Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand

In contexts of severe illness in Northern Thailand, many conceive of themselves as combinations of beings assembled through the binding ethical force of karma. Scholars working in many world areas have built frameworks for understanding “complex” (distributed, partible, fluid, transient) personhood....

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Published in:American Anthropologist
Main Author: Stonington, Scott D.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 2020
Subjects:
Anthropology
Social Sciences
Marcos
Arctic
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/163632
https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13464
id ftumdeepblue:oai:deepblue.lib.umich.edu:2027.42/163632
record_format openpolar
institution Open Polar
collection University of Michigan: Deep Blue
op_collection_id ftumdeepblue
language unknown
topic Anthropology
Social Sciences
spellingShingle Anthropology
Social Sciences
Stonington, Scott D.
Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand
topic_facet Anthropology
Social Sciences
description In contexts of severe illness in Northern Thailand, many conceive of themselves as combinations of beings assembled through the binding ethical force of karma. Scholars working in many world areas have built frameworks for understanding “complex” (distributed, partible, fluid, transient) personhood. In this article, I bring these frameworks into conversation with ethical theory to ask how one can make sense of ethical action when one is always already partly the other. For many in Northern Thailand, the answer is an ethical and hauntological choreography; rather than relying only on rational frameworks for right action or cultivating individual ethical dispositions, people seek to assemble optimal elements—other people, beings that have become components of themselves, material objects infused with ethical force—into scenes where the residual karmic “stickiness” of all can be unmade. This unmaking is achieved through a form of forgiveness and kindness that moves beyond individual agency. [personhood, ethics, ontology, haunting, Buddhism, Thailand]RESUMENEn contextos de enfermedades severas en el Norte de Tailandia, muchas se conciben así mismas como combinaciones de seres ensamblados a través de la fuerza ética unificadora del karma. Investigadores trabajando en muchas áreas del mundo han construido marcos para entender la compleja (distribuida, partible, fluida, transitoria) condición de persona. En este artículo, introduzco estos marcos en conversación con la teoría ética para preguntar cómo puede uno entender la acción ética cuando uno es siempre ya parcialmente el otro. Para muchos en el Norte de Tailandia, la respuesta es una coreografía hauntológica y ética; más que depender solamente de marcos racionales para la acción correcta o cultivar las disposiciones éticas individuales, las personas buscan ensamblar elementos óptimos –otras personas, seres que han llegado a ser componentes de sí mismos, objetos materiales infundidos con fuerza ética– en escenas donde la “pegajosidad” kármica residual de todos puede ...
format Article in Journal/Newspaper
author Stonington, Scott D.
author_facet Stonington, Scott D.
author_sort Stonington, Scott D.
title Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand
title_short Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand
title_full Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand
title_fullStr Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand
title_full_unstemmed Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand
title_sort karma masters: the ethical wound, hauntological choreography, and complex personhood in thailand
publisher Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
publishDate 2020
url https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/163632
https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13464
long_lat ENVELOPE(-61.833,-61.833,-64.500,-64.500)
geographic Marcos
geographic_facet Marcos
genre Arctic
genre_facet Arctic
op_relation Stonington, Scott D. (2020). "Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand." American Anthropologist 122(4): 759-770.
0002-7294
1548-1433
https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/163632
doi:10.1111/aman.13464
American Anthropologist
Paul, Diana Y., and Frances Wilson. 1979. Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahayana Tradition. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press.
Scheper‐Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scherz, China. 2017. “ Enduring the Awkward Embrace: Ontology and Ethical Work in a Ugandan Convent.” American Anthropologist 120 ( 1 ): 102 – 12.
Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland: University of California Press.
Stonington, Scott D. 2011. “ Facing Death, Gazing Inward: End‐of‐Life and the Transformation of Clinical Subjectivity in Thailand.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 35 ( 2 ): 113 – 33.
Stonington, Scott D. 2012. “ On Ethical Locations: The Good Death in Thailand, Where Ethics Sit in Places.” Social Science & Medicine 75 ( 5 ): 836 – 44.
Stonington, Scott D. 2013. “ The Debt of Life—Thai Lessons on a Process‐Oriented Ethical Logic.” The New England Journal of Medicine 369 ( 17 ): 1583 – 85.
Stonington, Scott D. 2014. “ Whose Autonomy? ” JAMA 312 ( 11 ): 1099 – 100.
Stonington, Scott D. 2015. “ On the (f)Utility of Pain.” The Lancet 385 ( 9976 ): 1388 – 89.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1970. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North‐East Thailand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ueki, Masatoshi. 2001. Gender Equality in Buddhism. New York: Peter Lang.
Vilaça, Aparecida. 2015. “ Dividualism and Individualism in Indigenous Christianity: A Debate Seen from Amazonia.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 ( 1 ): 197 – 225.
Wagner, Roy. 2008. “ The Fractal Person.” In Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, edited by Marilyn Strathern and Maurice Godelier, 159 – 73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. “ Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities.” Anthropological Theory 7 ( 2 ): 131 – 50.
Aristotle. 2004. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J. A. K. Thomson. London: Penguin Books.
Aulino, Felicity. 2014. “ Perceiving the Social Body.” Journal of Religious Ethics 42 ( 3 ): 415 – 41.
Aulino, Felicity. 2019. Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, eds. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Buse, Peter, and Andrew Stott, eds. 1999. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cassaniti, Julia. 2015. Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Chakrabarti, Dipesh. 2007. “ History and the Politics of Recognition.” In Manifestos for History, edited by Sue Morgan, Keith Jenkins, and Alun Munslow, 77 – 87. New York: Routledge.
Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cozort, Daniel, and James Mark Shields, eds. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Colin. 2005. “ Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies 59 ( 3 ): 373 – 79.
Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge.
Finlay, Nyree. 2018. “ Personhood and Social Relations.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter‐Gatherers, edited by Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, and Marek Zvelebil, 1191 – 203. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gammeltoft, Tine M. 2008. “ Childhood Disability and Parental Moral Responsibility in Northern Vietnam: Towards Ethnographies of Intercorporeality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 ( 4 ): 825 – 42.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gottlieb, Alma. 2004. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gross, Rita M. 1992. Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “ Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 ( 3 ): 575 – 99.
Haraway, Donna J. 1996. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.
Harvey, Peter. 2000. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heim, Maria. 2013. The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa On Mind, Intention, And Agency. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hertz, Robert. 1907. Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Rodney Needham. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaufman, Sharon R. 2003. “ Hidden Places, Uncommon Persons.” Social Science & Medicine 56 ( 11 ): 2249 – 61.
Keane, Webb. 2008. “ The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 ( S1 ): S110 – 27.
Keane, Webb. 2013. “ On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 ( 1 ): 1 – 17.
Keane, Webb. 2017. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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spelling ftumdeepblue:oai:deepblue.lib.umich.edu:2027.42/163632 2023-08-20T04:03:11+02:00 Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand Stonington, Scott D. 2020-12 application/pdf https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/163632 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13464 unknown Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Penguin Books Stonington, Scott D. (2020). "Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand." American Anthropologist 122(4): 759-770. 0002-7294 1548-1433 https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/163632 doi:10.1111/aman.13464 American Anthropologist Paul, Diana Y., and Frances Wilson. 1979. Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahayana Tradition. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press. Scheper‐Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scherz, China. 2017. “ Enduring the Awkward Embrace: Ontology and Ethical Work in a Ugandan Convent.” American Anthropologist 120 ( 1 ): 102 – 12. Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland: University of California Press. Stonington, Scott D. 2011. “ Facing Death, Gazing Inward: End‐of‐Life and the Transformation of Clinical Subjectivity in Thailand.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 35 ( 2 ): 113 – 33. Stonington, Scott D. 2012. “ On Ethical Locations: The Good Death in Thailand, Where Ethics Sit in Places.” Social Science & Medicine 75 ( 5 ): 836 – 44. Stonington, Scott D. 2013. “ The Debt of Life—Thai Lessons on a Process‐Oriented Ethical Logic.” The New England Journal of Medicine 369 ( 17 ): 1583 – 85. Stonington, Scott D. 2014. “ Whose Autonomy? ” JAMA 312 ( 11 ): 1099 – 100. Stonington, Scott D. 2015. “ On the (f)Utility of Pain.” The Lancet 385 ( 9976 ): 1388 – 89. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1970. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North‐East Thailand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ueki, Masatoshi. 2001. Gender Equality in Buddhism. New York: Peter Lang. Vilaça, Aparecida. 2015. “ Dividualism and Individualism in Indigenous Christianity: A Debate Seen from Amazonia.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 ( 1 ): 197 – 225. Wagner, Roy. 2008. “ The Fractal Person.” In Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, edited by Marilyn Strathern and Maurice Godelier, 159 – 73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. “ Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities.” Anthropological Theory 7 ( 2 ): 131 – 50. Aristotle. 2004. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J. A. K. Thomson. London: Penguin Books. Aulino, Felicity. 2014. “ Perceiving the Social Body.” Journal of Religious Ethics 42 ( 3 ): 415 – 41. Aulino, Felicity. 2019. Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, eds. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Buse, Peter, and Andrew Stott, eds. 1999. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cassaniti, Julia. 2015. Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chakrabarti, Dipesh. 2007. “ History and the Politics of Recognition.” In Manifestos for History, edited by Sue Morgan, Keith Jenkins, and Alun Munslow, 77 – 87. New York: Routledge. Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cozort, Daniel, and James Mark Shields, eds. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, Colin. 2005. “ Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies 59 ( 3 ): 373 – 79. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge. Finlay, Nyree. 2018. “ Personhood and Social Relations.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter‐Gatherers, edited by Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan, and Marek Zvelebil, 1191 – 203. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gammeltoft, Tine M. 2008. “ Childhood Disability and Parental Moral Responsibility in Northern Vietnam: Towards Ethnographies of Intercorporeality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 ( 4 ): 825 – 42. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gottlieb, Alma. 2004. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gross, Rita M. 1992. Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “ Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 ( 3 ): 575 – 99. Haraway, Donna J. 1996. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Harvey, Peter. 2000. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heim, Maria. 2013. The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa On Mind, Intention, And Agency. New York: Oxford University Press. Hertz, Robert. 1907. Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Rodney Needham. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufman, Sharon R. 2003. “ Hidden Places, Uncommon Persons.” Social Science & Medicine 56 ( 11 ): 2249 – 61. Keane, Webb. 2008. “ The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 ( S1 ): S110 – 27. Keane, Webb. 2013. “ On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 ( 1 ): 1 – 17. Keane, Webb. 2017. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. IndexNoFollow Anthropology Social Sciences Article 2020 ftumdeepblue https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13464 2023-07-31T21:13:20Z In contexts of severe illness in Northern Thailand, many conceive of themselves as combinations of beings assembled through the binding ethical force of karma. Scholars working in many world areas have built frameworks for understanding “complex” (distributed, partible, fluid, transient) personhood. In this article, I bring these frameworks into conversation with ethical theory to ask how one can make sense of ethical action when one is always already partly the other. For many in Northern Thailand, the answer is an ethical and hauntological choreography; rather than relying only on rational frameworks for right action or cultivating individual ethical dispositions, people seek to assemble optimal elements—other people, beings that have become components of themselves, material objects infused with ethical force—into scenes where the residual karmic “stickiness” of all can be unmade. This unmaking is achieved through a form of forgiveness and kindness that moves beyond individual agency. [personhood, ethics, ontology, haunting, Buddhism, Thailand]RESUMENEn contextos de enfermedades severas en el Norte de Tailandia, muchas se conciben así mismas como combinaciones de seres ensamblados a través de la fuerza ética unificadora del karma. Investigadores trabajando en muchas áreas del mundo han construido marcos para entender la compleja (distribuida, partible, fluida, transitoria) condición de persona. En este artículo, introduzco estos marcos en conversación con la teoría ética para preguntar cómo puede uno entender la acción ética cuando uno es siempre ya parcialmente el otro. Para muchos en el Norte de Tailandia, la respuesta es una coreografía hauntológica y ética; más que depender solamente de marcos racionales para la acción correcta o cultivar las disposiciones éticas individuales, las personas buscan ensamblar elementos óptimos –otras personas, seres que han llegado a ser componentes de sí mismos, objetos materiales infundidos con fuerza ética– en escenas donde la “pegajosidad” kármica residual de todos puede ... Article in Journal/Newspaper Arctic University of Michigan: Deep Blue Marcos ENVELOPE(-61.833,-61.833,-64.500,-64.500) American Anthropologist 122 4 759 770

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