Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Der Lehrstuhl „Gesellschaften und Kulturen Südostasiens“ freut sich, Sie zum folgenden Vortrag einladen zu dürfen:

"Matrifocality and ancestral cults in Thailand’s lower Northeast"

by Benjamin Baumann

30.06. 18 Uhr. Invalidenstr. 118, Room 117 and online.

Abstract:

The analytic concept ‘matrifocality’ looks back at a turbulent history in Anthropology. Mostly employed in Afro-Caribbean contexts to describe situations in which women as mothers are structurally, culturally and affectively central to the organization of social life, the concept was first embraced by feminist scholars only to become criticized as a heteronormative misconception by a later generation of critical anthropologists. Despite the ongoing controversy surrounding the concept in Anthropology, it was rarely utilized as a heuristic device to approach Southeast Asian social formations, in which women traditionally played important roles in the organization of social life. This is also true for Thailand, where a whole generation of Anthropologists used to frame local spirit mediumship and possession cults in terms of matrilineality and matrilocality. The concept ‘matrifocality’ was, however, rarely employed to classify the organizational logic of these societies. Notwithstanding this influential tradition in Northern Thai ethnography, questions for the structural place of women in local spirits cults and their relevance for the organization of social life are rarely addressed in contemporary anthropological texts. This paper seeks to reverse this trend by emphasizing the matrifocal organization of a localized ancestral cult in a predominantly Khmer-speaking province in Thailand’s lower Northeast. Based on 25 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a rural village in Buriram Province, the paper will detail a matrilineally transmitted ancestral cult, in which local matrilineages are reproduced through the veneration of ancestors that are imagined as elephant hunters. Although women are still the central nodes of these emplaced cults and female lay spirit mediums act as the main ritual officiants, the socio-economic transformations of local lifeworlds also affect the place of cis women in these cults, as more and more trans women become actively involved as professional spirit mediums. Will this transformation of local possession cults also affect the matrifocal organization of village life?

Benjamin Baumann is an assistant professor and coordinator of the international MA program 'Sociocultural Anthropology' at Heidelberg University's Institute of Anthropology. He studied Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies and holds a PhD in Southeast Asian Studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His ethnographic work examines rural lifeworlds, socio-cultural identities, and local language games in Thailand's lower Northeast, focusing on how the ghostly structures the imagination and reproduction of social collectives and communal sentiments of belonging.

Zoom-Meeting beitreten
https://hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/63868933349?pwd=iit1s0BKCtelOXMhaV3QZbHHir0eD5.1

Meeting-ID: 638 6893 3349
Passwort: 956048