Please note: This lecture will be held in person and virtually on Zoom. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Once you've registered, joining information will be sent to your email. Register for the Zoom webinar at: http://myumi.ch/A1MdA

Thai Buddhism is highly polymorphic, with wide regional and historical variation, with practices ranging from magical power to spirit possession to ethical codes to meditation. People draw from these elements to meet the demands of social, historical, political, and other contexts. In this talk, Stonington asks what assemblages of religious practice might
emerge in the face of domineering experiences of the body. Severe pain has been described by phenomenologists as a totalizing experience, making it an ideal test case for this inquiry.

Through interviews and participant observation with people coping with severe pain in Northern Thailand, Stonington argues that a specific set of meditation practices that showed up as orthodox for how they should relate to pain actually made their pain worse, sending them on investigative journeys to assemble novel sets of tools from other practices available to them. Through this isolated individual investigation, his interlocutors surprisingly settled on techniques similar to one another, a kind of emergent locally-heterodox rejection of received wisdom.

Scott Stonington is a sociocultural anthropologist and internal medicine physician at the University of Michigan. His first book The Spirit Ambulance, about dying in Thailand, won awards for ethnographic writing and social theory. Current major projects include the politics and experience of pain in Thailand; and the harms generated by time pressure, emotion, and improvisation in the clinical encounter in the U.S.

Accommodation: If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at cseas@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.