[Anthropgrad] Wednesday Anthropology Seminar

[Pen Judd]

09:30
*July 29 2009
Seminar Room A*

Stanley Tambiah's legacy and an anthropology of Theravada Buddhism in 
Thailand

James Taylor (University of Adelaide)

This paper is intended partly as a /festschrift/ to Stanley J. Tambiah’s 
contribution to the anthropology of mainland Southeast Asia, and partly 
to show how Tambiah’s ambitious early research on Thailand gave me a 
sense of intellectual focus since the 1980s. Tambiah’s last and to me 
his most significant monograph /The Buddhist Saints and the cult of 
amulets/ (1984) was, in his own words, for me a “primary point of 
reference”[i]. Although not without his critics, Tambiah boldly 
attempted to unravel some of the underlying /structures/ and dialectic 
within Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and explore an apparent paradox 
sourced in Weber’s early thesis; namely, the way that social actors make 
Theravada Buddhism consequential to their worlds and, correspondingly, 
how those living in the world impute /meaning/ in a religion intent on 
renouncing the world. Here I show something of Tambiah’s method and the 
way in which he elucidates critical historical forces and social 
practices taking an example from my own field work on reform forest 
monks and the primitive monks’ charter (/Vinaya/).
Although much of my own research, a decade after Tambiah’s “Buddhist 
Saints” attested to much of his earlier observations, in my method I 
extended the use of biographical sources and a more sustained 
ethnography over fourteen months and among seventy-two forest 
monasteries and temporary abodes of wandering monks. Tambiah clearly 
tended to lean more to the centre then work outwards; while I started in 
the frontier, in the forests, and worked towards the centre. [I would 
like to think that we met somewhere in between]. In my work I was 
concerned with two mutually reinforcing tendencies: a conscious attempt 
by actors to reproduce the past from memory work, and lived experience 
of the monks ritually inscribing meaning to practices in the present. I 
argue that, [however we /read/ Tambiah], he left an enduring legacy for 
mainland Southeast Asian scholars in his well known trilogy and numerous 
papers over a highly productive twenty plus years of research on 
Thailand that was largely put aside in 1983 with his interest on 
emergent ethnic issues in Sri Lanka. Indeed, I know of few, if any, 
courses on the anthropology and history of mainland Southeast Asia that 
have not cited his work on Thailand.
[i] See 1996 interview conducted with Mariza Peirano, “Continuity, 
integration and expanding horizons: Stanley J. Tambiah”. /Serie 
Antropologia/ 230. www.unb.br/ics/dan/serie230empdf 
<http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology/www.unb.br/ics/dan/serie230empdf> 
(accessed January 3, 2007).

-- 
Penelope Judd
Assistant Administrator
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies
College of Asia and the Pacific
Australian National University, Canberra
Tel:   intl + 61 + 2 + 61253149
Fax:   intl + 61 + 2 + 61253023
Email: Penelope.Judd at anu.edu.au
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