Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog.
Note: Contents data are machine generated based on pre-publication provided by the publisher. Contents may have variations from the printed book or be incomplete or contain other coding.
Contents Acknowledgments Note on Transcription Chapter 1: Introduction 8 Chapter 2: Spirits, Souls, and Selves: The Body as a Contested Site 46 Chapter 3: Souls Into Spirits: Death as Self-Transformation 74 Chapter 4: Domesticating the Self 114 Chapter 5: Maintaining Health and Well-Being 158 Chapter 6: Marking Maturity: The Negotiation of Social Inequalities at Midlife 190 Chapter 7: The Ethnopsychology of Aging and Overall Development 226 Chapter 8: Imagined Lives 265 Notes Glossary 275 References 284 Index Acknowledgments This project has benefited greatly from the help of more people and organizations than I could possibly acknowledge in these pages, but I would like to single out a few to mention here. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Shan villagers who welcomed me into their midst for over three years and literally shared their lives with me. I have tried to render their words and actions in a way that is in keeping with the generosity and trust they extended toward me; I can only ask their indulgence for any errors or misinterpretations that may have nevertheless found their way into this manuscript. My education in Shan customs and thinking is certainly not over, and I look forward to their continued tutelage in the years to come. The fieldwork that formed the basis for this book could not have been done without the helpful cooperation of the National Research Council of Thailand and the generous support of several different granting agencies. Financial support at various stages was provided by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation. Knox College also provided help in the form of a faculty travel grant, as well as ongoing support since then of various kinds. My intellectual debts are many. For introducing me to the Shan, and encouraging me to pursue fieldwork in a Shan village in the first place, I want to thank Paul Durrenberger. It was also my early work with Paul that first prompted me to consider how the study of cognition and worldview might be situated in a broader political and economic context. I am also deeply indebted to F. K. Lehman, who gave me my first lessons in the Shan language and supervised my first extended fieldwork among the Shan; he has taught me countless things over the years but, most germane to this project, I thank him for encouraging me to view Buddhism as a rich and living religion, one that is open to many interpretations. To my friend, Nikki Tannenbaum, I am grateful for her comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript, for her amiable companionship during a portion of my first field trip, and for endless conversations, in and out of the field, about all things Shan. While the process of making sense of my fieldnotes and writing this book has been, for the most part, a rather solitary endeavor, there have been moments in the process when I have enjoyed the help and stimulation of others. During an early sabbatical, I was fortunate to be able to sit in on Sherry Turkle and Mitch Resnick¿s graduate seminar at M.I.T. entitled ¿Evolving Conceptions of Systems and Self,¿ where I first started thinking about ritual as a kind of ¿technology¿ that impacts on the self. Later, during a year spent in Amherst, Massachusetts, a weekly writing group with fellow Southeast Asianists Susan Darlington and Margaret Sarkissian provided fellowship and feedback (and deadlines!) that kept me writing. Two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript provided many helpful suggestions which have greatly improved the book. I only regret that I did not have the time or expertise to follow up on even more of them. I would also like to thank Pamela Kelley of the University of Hawai¿i Press for her early enthusiasm about the manuscript, her good advice during the publication process, and her patience as I struggled to make production deadlines. Others have provided help of a more diffuse nature. I thank Lorraine Aragon for sustained friendship and support over the years, as well as stimulating conversation about all aspects of Southeast Asia. Clark Cunningham, Janet Keller, David Plath, and Jacquie Hill have been among the many mentors and friends too numerous to mention whose continued interest in this project has encouraged me to continue the work. My family deserves a special note of thanks. My parents, Odra and Jerry, and my brothers, Dan and David, have provided support in myriad ways that extends beyond the confines of this particular project but, without which, it never would have happened. My first husband, Roland Stone, accompanied me on my initial fieldtrip and contributed mightily to its success, not least by his eager participation in all aspects of village life. His memory lives on among our many Shan friends. My son, Maury, who cannot remember a time when his mother was not working on this book, has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the project, urging me to do things like bring a clipboard and pad of paper to the basketball court so that I could ¿work on my book¿ while watching him play. Finally, my debt to my husband, Steve Cohn, is simply without measure. He has shared the fieldwork experience, provided thoughtful commentary on numerous different drafts, and done more than his share of domestic tasks during those ¿crunch¿ times when deadlines loomed. More than once I wondered about the wisdom of pursuing a project that had already taken much longer to finish than I had anticipated; I owe its completion to his gentle prodding and unwavering conviction that it was worth the wait. Note on Transcription The Shan words used in this book have been transcribed according to their modern spoken form. For those words that have well-known Thai equivalents, I have tried to indicate these as well. However, I have not attempted to indicate the five tonal markers that occur in each of these languages. Vowel length is undifferentiated in Shan except for the vowel a, written a (short vowel) and aa (long vowel). In Thai, all vowels have a short and a long form, and are indicated accordingly. The following is intended as a simple guide to the pronunciation of the Shan and Thai words that appear in the text; it is not an exhaustive account of Shan or Thai phonetics. All frequently used Shan terms can be found in the glossary. Vowels Approximately the sound in: i as it occurs in open syllables in Shan, and in the long form (ii) in Thai Rita i as it occurs in closed syllables in Shan, and in the short form (i) in Thai sit u dune ei reign o hello e pen a father ai Thailand ao Laos au caught ae similar to the a in band oe similar to the eu in the French bleu ? is a high, back, unrounded vowel; there is no equivalent in European languages (the tongue is positioned as it is for u, but the lips are spread). a? is a diphthong formed by the combination of a and ?. (This, ai, and ao are the only diphthongs in Shan. ia, ua, and ?a are the diphthongs in Thai; they correspond, respectively, to the Shan vowels ei, o, and oe.) Consonants Aspirated stops are distinguished from their unaspirated counterparts by the addition of h (ph, th, and kh). However, to avoid confusion with the English consonant blend sh, the aspirated Shan sibilant (which has no unaspirated counterpart) is written simply as s. The initial ts in Shan is similar to the middle consonant sound in ¿flotsam¿; it corresponds to the consonant c in Thai, which is similar to the middle consonant sound in ¿judge.¿
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Shan (Asian people) -- Thailand -- Religion.
Buddhism -- Thailand -- Customs and practices.
Shan (Asian people) -- Thailand -- Social life and customs.