Table of Contents
- CONFERENCE> First International
Chöd-Zhijé Conference, July 12-16, 2017.
- White on Johnson, 'The Buddha on
Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the
Malaysian-Thai Border' [review]
by Jason Baumann
Historic First International Chöd-Zhijé Conference, July 12-16, 2017.
At Tara Mandala in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, USA
For more information please visit:
http://taramandala.org/chodconf/
This historic conference draws together leading scholars and practitioners
researching and teaching this unique lineage in its various manifestations.
Keynotes, panel discussions, and small group sessions will explore the
teachings of 11th century Tibetan yogini Machig Labdrön and her teacher, the
renowned Indian yogi Padampa Sangye; the role of women; as well as the
application of these teachings to the modern world. Dharma teachings and
performances of Chöd songs and dances will foster a rich and engaged
experience. Follow-up retreats will offer the opportunity to learn some of the
different lineages of Chöd practices.
Speakers include: Lama Tsering Wangdu Rinpoche, Lama Tsultrim Allione,
Drüpon Lama Karma, Lama Sarah Harding, Sangye Khandro, Dan Martin PhD, Michael
Sheehy PhD, Amelia Hall PhD, Kunze Chimed, Karma Lekshe Tsomo PhD, Michelle
Sorensen PhD, Alejandro Chaoul PhD, Naksang Rinpoche, Chöying Khandro, Padma
Tsho, Sarah Jacoby PhD, Tina Lang, Ācārya Malcolm Smith and others.
Tara Mandala is a Vajrayana Buddhist retreat center, nestled in the
Southwest Colorado mountains near Durango in Pagosa Springs. There are many
international flights to Denver and frequent daily flights to Durango.
Thank you to our sponsors: Shambhala Publications, Tsadra Foundation and
Wisdom Publications.
by System
Administrator
Irving Chan Johnson. The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah:
Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. 240 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-295-99203-7; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-295-99204-4.
Reviewed by Erick White (Cornell University)
Published on H-Buddhism (January, 2017)
Commissioned by Thomas Borchert
While all three major sectarian traditions of Buddhism (Theravada, Mahayana,
Vajrayana) are found within contemporary Malaysia, this Southeast Asian nation
does not figure large in the academic study of Buddhism. Modern Malaysia is a
Muslim-majority nation dominated by its ethnic Malay-majority population. While
Buddhist kingdoms flourished on the Malay peninsula in the premodern past, the
rise of Buddhists as a demographically significant religious minority (19
percent) in contemporary Malaysia is a reflection of colonial-era developments.
Buddhism is the second-largest religion in Malaysia after Islam, yet Malaysian
Buddhists are distributed across a variety of minority ethnic groups. Some of
these ethnic minorities, such as the Thai, have long lived in geographic
regions now encompassed by the modern Malaysian state. However, most of these
ethnic minorities (such as Chinese, Indians, Sri Lankans, and Burmese) migrated
to colonial Malaya in response to British imperial policies. As a national
Buddhist tradition which is a demographic minority, practiced almost
exclusively by ethnic minorities, and a historically recent consequence of
migration, Malaysian Buddhism has tended to attract less scholarly attention
than other national traditions in Asia. But this has begun to change as
scholars of Buddhism are increasingly interested in studying Buddhism among
minorities, migrants, and diasporas.
Most of the scholarly research on Malaysian Buddhism has focused on
Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism within the Chinese ethnic community.[1] This is
not surprising since Chinese Malaysians constitute the vast majority of
Buddhists (95 percent) within the country. More recently, some scholars of
Buddhism have turned to exploring non-Chinese Buddhist communities within Malaysia,
particularly those traditions that emerged out of transnational linkages forged
during the British colonial era.[2] Few if any scholars of Buddhism have
carried out research among those ethnic Thai communities in the northern
Malaysian states which are adjacent to Thailand's southern border. Ethnic Thai
communities are a small demographic minority within Malaysia's northern states.
They also constitute a very small percentage of the total number of Buddhists
in contemporary Malaysia. Thus, small in size, divided among scattered
villages, and distributed widely across an expansive rural terrain, ethnic Thai
Buddhist communities in northern Malaysia lack that demographic size, social
density, and institutional prominence which is more likely to attract the
attention of conventional scholars of Buddhism. Not surprisingly therefore,
most studies of Malaysia's ethnic Thais have been carried out by
anthropologists engaged in rural village studies. These anthropologists
primarily have investigated a range of disciplinary specific topics, such as
kinship, village social organization, the rural economy, and ethnic
minorities.[3] While Buddhism is inevitably addressed within these studies
because religion is an important marker of social identity and distinction for
ethnic Thai Malaysians, it is rarely the central analytic focus of any given
study. And even when it is a primary substantive topic of study, the analytic
frames employed and the research questions investigated inevitably reflect
anthropological debates and questions rather than those of religious studies or
Buddhist studies.[4]
Irving Chan Johnson's
The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters,
Mobilities, and Histories along the Malaysian-Thai Border fits squarely
within this tradition of anthropological scholarship on ethnic Thai Buddhist
Malays. Johnson carried out ethnographic research in the pseudonymous village
of Ban Bor On in 2001 and 2002, although follow-up visits update his analysis
well beyond this initial period of research. Ban Bor On is a small village of
128 households in the northern Malay state of Kelantan. The village is located
only fifteen minutes from the Thai-Malaysian border and its inhabitants are
almost entirely ethnic Thai and Buddhist. Its families have extensive kin and
friends across the border in Thailand's neighboring Narathiwat province, and
its trading activities and networks also stretch across the border as well. Ban
Bor On is one of Kelantan's largest ethnic Thai villages, and it has prospered
as its economy has shifted from rice cultivation to the growing of tobacco and
garden vegetables for trade. Increasingly affluent, securely embedded in
Kelantan's broader political and social landscape, and fiercely patriotic, Ban
Bor On's Buddhist households nonetheless live in a world of expanding social,
cultural, and economic horizons.
As the subtitle of the book indicates, Johnson is primarily interested in
updating the classical anthropological village study in an age when rural
communal life is increasingly entangled with social forces emanating from the
national, transnational, and even global stage. Exploring the vicissitudes of
identity in a turbulent, multicultural national border zone, Johnson analyzes
the ambiguities of identification at play as the occupants of Ban Bor On
encounter and transverse a multitude of both literal and symbolic national,
ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries. Buddhism comes in and out of focus
during his discussion of these encounters and negotiations. Nonetheless,
Johnson's monograph and its interpretation of the social significance and use
of Buddhism in the daily life of Ban Bor On offer many insights for scholars
curious about the contemporary social dynamics of Buddhism in minority communities,
border regions, and diasporic landscapes, especially those adjacent to Buddhist
majority nations.
The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah is primarily about the complex
politics of social and collective identifications within both a Southeast Asian
border zone and a nation-state that is structured by a highly regimented and
hierarchical bureaucratic ethnic politics. Johnson explores and explicates the
reimagining of collective identity by a minority population which experiences
marginality within the modern Malaysian nation-state across multiple
reinforcing registers--ethnicity, religion, territorial location, and
demographic visibility. Reflecting a common anthropological predisposition,
Johnson is particularly interested in the making and remaking of collective
identity in those hidden, intimate, and backstage settings of social life often
overlooked by other scholars. Informed by a long-established anthropological
fascination with the production and manipulation of boundaries in the creation
of collective identity, he is particularly attentive to the flows of people,
objects, symbols, and representations across boundaries and through
interstitial border zones. Grounded in scholarly approaches that highlight how
people creatively negotiate their collective identities, he examines how the
inhabitants of Ban Bor On critically respond to and rework the rigid,
essentialized identities offered up by nation-states as well as other
bureaucratic institutions. And attuned to contemporary anthropological
approaches that prioritize fluidity, rupture, and ambiguity, Johnson is
particularly interested in documenting and explicating those daily encounters
and experiences that highlight uncertainty, contradiction, connectivity, and
displacement. Throughout
The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah, Johnson
returns to the dynamics of mobility in and across multiple registers as he
seeks to understand how ethnic Thai Buddhist villagers as Malaysian citizens
constantly renegotiate their identity and commitments within a rapidly
expanding and unbounded series of entangled social worlds and cultural
horizons. Central to this identity work, according to Johnson, is the need of
Ban Bor On's residents to solve--even if only contextually and
provisionally--the "puzzle of Thainess" (p. xvi) and the
contradictory claims of belonging it places upon them as ethnic and religious
minorities living within a multicultural borderland of jumbled social
relations, histories, and memories.
After a brief preface which lays out the primary scholarly frames and
questions structuring the monograph's argument, in the introduction, "The
Kelantanese World," Johnson establishes the general historical, social,
and cultural settings within which the experiences of Ban Bor On's Buddhist
inhabitants take shape. Kelantan is itself a marginal place within Malaysia. A
territorially peripheral state imagined by other Malays as an Islamic backwater
ruled by conservative Islamicists, it was nevertheless in the past a powerful
center of Southeast Asian Islamic learning. The introduction succinctly
describes the complicated nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and legal
history through which the legal border between Thailand and Malaysia was
established. As a result of this process, local communities--Malay and Thai,
Muslim, and Buddhist--were reconstituted into new configurations of divided yet
interlinked economic trade, political governance, and cultural exchange. The
introduction explains the social and demographic place of ethnic Thais within
Kelantan, the economic and geographic place of Ban Bor On within Kelantan
state, and Ban Bor On's various enduring relations with Narathiwat province
across the border in Thailand. Finally, Johnson also critically reviews Thai
Kelantanese identity in the context of academic scholarship on the Malaysian
dynamics of ethnicity, plural societies, and national identity in the colonial
and postcolonial eras. Against overly romantic narratives of continuity,
religious otherness, and adaptation, Johnson argues for a strategic and
reflexive understanding of identification in which Kelantanese Thais are able
to "delicately maneuver between both Malaysian political identification
and Thailand's cultural assimilation" (p. 23) in search of a Thainess
beyond the options of either Malaysia's domesticated internal exotics or
Thailand's diasporic lost tribes.
In chapter 1, "Places," Johnson begins to unpack the changing
dynamics of mobile villagers, social memory, cultural horizons, and territorial
landscapes that structure his study. Villagers speak of an intimate past of
local, inter-village, and regional movement and relations rather than grand
historical tales of colonization or migration. Through local stories Johnson
explicates the relationship of Ban Bor On village to the nearby commercial and
administrative town center of Bandar Tumpat. But it is the subject of roads
that topically organizes this chapter. As markers of modernity, progress, and
mobility, roads open Ban Bor On up to Bandar Tumpat as well as larger cities
further afield in Kelantan and Narathiwat. Roads are socially vibrant worlds
and lifelines for traders and smugglers, pilgrims and monks, politicians and
bureaucrats. And it is on and through roads that the Thainess of Ban Bor On is
publicly displayed. Roadside rest pavilions and ordination processions along
roads serve as aesthetically elaborated material and performative markers of a
distinct, spatially situated ethnic identity for both the inhabitants of Ban
Bor On and their Malay neighbors. Spirit-haunted pavilions and Buddhist ordination
processions, in this sense, anchor the village in a cosmological register of
cultural and historical difference that is simultaneously a source of pride and
marginality, of local history and distant cultural ties.
In "Gaps," chapter 2, Johnson further explores the symbolism and
practices of a local Thai Malaysian identity by investigating "the social
and political production of ethnic invisibility" (p. 56) among Kelantanese
Thais. The chapter opens with an extended account of the difficulty of choosing
a logo for Ban Bor On's soccer team which can successfully negotiate the
contrasting demands of Thai and Malaysian discourses about national cultural
identity. Johnson then moves on to a detailed historical discussion of how the
colonial demarcation of the international border between the two nations shaped
discourses of geopolitical difference at the local level. The colonial and
postcolonial Malaysian state's official categories of belonging have no
determinate or substantive classificatory category for ethnic Thais (other than
"Other"). The village of Ban Bor On, therefore, dwells in the social
ambiguity of an unmarked, invisible peripheral ethnicity. This complicates and
confounds its residents' ability to easily or obviously situate themselves in
relation to many of the possible discourses of identification that speak to
them. Combined with the fact that Thai Kelantanese are native-born citizens who
are at the same time not
bumiputeras ("sons of the soil"),
this ambiguous bureaucratic classification frustrates and disadvantages
patriotic residents of Ban Bor On as they seek out the benefits of Malaysian
citizenship. It also complicates travel and economic activities in the
hinterland of Kelantan and Thai border towns as villagers must disentangle the
contextually shifting meaning and significance of being politically Malaysian
but culturally and ethnically Thai. Johnson explores these trials and
tribulations in detail at the close of this chapter by investigating the
complexities of religious identification at play when Thai Kelantanese travel
to Narathiwat to take part in
kathin and other Buddhist ceremonies as
well as when Thai monks and royal officials travel to Kelantan to manage
monastic temples or to cultivate cultural exchanges.
Buddhism is situated front and center in the next two chapters of
The
Buddha on Mecca's Verandah. Johnson examines the significance of Buddhist
temples, patronage, and aesthetics in the identity work of Thai Kelantanese in
chapter 3, "Forms." A craze for monumental temple buildings and
religious statuary has emerged among the Buddhists of Kelantan since the 1970s,
and this competitive effort to attract tourists links together Buddhist monks,
Malay politicians, Chinese businessmen, Thai bureaucrats, and Thai and Malay tourists
in joint projects of patronage, prestige, and profit. These monumental
religious forms have redefined the local distinctiveness of Thai Kelantanese
within Malaysia even as the building projects have embedded them in relations
of exchange with actors who live far outside their local villages. In
particular, these projects entangle Thai Theravada communities more deeply with
rural and urban Chinese Malays, both in Kelantan and beyond. As a result,
syncretic Sinic religious beliefs and aesthetics have gained prominence in
these building projects even as Kelantanese Buddhist temples have become more
dependent upon a boom in Chinese religious tourism. Through extended and close
analysis of several temples' building projects and their associated festivals,
Johnson explicates how the accompanying economic wealth, public visibility, and
increased status also produces social discord within local villages as
difficult questions about financial propriety, interreligious harmony, cultural
authenticity, and spiritual orthodoxy are raised. The increasing public
visibility and prominence of Buddhist culture, moreover, threatens to trigger
the ire of conservative Muslims who have historically practiced noninterference
in Kelantan Thai temple affairs.
In chapter 4, "Circuits," Johnson examines how the ambiguity of
Thainess is also reflected in the unusual institutional management of
Kelantanese Buddhist monks. While the ecclesiastical administration of
Kelantan's Buddhist Sangha is formally an extension of Thailand's national
monastic establishment, Kelantan's chief monk also receives his official
appointment to office from the Kelantanese sultan. This dual form of
religio-political rule is not found, however, in the Buddhist Sangha of other
northern Malay states, such as Kedah and Perlis. Turning again to social
history, Johnson investigates these complicated circuits of institutional power
by analyzing the unique trajectories of local history, cultural memory, and
social identity that were unleashed by Siam's colonial-era political response
to British administrative encroachment in Kelantan. He shows how these dynamics
laid the foundation for the overlapping sovereignties, cross-cultural
patronage, and interlocking royalist clientalism which has embedded Thai
Kelantanese monks firmly within the interfaith camaraderie and
politico-cultural aura of both Chakri monarchs and Kelantanese sultans. Despite
Kelantanese Thai anxieties over discrimination and local tensions between
Buddhists and Muslims, this amicable conjoined model of interfaith patronage
and protection endures up until the present. Moreover, Kelantan Thai village
headmen,
nura artists, and lay temple representatives are also
embedded in clientalistic relations with local Malay royalty and politicians,
such that while the villagers of Ban Bor On are the proud subjects of two
kings, they unambiguously perceive themselves as the loyal, patriotic citizens
of only Malaysia.
Johnson takes up the question of how Ban Bor On has responded to Thailand's
cultural nationalist discourse in chapter 5, "Dreams." He
investigates this issue by examining three forms of twentieth-century
long-distance cultural exchange and circulation: missionary monks, territorial
migration, and televised mass media. Thus, he documents the local influence and
prestige of establishment
thammathut missionary monks in the 1960s and
a newer breed of Dhammakaya missionary monks in the 1990s. Buddhist
missionizing and its discourses of orthodoxy entangle Ban Bor On in Thai
debates about cultural identification. Prime minister Phibul's
mid-twentieth-century program of creating ethnic Thai agricultural communes in
Thailand's ethnic Malay-majority Narathiwat province, however, also raised the
challenge of political identification. When creating these communes, the Thai
state encouraged Kelantanese Thai to migrate across the border and settle in
them. Ultimately, the success of the communes in attracting and holding
Kelantan Thai was uneven, while their ability to replace the political loyalty
of migrants was quite limited. Finally, Johnson briefly examines how Ban Bor On
residents watch much more Thai than Malay television. This disproportionate
exposure to Thailand's culture industries, ironically, suffuses their daily
lives with the cultural and historical symbolism, narratives, and
representational politics of "a Buddhist state they feel a strange
affinity with but to which they do not want to belong" (p. 170).
In his conclusion Johnson highlights several developments since 2002 that
reinforce his overarching argument that Thai Kelantanese are active agents
self-reflexively negotiating a dizzying flow of people, objects, and symbols,
and that through this negotiation they cultivate a collective identity that
contests their marginality and social invisibility as cultural and ethnic
actors within Malaysia. He reiterates the importance of daily encounters at
borders and boundaries in this project of collective self-constitution, the
gaps within official imaginaries and narratives that facilitate such local
agency, the unsettling impossibility that shadows all Thai Kelantanese efforts
at definitively claiming a stable collective identity, and the fact that even
small rural communities now act within expansive and confusing social horizons.
In the process of summarizing his argument, Johnson subtly reinforces the
reader's realization that while Buddhist actors, institutions, objects, and
practices often have been a frequent topic of investigation, his overarching
and central analytic goal has been to explain the general social dynamics
underlying the politics of collective identification among a marginal and
frequently invisible ethno-religious minority within modern Malaysia.
Nevertheless, the numerous substantive issues and analytic questions that
Johnson explores in this empirically rich, clearly written ethnography
highlight a variety of topics that scholars of Buddhism would benefit from
paying more attention to and examining in greater detail. Given how frequently
The
Buddha on Mecca's Verandah turns to an analysis of Buddhist discourses,
rituals, institutions, and material cultures in Thai Kelantanese society, in
the end the book paints a relatively nuanced portrait of a Buddhist minority
community living in the shadow of an ethnically, culturally, and religiously affiliated
national majority on the opposite side of a nearby international border. The
monograph, therefore, presents a case study not only for imagining Buddhism in
border zones, but for reflecting on how diasporic settings, majority-minority
relations, and the shifting contextual dynamics of collective identification
shape the lives of Asian Buddhists. Comparing the fate of Kelantanese Thai with
ethnic Thais in other northern Malay states would obviously prove illuminating,
as would comparing Thai Buddhists in Malaysia with other Buddhist communities
living in similar situations, such as Chakma Buddhists in eastern Bangladesh
and Tai Buddhists in southern China.
Buddhist minorities in Asia are a generally understudied phenomenon.
Johnson's monograph obviously highlights this phenomenon and documents its
substantive terrain in one particularly interesting border zone. In addition,
it implicitly raises questions about the differing cultural, social, and
political fortunes of migrant and nonmigrant Buddhist minorities within
Muslim-, Christian-, or Hindu-majority Asian nation-states. How significantly
does the historical status of being native-born rather than a migrant influence
the character and dynamics of different minority Buddhist communities? The
differing religious, historical, and political fortunes of Thai, Chinese, and
other Buddhist communities in Malaysia is a question that any reader of
The
Buddha on Mecca's Verandah naturally wonders about after finishing
Johnson's book. Similar questions, however, are worth exploring through
comparative reflections on native-born versus migrant Buddhist-minority
communities in other Asian countries, such as India, Nepal, Vietnam, or
Indonesia, for example.
Johnson's arguments about the dynamics of collective identification among
Kelantanese Thai places front and center the undeniably entangled
interrelationship between multiple types of identification. Identity claims and
discourses about ethnicity, religion, nationality, and cultural heritage are
inevitably so thoroughly intertwined in the lives of the villagers of Ban Bor
On that it is often difficult to disentangle and distinguish between these
registers of identity, both substantively and analytically. This tendency for
ethnic, religious, national, and cultural markers to collapse into each other
in both discourse and practice is a consistent feature of modern social life
that Buddhist studies scholars would do well to more closely and critically
attend to in their descriptions, interpretations, and analyses. Buddhist actors
and institutions often spend much effort trying to either fuse together or pry
apart these categories of identification, depending upon the situation at hand.
The Buddha on Mecca's Verandah places these sorts of questions and
dynamics at the center of its analysis. As a result, the reader gains insight
into the mix of rhetorical techniques, situational contexts, and strategic
interests that shape how a particular community of Buddhists in a particular
time and place tries to both conflate and distinguish between Buddhism and
nationality, ethnicity, and culture. Equally illuminating is the varied
success, stability, and consequences that result from these efforts at
conflation and distinction. In all of these ways, Johnson's monograph raises
descriptive dilemmas and interpretative questions that are worth pursuing more
broadly in academic scholarship on modern Asian Buddhism.
Lastly,
The Mecca on Buddha's Verandah highlights the importance of
thinking about transnationalism in the lives of what might at first glance seem
like relatively rural, relatively sedentary contemporary Buddhists. The
villagers of Ban Bor On are a very mobile community, however, as Johnson makes
clear. And yet their eagerness and ability to travel across national borders is
not the only reason that they live in an irreducibly transnational Buddhist
world. Buddhist actors, institutions, and discourses from across national
borders actively seek them out as well. In this sense, Johnson's description
and analysis highlight just how much mobility and transnationalism define the
lives of Buddhists in Asia. In particular, the lives of Kelantanese Thais
reveals how important and significant transnational Buddhist ecclesiastical
bureaucracies and culture industries are in Asia. Many scholars have studied
the ecclesiastical structure of the Sangha as a national organization, but few
have explored the transnational reach of these national institutions.
Similarly, the transnational spread and influence of Buddhist culture
industries is also a topic worthy of increased study in our increasingly
globalized religious world. Johnson's book points in suggestive analytic
directions, therefore, when considering how investigations of transnationalism
could enrich our understanding of Buddhist society and culture in contemporary
Asia.
The Mecca on Buddha's Verandah successfully avoids excessive
academic jargon, engagingly employs ethnographic vignettes, and effectively
integrates the personal voices and narratives of Ban Bor On villagers into
Johnson's picture of Buddhist minorities in a multicultural border zone.
Ethnography and history are continuously integrated in the empirical
descriptions and analytic claims presented in the monograph, and much of the
book's argument relies on the interpretive interweaving of historical
narratives, social memories, and contemporary observations in order to
explicate current social dynamics. In chapter after chapter, Johnson moves back
and forth between his observations and conversations in the present with his ethnographic
informants and the fine-tuned historical reconstruction of colonial and
postcolonial structural and long-term dynamics that have shaped the environment
in which the villagers of Ban Bor On live and act. The voice and perspective of
the author is effectively personalized and situated for the readers in a more
robust than usual fashion, in part because Johnson's family on his mother side
comes from the village. The anthropologist in this sense is something of a
local and native already before arriving in his field site, and Johnson
discretely pays attention to this dynamic and bias when it is methodologically
relevant to the subject at hand. The author carefully and effectively locates
his argument within the relevant anthropological and historical scholarly
literatures, although one wishes at times that he had more explicitly
highlighted how his study extends or contributes to existing scholarly debates.
The overall vision of Ban Bor On as a mobile village of Thai Buddhists
struggling with and against their invisible, minority, and peripheral status as
Malaysia citizens is illuminating, accessible, and thought-provoking whether
one is a general academic reader or a regional or disciplinary specialist.
The book is particularly strong in conveying not only the individual voices
and perspectives of particular inhabitants of Ban Bor On, but also the
collective attitudes and worldview of the village as a whole. When Johnson
discusses issues of contention within the village, however, there is much less
sense of how, if at all, different perspective, attitudes, and actions might
reflect social variables. Do disagreements among villagers about the behavior
and teaching of Dhammakaya missionary monks, for instance, reflect social
distinctions in terms of education, class, gender, or other social dimensions?
How, if at all, is the appeal and influence of Thai television and mass media
mediated by differences in generation, education, or literacy? In this regard
one wishes that Johnson had complicated more consistently the recourse to a
somewhat singular or homogenous communal voice when representing the experience
and perspective of Ban Bor On villagers. In a similar vein, while historical
transformations at the scale of Kelantan, the border region, or the Thai and
Malaysian nations is closely attended to, the reader has a less precise sense
of how, for example, ecclesiastical, social, or political relations at the
village level have changed over the course of the past decades or century.
Ironically, therefore, social relations at this more intimate and personal
level can come across as more enduring and unchanging than Johnson probably
intends to suggest.
Analytically, Johnson highlights the importance of understanding the
"puzzle of Thainess" within the lives of the villagers of Ban Bor
On--and of Kelantanese Thai more generally--if one is to understand the
dynamics of social identification among this ethno-religious minority. Even
though there is no consensus on how it should be defined or performed,
"Thainess permeates everyday life in Kelantan's Thai villages" (p.
xv), according to Johnson. At the same time, however, he also observes that
"during [his] stay in Ban Bor On, villagers never referred to their
behavior as an indicator of Thainess" (p. xv). This raises complicated
epistemological and analytic questions that Johnson sidesteps for the most
part. As he notes, the idea of "Thainess" is an explicit concept,
discourse, and meta-narrative within Thailand that is so prominent and
prevalent that presumably almost all Thai citizens take note of and act in
relation to it. This is not the case in Malaysia, however, and many of
Johnson's informants looked puzzled when he asked them about
"Thainess." Treating "Thainess" as the taken-for-granted, implicit
frame of reference for thought and behavior in the life of Kelantanese Thais,
therefore, is a challenging enough interpretive stance. But making it
descriptively and analytically the center of his anthropological explanation of
the underlying dynamics driving their everyday experience and behavior, their
marginality, and their practices of social identification is even more
complicated and theoretically challenging. In what sense is
"Thainess" the central social and cultural puzzle for the Kelantanese
Thai if the concept doesn't resonate in their own consciousness or explicit
statements? Is there another, less singular frame available for better
understanding the conundrum of social identification among this marginal
minority population?
Finally, Johnson does a wonderful job over the course of his monograph in
conveying the numerous comparative points of symbolic and social reference
against which the villagers of Ban Bor On contrast themselves in their work of
self-identification. Language, occupation, religious behavior (alms rounds,
ordination processes, spirit worship), the built environment (monasteries, rest
pavilions, and domestic architecture), eating habits, clothing, and
attire--these are just some of the symbolic points of contrast evoked by
villagers in a conscious fashion. Similarly, there are many social groups
against which his informants explicitly define themselves--urban and rural
Malaysian Chinese, Malay peasants, Malay politicians, Malay royalty, Southern
Thais, Central Thais, Thai royalty, Thai bureaucrats and administrators, to
name just a few. One wishes, however, that Johnson had thematically mapped in a
more overarching and systemic fashion this total field of symbolic and social
points of contrastive reference available when ethnic Thai Malays seek to
distinguish themselves in different types of situations. One benefit of this
analytic mapping is that it would allow one to discern more nuanced patterns in
how different types of contrasting references are utilized in different
contexts and in the pursuit of different goals. In this way, structure and
patterns in the identity work of Kelantanese Thai would become more obvious, as
would contextual strategies and techniques in the negotiation of sociocultural
marginality and ambiguity. And this in turn would enable a scholar of religion,
for instance, to more precisely understand when, where, and how the idea of
Buddhism does (and by extensions does not) become salient or influential in the
production of Thai Kelantanese identity. Such mapping would be especially
useful for scholars seeking to understand how religious, ethnic, cultural, and
national markers of collective identity are either fused with or separated from
each other in actual daily practice. In such a fashion, scholars could gain
even greater clarity and precision in understanding the Buddhist idioms and
salience of Thai Malay collective identity in the contemporary world.
Notes
[1]. Eng-Soon Teoh,
Malayan Buddhism: A Critical Examination
(Singapore: D. Moore for Eastern Universities Press, 1963); Piya Tan,
Charisma
in Buddhism (Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Dharmafarer Enterprises, 1992); and
Judith Nagata, "Limits to the Indigenisation of Buddhism in Malaysia, with
a Focus on the Religious Community in Malaysia," in
Dimensions of
Tradition and Development in Malaysia, ed. Rokiah Talib and Tan Chee-Beng
(Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk, 1995), 307-344.
[2]. Jeffrey Samuels, "'Forget Not Your Old Country': Absence,
Identity, and Marginalization in the Practice and Development of Sri Lankan
Buddhism in Malaysia,"
South Asian Diaspora 3, no. 1 (2011):
117-132.
[3]. Louis Golomb,
Brokers of Morality: Thai Ethnic Adaptation in a
Rural Malaysian Setting (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1978);
and Robert Winzeler,
Ethnic Relations in Kelantan: A Study of the Chinese
and Thai as Ethnic Minorities in a Malay State (Singapore: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
[4]. Mohamed Yusoff Ismail,
Buddhism and Ethnicity: Social Organization
of a Buddhist Temple in Kelantan (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, 1993).
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=48824
Citation: Erick White. Review of Johnson, Irving Chan,
The
Buddha on Mecca's Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories along the
Malaysian-Thai Border. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. January, 2017.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48824
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