The sacred borderland: a Buddhist saint, the state, and transnational religion in southern Thailand

This thesis is a study of religious charisma, the state, place-making and cultural flows in the southern Thai borderland. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Songkhla and Pattani provinces, the thesis provides a historically-grounded anthropological account of popular Buddhism and other, particularly Chinese, religious forms and their relationship to state formation and transnational flow. -- Southern Thailand provides a provocative site for the exploration of these issues. Located a great distance from Bangkok and inhabited by large populations of Malay Muslims and ethnic Chinese, the region occupies a position of ambiguity in the national Thai imaginary. The thesis considers the production of the South itself as a region within the Thai nation-state and the complex manner in which it is figured as being both 'Thai' and 'un-Thai' in everyday constructions. -- As a mechanism to explore the central themes, the thesis focuses on a semimythological monk known as Luang Phò Thuat. Said to have wandered the landscape along the Malay Peninsula during the seventeenth century, he has become the centre of a thriving cult of images and is now one of the most popular Buddhist figures in the South. I argue that this popularity is bound to a certain vision of a unified South and that the narratives of his journeys performatively seek to 'suture' zones belonging historically to Buddhist and Muslim zones of influence. However, rather than assuming that Luang Phò Thuat is solely a figure of colonisation, I argue that, as a 'dhamma ambassador', he also has provides the promise of crossing boundaries as much as maintaining them. -- Continuing the theme of boundary crossing, the thesis also deals with transnational religious flows of pilgrimage and tourism, especially by ethnic Chinese Malaysians and Singaporeans. I argue that the sacred geography produced through figures such as Luang Phò Thuat is utilised by local brokers of religious sanctity to generate and direct tourist flows. In the process, novel religious formations and innovations take place as local and transnational actors negotiate relationships of patronage. I consider the impact these flows have on local religious forms and focus in particular on constructions of 'Chineseness' and 'Thainess' and the roles that they play in mediating cross-border interactions. As I demonstrate, far from undermining the dominant symbols of the Thai state, many aspects of transnational religion contribute to the vision of southern Thailand as a Buddhist zone, and thereby support the process of state formation.