JASR 28.3 (2015): 293-308 JASR (print) ISSN 1031-2943 doi: 10.1558/jasr.v28i3.28434 JASR (online) ISSN 1744-9014

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3, Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF.

A Spirit Map of Bangkok: Spirit Shrines and the City in Thailand

Andrew A. Johnson

Yale-NUS College

Abstract

As many scholars of Thai Buddhism have shown, Thailand’s religious sphere incorporates animist and Brahminist elements into a new fusion. But this religious system is not seamless, rather it rests upon internal contradiction and division, between upper and lower class, rural and urban. Alongside the official spirit shrines devoted to the Thai state and the continued progress and expansion of the city, via an analysis of urban spirit cults, I address the unexpected irruption of nature, death, and accident into the planned urban cityscape. Here, I examine one nocturnal pilgrimage by a spirit medium and her devotees across Bangkok’s spiritual cityscape. I ask what this ‘spirit map’ of Bangkok opens up for analysis in the context of those areas of Bangkok swallowed up by its continuous expansion, and address the nature of urban religious aspirations for her and her spirit’s devotees. Ultimately, drawing from Bhabha’s idea of hybridity, I argue that this medium’s Bangkok presents a challenge to established hierarchies of power, a challenge that focuses on the unusual (e.g. accident sites) as evidence for the appearance of the transcendent.

Keywords

Buddhism, Thailand, urban religion, hybridity, the city, mediumship, spirits.

Mae Im1 led the five women out of the noise and darkness of Rama II Road into the florescent glow of Lady Mother King Cobra’s shrine. She dutifully assembled the required number of incense sticks for each of the lesser spirits and kneeled at their altars in turn before moving up the low 1. Mae Im here is a pseudonym, as are other personal names mentioned.

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steps to the tile floor of the Lady Mother’s sanctuary. Here, she motioned for the other women to sit next to her in front of an impressive array of wooden statues of cobras, dragons, and nagas.2 In front of them stood eleven department-store mannequins: one for the Lady Mother, one for her handlebar-mustachioed consort, and their nine children. Mae Im folded her hands in a wai, burning tips of incense sticks extended towards the images. These she carefully planted in a pot filled with sand in front of the altar, after which, respects paid, she retired to a bench in the corner. Two of her attendants sat near her, talking in low voices, and two sat in front of the Lady Mother’s image, searching for lucky numbers in the folds and patterns of her scales. The sixth woman, Amporn, joined me as we peered out of the side window into the vacant lot next door, a lot where the shrine lowered chicken and eggs down to a transient population of cobras, king cobras,3 and pythons. The Lady Mother was the spirit of a cobra killed by a team of engineers building the road. These men had ignored the dream portents that she had sent to their workers, portents that prophesied disaster should they cut too quickly through the tall grass. The snake’s body, along with those of her young, were discovered underneath the treads of a bulldozer during construction, and subsequently her ghost caused traffic accidents and disasters along that stretch of road. Mae Im was a woman in her mid-sixties, who, like the rest of her retinue, ran a market stall in the city of Samut Prakan, on the outskirts of Bangkok. She was tall, relative to Amporn and the others who came with her, with hair dyed jet-black and teeth too white and straight to be anything but dentures. She and the other women in the group were not well-off, although none of them were impoverished, and Amporn even owned a car—a distressed Mazda out of which the six women had poured that night. But that night Mae Im was not herself. Her white, flowing clothing and white headscarf marked her as possessed by her attendant spirit, a child. When possessed, she spoke in a high, falsetto voice, and rarely spoke directly with me. This possession would happen a few nights a week, usually during consultations with supplicants from near her home.

2. Cobras predominated, but interspersed among these were several statues of Chinese-style dragons donated by Sino-Thai devotees as well as nagas, Hindu-Buddhist mythic serpents. This omnivorous approach to anything both holy and serpentine becomes more significant in light of the discussion below. 3. The common Indochinese cobra (Naja naja) and the king cobra (Ophiphagus hannah) are quite different snakes. The Indochinese cobra is smaller, darker, and eats rodents, while the king cobra is large, muscular, and primarily feeds upon other snakes. Each is quite deadly to humans. Thai makes the distinction between the two: ngu hao and choong ang, respectively. The Lady Mother is explicitly the spirit of a choong ang, although she is said to be fond of all snakes.

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This night was different. Mae Im—or, rather, the spirit—had demanded a trip out to see the snakes. The python that Amporn and I had been watching had disappeared into the tall grass of the vacant lot, and we had returned to sit next to Mae Im, talking about other spirit shrines nearby. Mae Im suddenly stood up. ‘I want to go out!’ she announced in her falsetto voice. Amporn explained patiently, as to a child, that Mae Im was already ‘out’ [thiao].4 ‘I want to visit my friend, the son of Nak’ continued the child spirit. It was a strange request. Mae Nak Phra Khanong (‘Mother Nak of Phra Khranong district’), also referred to as Ya Nak (‘Grandmother Nak’) or Nang Nak (‘Mrs. Nak’), was the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth while her husband was away at war. Upon his return, the ghost tricked the man into believing that she was still alive, killing those townfolk who sought to warn him. Eventually, depending on the story, either a medium or a monk was brought in to defeat Nak, imprisoning her spirit in an amulet fashioned after her forehead bone, an amulet that, according to popular rumor, now belongs to the Thai royal family. Amporn maintained that none of these tales about Nak’s subjugation were true, that instead the local people had planted a takhian tree, known for harboring power-ful spirits, on Nak’s corpse, its weight—both spiritual and physical—forcing her to be still. While Nak’s was a popular ghost story (cf. Nonzee 1999), Mae Im’s request references something else—Nak’s place within the world of popular Thai spirit devotion (McDaniel 2011). Her shrine stood at the other end of Bangkok from the cobra’s, in Phra Khanong district, where devotees came to ask for relief from military conscription. This connec-tion hinged upon upon Nak’s hatred of the Thai military, as she, according to popular belief, blamed them for the absence of her husband during her labor and thus, indirectly, for her death. But it was not Nak that Mae Im’s possessing spirit wished to visit. Rather, it was her child. The Nak shrine has within it several smaller shrines, including pieces of an antique boat, the trunk of a takhian tree, and that of Nak’s child (for details on the cults of particular trees, see Johnson 2012). It was here that Mae Im wanted to go: ‘[My possessing spirit] wants to play [with Nak’s child]’. After we had endured the trek across town with seven of us piled into Amporn’s Mazda (the women’s and my own small sizes making the journey possible, if not entirely comfortable), we parked on the grounds of Mahabut temple, a Buddhist structure that housed the shrine. Mae Im sat quietly on a bench in the back of the room, occasionally letting out a small giggle. She didn’t

4. Here, I use the Royal Thai General System of transcription.

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respond to questions from either her devotees or me, and Amporn whispered to me that the spirits were playing. While at the shrine, Mae Im’s devotees were busy, but they were notably not busy interacting with Mae Im. Instead, they were paying their devotions to Nak or the child and, mostly, collecting numbers from the takhian tree, under which Nak’s corpse, according to Amporn, still struggled. One of the women explained to me that she could consult with a spirit at any time—indeed, consulting Mae Im’s kuman was of less utility than consulting a more articulate and less capriciously playful spirit. But, she continued, here she had visited a site of charismatic power [barami—again here ‘charisma’ in a distinctly non-Weberian register] with Mae Im, who was also a source of power. And, bathed in such power, she would be more likely both to see something (e.g. a number) and to be seen (e.g. be looked on with favor by Nak). After a short time, Mae Im blurted out her desire to leave again. She announced that she wished to see ‘Father Elephant’. This was a statue to Erawan, Indra’s elephant.5 The gigantic statue of a three-headed elephant looms over Sukhumvit Road just past the Bangkok city limits in Samut Phrakan (Mae Im’s home6) and houses the Erawan Elephant Museum [phiphithaphan chang erawan], a collection of Buddhist art. But it is not simply novelty architecture. After its construction, those passing by began to bring offerings to ‘Father Elephant’. Just outside of the museum fence, on the side of the road, is an impromptu altar. Here, dancers can be hired by devotees to repay fortune granted by Erawan, or baskets of fruit to offer to the elephant can be purchased. This is what Mae Im did, buying a basket and carefully laying out the garlands of flowers on the altar’s hooks, placing the bananas on the altar, and burning joss sticks. Amporn explained: ‘the child [spirit] likes elephants. All children like elephants. This [elephant] shows what it was like here in the past [samai boran]—there were elephants here, before the highway. Now it’s too busy [wun wai].’ A short while later, Mae Im stood shakily from where she had been kneeling in front of the altar. She removed the headscarf that had marked her as possessed and announced in her own voice, and to no one in particular, that it was time to go home. Although she had no memory of

5. This is not the shrine most typically called ‘the Erawan shrine’, which is a shrine to Brahma outside of the Erawan hotel in the center of Bangkok’s commercial district. This latter shrine is named for the hotel (which in turn is named for the elephant), whereas the ‘Father Elephant’ shrine is a shrine to Erawan himself. Mae Im expressed no interest whatsoever in this other so-called Erawan shrine, which is internationally known and visited by devotees from around East and Southeast Asia. 6. Conveniently, the shrines that Mae Im’s spirit wanted to visit lay in a direct line from the cobra shrine to Mae Im’s home.

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the night, Mae Im felt that the night had been a successful one and that her possessing spirit was pleased. But by now, everyone was tired and hungry, and Mae Im resolved to climb into Amporn’s Mazda and head towards Samut Prakan city center, leaving me to stand and wait for a taxi outside of the elephant shrine. Mae Im’s nocturnal pilgrimage, cast as an impromptu trip at the whims of a child spirit, reveals an alternative geography in the city. It is a space that exists in tandem with officially sanctioned spaces of spiritual worship: Buddhist temples, the Erawan Shrine at Ratchaprasong, the City Pillar (see King 2011; Keyes 2006). Mae Im’s pilgrimage across Bangkok and her dismissal of such official sites presents spirit mediumship as a tradition that both incorporates hierarchical Thai Buddhist conceptions of power while at the same time challenging them. As such, Mae Im’s Bangkok can be seen to present a hybrid (Bhabha 2004) reading of power, a map of the city that charts an alternate geography, one better suited to a rapidly-changing Thai social and political order.

Buddhism and Hybridity Mae Im’s trip across Bangkok, its purpose, and the reason why she chose the sites that she did must be seen in the wider context of Thai religious practice, syncretism, and hybridity. Thomas Kirsch characterized the Thai religious system as syncretic, interweaving Theravada Buddhism, animism, and folk Brahmanism (Kirsch 1977), a definition that has been taken up by many scholars working both in Thailand and abroad (cf. Shalardchai 1984; Tambiah 1976). In these readings, concepts of power acquire moral characteristics (see the seminal article by Hanks 1962). Buddhism acts to grant barami (Sanskrit: paramita, a term here that I will translate as ‘charisma’ in the sense of a magnetic force drawing good fortune, love, and prosperity from the cosmos), and Brahmanistic prac-tices serve to legitimate kingly rule and the duality between the passive phra-khun [righteous authority] and active phra-dej [kingly might] (see Jackson 2010). In such a center-oriented conception, the city, empowered as it is by central shrines and the presence of a ruler, spreads this urban potential to its residents (see Swearer 1987; Johnson 2014). Outside of the city, in village practice, animist notions of power prevail (see Shalardchai 1984), cloaked as they often are in Buddhist garb. Here is a neat parceling of religion into separate spheres: the urban Buddhist, the rural animist, and the kingly Brahmanist. But Pattana Kitiarsa (2005) criticizes this characterization of Thai religion as a syncretic fusion of distinct traditions, arguing instead that what initially appears to be either Buddhist, Brahmanist, or animist is the product of a long period of mutual influence and long-term interaction. Instead, as Holt (2009)

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describes in the case of Laos, animism and Brahminism as well as politics and economics inform the everyday practice of Theravada Buddhism, making the distinction of ‘animism’ from ‘Buddhism’ impossible (see also McDaniel 2011: 16). Such a combination is evident in the manner in which Mae Im used shrines, even while all the time self-identifying as a Theravada Buddhist. For instance, when Mae Im visited Erawan, she did not identify the elephant as Erawan, the mount of Indra; instead, she simply called the statue ‘Father Elephant’ in the same way she referred to the cobra deity as ‘Mother Cobra’. Recall also Amporn’s comments regarding Father Elephant signifying dead elephants from the past, rather than being a war machine for the gods—in each case, the Sanskrit, overtly ‘religious’ readings of such places are eschewed for alternate readings involving the death of the natural world and its supernatural persistence. Pattana argues that ‘hybrid’ is a better term for this shared notion of power and efficacy. But Pattana stops there. Instead, here I bring in the concept of hybridity as conceived of by Homi Bhabha (2004). For Bhabha, hybridity, originally a negative term implying the adulteration of a formerly ‘pure’ tradition, is instead a potential source of critique against the hegemonic production of knowledge, as it destabilizes existing hier-archies and binaries between colonized and colonizer.7 In Mae Im’s case, the insertion of the wild and the dangerous into her supernatural map of Bangkok makes the case for a popular Buddhist practice that rejects state, royalist, and middle-class formulations of where Bangkok’s urban power stems from. It is a practice that, as I have argued elsewhere (Johnson 2012), embraces the precarity of urban existence and the changes under-gone by the city and its residents and, via combining these within the mainstream vocabulary of barami, questions received ideas of urban sacrality. To tease out this relationship, I turn to the commonalities that the snake, the ghost, and the elephant have and their relationship to the city, beginning first with Mae Im’s own possessing spirit. Mae Im referred to her spirit as kuman thong, but this word has other connotations in other con-texts. In his own study of the Nak shrine, McDaniel describes the practice of making kuman thong by preserving (often by roasting) the corpse of a stillborn infant or aborted fetus (2011: 171). The corpse, drained of its fluid (in turn used for other magical purposes) was then covered in gold leaf and made into a potent talisman. McDaniel describes another kuman present at Wat Mahabut (the home of the Nak shrine), the shrine to Baby Ae, a corpse of a child whose coffin became disinterred during a flood and now exists as a shrine to local sports teams (2011: 170).

7. Thailand was never colonized, but here I am using a postcolonial binary to point to the disconnect between Thailand’s royal or aristocratic elite and the ruled population.

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Mae Im was adamant that her spirit was not housed in such a pre-served corpse and described this practice as ‘black magic’ [mont dam]. Instead, she described her possessing spirit as that of an aborted child discarded in a vacant lot near her house.8 Mae Im speculated that the mother must have been a foreigner (implied to be a Burmese refugee) and possibly addicted to drugs (again, pulling from Thai stereotypes about Burmese migrants). The wandering ghost ‘missed [his/a] mother’ and appeared to her in a dream, asking her to be his caretaker. Since that time, she has become possessed in the manner that I describe above on a semi-regular basis, and others in the market where she worked began coming to her. This transformation from a market vendor to the center of a small religious group came at a time of transformation in Mae Im’s own life. As is common amongst Thai mediums (see Suriya 1999; Morris 2000; Johnson 2014), the shattering of Mae Im’s own family preceded her adopting a supernatural one. Before her possession, her husband had left her for another woman, and her own anger and distress at him further alienated her son, already a young man at the time. In a crude interpretation, the spirit could be seen to stand in for the family ties so painfully severed. In this way, the kuman can be seen as both a private and public symbol, in Obeyesekere’s (1981) sense: something that both resonates deeply with Mae Im’s own sense of alienation and that resonates with other, cultural interpretations of loss and alienation as well. Mae Im stressed to me the ordinary, familial nature of her relationship with the spirit. Despite the fact that the child was an immaterial spirit who had been abandoned in a vacant lot, he was ‘just like an ordinary child’ [dek thammada] and she was ‘just an ordinary mother’. She ‘take[s] care’ of the child by feeding it at a small shrine at her home, and it ‘take[s] care’ of her and her followers via gifts of fortune or foresight. The child seeks to be taken to ‘play with friends’, despite the fact that those friends include baby cobras, ghosts, and divine elephants. This emphasis on the ordinariness of her familial relationship with her child and the ordinariness of the child’s playmates, in terms of the language that Mae Im uses (‘snake’, ‘elephant’, rather than making reference to Sanskrit or Pali worlds, as mainstream Thai shrines do), further illuminates the relationship’s strangeness.

8. Here, she dodges my question by not addressing whether or not such a corpse existed, or whether the story of an abandoned infant was given to her in a dream. She has a reason to be cagey about this information. If found, such a corpse would be quite profitable on the black market, as the recent case of Chow Hok Kuen, a British citizen who was arrested smuggling corpses of fetuses for resale in Taiwan, indicates (The Nation 2012). Chow planned to sell the fetuses for roughly USD 8,000 apiece.

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By ‘strangeness’ here, I do not mean my own reaction when faced with Mae Im, dressed in white polyester and giggling like an infant. Instead, I mean how the notion of the strange, the out-of-place, is incorporated into the everyday, the ‘ordinary’, a term that in Thai (thammada) references cosmic law (thamma, dharma). Through her nighttime map of Bangkok, Mae Im seeks out those moments of strangeness as places of veneration. In the Lady Mother’s and Nak’s cases, this ‘strangeness’ is also marked by death and danger, and in each case there is an overturning of traditional authority (urbanization, militarization, and civilization, respectively). The irruption of the strange into the commonplace at each of these shrines, as with the child spirit, marked the emergence of powerful forces of potential into the world, forces that had been underlying the built cityscape.

Spirits of the City This idea of a landscape filled with the sudden appearance of the strange in the everyday typifies early writing on European cities. For Baudelaire, for instance, the city was a place where one encountered the unexpected, and the quintessential urban dweller, the flâneur, was one who consumed these in a solitary fashion (Benjamin 2006). For Simmel (1950), these encounters altered the mentality of the urbanite, creating a less emotional but continually anxious subject. But Mae Im is no flâneur, at least in Baudelaire’s sense of a solitary seeker of experience. Rather, she is seeking something else in the city, something that requires us to delve deeper into Thai conceptions of urbanity. The most direct translation of ‘city’ in Thai is mueang. But this term, as Holt in his study of Lao religion notes, is more complicated than a simple translation would suggest (Holt 2009: 30). In Tai9 political arrangement, the mueang was one node in a fractal structure, what Tambiah (1976) termed a ‘galactic polity’. Clusters of family compounds [ban] came together as a mueang, and occasionally mueang would organize under a capital mueang to form a mandala, a kingdom structured around a sacred center and satellite polities captured under its charismatic power (see Tambiah 1976). In times of distress, the mandala structure might weaken, leaving individual mueang entirely independent, pulled under a rival’s power, or even in the position of having to form their own minor mandala structures. At each level of this configuration, neighborhoods, mueang, and mandala, ban, mueang, and mandala, guardian spirits [phi]

9. The term ‘Tai’ is an entho-linguistic term referring to the people of northeastern Burma, southern Yunnan, Laos, and Thailand. Sub-groups include Lao, Yuan (Northern Thai), Shan, and Siamese (Central Thai), like Mae Im. Historically, these regions share this notion of mueang.

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served as focal points, often enshrined in a pillar at the center of the town. The city, in this configuration, was a machine for generating prosperity; it was sacred space (see Johnson 2014). While the political allegiance of a particular mueang might fluctuate between rival mandala, spirits were tied to a particular place: the gods of the capital city might be venerated in the satellite, but they would not come to replace the local deities. Holt describes such spirits as ‘a concept of power…intrinsic to a specific territory…or the very sense of social collectivity’ (Holt 2009: 24). Such a system of power continually repli-cated in miniature lends spirit beliefs a fractal-like nature, what George Condominas (1990) terms ‘systèmes à emboîtement’. This fractal nature of place-based religious power continues to the level of the neighborhood [mu ban]. In northern Thailand, most neighborhoods have spirit shrines dedicated to a particular guardian, and most of these shrines have mediums, often middle-aged women (much like Mae Im) and occasionally transgendered women (Johnson 2014). These shrines serve as places to address this-worldly problems: problems in personal relationships, concerns about money, or the desire to succeed in a particular venture; concerns which contrast with those that one would bring to a Buddhist monk, who would be less interested in helping to fulfill desires and more interesting in having the layperson nullify his or her desires. The possessing spirits are often described as having their origins elsewhere, having come from Burma, India, or simply purchased from abroad (Morris 2000: 153). A city like Chiang Mai or Nan, then, is a patchwork of partially overlapping claims to power by local ‘lords’ [chao], each one claiming (via a particular medium) a very local and specific kingdom and each one drawing authority from a different source. But the city is in flux. Walter Irvine (1984), in his study of Chiang Mai’s spirit mediums, notes a shift from spirits tied to locality to spirits tied to particular charismatic individuals, and often referencing national, as opposed to local, heroes, a shift that he attributes to increasing disloca-tion and change as Chiang Mai expanded during the latter part of the twentieth century. In my 2014 study of Chiang Mai’s spirit mediums, I found this split between place-based and charismatic mediumship that Irvine described even within the spirits of a particular medium. However, my data suggested that Irvine’s prediction of the end of place-based mediumship in favor of charismatic and nationally oriented practice was premature (Johnson 2011). Instead, local spirits became one particular genre of spirit possession, existing alongside charismatic mediumship. Bangkok presents an extreme case of such urbanization and change, being the most primate city in the world and forty times the size of Thailand’s next largest city, Khorat (Nakhon Ratchasima) (Pasuk and

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Baker 2009: 199). Yet in Bangkok, too, urban organization has under-gone a radical shift. In Thai, Bangkok’s name points to its origins as sacred space. The name is the longest place-name in the world,10 and describes the city as divinely founded by Indra and as home to various angelic beings. Such an idea of a divinely founded city (especially by Indra) is not unusual for cities in premodern Southeast Asia (see Duncan 1990 for a discussion of Kandy, in Sri Lanka). Through invoking the heavens and through the installment of a new royal dynasty named for Vishnu’s avatar Rama,11 Bangkok’s founders sought to establish a new start to a shattered kingdom via a divine city, one that would ensure unity and prosperity. Bangkok, like most Thai mueang, grew initially partially by force. New Thai kings captured and forcibly resettled artisans and workers from rival or restive provinces (see Kraisri 1965), creating a model of feudal rule that was far more centralized than its European or Japanese counterparts, based as it was on the idea of the divine city as the center of the mandala. During the late twentieth century, Bangkok’s growth accelerated as it absorbed economic migrants from the languishing provinces and swal-lowed smaller water-based communities (bang) around it as it expanded. Mae Im’s part of Samut Prakan province is one such community that was drawn into Bangkok (practically, if not administratively) during this time. Marc Askew describes how the notion of a heterogenous locally-oriented space, yarn,12 gives way to the idea of national heritage in late twentieth-century Bangkok. For Askew, Bangkok is a patchwork of such yarn, communities defined by their activities or features (e.g. ‘Bang Phlu’ sold phlu leaves) (Askew 1996: 192-93). Yet in opposition to this loose network of neighborhoods are the interests of a centralized Thai state seeking to render Bangkok’s urban geography more streamlined and ‘readable’ to its population by identifying and promoting urban monu-mental heritage. Yarn such as Phom Mahakan, a poor community in the monument-strewn heart of Bangkok, Rattanakosin Island, have been threatened with eviction in favor of open parks, white-washed monuments, and rationalized space (see Herzfeld 2006). The city, here, is a text to be read via a series of monumental structures, parks, and royal temples and not a messy community in which to live.

10. Krung thep maha nakhon amon rattanakosin mahintara yutthaya mahadilokpop noparat rajathani burirom udom rajniwet mahasatan amon piman awaltansatit sakatattiya wisanukram prasit. Bangkok is the name of a small village on the opposite side of the river and its use to refer to the capital of Thailand is incorrect. Most Thais simply refer to their capital by the shortened name, Krung thep. 11. Since the founding of the Chakri dynasty in 1782, Thai kings have been referred to as ‘Rama I’, ‘Rama II’, etc. The current monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej (r. 1946–), is Rama IX. 12. The Royal Thai Romanization scheme would render yan.

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Ross King (2011) attempts a ‘reading’ of these various ‘texts’ in Bang-kok, sketching through architecture different narratives of Siamese royal domination over neighboring mueang, the influence and ‘crypto-colonial’ (Herzfeld 2002) influence of Western powers, and other such narratives. Moving through Bangkok’s spirit shrine landscape, one could read the city in a similar style, highlighting the most popular or visited non-Buddhist religious sites across the city. One might start with the city’s foundation pillar, enshrined on Rattanakosin Island, across the street from the Ministry of Defense. City pillars [lak mueang] had their origin in the construction of the city as the Hindu-Buddhist cosmos in miniature. The heart of the mueang was this post, a shrine to the city as such and the point where prosperity flowed out, and the seat of Indra’s power over the city. It was constructed as the Siamese state re-formed after the destruction of Ayutthaya at the hands of the Burmese in 1767. From the city pillar, one only needs to walk across Ratchadamnoen Nai Road to arrive at the Grand Palace and the shrine of Phra Siam Thewathirat, a god conjured by the Thai monarch in 1855 in the wake of signing unequal trade relations with Britain. The deity is credited with saving Thailand from colonial powers, and is still invoked as a savior when Thailand escapes the worst of regional crises (Jackson 2010: 40). But by far the most popular spirit shrine in Bangkok is the so-called Erawan shrine, a monument to Brahma erected after the Erawan hotel became plagued by misfortune and accidents during its construction. The shrine has become such a potent symbol that, when a mentally ill person broke the central statue in 2006, the man was promptly lynched by other worshippers (Keyes 2006). Today, the (rebuilt) shrine is a node for popular worship by devotees from around the region, including Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan.13 What these three spirit shrines share is the marshaling of divine forces against those of chaos and dissolution. The city pillar creates civilized space out of non-civilized space and places kingly power at its center (see Johnson 2011, 2014). Phra Siam Thewathirat, emanating from the royal throne room, ensures the sovereign rule of Siam and marks its resistance to colonialism. The Erawan shrine chases away malevolent ghosts and allows for the flow of people and capital. They protect the mueang, the mandala, and the ban, respectively, and they constitute the mueang as a machine for prosperity. Additionally, these spirits emerge at moments of crisis, in the face of threatened dissolution (dominance by the Burmese, dominance by the Europeans, or the collapse of infrastructure). Here,

13. The shrine was again destroyed by a bomb planted in September 2015, by culprits unknown at the time of writing.

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then, is a parallel with Mae Im’s spirit: hidden continuity emerges in the face of seeming discontinuity. But Mae Im’s spirit shrines are sites which point towards continuities other than the city and the palladiums mentioned above. The snake, the village ghost, and the elephant refer back to ways of life displaced by Bangkok’s growth, and stand in opposition to it. Lady Mother King Cobra cursed the builders of Rama II Road with (first) snakebite and (later) traffic accidents. Grandmother Nak, a village woman in a rural town, destroyed her home village and still stands full of hatred against the Thai military. Even at the ‘Hindu’ shrine of Father Elephant, Amporn describes the deity as ‘father elephant’, without an explicit connection to kingship or to Indra, but instead as representing a past way of life (as she says, in ‘ancient times’ [samai boran]), one juxtaposed to ‘the highway’. Regard-ing Mae Im herself, her inhabiting spirit is an abandoned infant of less than auspicious birth, whose (according to Mae Im, possibly foreign, possibly drug-addicted) mother ‘threw [him] out’. Rather than shrines to the mueang, these are shrines against it: each shrine shows something abandoned by the city. Hybrid spaces, they incorporate anti-statist readings into an alternate, a shadow city.

A Spirit Map of Bangkok Mae Im’s map of Bangkok is one that is several things at once. It is a hybrid of, on one hand, both state-oriented narratives of urban order and what King describes as Bangkok’s various ‘levels of colonization’ (2011), and on the other, precisely those things that urban order seeks to pave over. It is a means by which she can recapture a lost familial unit. It is the recognition of a spiritual cityscape that asserts continuity in the face of dissolution, not as a triumphalist narrative of the mueang over the forces of disintegration, but rather as a haunted landscape, one where those outside of the halls of power seek out things destroyed by the city. These are seen as sudden irruptions into the ordered concrete of the ideal city, irruptions that by virtue of their power of destruction become places that link individuals to a time before the mueang. Similarly, Mae Im’s map of Bangkok is not one that replicates a yarn-based system of neighborhood spirits. In her search for kindred spirits to her possessing kuman, Mae Im does not stick close to the spirits of her home in Samut Prakan in true ‘galactic polity’ fashion; rather, she draws a crescent across Bangkok’s southern edge, picking sites of dislocation and strangeness as sites where her possessing spirit desires to ‘play’. These are sites where that which is paved over re-emerges into the everyday. Putting it thusly—as an emergence of the unexpected into the

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everyday—we would expect it to result in the uncanny. But the Freudian uncanny is a feature of the middle class, one struggling with the suppres-sion of fears and anxieties it imagines itself to have overcome (Freud 2003; Johnson 2013). Instead, Mae Im and her attendants seem relatively comfortable with the ghostly haunting of urban space. To explain this more fully, one must see Mae Im not as a member of a middle class seeking to overcome those forces of chaos that Lady Mother King Cobra and her fellow spirits represent and identify as good subjects of the mueang, but rather as a person seeking potential within the very shocks and surprises that the urban environment provides. In this way, the unexpected encounters that characterize urban life come not as a desensitizing force, as Simmel (1950) would have it, nor does the haunting of the surety of the present by that which it claims to have over-come come as a fearful presence, as Freud (2003) would. Instead, the moments when something unexpected comes into being are signs of an alternative, a way that Mae Im can expose the contradictions in the triumphalist narrative of the city and assert the continuity of something pre-urban that emerges into the urban space. By immersing herself in this potential (by becoming possessed by it) and in seeking out those spaces of irruption, Mae Im lays claim to her own connection with it at its point of alienation (much as she finds a new, spiritual child just as she becomes alienated from her own biological child). The presence of spirits such as Grandmother Nak or the kuman speaks to the failure of hegemonic centers (such as the city pillar) to have complete dominance at the messy fringes of the mueang and to the existence of something lasting beneath Bangkok’s concrete. Hope, not fear, is the result of the irruption of the unexpected into everyday life. As Hirokazu Miyazaki describes, hope is a discovery that ‘reality is in a state of not-yet’ (Miyazaki 2004: 9). By mapping out the very places where the dominant narrative of the ‘galactic polity’ fails to take control completely, Mae Im opens the space for a counternarrative, one where spaces of death and dislocation instead become spaces of hope. It is in these places where the city has failed that she and her followers find this ‘state of not-yet’. Peter Van Der Veer (2015), in an introduction to a volume on the urban and the sacred in Asia, points out both the persistence of a discourse on urban/rural divides as well as this discourse’s inadequacy. Supposedly rural communities set up ‘urban villages’ in China, just as many Thai ‘Northeasterners’ have in fact lived and worked in Bangkok for years, regardless of what their identity card lists as their place of residence. Lending support to Henri Lefebvre’s characterization of the ‘urbanized’ countryside as that which is integrated into an urban

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economic system, relatively poor, certainly rural Mekong fishermen with whom I worked would gather to reminisce about their days living in Taipei or Tel Aviv. In the present moment, mobility and mutability, more than a medieval division of the city beginning and ending at its walls, characterizes the city. As such, the city exists here principally as an idea. It is the seat of legitimate power, power that, as Durkheim might have it, is reified within certain sacred sites and places. But, following Mae Im’s spirit map as a shadow to Bangkok’s official religious geography, as sites that present challenges to developmental notions of progress (as the Lady Mother’s engineer-killing snakes do), national institutions (as Nak’s anti-military stance does), and official readings of religion (as the recasting of Erawan as a monstrous elephant instead of the mount for a Hindu god does), those cut off from official sources of power seek alternate ones. It is via reversing national cults of space and place and stitching them together via night-time pilgrimages such as Mae Im’s that alternate cityscapes and, indeed, alternate cosmologies come into being.

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