Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Horstmann, Alexander

Titel

Exchange of Religious Gestures in Ritual Space Performing Ritual Traditions in the Songkhla Lake Basin, Southern Thailand and the Negotiation of Boundaries between the Communities

Ist Teil von

• Anthropologie et sociétés, 2012-01, Vol.36 (3), p.117-136

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Sociological Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this article, I am interested in the exchange of religious gestures in ritual space as it unfolds between Buddhists and Muslims in shared neighbourhoods of Southern Thailand. Multi-religious neighbourhood refers to the sharing of physical space and to the development of local knowledge in which people express their belonging to a commonly identified entity by investing into relations beyond the religious divide. Gestures in ritual space provide a privileged terrain to understand the dramatic performances in which social hierarchies and normative orders are expressed and identities negotiated. In ritual space, and through bodily performance, identities and social positions are legitimated, negotiated, reflected, expressed and transformed. My thesis is, then, that the performance of gestures in ritual space opens a window on the negotiation of Buddhist-Muslim relations. The exchange of prayer gestures in ritual space refers to the morality and economy of exchange between Buddhists and Muslims and the rationality behind it. In the following, I want to show how a close look on the exchange of gestures gives a more dynamic perspective on the tensions and contradictions evolving between Buddhists and Muslims at this time. I argue that the performance of gestures in ritual space is perceived as a transgression of a space that is characterized by increasingly rigid ethnic and religious boundaries and threatened by the circulation of images of political violence in the Deep South. The exchange of gestures thus reflects the remainders and revitalization of a traditional social order beyond the politicisation of religion. Adapted from the source document.