Introduction: Modern Magic and Prosperity in Thailand

Summary

When Asia’s major religious traditions are commodified, they do not lose their symbolic power and efficacy. They intimately embrace the … forces of the market. (Pattana Kitiarsa 2008a, p. 8)

Growing numbers of anthropologists and religious studies scholars have detailed the rise of diverse new forms of both fundamentalist and magical religiosity in Southeast Asia over recent decades. They have also outlined the ways that these phenomena fundamentally challenge the predictions of Weberian sociology—still influential in fields such as history and politics—that modernity is a process of ineluctable rationalization and a condition of unavoidable disenchantment. But these empirically based critical studies have not yet presented integrated accounts of how modernity produces new modalities of enchantment. While we have excellent critiques of Weberian sociology, we have comparatively few positive accounts that theorize the productive relationship of modernity to magic and enchantment. In this study I argue that since the end of the Cold War the performatively productive role of ritual practice operating in the specific conditions of neoliberal capitalism, new visual technologies and digital media have been engines of modern religious enchantment in Thailand and across mainland Southeast Asia. The performative effects of ritual practice (Tambiah 1977, 1981, 1985) provide a frame for bringing separate accounts of the enchantments of neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) and the auraticizing effects of new media (Morris 2000a), as well as the retreat of rationalizing state power from the religious field (Hefner 2010), into a fuller account of how modernity makes new forms of magic.

My analysis is built upon a study of cults of wealth centred on a range of Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese and Thai spirits and deities that have become prominent features of the religious landscape in Thailand since the 1980s. While having diverse origins, these cults are not isolated instances of ritual innovation but rather form a richly intersecting symbolic complex that is now central to national religious life, including monastic Buddhism. Emerging from multiple religious and cultural origins, I detail the many similarities among the cults of wealth, their close relationship with cults of amulets and professional spirit mediumship, and I trace how these prosperity cults intersect symbolically in a wide range of settings and ritual products.