Stranger diviners and their stranger clients: Popular cosmology-making and its kingly power in Buddhist Thailand

Abstract

Marshall Sahlins argues that kings are ‘stranger kings’, as they typically originate from outside their kingdom or from the celestial realms. He advances that kings draw authority precisely from an ability to appropriate a geographic and cosmological Other for the benefit of their subjects. With this article, I propose that, in contemporary Thailand, a kingdom ruled by a Buddhist monarch, this defining ability of kings spreads to commoners. An ethnographic study of diviners (mo du) and their clients (luk kha) in Bangkok reveals that Thai Buddhists routinely make cosmologies. Such cosmology-making entails appropriating foreign and divine forms of knowledge in the manner of kings. I argue that this phenomenon allows commoners to master the idioms of power of Thai Buddhist kingship. This results in tensions between commoners, and places them in an ambiguous relationship with the monarchic state.