Households, Villages, and Their Inhabitants

In the past, according to the recollections of many interviewees, individuals in northern Thailand were literally born into houses—this was before hospital birthing became common. The houses were themselves geographical locations constructed around a sacred center, the “auspicious post” that served as “the ritual center of the dwelling” (Reference DavisDavis 1984:49). The inhabitants of the house were guided in their actions and interactions by spirits. When a child was born, his or her identity was immediately established by announcing to the spirits that a new family member had arrived and had become part of the mini-jurisdiction over which the spirits presided. The elders placed the newborn child on a flat, round bamboo tray for winnowing rice and asked the household spirits and the ancestral spirits of the family rice pot to guard and protect the newborn: “Receive this baby as your child; accept this newborn member of our household” (interview with Thiphaa).Footnote ⁷

The identity of each villager was connected from birth to a sacred location and a geographically based community of humans and spirits. Injuries, illnesses, and other mishaps were located in relation to house and village. For example, if a baby cried all night or if a child was sick or injured, the family prayed for the intercession of the ancestral spirits of the rice pot, which was, of course, a prominent feature of the house's kitchen—a “place” in the geography of the home. Other household spirits required regular propitiation and notification of the family's comings and goings. In exchange, they offered protection against harm: “If you wanted to do anything, you had to consider the household spirits first. They were always watching. People respected them” (interview with Banchaa). Villagers propitiated the spirits and asked for their protection on special occasions by praying: “Household spirits, please guard and protect us. Look after our house. Keep us from harm. May those who live in this house live in happiness and comfort” (interview with Banchaa).

Spirits were involved in many aspects of injury practices. Injuries inflicted on a villager could offend the spirits and require propitiatory ceremonies. If individuals behaved disrespectfully, the spirits themselves could cause injuries as a form of punishment. When injuries or illnesses occurred, moreover, the household spirits had the power not only to relieve suffering but also to identify the underlying cause. In one such ritual, the family rice pot was covered with a shirt, and two women who were traditional healers sat on either side. They would ask the spirits of the rice pot, “What about this person? Where did he get in trouble? What did he do wrong?” A wooden stick, suspended above a large flat bamboo tray filled with grains of rice, would then swing back and forth as the spirits inscribed their answer in the rice (interview with Műang).

The intimate relationships of the household were enlarged and replicated at the village level. The word for village, muu baan, means literally “a group of households.” The village chief in northern Thailand is the , or “big father,” suggesting a collective familial relationship within the village. Guardian spirits watched over the entire village, just as they watched over each household (see Reference WijeyewardeneWijeyewardene 1970; Reference TerwielTerwiel 1976; Reference RhumRhum 1994; Reference Tanabe, Tanabe and KeyesTanabe 2002). Even Buddhist temples had their own (non-Buddhist) guardian spirits, or sűa wat, which were propitiated by monks and villagers. One commentator has used the term villagers' Buddhism to describe this mixture of Buddhist and non-Buddhist elements in rural Thai communities (Reference RamitanonRamitanon 2002:34). Locality spirits were part of village cosmologies that also included Buddhist shrines, temples, monks, and saints.Footnote ⁸

Shrines for the guardian spirits are familiar features of the village landscape and were remembered as the site of prayers and offerings. They were consulted in cases of injury or illness, so that the spirits could identify the cause and suggest a remedy:

Village leaders resolved conflicts, including injury cases, by reminding disputants that they worshipped the same guardian spirits. They were, in essence, brothers and sisters.

Households and villages were nodes of social and spiritual interconnection. Residence in these communities conferred identity on humans and spirits and gave a place and a meaning to important events, including injuries. The communities were locality-based, centering on shrines and sacred markers that symbolized the spatial locus of human and supernatural authority. Identity as a household member and villager arose from participation in these communities of people and spirits. In order to understand how injuries were conceptualized and handled within these social locations, it is necessary to mention some of the key attributes of identity that were assumed by those who resided there. These identity attributes defined the nature of injury itself—what aspect of a human being was harmed when an injury occurred, and what remedy or response was most appropriate for the injury victim and the community as a whole. Particularly relevant to an understanding of injuries were the components of identity known as khwan and winyaan.

The first identity attribute, the khwan, is a flighty spiritual essence found in all living beings and in some natural objects such as rice fields, mountains, and even automobiles.Footnote ⁹ When an individual suffers fright, trauma, or physical injury, it is said that the khwan flies out of the body, and a ritual—known as riak khwan or, in northern dialect, —must then be performed to recall the khwan and bind it in the body by tying a sacred string or thread around the wrists. Loss of the khwan causes the individual to become unwell, both physically and mentally, and the confusion and alienation of the afflicted person was, at least in the past, understood to pose a risk to the entire community. Symbolically, the lost khwan was thought to escape from the physical boundaries of the village and enter a realm beyond that of human society. As Tambiah writes concerning the khwan ceremony in Northeast Thailand,

Recalling the khwan of an injured person was seen as essential to repair the fabric of the community. Significantly, the payment made by the injurer was—and still is—referred to as “payment for the khwan” (khaa tham khwan). This term, even today, is widely used in Thai society to describe the compensation that is paid in an injury case. It is understandable that, in the closely integrated village society of humans and spirits, the entire community would insist that the injurer pay compensation. The injurer's transgression put everyone at risk, and the victim would cease to be a functional member of his or her family and village until the khwan was recalled and bound firmly into the victim's body. Because each injury had this communitarian dimension, compelling the payment of injury costs was assumed to be essential to the preservation of village society.

The second component of human identity that is relevant to this discussion of injuries is another type of spiritual essence known as winyaan. More durable than the khwan, the winyaan leaves the body only at the time of death. Buddhist rituals to make merit for the winyaan can ensure its progression toward a favorable future life, and ultimately the winyaan should undergo reincarnation; but when death results from an injury, there is a danger that the winyaan will remain at the spot of the fatality. When a violent or unnatural death (taai hoong) occurs, the winyaan that is allowed to linger at the location becomes the most dangerous type of ghost (phii taai hoong). It waits until other humans come near in order to sicken or kill them, so that a new winyaan will take its place and it can continue its normal path in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Thus, when violent or unnatural deaths occur, it is imperative that a ritual be performed to prevent this type of dangerous and malevolent ghost from being created.Footnote ¹⁰ Interviewees recalled that paying the cost of these merit-making ceremonies in cases of abnormal death was an obligation assumed by the injurer. The entire village had an interest in enforcing this obligation, since everyone was put at risk by the dangerous and malevolent phii taai hoong.

In sum, the remembered mapping of injuries onto the landscape of northern Thailand began with traditions located in households and villages. In proximity to those geographical centers, individuals acquired an identity and a status, and they fell under the protection of territorially based authorities—both human and supernatural—who could interpret the cause of injuries, identify the transgressions that caused them, and enforce the payment of compensation. Injuries within the community disrupted social harmony and threatened the well-being of all. The risks associated with this kind of normative violation were voiced by the spirits through various means, such as the ritual to ascertain the views of household spirits, ceremonies associated with spirit mediums, traditional healers, and others. Village elders, including the village or subdistrict chief, served as agents of human authority to compel the payment of compensation. All these practices were understood to be consistent with “villagers' Buddhism,” which was actually a heterogeneous mix of Buddhist and non-Buddhist customs and beliefs.

According to Reference Eoseewong and EoseewongEoseewong (1998:22–24), the household and village guardian spirits formerly enforced a localized customary law at the village level. When villagers violated social norms, the guardian spirits identified the transgressors and demanded that they be called to account. He distinguishes between the ghosts of particular deceased individuals—the winyaan that linger among humans and cause trouble rather than proceeding on the cycle of rebirth—and the household or village guardian spirits. The latter, according to Eoseewong, were regarded generically as ancestral spirits but were not associated with any identifiable individual. As nonindividualized beings, they played a key social role. They were not the frightening “ghosts” that, in Eoseewong's view, became part of Thai folklore relatively recently. Rather, they were the respected upholders of social norms and customs. In particular, the locality-based guardian spirits were the enforcers of a village-level customary law concerning injury and compensation.

Injuries Far From Home

As recalled by the interviewees in this study, the prototypical law of sacred centers was the localized customary legal order associated with the house and village. Space was conceived as radiating outward from these centers—and from the guardian spirits and markers around which the centers were constructed. Their potency weakened as individuals moved farther from them—across the fields, into the forests, and onto the highways leading to other villages and towns. Injuries located at a distance were less likely to result in compensation to the victim. Of course, other villages, towns, and provinces also had their own sacred centers. Yet for each person one particular locality had special significance—the one where he or she was “registered” with the guardian spirits and familiar with the local norms and authority figures. Outside this locality, unless the person had re-registered with spirits elsewhere, legal enforcement became problematic.

Beyond the village and the rice fields, and in some cases directly adjacent to them, the dense forests and mountains of northern Thailand represented zones of ambiguity and risk. Unlike the village, the forest was unregulated by customary law. It was wild and uncivilized. Injuries in the forest, it seemed, were nearly always caused by dangerous spirits who lived beyond the boundaries of civilization. Such spirits could be offended by improper human behavior, even when it was inadvertent, and in retaliation they could cause injury or illness or could cause the transgressor to become hopelessly lost. Stepping on or climbing a tree occupied by a spirit could lead to unfortunate results, and many injuries occurred because villagers urinated or defecated in the forest without asking permission of the spirits. Forest spirits could also cause injuries in retaliation for highway construction projects that destroyed their habitat. When major highways were built, the foreman would promise the spirits that, in return for permission to complete the construction without incident, they could take the life of a traveler in the future:

Thus, vehicular injuries on these new highways could be attributed to the forest spirits rather than human negligence, although the Buddhist concept of karma also played a part in the selection of one person rather than another as the victim. The spirits of the forest were not benevolent like the ancestral spirits located in households and villages, nor did they enforce customary legal systems that provided compensation. The interviewees' accounts of injuries in the forest never described dispute resolution between a victim and a negligent injurer. Instead, the responsibility for the injury was always assigned to malevolent spirits, even when another human actor was obviously involved. Distance from the village in such cases affected the interpretation of injuries and diminished the effectiveness of ordinary compensation mechanisms.

The weakening of the law of sacred centers became more pronounced as individuals traveled farther from home, toward other villages and towns. The highways themselves could be a source of danger since the malevolent ghosts of accident victims resided along the roadside. When injuries occurred on the highway, the cause was often traced back to the depredations of these ghosts. They could obscure the vision of a person who came too close or could otherwise try to cause a fatal accident in order to have the victim's winyaan take the place of the ghost and allow the latter to leave that location and resume its spiritual progression toward a new birth. Such explanations did not necessarily support the assumption that the injured person should receive customary compensation from another human, since the essence of the problem was the ghost.

Injuries far from home presented another problem: the difficulty of negotiating a remedy. When both parties lived in the same village, the village chief or subdistrict chief (kamnan) could remind them of local norms and expectations for paying compensation after an injury took place. But when injuries occurred on the highway, the parties were likely to have been strangers to one another and may have found themselves without a mutually acceptable mediator. In such cases, injurers who disagreed about their obligation to pay compensation might discover that there was no authority figure to compel them to change their minds. In legal spaces where authority radiates outward from a sacred center, the more distant a location is from the center that holds significance for the disputants, the more problematic enforcement becomes.

Injuries Off the Map: Delocalized Causes of Harm

I have spoken thus far of injuries that were associated with specific locations: the house, the village, the forest, and the highway. Yet even in the imagined landscape familiar to preceding generations, many causes of injury were not locality-based and could not be mapped at all. For example, karmic explanations of injury, which often appeared in combination with other explanations, were not place-specific. They referred to the injured person's own misdeeds, either in this life or in an earlier life. The injury was thus a consequence of actions the injury victim had previously directed at the injurer or at another person or even an animal. The effects of these actions later manifested themselves in the form of an accident.

Karmic explanations placed the ultimate causal responsibility on the victim him- or herself. What then of the injurer? A different type of explanation that may be more common in the present than in the past is negligence. The concept of negligence is also “off the map” in that its causal roots are not fixed to any particular geographical location. The Thai word for negligence is pramaat, which is also a legal term, but its colloquial meaning in Thai is more complex than it is in English. When individuals cited the injurer's negligence as one cause of their injury, they usually hastened to add that they themselves had also been negligent. Negligence on the part of both parties—injured and injurer—appeared to be linked conceptually in the minds of ordinary people in Thailand.

Injuries occurred because both parties lacked sati, or mindfulness. Sati is another Buddhist concept, signifying a mind that is focused, calm, aware, and undistracted.Footnote ¹¹Sati can be achieved through concentration and meditation as well as a philosophical understanding of the illusory quality of everyday life. Negligence is, in a sense, the opposite of sati. As one interviewee observed, “[I]f you are negligent then you don't have sati; you are acting without sati” (interview with Uthit). The concept of negligence was thus connected to the lack of mindfulness by the victim as well as the injurer, and both in turn were tied to the Buddhist concept of an undisciplined mindFootnote ¹² and a lack of spiritual training and awareness. Moreover, the teachings of the Buddha would explain that negligence was a secondary cause of injury, not the root cause. The root cause, from a Buddhist perspective, is karma. The carelessness of both parties and their lack of sati have karmic origins.

Karma and negligence are two of the most important “off-the-map” causal explanations for injuries. Neither cause has specific spatial referents; neither has a geographic “place.” Interviewees also identified other nonlocalized explanations for injury. The concept of fate or destiny ( ), for example, is connected to karma yet distinguishable from it. Women “have ” when their age is an odd number, but men have , and are therefore more susceptible to injury, when their age is an even number. According to Reference KeyesKeyes, is a non-Buddhist concept of causation “that operates irrespective of the moral actions of people, whereas the Buddhist concept of Karma relates all causation ultimately to moral action” (1977:117). Nevertheless, injury victims in northern Thailand tended to merge the two concepts, and they spoke of their as the product of bad karma they had accumulated through misdeeds in their current or previous lifetimes.

Injuries sometimes arose from another nonlocalized cause, one's “stars” (duang). When a person's stars are in the ascendancy, good luck of all kinds may occur—one may win the lottery, succeed in gambling, and achieve success in all endeavors. But when one's stars are on the decline, bad fortune is likely, and injuries may occur.

Injuries could even be caused by a person's name. One interviewee, for example, complained that his parents did not choose a name for him that was appropriate for the day, month, and year of his birth. An inappropriate name can bring bad luck and make one susceptible to injuries. At the time of the interview, he was considering a name change in order to improve his luck and avoid further mishaps. A female interviewee changed her name after her husband was killed in a traffic accident, but this did not protect her several years later from a motorcycle collision that broke her leg. It may, however, have made her accident less serious and saved her life.

All these delocalized causes of injury—karma, negligence, absence of sati, fate, stars, and other forms of bad luck—had one thing in common: none of them, except perhaps the injurer's negligence, was associated with a remedy of any kind, or at least a remedy that the injurer was obliged to provide. If the cause of the injury was the victim's own karma, contributory negligence, lack of sati, fate, or bad luck, then why should the injurer take responsibility? In the past, these delocalized causal explanations were familiar and widely accepted, yet they did not necessarily relieve the injurer of an obligation to pay compensation. When injuries occurred in villages near the watchful eyes of the guardian spirits, the delocalized explanations were rarely regarded as the exclusive cause of the injury. Causation was multiple, shifting, and overlapping. No single explanation trumped the others. All of them were relevant, and combinations of them were likely to be mentioned when an injury occurred. The village chief could refer to the victim's karma at the same time that he reminded the injurer that he or she had violated local norms and disturbed the well-being of the entire village. Injuries could be simultaneously localized and delocalized. In the normal course of things, injurers were in the end expected to pay compensation.

Relocalization and Delocalization of Injury and Identity

Viewed from above, the landscape of northern Thailand might appear to have undergone little change over the past 25 years. The major cities—Chiangmai, Chiangrai, Lampang, Lamphun, Phayao, Phrao, and Nan—still occupy sites along the rivers where they were founded centuries ago, and smaller towns and villages are still scattered among the rice fields, orchards, and forests. Yet a closer view would disclose some new features. The cities have extended outward into the adjacent countryside as their populations and their commercial activities have expanded. Major highways have been constructed throughout the region. Airfields now handle hundreds of flights from elsewhere in Thailand and from Laos, China, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Singapore. Housing developments and resorts have proliferated. Some villages have shrunk and even disappeared as young workers have migrated to the cities.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Thailand experienced dramatic social, economic, demographic, and cultural changes as a result of intensified global influences. In part, these changes were fueled by the transformation of the Thai economy from one that was primarily agricultural to one that was increasingly based on industrial development and the export of manufactured goods (Reference DixonDixon 1999; Reference Phongpaichit and BakerPhongpaichit & Baker 1998). As described by Reference Baker and PhongpaichitBaker and Phongpaichit, Thailand's GDP increased 500 percent from 1975 to 2000, 25 percent of Thai workers left the agricultural sector, and the population of Bangkok tripled (2005:201–3). “Globalization” in Thailand during this period intensified across all five dimensions described by Reference AppaduraiAppadurai (1996): population movement and change, media innovation and dissemination, technological expansion and interactivity, financial interconnectedness, and ideological and political expression (for a discussion of globalization's influence on Thai political and legal culture, see Reference MungerMunger 2007). Although there is not space here to describe how all these types of change were experienced in Thailand, particularly in the northern region, there can be no question that the final decades of the twentieth century brought profound transformations to the lives and identities of Thai people.

As these changes took place, the landscape of injuries in northern Thailand was transformed in two significant ways, both of which affected the relationship between state law and the law of sacred centers. First, because people in northern Thailand tend to live and travel away from their birth communities, injuries have become increasingly relocalized. That is, injuries no longer occur near a sacred center that is known and respected by the injurer and his or her victim. Instead, most injuries now occur far from home, near other less familiar centers or outside the reach of any form of customary legal ordering. In only one instance did an interviewee describe an injury located in the village where he was born. In that case, local customary practices were applicable, and mediation by a village leader was still possible. More typically, however, injuries are not viewed as a matter of concern to all the humans and spirits in a particular location. There is no community that demands a resolution. Loss of the khwan no longer has implications for the rest of the community. Behavior that injures the individual no longer offends the guardian spirits of the village. Compensation obtained, or not obtained, from the injurer to restore the physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being of the injured person no longer affects others who live nearby. There is no village leader of whom the disputants can say, in the words of one of our interviewees, “He knows the accused and he knows the accuser. He knows both of them. He will do justice to both of them” (interview with Maanit).

The relocalization of injuries is partly a by-product of population movement across space. Since individuals spend less time in their birth villages, it is more likely that the injuries they suffer will occur far from home. More broadly, however, relocalization is connected to a general weakening of the linkages between individuals and the sacred centers that formerly shaped identities and daily practices. When babies are born today, they are less likely to be presented to the local guardian spirits because births increasingly take place in hospitals rather than homes. Birth rituals are less often performed, and children do not immediately become a part of the community of humans and spirits as they did in the past. Similarly, when young people marry in hotels rather than in their home village, the traditional wedding ceremonies no longer resemble the community celebrations of the past, and the new spouse does not move in with the parents and grandparents or “register” with the household spirits as a new member of the family. Instead, the young couple often lives and works in the city and not in the villages where they were raised. In these and other ways, the linkages between individuals and sacred centers have been weakened. The relocalization of injury is symptomatic of a more general loss of locality-based identity that has occurred in northern Thailand.

The second transformation of the landscape of injuries is apparent in the pervasive tendency to view injuries in terms of their delocalized qualities. That is, the causes that are “off the map”—karma, fate, stars—have become highly significant in the perceptions of injury victims, and injuries are often viewed as lacking any locational significance whatsoever. Malevolent ghosts are still thought to cause injuries in particularly risky places. But when injuries occur far away from the view of village guardian spirits, their mapping becomes less consequential and therefore of less interest to the parties.

The delocalization of injuries—the tendency to offer explanations that cannot be mapped—may be part of a broader shift in the ontology of Thai belief systems. As we have seen, “villagers' Buddhism” in the past integrated Buddhist and animist beliefs and practices into a seamless whole. Belief in karma and other aspects of formal Buddhist doctrine existed side by side with belief in local guardian spirits, khwan, and winyaan. Put another way, villagers' Buddhism contained both locality-based and delocalized elements. These elements were not sharply distinguished, for there was no need to do so. Phenomena—including injuries—could be explained simultaneously in terms of karma, fate, and locality spirits. But as individuals tend increasingly to live and work far from home, they have less opportunity to propitiate village guardian spirits, to inform them of their activities, and to seek their protection and guidance.

Observers of contemporary Thai society have noted an enormous growth in the popularity of delocalized deities, who can affect human lives but are not tied to a particular spatial location or sacred center. Such deities have, in a sense, replaced village-based sacred places and entities, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. One is Chao Mae Kuan Im, a female god–like figure of Chinese origin who is associated with morality, piety, and kindness (Reference Ganjanapan, Yamashita and EadesGanjanapan 2002:131).Footnote ¹⁵ Images of Chao Mae Kuan Im can now be seen throughout Thailand, and interviewees often mentioned her as an object of veneration. Equally ubiquitous is King Rama V (r. 1868–1910), known by his abbreviation as “ 5.” Long respected as a shrewd and able ruler who steered his country past the shoals of colonialism into an era of independence and “modernity,” 5 has in recent years attained godlike status. His pictures and statues are placed on shrines and worshipped in many houses and business establishments throughout the country. As the modernizing king, he is thought to bring “luck in business as well as protection” to those who honor him (Reference Ganjanapan, Yamashita and EadesGanjanapan 2002:130–1).

Failure to propitiate and worship both Chao Mae Kuan Im and 5 could bring misfortune, which in turn may lead to injury. Yet unlike the village and household guardian spirits, these newer deities are delocalized. Their influence and protection is not associated with a particular place. They can be “accessed” wherever people may go as they travel far from their birth village to live and work in Thailand's new economy. Religiosity has become less place-dependent.

Other deities or protective spirits are equally mobile and, in some cases, are adopted specifically because they are believed to provide protection as people travel from one location to another. Mobile spirits, as opposed to sacred centers, are particularly useful to those who participate in the internal migrations associated with Thailand's economy in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. For example, a pair of “spirit brothers” ( ) played a key role in the injury suffered by a young woman named Daaw. When Daaw was 13, poverty forced her mother to send her away from their small village in central Thailand to live with relatives hundreds of miles to the north. Before Daaw left on her journey, her mother presented her with the two spirit brothers. These supernatural boys, probably metal or ceramic images, were only a little younger than Daaw herself and came originally from Daaw's uncle, who was a spirit medium. He gave them to Daaw's parents so that they would be prosperous and “live well.” He told them that the boys would bring good fortune but that they must take proper care of them: “If we don't feed them, we will suffer” (interview with Daaw).

Daaw speaks to the spirit brothers frequently. Each day she offers them fruit, rice, and sweet drinks or milk. She must also inform the spirit brothers about her comings and goings before she leaves the house. If she tells them everything, they will protect her. Once they even helped her buy a winning lottery ticket. But if she fails to inform them before she goes out, she will lose their protection, with potentially disastrous consequences. That is one of the most important causes of a serious injury she suffered in a motorcycle accident:

Daaw's narrative illustrates how delocalized supernatural figures have replaced village-based spirits in the everyday lives of many Thai citizens. Worshiping such figures can bring good luck and protection. Failing to worship them properly can bring loss of protection and injury. But these mobile, delocalized spirits do not provide access to any official or unofficial legal system that would require the payment of compensation when injuries occur.

In sum, both the relocalization and delocalization of injuries entail a subtle but highly significant shift in the conceptualization of why injuries occur and what should be done about them. Together, they tend to reduce or eliminate the role played by the law of sacred centers. They make it less likely than ever before that any system of customary law will hold the injurer responsible and require the payment of compensation to the injury victim. Instead, they reinforce interpretations of injury that place the ultimate responsibility for accident prevention on the victim him- or herself.

The Delocalization of Karma

The lowland peoples of northern Thailand are overwhelmingly Buddhist,Footnote ¹⁶ and belief in the law of karma is central to their religious outlook. Yet the recent social transformations have brought a marked change in the role karma plays in explaining injuries and shaping the responses of injured persons in contemporary Thailand. Buddhism was, of course, a key consideration for injured persons 25 years ago, and long before that. Yet in the past villagers did not perceive sharp distinctions between their Buddhist beliefs and remediation systems founded on customary village-based practices, spirit worship, and mediation. Mediation of injury cases by secular authority figures also incorporated Buddhist norms of moderation, selflessness, and forgiveness. Buddhism may have tempered the quest for a remedy by discouraging selfish or overly aggressive responses, but it was not understood to prohibit entirely the demand for compensation. Since compensation reflected the interests of the entire village, not just the interests of the injured party, it could be pursued without violating Buddhist precepts. In this sense, Buddhism and belief in karma were viewed as consistent with spirit-based belief systems and the customary law associated with them.

In recent years, however, the integration of Buddhism with other locality-based belief and remediation systems has begun to break down. As individuals leave their birth communities, they worship at temples in locations where they have no network of friends and relations. Indeed, they may have no affiliation with any particular temple, and for ceremonial purposes they may regard a number of temples in various locations as equally suitable. Furthermore, individuals in contemporary Thailand can now access Buddhism in new and sometimes unprecedented ways, thanks to dramatic technological changes over the past quarter-century. The teachings of charismatic Buddhist teachers have long been available through books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, and nowadays such writings are extremely popular. But new media have facilitated other forms of delocalized Buddhist practice. Televangelism now supplements the ever-popular radio broadcasts of Buddhist sermons. Buddhism can also be accessed over the Internet and by DVDs and cassette tapes (compare Reference HirschkindHirschkind 2006 on Islamic cassette sermons in Egypt). Devout Buddhists can, and increasingly do, perceive their religious practices as delocalized. Buddhist practices have tended to lose the geographical specificity and the linkage to other localized spirit-based belief systems that they once had.

The accounts of numerous injury victims illustrate the extent to which the Buddhist perspective on injury has been delocalized—cut loose from its geographical anchor in village society. These individuals portrayed their injuries as primarily the result of their own misdeeds. One young man speculated that his frequent accidents resulted from his earlier employment in a slaughterhouse, when he took the lives of many animals (interview with Aran). A middle-aged woman believed her broken leg was caused by her own actions in beating a dog that had entered her house years before and breaking its leg (interview with Buajan). Others explained that they must have injured their injurer in a previous lifetime, creating karma that had caught up with them in their present life. The cycle of injury and response would continue across many lifetimes, according to the law of karma, unless one of the parties manifested the Buddhist virtues of generosity, compassion, and forgiveness.

Moreover, karmic explanations of injuries have expanded, because people believe that the conditions of modern life make them more vulnerable to injuries caused by karma. As one interviewee observed, a devout Buddhist who has trained him- or herself to be mindful (to have sati) at all times can, to some extent, guard against the accidents that karma might otherwise produce. But in contemporary Thai society, it is more difficult than before to maintain sati. Both the injurer and the injury victim are hurried, distracted, and careless. Under these circumstances, their karma is far more likely to catch up with them and to manifest itself through the negligence of both parties:

In contemporary Thailand, people find it more difficult to maintain the spiritual discipline necessary to guard against injury. These same societal changes have transformed the concept of karma itself by removing it from the context of “villagers' Buddhism” and disconnecting it from any functioning system of compensation that an injury victim might attempt to invoke. With the atrophy of customary mechanisms for compensation, and with the relocalization of injuries far from the traditional sacred centers and the delocalization of injuries off the map entirely, injured persons look to themselves and their immediate family to manage their physical and spiritual recovery.