Monks and Magic: Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand by Barend Jan Terwiel (review)

Monks and Magic, the classic account of Buddhism in rural Central Thailand that was first published in 1975, has been reprinted with a new preface and postscript and with additions to the text. The book is organized around the ways in which engagement with Buddhism develops through the life-course of villagers. The author’s own engagement with the monastic and lay communities gives the work a notable depth in the ethnography of ritual and meaning. This remains an important but controversial book: important for the beautiful, detailed ethnographic account of ritual and belief in a village community that it provides, and controversial for the unbridgeable separation that, the author maintains, exists between “village” and “elite” Buddhism.

Terwiel begins by considering the introduction of Buddhism to Thailand with an account of the history of the region, religion and ritual in his first chapter. He suggests that adherence to Buddhist orthodoxy has never been a necessary aspect of engagement with Buddhism for the majority of Thais. In the following chapters he provides detailed ethnography in support of his argument that Buddhist concepts are reinterpreted in a “magico-animist mould” (p. 20) in the village in which he worked. Chapter Two provides an introduction to the monastery, the village and the surrounding area. Terwiel spent the first six months of his fieldwork ordained as a monk in the village monastery and another five months living with the family of his ordination sponsor. Chapter Three explores the beliefs and practices surrounding conception and birth, providing rich ethnographic detail on the rituals of childbirth, the protection of the new mothers and naming ceremonies. Chapter Four continues the consideration of youths as they move into adolescence, providing detailed information about the engagement of young men and women with forms of protection and religious belief.

Chapter Five considers in remarkably rich ethnographic detail the first period of ordination into the Sangha for young men as a rite de passage. Chapter Six focuses on courtship and marriage, and usefully explores sangha involvement in rituals around marriage and procreation. Chapter Seven locates engagement with Buddhist ritual during house building as a form of practical knowledge that facilitates avoidance of inauspicious times and materials. Chapter Eight examines religious precepts in detail. Chapter Nine focuses primarily on the link between karma and financial outlay. Terwiel argues that farmers believe that reciting Pali formulae will have a generally beneficial impact. Chapter Ten focuses on old age, death and the hereafter. Terwiel draws a distinction between escaping rebirth and being reborn in better circumstances and argues that villagers are focused exclusively on the latter. He examines the relationship between the living and the dead and the duty that the living owe to the dead. Throughout, Terwiel pays particular attention to the differences between men and women, taking into account differing access to education and religious knowledge. He argues that women are in ritual opposition to men until they pass childbearing age.

Terwiel intended his work to illustrate the distinction between two approaches to Buddhism in Thailand, which he identified as “rural, unsophisticated Buddhism” and the “Buddhist religion of the highly educated classes” (p. 1). In so doing, he made an important contribution to a hot debate in the scholarship of the time. He sought to resolve a dialectic in scholarly characterizations of Thai Buddhism as either syncretic — “a harmonious blend of Buddhism and local creeds” — or as comprised of distinct “strata in the religion” (p. 1). Disagreement about the character of Thai Buddhism arose, he argued, as a result of conflating two distinct “types of Buddhism” and of drawing conclusions from either “the untutored population” or the “statements of the educated classes” (p. 3). He makes this point clearly when he writes, “The religion of the farmer is basically magico-animistic, whilst those among the elite who adhere to religion may be regarded as having organized an intellectual...