sacral potency and divine communication of an ecstatic nature is valorized even as it is simultaneously distanced from those stigmatizing features of immorality, superstition and a loss of agency generally associated with trance and especially possession.

Author

• Erick D. White, University of Michigan