Khwan are a ubiquitous force of life in Southeast Asia. Virtually all Tai peoples are familiar with khwan, from Assam in the West, Yunnan to the North, Vietnam in the East, and Malaysia to the south. To help construct a sense of cultural coherence out of a wide-ranging, non-nation-state group of people, and to understand a local non-Buddhist theory of mind and mental health, Barend Jan (Baas) Terwiel presents us with a puzzle: just what is the khwan, and how can the many definitions and representations of it make sense to an English speaker?

Terwiel’s student, Benjamin Baumann, puts together a collection curated from over 50 years of publications, and invites Terwiel to comment on his own work from the vantage point of today. As noted in the introduction, contemporary anthropologists, myself included, still struggle to translate ideas related to khwan. The book thus serves as both a retrospective on Terwiel’s life and work, and an up-to-date repository of information on this elusive topic. What has emerged is a very valuable, and very welcome, addition to the scholarship on mentality and mental health in Southeast Asia.

The book’s thesis is that understanding khwan helps us to understand a pre-Buddhist Tai concept of sociality that continues to be meaningful today (p. 177). Using Tylor’s idea of survivals to craft this argument, Terwiel suggests that contemporary practices may help us to piece together what happened before: ‘rituals’, he says, ‘often contain customs which may give us a hint of practices in the past’. He carries out his investigations methodologically by use of his own ethnographic research in Thailand and Assam, along with that of a generation of ethnographers such as Condominas, Davis, Tambiah and Wijeyewardene, and of historical ritual texts, and puts it all into comparative conversation. The book is largely, as Terwiel writes, ‘a comparison of rituals of a series of culturally related and historically linked peoples’ (p. 81).

In ‘Chapter 1: The Concept of ‘khwan’’, Terwiel offers some definitions of khwan, although he is clear that none of them fully captures the idea. Khwan are ‘spirit’; ‘duration of life; the mind’; ‘compensation’; ‘a state of well-being’; ‘a whorl in the hair’; ‘an angel in the head’; ‘the essence of life’; the ‘element of vitality’; ‘a fairy or spirit attached to a person from birth’, or just ‘psychic energy’. He picks as the most important: ‘an invisible substance of which it is believed that it is in a person throughout [their] life’ (p. 3). I liked the definition that suggested khwan to be ‘an ethereal entity that is prone to stray from the body, a condition thought to be responsible for various maladies, and must be ‘lured back’ and re-established in the body through incantations and other traditional ceremonies.’ In my own work I have seen how khwan are notoriously fickle, and can wander and get lost, so they often must be retrieved and re-instated in the body.

If khwan are parts of the soul, or an entity in the body, though, why are some animals like buffalo and some inanimate objects like rice, musical instruments, even cities, cars and the wagons that bring the rice to the threshing ground considered to also have khwan? Why is it thought that some khwan travel on after death? Are they multiple, or single? Many people say there are 32 khwan, but others say there are 81, or even 120. Why are some things, like eggs and white thread, present in so many khwan rituals across the Tai-speaking world? And what does compensation have to do with life spirits? The khwan are thus introduced as a puzzle; making sense of them is the book’s goal.

Each chapter after this first one contains its own mystery, with some suggestions of answers, and offers new evidence for the book’s larger puzzle. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are from Terwiel’s years of ethnographic work in Thailand. He discusses white strings and khwan incantations for babies and soon-to-be ordained monks, and an interview with the famous monk Phraya Anuman, and the ominous khwan-fleeing quality of a sneeze. Chapters 5 and 6 offer rich comparisons of khwan in death rituals and as part of everyday life among dozens of different Tai groups. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 focus on Terwiel’s time in Assam, again with a comparative eye on similar practices across disparate Tai and neighbouring communities. Chapter 10 presents an exciting, previously unpublished ritual text on a calling of the khwan ceremony. Chapters 11 and 12 offer analyses of khwan in rice myths, and of khwan placements in the body in different lunar stages, respectively.

In the final ‘Chapter 13: Conclusions’, Terwiel revisits some of the earlier puzzles of the book to tie it together: why are khwan considered to be in inanimate objects, and why does ‘khwan’ also mean compensation? Through this quite narrow focus, Terwiel very satisfyingly makes some broader conclusions to solve the book’s larger question of just what khwan are all about. Terwiel makes use of a khwan ritual done on a Mitsubishi pick-up truck to make his argument. A pick-up truck is not an animate object at all, Terwiel points out, and everyone knows it. It does, however, serve as an instrument to assist its owners to make a living. Like the human body, a car is a complex organism, which at death experiences a disintegration, and its animating elements disperse. A similar idea holds for the connotation of compensation; ‘when a human relationship has been damaged through an insult or aggression, the complex social network needs to be repaired’ (p. 241). The apparent puzzle, Terwiel concludes, only seems like a puzzle because the anthropologists who wrote about khwan often followed their current-day, ‘Eurocentric idea that only humans were in possession of a soul’ (p. 242). From all of this, and from his many years of work on the khwan, Terwiel concludes that we can best think of khwan as the quality of proper functioning of a complex being, item or organisation.

This is a book that operates at many meta-levels of analysis. Terwiel and Baumann are very aware of the dated-ness of much of the work, and ‘some formerly used analytic concepts were replaced by concepts that seem more appropriate from the vantage point of the present’ (p. xv). New passages are bracketed when replacing old text, and footnotes and extensive commentaries are incorporated into each chapter to offer contemporary analyses. Terwiel knows too that the subject of khwan is fairly specialised. When he first wrote about khwan, he tells us, he was sure that no one could critique the work, or even be interested in reading it. He knows that this is changing, as the book’s publication and this review attests.

Overall, the comparative ethnographic method might feel unfashionable to some, and some of the conclusions from ethnographic examples are not borne out through further study. There may not be a single meaning of khwan, and there may not have ever been one, and so the project of working to reconstruct a single, proto-Tai or Ur-text may be out of synch with the reality that there had been and always are multiple perspectives. Comparing disparate rituals to construct surprisingly coherent narratives, however, is here an extremely intriguing and attractive project, and Terwiel with Baumann’s help has convinced me that it is a worthwhile exercise to take on. The soul of the Tai re-examined is an indispensable book for anyone in the fields of anthropology and cross-cultural psychology interested in mentality, sociality, and health, and for anyone who seeks to learn more about the many Tai-speaking peoples of Southeast Asia.