BETWEEN LIVES: LIVINGNESS AND REMNANTS OF RICE ONTOLOGY IN NORTHERN THAILAND
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Combining ethnographic and archival analysis with creative research, my dissertation investigates rituals and performances that center on animistic rice culture in northern Thailand. This study of Thai animist peasantry pays close attention to cultural erasure, resistance, and reemergence of the subdued to dislodge animistic rice culture from state-sponsored narratives and Theravada Buddhist domination. In the locations of Lampang, Lamphun, and Chiang Mai, I deploy methodologies from the disciplines of anthropology, theater and performance, and gender and sexuality to examine religious coloniality, gender subjugation, and human and non-human subjectivity. My dissertation provides an alternate interpretation of rice ontology in the ways that my devised theater production Ricelihood (2020) and other contemporary animist rice rituals represent community acts of political resistance that maintain the continuity of rice culture by including the marginal voices of the rice-farmer elders who remain and of the younger generations who have left the rice fields and only return home occasionally. Together with new materialism and animist affect, I explore the ways in which the contemporaneity of migration, economic disparity, and indebtedness disrupts animist-agrarian practice, yet at the same time, furnishes ways to sustain the rice culture’s livingness. I understand these ongoing changes as processes of survival. These processes are what I call livingness.