Enunciating ambiguity: Thailand’s phi and the epistemological decolonization of Thai studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why are ostensibly paradoxical statements so common when villagers in Thailand’s lower Northeast are asked to recount their personal encounters with the nonhumans known as phi in local language games? Inspired by the anthropology of ontology and drawing on Wittgenstein’s linguistic phenomenology, I set out to explore the epistemic appropriateness of the paradox in ethnographic accounts of villagers’ narratives about these encounters. In an attempt to epistemologically decolonize the debate on Thailand’s phi, I use interlocutors’ ostensibly paradoxical narratives about their encounters to reflect upon the multiple worlds that intersect in villagers’ everyday lives. While an analytic reconstruction of the various language games this multiplicity produces and their partly irreconcilable ontological registers may help to dissolve the paradox of villagers’ accounts analytically, I ask whether the scholarly inclination to identify and resolve paradoxes through the acknowledgment of epistemological multiplicity reproduces the hegemony of naturalism. An outline of animist collectivity and its identification as the social ontology of everyday village life finally suggests that the ostensible paradoxes that encounters with phi produce are not only what makes them socially meaningful, but also enunciations of the concept phi itself.