I went to a seminar last night at the local Uni. This was a Heritage seminar series. Visiting academic who was an expert in Thailand. He spoke of the popular obsession Thais have for the supernatural. He also spoke of how when the Western nations encroached on Thailand they told the Kings of the time, that their dress was barbaric. Thais dress for men and women especially in youth, was almost exactly the same. This was seen as an indication of their inferiority - even immorality.
This was a very dangerous political situation. Thailand is one of the very few countries in Asia that was not taken over by the colonial powers. To be seen as inferior culturally had been a major pretext for colonisation - if not really pretext, then certainly justification.
That was only one issue which caused the split between popular and official lines. Dress was changed from above, but more than that, the supernatural was also seen as barbaric from a Western influence that was wedded to Christianity. And Christianity had changed.
He spoke of the cultural shift that happened in the West. Rationality, and secularism. Aside from what I have spoken of previously - the Enlightenment, he identified another threshold point, The Reformation.
The Reformation brought in a new version of spirituality - my soul and God. They emphasised a concept that had been alive for aeons, but it was the emphasis - to be spiritual was about your personal soul's relationship with God. Not the world around you. Of course, there were issues in this to do with the reaction against the Roman Catholic power - the power of the church institution. In Catholic terms, it is dangerous to rely on your own connection and interpretation of God. With good reason in my view, except they abused this for temporal power purposes.
But the effect was similar to the movement in Judaism long before, which you can read in the Bible, where the cult of the Temple strove to push aside the cult of the 'forest alters'. In other words, centralised political power dressed up as religion strove to eradicate the worship of nature spirits which had been essential to Jews as it was with ever other people in the world.
In the reformation, the revolt was against Papal dictatorship of personal spirituality. But the effect was to focus on the inner personal aspect of spirituality, and deny the validity of nature and land spirits. This had the effect or preparing the distinction between spiritual and secular areas of the world - in the cathedral, or in the heart, you could be holy, but outside, the world was now up for grabs from science and developers.
In Asia he explained, there is a different version of 'modern'. There are many versions - pathways to and through modernity. People are modern and believe in the supernatural - the two are not incompatible.
This causes a huge problem for the archaeological oriented new movement of Heritage. Now this is curious. Heritage and Archaeology feel they have the moral right of access to a 'site', and that locals coming in and pilfering objects is vandalism. But he pointed out that that is only a secular scientific belief system.
Local popular religion is obsessed with objects of power. He said they have the most intense observational interest in which places have spirits, which objects have power, and whether that power was for good or bad. So when a new sacred site is discovered, the locals raid it for the power objects, because that see power objects in a dynamic way. PLUS, he suggested, so do the power objects themselves!
Heritage wants to set things aside in some museum, where the study or earlier cultures can proceed academically, but he suggested, the power objects themselves would rather be active in the world - and so too do the people see it this way. He called the release of stored power objects in old temples and stupas, as an 'explosion' of their efficacy into the world.
Power objects and places are part of the ongoing living culture of belief and interaction with a personally meaningful and supernatural world, which has been denied official validity from the upper echelons - the literati. Who he suggested were most interested in 'becoming modern' - no matter what the age.
He gave the example of China, where there was a huge push, long before Communism, to secularise the world. But he pointed out, the number of educated people in China who were influenced by this movement, despite the fact they wrote the books and thus established the official history of China, were an infinitesimal fraction of the population. No one else took the slightest bit of notice.
He said this still happens in Western countries. First in the common field, when the State 'sanctifies' certain famous places, but for the people, there are always local places which remain paramount in people's everyday lives. But also, and more important when Western nations need to quantify the sacredness of native peoples in their own country. They always want to say, which places are sacred and which aren't (so we can dig them up). But sacredness is about a living spiritual culture, which is intimately connected to the awareness of spirits, and it not only changes, but is not always associated with recognised 'old' sites. It can be certain streets, rocks, trees. The Western secular mind can't handle that approach to 'meaningfulness', or 'retribution' when sacredness is violated. He gave an example in China when an influential 'reformer' personally cut off the head of an old Buddha statue - later he was killed in an explosion at a new airport development he was overseeing. The explosion sliced off his head. This was not lost on the populace!
He explained that after the Protestant wave swept Western nations, we now live in a natural world that has no spiritual significance. So when we travel to the non-Western countries, they know we see their supernatural-aware spirituality as inferior, so not only do they not tell us about it, but we show no interest in knowing anything about it.
However, that in no way means it is not alive and vital. This causes a dislocation of understanding between cultures. They are so intensively engaged in a local dynamic spiritual culture that is focused on the most intricate and complex observation of spirits and their effects, yet they tell no one about it from outside, and it is treated in a schizophrenic way by the official levels of religions and institutions.
Too much to go into, but I would like to mention the effect of map making. He described temples in Thailand, where the life and 'environmental events' of the Buddha would be depicted on the walls, superimposed on features of the local landscape. (An aboriginal woman in the audience I could see nodding her head excitedly at this issue of mapping.) But cartographers would come in and map areas with no regard, no understanding - worse, a disdain and abhorrence of local concepts of land-meaning - and draw up a whole new interpretation of the natural world.
I mention this because at an earlier seminar at the Uni a professor explained the unbelievable power that mapping brought to our earlier culture, that saw distances from the perspective of the foot and the hoof. To map was to make the world understandable and graspable - back then. It was in fact The Obsession of the time, as it transformed the world in which we lived. He of course, as you can image, went into great and fascinating detail on how this powerfully affected government and social processes, attitudes and beliefs. But I mention it just to indicate the potency of what was at stake - one intensively secular-material culture against another intensively spiritual-material culture.
Christianity, especially Protestantism, provided the moral backbone of the secular attempt at domination of the spirits of land. Mining could never have occurred without the divorcement of the spiritual from the material, to say nothing of modern building development. But as he demonstrated, the old spiritual-material world view never went away. The once strongly held belief that Christianity would be the vehicle of rationalism, has proved false. The people of the non-Western countries, have never given up their instinctual awareness of the material-immanent supernatural.
So, my friends, we here are not alone!
