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Interpreting Thai Religious Change: Temples, Sangha Reform and Social Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Richard A. O'Connor
Richard A. O'Connor
Affiliation:
University of the South
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Extract

Thai religion is changing. So is Thai society. To most scholars the connection is obvious: social and especially material changes drive religious ones. So a new middle class causes religious ferment while a crisis in legitimacy explains a militant Buddhist movement as well as the fervour for amulets and forest monks. Such explanations are typical in using extra-religious current events to explain religious change. We need not dispute their specific interpretations to make a larger historical point: today's religious changes are, if only in part, the unintended consequences of a century and a half of Sangha reform that has undermined the local Buddhism of the temple or wat. In effect centralizing reforms took the wat away from locals and, by driving folk practices out of the temple, fostered today's religious “free market”. This long-term institutional shift, changing the wat's place in Thai society, can be the context for understanding today's religious changes.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , September 1993 , pp. 330 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1993

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References

Insights from Tom Kirsch, Kris Lehman and Jim Scott helped to conceptualize this paper. Leif Jonsson, Nina Kammerer, Grant Olson, Craig Reynolds, Nikki Tannenbaum and Kamala Tiyavanich offered valuable comments on earlier versions. I am indebted to SSRC-ACLS for funding my initial research and a Luce fellowship at Cornell that led to this current paper.

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45 Where social science imagines society as a collectivity of choice-making individuals, it has a strong methodological bias towards studying change to confirm its model of society. The reason is change reveals choice as continuity cannot. Continuity makes it impossible to differentiate between a person who agrees with his or her choice, and another who has not thought to choose. Thus the immense historical continuity of social life disappears behind myriad studies of change.