This remarkable and detailed, yet accessible, study proposes new ways of understanding modern Thai Buddhism. Based on his outstanding language skills, his long‐term and close familiarity with Thai liturgical and magical practices, historiographies, and manuscript culture, McDaniel challenges a number of well‐established concepts in the study of Thai Buddhism. Critical of the explanatory models of syncretism, and unsatisfied with scholarship that overemphasizes the study of institutions and canonical texts, McDaniel “focuses on individual agents and the relationships that are formed between them by looking closely at their religious products (texts, rituals, liturgies, art) in highly specific contexts.” He develops his arguments by drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of different sources, such as hagiographical texts, ghost stories, films, amulet magazines, temple murals, and his numerous interviews with monks, nuns, amulet collectors, devotees of Buddhist saints at shrines, taxi drivers, etc. In his “ethnomethodological study” of the “cacophony” of religious experiences in Thailand, he pursues “a pragmatic study of cultural repertoires,” interested in exploring the “complex technologies [such as of astrology, protection, prognostication, and moral precepts] people actually employ to solve problems.” Given the many significant conceptual and methodological issues that McDaniel attempts to engage, and the substantial scholarship upon it is based, this book seems destined to provoke a lot of critical discussion among scholars, yet it should also be of value for a wider audience interested in Thailand and religion.
