Editorial Foreword

Abstract

Ritual, power, and ‘production’ are some of the themes that connect the six research articles featured in this issue. Alexandra Kaloyanides explores ritual and power through a study of the highly ornamented Burmese manuscript known as the Kammavacā, an authoritative text that is conventionally used in important monastic ceremonies. The article examines the process through which the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Kammavacā emerges as a standardised ritual object and for what it reveals about the local political-economic conditions of Myanmar’s last kingdom, the Konbaung dynasty. Focusing on the visual and material features of over four dozen Burmese Kammavācamanuscripts, the article suggests that the production, decoration, and circulation of these texts constitutes an attempt by the royal court to mobilise protective ‘militarised’ spirits in the wake of an advancing British occupational force that threatened to overwhelm the kingdom. Where Kaloyanides’ article examines the harnessing and distribution of spiritual power by the royal centre, our next article by Edoardo Siani expands this perspective to consider the appropriation of cosmological ideas and ritual practices as they relate to expressions of everyday resistance in contemporary Thailand. Based on ethnohistorical fieldwork conducted between the coup of 2014 and the death of King Bhumibol in 2016, Siani’s study examines how divination is utilised by different stakeholders in contemporary Thai society as expressions of contestation and dissent. While acknowledging that cosmological references and divination practices are often reflective of conservative stakeholders, Siani suggests that Thai diviners continue to provide political actors across the social landscape with the spiritual vocabulary and ritual means to contest and produce sovereign claims to power. Shifting to the sixteenth-century world of the Spanish Philippines, Stephanie Joy Mawson examines a similar contestation between legal, religious, and ritual worlds via 98 Inquisition cases concerning ‘folk magic’ or hechicería, a juridical category denoting a minor religious infraction. Her examination of the interaction of Spanish and Filipino folk practices complicates our understanding of what constitutes the boundary between the local and the foreign by pointing out that the Spanish came to the Philippines with their own ‘folk magic’ practices that intermixed with pre-existing customs. Similar to Siani’s findings in contemporary Thailand, Mawson’s research suggests that these rituals were adopted by elites and commoners alike, drawing the attention and ire of the ruling authorities. While the article illustrates the way Spanish-Mexican folk knowledge was appropriated and produced by local practitioners, this research also considers how Asian botanical, medicinal, and spiritual knowledge was incorporated into Spanish understandings of folk magic. Colonial authorities struggled to repress hechicería practices within the Spanish community Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 54(2), pp 173–174 June 2023. 173