Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders: Living Through Narrative in Thailand

After about twenty years of work - interrupted by a a whole lot of other projects, I've finished my first book, Narrative Practice and Cultural Change: Building Worlds with Ghosts, Karma, and Capitalist Invaders in Thailand, published by Palgrave Macmillan last year.

Here's a sample: the first few pages, lightly edited.

"Are ghosts real?" I asked Tren. At that moment, the context of the question made sense in my mind, if not in his. It was a hot night. Close to the equator, Bangkok nights are almost always hot, and usually muggy. We were walking west along Silom Road, toward the river and away from what serves as the city's financial center during the day then transitions at dusk into a sprawl of night clubs, sex clubs, restaurants, and tourist shops. As we continued moving, the city’s congested traffic and glaring neon illumination gradually gave way to quieter blocks of shophouses, stores on the first floors closed and shuttered for the night, the lights in the residential rooms above slowly switching off. Eventually, we came to the neighborhood where Tren’s grandparents had settled when they first came to Bangkok, when his father was a boy. This comparatively dimly-lit and deserted old street was the sort of place that frightened most of my friends here. For Tren, who kept hopping behind me so that I would protect him from the cockroaches skittering across the sidewalk, the fear was of these malaeng saab, and not, as it was for most of the Thais I knew, of ghosts.

Tren said he wasn't sure if ghosts exist. "They're like love," he explained, taking his eyes off the sidewalk for a moment. "If you've never experienced love, how do you know if it's real?"

This was an unexpected turn. "Is love real?" I asked.

He told me a story he'd seen earlier on the news about a man who had killed himself so his son could use his life-insurance to pay off his gambling debts. That was love you could be sure of, Tren said, setting the bar rather high.

Love, ghosts, death, and money: these themes float through Thai conversations all the time. But how do they relate? One of the tasks anthropologists set for themselves is to understand how people bring their visions of the world together. In recalling the experience, I can't help but wonder: what moved Tren's thoughts from ghosts to love, then money and back to death? Where did these connections, shaped together into a loose story, come from? How much was standardized by his society, and how much was drawn from Tren's own idiosyncratic history? How much came to him at that moment, simply in response to the day's events, the drift of our conversation, or by walking near his family's old home? And how much did these sources all overlap?

If I understood this, it would help me understand my friend – but it was important for other reasons as well. Exploring the way he connects love, death, and money – and karma, and cockroaches, and his family and everything else – reveals how he puts together a vision of his world. Human beings are limited in what they can know, but they create visions of reality that are as large as their universes – almost infinitely larger than the lives that create them. And the way Tren conceptualizes a reality that is larger than his life matters, because this lets us see what motivates him: it gives us a window into the sorts of questions he worries about, the limits of his knowledge, and its possibilities. It reveals the goals he has, the interests he pursues, the fights he will take on and the ones he'll let pass. In other words, this vision of the world can also explain how he fits himself into his society. And this matters because the way he thinks and acts and speaks – his unconscious habits and the well-thought-out decisions he makes – constitute his contribution to Thai society. If we look a bit wider, to the people who have taught him, and the people he influences – people pursuing their own aims – we begin to see that Bangkok and Thailand are the products of millions of people following their own motivations moment to moment, creating the moving, changing systems that give rise to the next generation of world-views. There is a line, then, that travels through the narratives individuals tell about their lives, connected to their visions of the world and their conceptions of self. This line travels through the cultural information that members of a society share and teach one another, and then back through to the stories they tell.

Knowing this, how can anthropologists talk about how people interpret their worlds? As Edward Sapir pointed out, humans live in dynamic social contexts. They move from one context to the next – one job site, one relationship, one conversation – and the understandings that emerge from those contexts change as well. But Sapir's vision of a cultural reality made dynamic through communication is only a start. Often, the challenges individuals face don't come with a good guide for resolution, and require a response that doesn't fit with cultural norms. Tren could have defaulted to one of several not-so-original answers in his thinking about love. Even when predictable responses are available, drawn easily from a cultural context, people will often come up with theories that come and go, that satisfy for the moment but lack enduring value. The flux of ideas and interpretations (restrained more, perhaps, than many people realize, by social forces) is a consistent element of human life. This is one result of living in a dynamic social environment: making sense of the world, and making sense of other people's descriptions of it, is often a matter of heuristics more than of identifying pre-set patterns and rules.

When Tren set out his theory, he was wondering about the nature of love, but also about the nature of what he could know about love in other hearts. And to some extent this reflected his notions about what it means to be human, as seen through his ideas about his human abilities to love and to know. The answer that Tren came up with at that moment is part of this dynamic system. It doesn't reflect some grand final answer about the nature of human life, but it does reflect something fundamentally human, an ongoing project that all of us undertake every day: starting from his own perspective, he was attempting to put together, in a new and possibly better way, what he knew about this changeable world, and to work out how he fit into it.

We can think of this fragment of conversation about love and ghosts as the work of being human – a tiny, transient piece of Tren's project of making sense of himself in his world. And just as money and death are rearrangeable pieces of the cognitive networks that Tren used to think, feel, and act with, Tren himself was contributing to the fluid social networks that make up his community, his city, his nation, and the family of our species. How, then, can we make sense of all these moving parts?

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