<研究ノート>宗教儀礼と都市のモダニティ : チェンマイの精霊崇拝の民族誌研究

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between spirit worship in Chiang Mai and modernization of the city through the ethnography of Shigeharu Tanabe, Sommai Premchit and Amphay Dore, Gehan Wijeyewardene, Rosalind C. Morris, and other significant ethnographers. Or, it is to know in what kind of condition Geertzian local knowledge situated. In Northern Thailand, there is a double standard of the social value: the one is of the nation, and the other is of the ex-suzerainty: historically Thailand has no experience of being colonized, and maintains its original culture, though economically the country sees an explicit tension with the globalisation after the monetary crisis in 1997. And as to Northern identity, it is proved by the historical fact that it had been an independent suzerainty until the end of 19th century before the integration. And the global process is also added there: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) tells that local identities are always with the global process and not able to be separated from it. Generally, spirit worship in Chiang Mai consists of everyday seance ritual in the spirit medium's houses and of several calendrical rituals. As to the former, the myth of Suwan Kham Daeng, or the Lord of Russet Gold, the legendary founder of Chiang Mai and the most powerful spirit, who is believed to live in Chiang Dao caves, is important. And as to the latter, Inthakhin Festival, or the Festival of the City Pillar, is one of the most important one because it is also the myth of the city and a historical conjunction of the religious syncretism. And at the same time, the modernization goes on and the urbanization accelerates. People's everyday life focuses more on material consumption, and so-called "new middle class" appears. Then, how can we think about the popularity of the religion? Spirit worship in Chiang Mai represents the people's memory of the city. The modernization could contradictorily rouse and enforce the memory of the various temporality and spatiality in the spirit worship to introduce it as sociability through the body of the medium into the consumptive society: It can be recognized as a self-organization by biopower, as a self-determination, or a bricolage from the people's side.