Believe it and/or not: Opening up to ontological pluralities in Northern Thailand

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the study of belief in anthropology generally connotes an “either/or” dichotomy—either one believes something or one does not—which exceeds the concept of belief and stems from monotheistic and totalizing biases rampant throughout the discipline. Thus, I take up John Mair's recent call to study cultures of belief in relation to cosmo- and pluriverse politics. Drawing on a Pali philosophical lineage, I list overlapping ways people invoke belief and believing in northern Thailand. I then argue that a local kaleidoscopic theory of mind, in step with this logic of listing, can provide inroads to patterns, modes, and styles of belief inaccessible within prevailing anthropological paradigms. By playing with academic form as well as the somewhat out of fashion concept of belief, I highlight a particular sense of karmic contingency and related assumptions about multiplicity—of perspectives and of realities. This study of belief in turn serves at once to underscore pluralities as experienced in northern Thai contexts, to suggest such possibilities elsewhere, and to draw attention to the consequential limitations placed on conceptual landscapes by the underlying ontological assumptions of dominant forms of western knowledge production.