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Hierarchy and Power in Pre-National Buddhist States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Peter Vandergeest
Peter Vandergeest
Affiliation:
University of Victoria
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Extract

Since the Second World War, an important school of social science scholarship in Southeast Asia has explained pre-national social hierarchy in terms of religious cosmology, or religious beliefs in the ordering principles of merit and karma (Heine-Geldern, 1956; Geertz, 1980; Errington, 1989). With respect to Siam/Thailand, Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) exemplifies this approach in its strong form—he has attempted to explain all religious practices of the ‘Thais’ as expressions of Buddhist orthodoxy. For these writers, religious and cosmological meaning is fundamental, and subsumes the economic dimension. Their emphasis on cultural coherence contrasts with a second school of thought exemplified by Scott (1977, 1985) which focuses on slippage or difference between the ‘great traditions’ represented in Thailand by Buddhism, and little traditions of peasantries, based on local experience, pre-existing little traditions or the appropriation of past ‘great traditions’.

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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , October 1993, pp. 843 - 870
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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