# Ritualizing Media, Mediatizing Ritual

Milan Kroulik

► To cite this version:

Milan Kroulik. Ritualizing Media, Mediatizing Ritual: A Study on the Interaction of Media Technologies and Ritual Practice in Thai Rituals. Philosophy. Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, 2024. English. NNT: tel-04589782

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Ritualiser les médias, médiatiser les rituels : une étude sur l'interaction des
technologies médiatiques et de la pratique rituelle dans les rituels thaïlandais

Mgr. Milan Kroulík, MA

Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

Equipe de Recherche

sur les Rationalités Philosophiques et les Savoirs

(ERRAPHIS)

Philosophie

Date de soutenance: 21.5.2024

Jury:

Jean-Christophe Goddard, Aline Wiame, Stéphane Rennesson, Georgy Chernavin, Guillaume

Sibertin-Blanc (absent), Natalie Depraz (absente)

Marc Maesschalck (rapporteur), Niels Weidtmann (rapporteur)
Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

Équipe de Recherche

sur les Rationalités Philosophiques et les Savoirs

(ERRAPHIS)

Philosophie

Dissertation

Mgr. Milan Kroulík, MA
Ritualizing Media, Mediatizing Ritual: A Study on the Interaction of Media
Technologies and Ritual Practice in Thai Rituals

Ritualiser les médias, médiatiser les rituels : une étude sur l'interaction des
technologies médiatiques et de la pratique rituelle dans les rituels thaïlandais

Doctoral advisor

Prof. Jean-Christophe Goddard

2023
I hereby declare that I have written this dissertation independently, using only the mentioned and duly cited sources and literature, and that the work has not been used in another university study programme or to obtain the same or another academic title.

In Warsaw, on 17.5.2023

Mgr. Milan Kroulík, MA

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The current version has been slightly altered as compared to the one handed in on 17.05.2023. It is cleaned of all references to the cotutelle agreement with Charles University, Prague, I previously worked under. It is also cleaned of all Thai script except in direct quotes, as I found it impossible to render it correctly and it disorganized the layout of paragraphs it was used in.

In Warsaw, on 29.1.2024

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Mgr. Milan Kroulík, MA
**Keywords:** Anthropology, Theravāda, Thailand, Ontological Turn, ritual, body thought, temple, cinema, Deleuze, media theory, perspectivism, STS, cosmotechnics

**Mots-clés :** Anthropologie, Theravāda, Thaïlande, tournant ontologique, rituel, pensée du corps, temple, cinéma, Deleuze, théorie des médias, perspectivisme, STS, cosmotechnique
## Abstract

The text develops a new philosophy and infrastructure of thought based on empirical encounters between Buddhist practices and thought, media theories, cinematic thought, philosophy of the body and general anthropological issues in such a way that all parts influence and transform each other. This creates a fluid text whose conceptual anchoring is continuously evolving and is evidently decolonial, as it develops a Buddhist conceptualization of science and thought as an alternative to the dominant one, which turns out to be distinctly Christian regardless of what it claims about itself.

## Résumé

Le texte développe une philosophie nouvelle et une infrastructure de pensée innovatrice basées sur des rencontres empiriques entre les pratiques et la pensée bouddhistes, la médiologie, la pensée du cinéma, la philosophie du corps et les questions anthropologiques générales, de telle sorte que toutes les parties s'influencent et se transforment les unes les autres. Cela crée un texte fluide dont l'ancrage conceptuel évolue continuellement et est manifestement décolonial, puisqu'il développe une conceptualisation bouddhiste de la science et de la pensée comme alternative à la conceptualisation dominante, qui s'avère être distinctement chrétienne, indépendamment de ce qu'elle prétend à propos d'elle-même.
# Contents

<table><tr><td><strong>Conceptual Preliminaries</strong></td><td style="text-align: right;"><strong>8</strong></td></tr><tr><td>01. Reading(,) Writing</td><td style="text-align: right;">9</td></tr><tr><td>02. Speculation and a Future-Oriented Research</td><td style="text-align: right;">19</td></tr><tr><td>03. On Images and Other Encounters</td><td style="text-align: right;">31</td></tr><tr><td>04. From Media to Mediation</td><td style="text-align: right;">39</td></tr><tr><td>05. Buddhist Conceptual Alternatives</td><td style="text-align: right;">45</td></tr><tr><td><strong>The Anthropologist, Media and the In-Between</strong></td><td style="text-align: right;"><strong>53</strong></td></tr><tr><td>06. A Temple in the Jungle</td><td style="text-align: right;">54</td></tr><tr><td>07. Cinema Worlds, Polyicony and the Multiplicity of Realism</td><td style="text-align: right;">73</td></tr><tr><td>08. Mediating Anthropologists, Relating Relations, Creating Worlds</td><td style="text-align: right;">96</td></tr><tr><td>09. Cosmic Frameworks of Perception</td><td style="text-align: right;">127</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Ritual & Cosmological Experiments</strong></td><td style="text-align: right;"><strong>155</strong></td></tr><tr><td>10. Of Strings and Other Felicities</td><td style="text-align: right;">156</td></tr><tr><td>11. Fracturing Realities: Fiction is the Landscape or How to Pluralize Ways of Seeing</td><td style="text-align: right;">170</td></tr><tr><td>12. Assembling Chanting</td><td style="text-align: right;">191</td></tr><tr><td>13. Sketches Toward a Buddhist-Derived Conception of Rite and Sound</td><td style="text-align: right;">216</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Historical Encounters of Worlds</strong></td><td style="text-align: right;"><strong>233</strong></td></tr><tr><td>14. Historical Images, Transforming Encounters</td><td style="text-align: right;">234</td></tr><tr><td>15. Commercial Worlds of Water and Ritual</td><td style="text-align: right;">245</td></tr><tr><td>16. Worldly Encounters</td><td style="text-align: right;">260</td></tr><tr><td>17. Recentering Siam</td><td style="text-align: right;">270</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Future Is Now</strong></td><td style="text-align: right;"><strong>287</strong></td></tr><tr><td>18. Karmanetics: A Media Theoretical Recoding of Buddhist Ontogenesis</td><td style="text-align: right;">288</td></tr><tr><td>19. Generative Comparisons: Meditation and Cinema</td><td style="text-align: right;">308</td></tr><tr><td>20. Redescribing Research in a More-Than-One-World World</td><td style="text-align: right;">334</td></tr><tr><td>21. Conclusion or Hard Reset</td><td style="text-align: right;">359</td></tr><tr><td>22. A City as Motion</td><td style="text-align: right;">372</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Bibliography</strong></td><td style="text-align: right;"><strong>382</strong></td></tr></table>
Conceptual Preliminaries
# 1. Reading(,) Writing

A text composes of many elements, some of which is the space for the reader to enter, some of which, in my case, as I draw heavily on ethnography (as practice and concept), is the space from which the author composes. Then there are also the ways that concepts, images (concepts connect to) and images of thought (infrastructure) come together. From a decolonial perspective, the most significant limitations of classical research writing is that it operationalizes a very limited amount of tools (conceptual or imageric), while keeping otherness contained as the merely empirical. It is only one way of doing the world (with all its contradictions) that is allowed the power to shape reality, while other possibilities are apriori coded as fantasies, as something obviously untrue because unscientific. Thinking in scientific conventions is generalized as if every single modern white person would do it all the time, as if every scientist were able to always employ these skills no matter how immediately pressing a reaction is required. Other worlds, however compatible elements of them might be with the one that propagates itself through their analysis, are relegated curiosities to be categorized, but only rarely given the force to transform categorization and thought practice itself.<fnref n="1" /> Thus for example, most Buddhist studies are well aware of Buddhist critiques of subject and essence or truth centered practices, but the alternatives offered in the Tripiṭaka, the Buddhist canon or practices drawing on it are never allowed to enter research at the same level as Western conventions. Mutual transformation is minimized, and if it happens, disavowed. Research is still mostly a one-way street, a transmutation of the world into the reality principle derived from a very specific hegemonic tradition presenting itself as the sole and unified West separated from the rest of the world. Effectively this leads to turning in circles<fnref n="2" /> – the tacit assumptions of Cartesian modernity (of radical separation of subject and object, world and self, of human and non-human) seem impossible to displace, to innovate, so long as writing and thinking is composed in the ways developed to support precisely this type of thought. One might sense here that one of the issues is the separation between ontology and epistemology, so dear to

<footnote n="1">¹ I conceive ‘world’ as material-semiotic, it includes cosmologies, practices, institutions, forms of thought, etc. Worlds emerged as meta-stable frameworks as (not only) humans were interacting with their environments and past solutions and ideations came to be stored (as interpersonal and externalized memory) so as to become self-evident for those participating in a world. When worlds meet, self-evidence is fractured, bodies can learn radically new things (or double down on even more on what was considered normal). Some elements produced in a world more easily fit (with little friction) to other worlds – the more complex (as to the variety of material-semiotic parts) a thing, the more resistant it will be. However, this also means that it might become dangerously fragmentational for the world it was formed in as that world changes, hence a thorough differential archaeology (in the Foucauldian sense) of media and thought can effectuate unforeseen needs for adaptation.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Occasional skids into a new circle notwithstanding, which is how such sciences develop. What is vexing here is that these are events outside of the methods proper, they come as accidents, and the metaphysical-conceptual infrastructure then goes on pretending it has always been the way it is. It cannot see its own (conditions of) change.</footnote>
Western tradition, yet so non-sensical once understood from a different position.<fnref n="3" /> The primary delusional proposition that the knowing of what is and the knowing how are separable, and indeed both being neutral in their worldly effects, is impossible to maintain. They are in fact a prime example of an ideological operation, one that aims to hide what it in fact does by claiming it does something else.

This effect is so strong that even much of anthropology, that one science built on distinguishing what people say and what people do, only rarely manages to use this particular lens at what it does itself. Ruptures in these world-making practices appear when other worlds are encountered – which is where anthropology, but also thoroughly thought through materialisms and media theories enter to cultivate the playing field. It is here that a certain tacitly operating image of thought can be disentangled. “The image of thought is Deleuze’s characterisation of what comes before thinking: that which philosophy implicitly presupposes and explicitly projects, a pre-philosophical and natural and hence dogmatic image of what thinking is. [...] It is pre-supposed in the sense that everybody knows what it means to think, as though it were common sense.” (Dronsfield 2012, 404) In early works, Deleuze was concerned with a thinking without image as a destruction of a simply assumed unity: “[...] we do not speak of this or that image of thought, variable according to the philosophy in question, but of a single Image in general which constitutes the subjective presupposition of philosophy as a whole.” (Deleuze 1994, 132) However, by *What Is Philosophy?* (1994), “Deleuze now refers to the need for a new image of thought, he nevertheless continues to use the term image to refer to philosophy’s dogmatic presupposition about thinking. This new image of thought is, of course, nonrepresentational, but he nevertheless chooses to refer to it as an image. This language suggests that Deleuze’s concern is not that the dominant image of thought is an image, but rather, that this image is dogmatic and representational.” (Hein 2017, 658) Thought cannot do without image, the work lying in constructing a non-representational image of thought, one that is not set in advance but comes to be formed through complex interactions. But also, one can notice that thought fragments, once different images of thought can be constructed, once a few disobedient bodies do away with common sense. Importantly, “mainstream qualitative research shares in the same dogmatic image of thought that philosophy presupposes. More specifically, this image is an implicitly subjective presupposition, based

<footnote n="3">³ Many of the central linguistic operators explored in the research fields drawn on here, including how they are used in this text, make use of the inherent polysemy and foundational instability of concepts such as ontology, cosmology, image, frame, etc. The impossibility to finalize meaning has as is well-known been demonstrated long ago, and what is being done here is a writing of contextuality (kala-thesa is a Thai conception of this) that if it were to pretend it was possible to clearly define each word, it would perform a version of a world where things precede context and an easy universalism is possible, regardless of what is claimed in the text. In other words, the way a text is composed is part of how it proposes the world works – analytical writing is not only impossible (in terms of it being as consistent as it claims), but above all not neutral. (Cf. Jackson 2020)</footnote>
in opinion, that ‘everyone knows’ (preconceptually) what it means for a qualitative researcher to think.
[...] Every qualitative researcher is assumed to have this ‘natural’ capacity to think.” (Ibid., 659) The
thinker to emerge one the dogmatic image of thought is abandoned is one that “manages not to know
what everyone else know” (ibid., 658) and as such comes to construct thought in new ways. It is a
thinking about thinking, what I call an infrastructure of thought, which is non-representational. The
ways thought connects. Thought meanwhile connects with images, a human is never a self-contained
concept as it comes to operate through a body. Thus, different people from different backgrounds will
think the same concept differently. While for Deleuze, philosophy is the creation of concepts, when
engaging the meeting of sensual, aesthetic worlds, it appears that much more is created, including the
creation of ways of connecting thought. Infrastructure, that which is below structure, that which
supports and connects that which appears to our senses, generally disappearing from sight. The
anthropologist Brian Larkin (2013, 329) defined infrastructures as “objects that create the grounds on
which other objects operate” and that “they are things and also the relation between things.” The media
theorist John Durham Peters (2015, 38) even thinks that “ontology, whatever it is, is usually just
forgotten infrastructure.” Encounters with other worlds can make the ontological reappear as something
that was once formed and could be different. Something similar occurs in recent research: “The new
empiricisms and new materialisms are, indeed, laying out a different plane of thought. But different
images of thought and their accompanying concepts vie with each other.” (St. Pierre et al. 2016, 2)
Cracks appear in complex interactions, unpredictability arises, thought as it happens through bodies can
never be purely immaterial – associations change as concepts travel. Indeed, how else would they be
able to exert any effect in a material world? Deleuze furthermore demonstrated how cinema and the
images (of thought) produced through solutions to crises it faces, can “provide philosophy with a new
means of creating concepts that would replace its earlier universals.” (Lambert 2012, 156) Thought is
sourced from interactions with the world.<fnref n="4" />

As any body having undergone thoroughgoing engagement with anthropological (or related)
literature comes to be aware of, there is more than one common sense. Common sense, whatever it may
be, therefore grounds nothing. Analogously, in a body trained in media theoretical sensitivity that has

<footnote n="4">⁴ It is important to note that ‘good will’ is assumed by the dogmatic image of thought, which is obviously anything but present in academia and society in general, as anybody working on making real critical theories in an uncritical field has experienced. ‘Good will’ like everything else is something that has to be learned. The dogmatic image of thought as it continues operating is one that just assumes humans to sort of operate by themselves, leaving learning, whether in thought or body, outside. It actively prevents for many things to even be thought in the first place. (Hein 2017) Unsurprisingly, this goes well with Christian cosmology and its small concern with humans, improvement and nigh impossibility to think gradual change. This is another central part of the work done here, as Buddhadharma offers many tools to think learning.</footnote>
ever encountered a sūtra (pa. sutta), awareness arises that thought and image here are coded differently than in any of the wide variety of writing and thinking styles considered part of Western tradition, and that simply doing away with the very material form of how sutta are composed might be losing much of what makes for a distinct world and thought. Awareness however doesn't yet mean that the tools to actually generatively deal with such an encounter are available, or that it won't ultimately be caught in the dominant conventions of the listener. Translation is transformation, and it doesn't only happen between languages in the narrow, common-sense sense. It is important to acknowledge the difference of the Deleuzian project from almost any other philosophical edifice: as one learns to see what concepts and conventions do, immanently, as transformations, one unlearns to the habit of inserting a transcendent but never really explicitly stated comparison or ground against which anything is evaluated. Actual continuous change is thus magically dispelled and only an already existing image of the world propagates itself through the practices of the Moderns.<fnref n="5" />

The fields of anthropology and directly related, cross-pollinating inquiries in STS and feminist technoscience (de la Cadena et al. 2015) in recent years have brought the innovation of the ontological turn, the demonstration that far from there being one natural world and many cultural, there are in fact many naturecultures (Haraway 2003), ontologies (Viveiros de Castro 2015), cosmotechnics (Hui 2016) or worlds (Law 2015): “Just as the ontological turn wants to do away with the opposition between nature and culture, the concept of cosmotechnics is designed to overcome modernity’s opposition between nature and technology.” (Lemmens 2020, 4) Each differs somewhat in the way they think and enable to think the world, as well as in their respective conceptual genealogies.<fnref n="6" /> They can be and have been put into productive dialogue as they try to articulate a similar set of problems generated by the limits of the more common paradigms. (Åsberg 2010, Jensen 2017, Lemmens 2020) Most of this research has been consciously philosophical/conceptual, only rarely drawing on ethnographic imagery in other but the most abstract ways. The challenge to me, here, is to create an ethnography or rather a

<footnote n="5">⁵ Ironically, this convention is so strong, that many works that reference Deleuze and Guattari keep evaluating the world as against the image introduced by them, thereby reinstating precisely what was supposed to be dethroned. Transcendence as the positing (from within world) of something outside of it, an unchangeable principle, is complexly encoded on countless levels, mutually stabilizing, reinforcing the seeming naturalness of transcendence.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ I would like to point out, that critics of the ontological turn, summarized in Gad et al. (2015), but not only them, tend to operationalize a basically static image of the world, where nothing new appears, and so posit whether they want it or not eternal incommensurability, make learning and the creating or appearance of new entities in the world (whether co-constituted by humans or not) impossible. If most anthropology is Kantian, as Viveiros de Castro (2004a) points out, it shows here too, in this very static and definitely non-generative conception of world(s) and all that can be there. This remains so for the ontological turn in anthropology. All of this is undeniably representational, enacting a nature-culture divide, where thought and writing have no essential impact on the world, and are in some ways not of the (material) world.</footnote>
cosmography, a writing of worlds, that operationalizes ontological concepts sourced from Buddhist
teachings or discerned in Buddhist-coded worlds. Anthropology, whether in its more theoretical or its
ethnographic form, has long been a technique of critiquing reality. (Jensen & Morita 2012) It
introduces some sort of otherness, a new element into what would otherwise appear as a given and
finished world: "An ethnography carries beings of one world into another one. This is a promise that
our writing shares with fiction, poetry, cinema, and most other expressive arts." (McLean & Pandian
2017, 1) Concurrently, until recently, dominant anthropological practice remained within a paradigm
that ultimately keeps such difference bracketed, a practice that constructs conceptual infrastructure to
ensure that the other remains other, mere examples of secondary variety but ultimate confirmation of
sameness, of the modern propositions of what makes a human human. All too frequently, these
endeavors have come to be separated, even treated as different if related entities. As if 'that which
comes before thinking' is having a much greater force than thinking, at least the most conscious part of
it (the conceptualization of which differs between philosophical traditions). Such disconnected dualism
enables to uphold the illusory convention of theory and (empirical) reality to be separate, even as they
clearly affect each other and thus cannot easily be treated as separate, disconnected. Such a split is
easily discerned in ethnographic writing, among others, with its realism (however much critiqued),
where in general, entities that do not in one way or another conform to scientific naturalism are
assumed to be simply unreal, or cultural. Bruno Latour tackled the problem for a long time now, and I
will paraphrase here to make it fitting to the spaces I explore: why is it that things/concepts such as
religion, society or state (neither of which is simply found 'out there' or can be pointed to) are
unquestioningly treated as real, independently existing, while ghosts or bodhisattvas or karma are not?<fnref n="7" />
There is a rather foundational blind-spot for the hegemonic Western cosmopractice: "In our emphasis
on biology we dismiss culture too lightly. The assumption is that a man-made thing can be unmade."
(Strathern 2016, 276) As Strathern has been pointing out for a long time, Moderns pretend that culture
can be (un)made and nature is given, all the while remaking the biological through all kinds of
interventions and resisting cultural changes as if even a slight shift to which gender can play with
which toys would bring about apocalypse. All entities are made, what they differ in is the elements they
are composed of. "To be 'made' is not to be 'made up.'" (Haraway 1997, 99) In any case, just because

<footnote n="7">⁷ Following Latour, among others, some researchers point out how some so-called fictional beings such as Mickey Mouse are very hard to unmake – their comparative immateriality even enhancing their reality. (Felski & Muecke 2020) Furthermore, Mickey of course is very much grounded in materiality, in many places at once, much more than the author of these sentences. The lack of a properly organic body to support a figurative dimension merely means that a different kind of materiality is at play and an inquiry into the composition of things is thus even more important. What additionally interests me, as will become clear in later chapters, is the material networks that enable and stabilize the existence of such less material entities.</footnote>
entities are fictional (even in the common sense usage), it doesn't mean they don't do things, that they are not to some degree real, precisely because they have effects, are entangled with and entangle other entities. (Muecke 2012) All of this directly impacts how worlds can be written, with a marked difference to the epistemological solipsism of the writing culture tradition in anthropology that continued to rely on the above described separation – worlds are made through writing, all is onto-epistemology, all is performative, all is operations.<fnref n="8" />

To not do the hard work of developing writing worlds which build on theory, keeping to a vague realism with the occasional new concept being plugged in instead (or doing away with a reality outside of text, outside of research altogether) without significant change to the whole edifice of writing, is to give up not just on the most challenging questions posed in the encounter of worlds but also on the creative abilities of bodies to solve problems in innovative ways – the bodies in question here being those tied in complex networks and conditions that put together new ways of writing appropriate to the demands of the situation. Such a change brings research even closer to literature, as new ways of combining or even making vocabulary (or some minor hacking of grammar) have to be created, such that perhaps have not been here yet or have been forgotten, such that give rise to new worlds, however speculative and experimental. Such that point to the future, and not the past. Such that enact openings and not closings in the name of a transcendental truth or reality or nature all with capital letters. For any kinds of realism today close off the world, limit what elements are taken as real and which are excluded, which elements are taken as being part of the world (already here) and which are not. For what does science do if not create new entities (concepts, tools, images, languages) in order to enable a controlled effect on things in the world that have hitherto been mostly uncontrollable, such as diseases or different kinds of movement in the world? The scientific endeavor, however varied and tied to all manners of interests, was always busy with fictioning, because the things (including the languages innovated) that are continuously created have not been here before, at least not actually. What is insidious about the metaphysical infrastructure of science talk or the cultural practices of the Moderns in general is that such new entities are treated as being not new at all. If this were acknowledged in the way thinking is happening, the ghost of a world created by God as already finished would haunt us all much less. Modern Euro-American secularism continues to be intimately conditioned, is indeed unthinkable without a Christian legacy of the One and a world already finished the moment it came to

<footnote n="8">⁸ This parallels the influence of Derrida's deconstruction and Deleuzian constructivism in all kinds of research, keeping in mind that the work of Deleuze and Guattari even more than that of other philosophers such as Derrida is regularly and unquestioningly recoded into conceptual frameworks directly contrary to whatever said philosophies take so much pains to enable. (St. Pierre 2021a)</footnote>
be.

Meanwhile, the world transforms, sentient beings keep living and combining. It is here that the theological basis of much Buddhist studies, if not much humanities research in general, is laid bare: scientists keep arguing about whether or not this or that activity is actually Buddhist, whether it is properly human or not. A matter of correct classification based on a tacit model, itself of course changing as what is considered Buddhist or not develops, one that only makes sense in a world that is already finished, one where new developments get reduced to old generalities. Stripped of everything that makes unique and creative. When in fact, the world keeps innovating itself and being innovated, and cares little about the essentialist pretensions of some humans. Indeed, the world, following the work done by researchers in the ontological turns, is not simply the same everywhere. What is vexing in science is that so much theory and methodology, or engagement in general looks backward. The more material and financially intense sciences, colloquially considered hard, at the very least create new useful things (including theories) based on interactions with materiality, while all too many humanities keep reiterating idealizations for their engagement with resisting materiality (which includes the lives of sentient beings) is minimal, making projection all the easier.<fnref n="9" /> As Wark (2020, 226) in her overview of the research of Keller Easterling wrote: “I am continually frustrated by the way in which scholars in the humanities and social sciences keep trotting out the same old authorities and the same tired languages, which pretty much guarantee that when they look at the present all they will see is how it looks like the past.” This extends to writing styles, to literary inspirations. Anthropology keeps turning around anthropocentric models, even as they are being undermined through human-technology developments as well as all kinds of human-nonhuman enmeshments, pointing toward worlds where unlike in Christian-Secular ones the human was never simply and fully different from other creatures, however immaterial.<fnref n="10" /> The conceptual-imageric baseline remains one built on bourgeois realism of the individual as the sole real existent and final ground of anything and everything. In other words, it is not purely conceptual, but the images implicitly contained are such to support transcendental individualism all the while being unacknowledged and generally hard to detect, as the world has gradually been built so that they are encoded all around. Hence, a separation between concept and image is an analytical operation, enacted in thought, but not so in general, for while separate they are not separable. In a world where such connection is routinely disavowed, it is much

<footnote n="9">⁹ This is why anthropology and media theory, practices based on the confrontation with elements of the world that are not already articulated in language, are so generative.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ The humanist concept of the human is one of those immaterial creatures through which the ‘material human’ becomes and to which it came to be tied and set.</footnote>
easier to innovate conceptually while continuing to perform the very world one has been critiquing
rather than to develop ways of writing realities based on that innovation. Much of the research
mentioned above seek to do precisely that. What I add, is the power of Buddhist tradition and a special
focus on intersecting technology, media and ritual as sites of innovation. A thoroughly post-
anthropocentric world, grounded and ungrounded in liminal spaces, in spaces of indistinction between
entities and concepts regardless of their degree of organicity. That, and a specific focus on images.

All of this requires thorough engagement with theories of language, and, quite obviously, any
kind of representationalism is of no relevance. The limits of any work, any cut made in the world, make
it impossible to write all of the theories, thoughts and images that came to shape the current
composition, though readers knowledgeable will of course notice what is being actualized, based on
employment of words and manners of writing. A theory of language then will not be offered, though it
is generally in line with the Deleuzian conception. (Cf. Leclerle 2002)<fnref n="11" /> The chapters here
operationalize different connections, arrange various parts in non-hierarchical ways. There is nothing
that would precede anything else. In other words, not to write about, while keeping modern
metaphysics beyond history, but write with and as, or simply to write worlds. “Writing thus becomes a
means of marking and maintaining an openness to events, surprises, and contingencies, to a reality that
is as much a source of questions and provocations as of answers.” (McLean & Pandian 2017, 4) It is in
the connections established, constructed that the power of thought to create worlds lies. These were in
fact among the most challenging parts of this research, as well as experimental. Often, it turned out that
things that seemed to offer themselves to be connected, could in fact, for now, not be. And even when it
turned out to be possible, the construction, the hacking of possibilities out of the virtual into something
stable and legible proved infinitely challenging.<fnref n="12" /> One does not just follow paths laid out by others,
stabilized by hegemony, which one fills with some minor elements drawn from elsewhere (the entering
of the outside into the inside without significantly transforming it). And, it is only once awareness of
the contingency of elements arises, that challenge comes, because what once seemed so obviously
given as to disappear completely as a field to engage and transform, that is enact freedom, has come to

<footnote n="11">¹¹ “We can attribute ‘Battle of Waterloo’, for instance, to a particular state of affairs, but what we find in that state of affairs are bodies mixing with one another: spears stabbing flesh, bullets flying through the air, cannons firing, bodies being ripped apart. Strictly speaking, the battle itself exists nowhere except in the expression of my proposition, which attributes ‘Battle of Waterloo’ to this mixture of bodies. More precisely, we could say that the battle itself merely ‘insists’ or ‘subsists’ in the proposition. Hence one of the fundamental theses of *Logic of Sense*: sense is to propositions what attributes like ‘Battle of Waterloo’ are to states of affairs.” (Smith 2019, 48) States of affairs, admixtures of bodies can be assigned different attributes, as they are very explicitly once different language worlds are entered.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Wark (2004) puts hacking as the “creative production of abstraction,” (071) to hack is to “release the virtual into the actual, to express the difference of the real.” (074)</footnote>
be an opening toward the future where even the tiniest stride is fraught with uncertainty. It is like
physically stepping into worlds unknown, while at the same time building something that doesn't
disappear immediately, swallowed by the jungle. It is constructing something others can follow, take
apart and rebuild in other ways. That is, despite all the contingency and impermanence, science has a
universalist dimension – in that others have to be able to follow the paths laid out, and be able to
generatively engage them (without having to agree on everything). If one were to write worlds
composed so wantonly of new elements, that none can follow, it ceases to be science – it comes to be
an idiosyncrasy that might be inspiring but is of little coherent use. Science then, here, is not the quest
for a true image of the world (that cannot be, as of course, the image produced comes to be part of the
world, that is the world keeps changing as science is made), but rather somewhat stabilized techniques
that draw on other techniques that can be reiterated by others drawing on similar techniques and used in
other contexts. And good science is one that aims at creating new tools to add to this repertoire. To
create a philosophical concept or an anthropological description that makes something that seemed
impossible, possible, even self-evident, is one of the great pleasures of research. It almost makes the
sweat and toil behind innovating scientific prose worthwhile.

Writing is also always a montage, an assemblage of disparate elements that achieve certain
effects. Many things happen in between, they cannot be described or thought in a positivist way – as
media theory has gone to great lengths to demonstrate (more on which later). Different ways of writing
make things appear in the cracks. Following Eisenstein, but also Adorno and other thinkers, thought
appears when elements collide. (Suhr & Willerslev 2012, 2013) This is a further theoretical background
to the form encountered here. Furthermore, the seemingly incoherent style of the pages you are about to
read results in the inquiry being led by problems met in the field. The field here is not just taken as that
site out there where an anthropologist body goes to be transformed. It includes the research done by
reading and watching. It is all reality, and it is highest time to move away from the idea that there is
first a real out-there, say a Bangkok, and then its representation in texts. All things compose locally of
different elements all the time. The Bangkok or philosophical problem or chanting ceremony composed
in this text is a different one than that elsewhere. They are connected and overlapping, but not the same.
Other entities are connected too, but overlap less or not at all. The way to think this problem, by way of
images specifically, is one of the strongest threads of this work. It goes through variations of problems,
sometimes obviously on the so-called surface, sometimes less so. The connective tissue is there, it
moves through different strata of the thought composing here. As such, the text engages systematically
a couple of problems in different combinations, much like a movie according to Brenez (1997), a
theorist drawing on Deleuze's thought developed with cinema, takes a figure through different
figurations and combinations as it goes on. The problems ask for different solutions that include
manner of composition. Things don't fit neatly in a more than one-world world. Different strands of
anthropological and other research I draw on here encounter analogous situations, active resistance to
understanding of what is actually claimed based on the false security of a world that is basically
finished and known. One might even conceptualize it as the meeting of worlds in a classically
anthropological fashion. Interactions with researchers with a background in metaphysically essentialist
and humanist frameworks certainly can evoke the misunderstandings between conquistadores and
Arawak, or Jesuits and Confucian scholar or Buddhist monks centuries ago (as will be explored in a
later section), all the time one side keeps claiming that we are all same (epistemology), while denying
that sameness in their dismissal of what they don't understand (ontology). If only the habit of reacting
to the unknown with curiosity, awareness of the labor awaiting and the joy of dealing with conceptual
challenges were more common in these worlds of ours. A real, affirmative experimentation built on the
cultivation of the arts of noticing inconsistencies.
## 2. Speculation and a Future-Oriented Research

These are times where information can be gathered ready-made from almost anywhere. And mostly verified. In fact, there is so much information around that the even the most attentive will hardly be able to remember from where this or that particular nugget, much less all those half remember certainties that make up a world.view) came.<fnref n="13" /> An impossibility to know from where one knows what one knows implies there will always be uncertainties, speculations, shadowy border zones open toward something entirely other. It's the ideology of fact and certainty, significantly not a simple reality of fact and self-evidence that turns attention away. And people come to live in and as a world where divisions are clear, entities are given, and idea and thing are routinely conflated under the aegis of a long disproved representational theory of mind. Foundational myths of modernity still happily operating ensure that, for they are so thoroughly embedded in countless parts of reality that they appear self-evident, necessary, universal. Lucky then that science in some corners hasn't lost its emancipatory challenging force to probe and destabilize what is currently taken as given in places one would have never thought to look. Soil must be continuously cultivated, so it won't stop birthing the desired fruits, and a tilling with new techniques and new tools can lead to the breeding of new species off similar ground, entities better adapted to changing environments.

One of the sources for many modern conventions, Thomas Hobbes, when considered under the aspect of being in the process of creation, that is not retrospectively (when parts of it, such as the concept of social contract, seem self-evident), comes to appear as something of an SF writer. (Cf. Latour 1993)<fnref n="14" /> The relation between myth and history, especially since history is never accessible by the senses, was at this time still unstable and contestable. (Springborg 2007) The myth of objective history that is the transformation of uncertainty into a pretense of uncomplicated, independent, objective knowledge (as taught today in schools) was history yet to happen.<fnref n="15" /> Modern society (as

<footnote n="13">13 What is meant here is information in the common sense, that is something that appears as information to a contemporary body. Technically speaking, all has to be translated into some sort of information in order for a body to notice and process it – the world has always been too excessive and where what shard of memory comes from impossible to accurately pinpoint. Which makes the question of accurate representation redundant or rather misleading.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 It is important to note that Hobbes was another among modern philosophers who participated in direct colonial endeavors, in his case the Virginia company. Issues we know he was present in discussing are justifications for settlement and natural-rights arguments. (Springborg 2007)</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Many of the foundational myths found in Hobbes's work, such as the pre-social savage, keep being reproduced in popular media. (Friedman 2018b) It is the incessant reproduction and repetition of some conventions and narratives that makes them into myth as in foundational divisions of the world that are challenging to notice for those living (in) them. One of the important effects of anthropology as it eventually developed, as well as media archaeology, STS and to a lesser extent religious studies, is the introduction of variation into things that seem so self-evident as to be unnoticeable, and with the variation awareness of some of the myths that operate in the reality of Moderns.</footnote>
organization) and the elements that constitute it had not yet been created as concept, divisions between
spheres and imagery to go with, much less were they foundational, just assumed to exist like that,
because encoded into the world through ubiquity, many of which are explicitly sourced from Hobbes.
As for Hobbes, “[h]e had written his earlier, more academic work, *De Cive*, in Latin, but with
Leviathan he hoped to reach a broader audience. For this reason he supplemented his use of logic and
‘geometric demonstration,’ with ‘myth, imagery and illusion’ in order to make a bigger impact.”
(Friedman 2018a) The German media philosopher Horst Bredekamp (2007, 30) takes particular notice
of the visual dimension of his work and how it also connects a biological conception of human with the
political: “For just as vision reacts to physical pressure, so politics is enacted through pressure exerted
in space-time, producing the images that people everywhere encounter, described by Hobbes’s
extremely comprehensive concept of the political.” The visual part thus is irreducible to text, it brings
together and transform elements commonly present at that time (but alien to a reader today) such as
feudal effigies and the developing science of optics into a conception of the modern state. “The
frontispiece of Leviathan is embedded in Hobbes’s complete works, which are largely constructed from
images. This layout makes it clear that Leviathan is not an exception but rather the culmination of work
from the beginning intended to deal with pictures.” (Ibid., 44) The imagery put together appears to
resist much more effectively any easy projection of unchanging reality than the text does. It seems easy
to ignore genealogically complex origins of certain abstractions and treat them as simply appearing
without precedent. Both, image and text, meanwhile, are definite acts of speculation and myth-making
at work.

It is this supplementing of an ostensibly scientific or ontological account with myth, imagery
and illusion that can serve as an orientation. For one, according to the anthropologist Kerim Friedman
(2018a) Hobbes's myth of the sovereign that binds the people to bring an end to war, ignores that it
were typically sovereigns who engaged in wars with other sovereigns. On the other hand, the
supposedly natural qua pre-social state that humans live in before entering into such a contract is
already social, because familial (however such families might indeed be organized). The still potent
image of the animalistic savage<fnref n="16" /> is of course one that organizes not just popular, scientific, and
political convention and imagination, but is also a genealogically foundational one within
anthropological discourse. The argument expands this contradictory logic to the problem of language as
sociality: either language is present in the state of nature, which means the natural is social, or language

<footnote n="16">16 Bracketing for now that animal bodies and societies are much more complex, evolving and adaptive than (not only) Western cultural bias continues to assume against all the evidence of current ethology (e.g. Despret 2016). Furthermore, sciences in Japan for example at times follow different cosmological conceptions of the non-human (Jensen & Blok 2013).</footnote>
is not present in the abilities of a savage, which poses the problem of when exactly this phenomenon
emerges. Hobbes's arguably foundational myth for modern liberal capitalist ontology, that of the
Moderns as per Latour (1993), requires that two for classical (onto)logic contradictory elements operate
concurrently: man as artificial and natural.<fnref n="17" /> It also posits a negative outside, a horrific inhuman other
as its most extreme version, against which an inside is articulated. (Shaw 2008) The fantastic negativity
of the other that precedes the (secondary) positivity of the self is another of the most constitutive
elements of Modernity.<fnref n="18" />

Hobbes's mytho-imagery was speculative at the time he created it, it was social science-fiction
that has become mostly undisputed fact. Society and individual, nature and culture had to be created,
they were not found ready-made in Nature. Many may treat it as philosophy out of history and
imagination, but deliberately ignoring evident connections does not make them disappear entirely (oh
the hubris of philosophers!). To put it in the words of the anthropologist Michael Taussig (1987, 121):
"All societies live by fictions taken as real." It is through such foundational mythologies, which include
imagery, narration and concepts, that always-incomplete texts are read, and tentatively completed. (Cf.
Derrida 1976) Thus, the pre-conscious contemporary enters into the worlds created in writing. Post-
representational anthropology actively engages this creative and uncertain space, these gaps that are
always automatically filled in or skipped, and makes them into problems, into possibilities. For the
*Writing Culture* situation (Clifford & Marcus 1986, Marcus & Fisher 1986) rendered it impossible to
ignore the impossibility of positionless objectivity. It definitively made that which most often disguised
itself as fact show itself as fiction, as something made, non-neutral and effective. And, analogously, the
position of the researcher creating knowledge became part of that knowledge making. To go further,
one can notice that this way, the whole world enters. That in front of the researcher and that in back,
which made her do what she does. Nothing is entirely irrelevant in the constitution of a scientific
artifact. Monads rejoice. Indra's net is the name of the game.<fnref n="19" /> *Writing Culture* solipsists<fnref n="20" /> hadn't

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ It is here that feminist technoscience and other research paradigms that do away with the culture vs. nature paradigm are most clearly founding a new world.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ As can be seen in the common reflex of pointing out that somewhere else, it is worse and thus, over here, you should be grateful for what you have, because it is always already better than elsewhere without actually really defining what it is that is good in concrete terms and verifying whether it actually works.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ The image of Indra's net is used in certain strands of Buddhist tradition to grasp the concepts of emptiness (*suññatā/śūnyatā*) and interdependent arising (*paṭiccasamuppāda/pratītyasamutpāda*). The rare Hindu deity that retains its name while migrating into a different cosmological/ontological worlding.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ The decidedly postmodern movement of Writing Culture framed everything around words and infinite reference within a (research) language, a play of signifiers, while cutting off any connection to the fieldwork situations, however imperfect, from which this knowledge arose. It came to see everything as nothing but imperialist projection, thus overvaluing the power of the researcher over any resistances the world might offer, hence solipsism. (Cf. Strathern 1991)</footnote>
noticed it yet, as they continued to operate within the very representationalism they critiqued as never
being fully adequate. On a related track, it was also made apparent that “the idea of difference, whether
cultural, methodological, or even epistemological, cannot be sustained as a useful analytical
framework.” (Miyazaki 2005, 6) An apriori expectation (one simply posed but not actually argued for)
of difference between integrated cultures that are entirely untouched by either the scientist-
anthropologist or global networks is thus made to appear as one of the foundational myths of
anthropology and modernity. (Strathern 1988) The disavowal of the researcher's activity is perhaps the
most ironic aspect of this configuration. Culture, as a concept, apart from being a fairly recent creation
with its own varied history (Böhme 1996), does things (such as solidifying borders where once there
was permeability and overlapping) that we perhaps don't want it to do.<fnref n="21" />

The following pages draw on fields outside of anthropology proper, as similar openings have
appeared in many places and since if there is anything evident in the 21st century of the Christian-
Secular calendar or 26th according to the Buddhist one. Old divisions between fields are increasingly
breaking down forcibly disclosed by the actual world as arbitrary and impermanent. As long as the
dominant, entrenched, institutionalized practice continues to function in favor of ideal-type definitions
from long ago above the movements of the world, the very blind spots that have been tirelessly
diagnosed by those able to inhabit different perspectives will be perpetuated.<fnref n="22" /> The whole way of
thinking what knowledge is, how it is created and what role institutions play within this creation has to
be rethought. Change was underway all along, much like crises were occurring all the time. In this
case, I mean conscious change as an articulation of possible solutions to the problem at hand. Ones that
seek to construct alternative onto-epistemological genealogical foundations to the normative
(mis)conception of a rift between description and world, representation and reality, artifice and Nature.
They all entail a reorientation toward the future, toward speculation, toward not taking apparent fictions
as facts (the act of mythologizing) just because of the fear of losing any footing. “Far from
recommending a rehabilitation of pre-modern or non-modern ontologies or cosmologies though, the
cosmotechnics project explicitly looks at the future and aims to be an imaginative and inventive
discipline in search for new cosmotechnics [...]” (Lemmens 2020, 4) Even with indigenous practices,
naturecultures, the view is toward futures, for the question is how to sustain these alternatives in the

<footnote n="21">²¹ “The concept of culture is deeply reactionary. It is a way of separating semiotic activities (orientation in the social and cosmic world) into spheres to which people are referred. These isolated activities are standardized and capitalized to suit the dominant mode of semiotization – they are cut off from their political realities.” (Guattari & Rolnik 2007, 21)</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Full (not conditional) acceptance of conventional and conventionalized barriers between disciplines typically leads to ignoring counter-evidence to disciplinary self-definition. (Cf. Buck-Morss 2009, 22–23)</footnote>
face of capitalist hegemony (and its ontologizing conceptual divisions) and how to keep them generative in face of immense change. The approaches are all experimental, in that they aim to engender possibilities, be it on the level of textual, figural/imageric or conceptual composition. They are transformations of traditions that will appear as radically new only to those unaware of the variety already found in the world(s) of science. Sometimes it's difficult to see what's under our noses, especially when the convention is one that teaches us to perceive the world as finished, despite all the talk of evolution.

It further becomes a question of how to write with a propulsive force, how to not take what one perceives to be “as the end point of a process,” which leads to a loss of “the newness or freshness of the prospective moment that defines that moment as hopeful.” (Miyazaki 2005, 8) As Hirokazu Miyazaki following Ernst Bloch, Richard Rorty and Walter Benjamin tries to remind readers, in philosophy and other contemplative knowledge practices, the limits of the discourse stem from its retrospective character. In other words, much research “presuppose[s] a closed world that has already become [...]” (Bloch 1986, 8) Whatever the differences, Western Modernity in its organizing principles continues to be a variation of Christian cosmology. One where God created an earth in which nothing really New actually ever appears. In other words, a recoding of Darwin's non-Christian cosmological innovations. To think the future, to think with alternatives, requires other methods of thought, creation and composition. Methods that make it possible to take into account the material, corporeal, environmental conditions in which knowledge is created. To refine the old anthropological distinction between ivory tower speculation and field-work engagement of human practice, not as to deny one or the other, but so as to acknowledge their differing operativity. (Viveiros de Castro 2011b) Knowledge not as retrospection, but as prospection – a radical temporal reorientation. The gap that becomes apparent “lies between the conceivability of future transformations and the possibility of actualization.” (Csicery-Ronay 1991, 387) It expects the openness of reality, the unfinished quality of becoming, of “historically unforeseeable innovations” (ibid., 387) and with it the role of each and every sentient (or even not-so-sentient) being in making and partaking in world(s). Haraway playfully uses “SF” to denote a range of related compositions: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, Speculative Feminism, Science Fact, So Far. And all this invention is of course situated, it stems from field-work encounters, from experiences that put into question certain parts of what one takes for granted. And to be communicated it's put into some sort of narrative.
Stories “are always a complex production with many tellers and hearers, not all of them visible or audible.” (Haraway 1989, 8) Stories are ways of ordering and relating things in the world, something research also does, as is learning to see other ways of connecting, even other ways of putting together parts that form things. Only more often than not this creative activity is then disavowed. Any science is culturally and historically specific and involved. Sciences become within the processes that give them birth and act in the constitution of other processes. There is always something at stake for humans and non-humans alike. This embeddedness is part of SF, and contains the conception that any innovations necessarily emerge from established conventions. Innovation thus conceived is the bracketing of some elements and intensified development of others. They “cannot leap over the crafted standards for producing credible accounts,” (ibid., 12) since nothing stands above or outside history, and even when pushing the limits of a practice, a discourse, to be able to transform it, the work done must remain legible, in other words, credible. That is the challenge with innovation. This is what makes for the Science in Science Fiction, it is not free-form speculation, but actively sought innovation based on engagement with conventions. After all, there is no other way out of a dominant ideology. Free-form speculation without encounter with an other outside and within convention, rarely becomes anything more than vulgar reproduction of ideology. What SF is about is “concrete objectivity.” Situatedness is what produces objectivity, for one cannot see ‘everything’ from anywhere, but one can to a certain extent delineate the limits of the knowledge one produces while remaining open to other knowledge production. Reality is contested, a process in the making, nobody has the one correct narrative. If anything, it’s necessary to let go of the One, that remnant of the Christian God transformed into Nature or Man that grounds everything in the end.<fnref n="23" /> The only non-objective position is the one that arrogates disinterested objectivity hiding all the effort that goes into the production of its own position. (Haraway 1990) Yet, it is also here that Fiction is situated, for even active fictioning must remain credible in order to have the desired fictional effect, according to historically implicit standards, to be legible and not be taken as the scribblings of the insane or othered. As philosophers of language have demonstrated, for

<footnote n="23">²³ This is not a Spinozist immanent One, not a One world of continuous variation, but rather a One as a point of creation or radical change (Jesus), with concurrent stable, essential existence of all. A dualism that is secondary in time (the Devil falls after God creates Angels, free will appears after the fall from paradise, and for Rousseau but contra Hobbes, the human corrupts through culture what is innocent in Nature) but operates logically concurrently with the One. Nature is one Nature, not continuous differentiation, appearance and disappearance of bodies and forms and environments. This concurrent operation of the essential One and essential Dualism is mythological because it makes it possible to use two different logics and different times in an argument without, in the self-image of Western rational exceptionalism, being confronted with basic logical inconsistency. (Latour 1993) One of the reasons why Buddhist teachings, when not contained into Otherness, come to act in a very generative manner is that they are precisely about the appearance of stability from instability, and the mistaken attachment or grounding in what cannot ever ground anything. The functioning of stability and change is not simply inversed (as in many European reworkings of these teachings), but displaced – the appearance of stability is still part of the world and not to be easily dismissed for some real truth, as will be explored in different configurations throughout this text.</footnote>
communication to be successful different sets of conditions have to be met – this is a radicalization of their epistemological claims by virtue of not excluding or containing border cases. (Cf. Derrida 1988) Analogously, the ontological containment of the Other in anthropological practice has been destabilized. (Winch 1964) It is however only recent innovations such as the ontological turn, new materialisms and generally systematic inquiries into the constitution of the world, not limiting knowledge to epistemology (while still positing an ontology through words as if independently) that made possible to make connections where none were seen before.<fnref n="24" /> One should not reduce Science Fiction to the science part in a bid of pretending that science and technology are neutral and the same in any society. Speculative Fabulation is also to be done in relation to imagination, be it socio-political, biological, environmental, or ethical. All of this can draw on the countless pages of research about past arrangements, the otherness of which acts to destabilize the certainty and necessity of the contemporary. Such research also points toward a fundamentally ateleological development of the world and human societies. Through sheer addition of various readings across fields such an enormous wealth in wide-ranging arrangements is gathered, one of excessive resistance to any unified projections of how the world really is. Thorough empiricism, one that doesn't hide its own activity, one attuned to the resistances of things in the world to easy classification, one that considers the lighter matters such as words, images, formulas, styles and concepts as equally existing and worthy of attention, will always challenge its own certainties.

So reality itself might be open, more radically so than dominant convention and its genealogies are capable of conceiving, and texts or anything do not and will never represent (as in correspondence between natural and artificial, human-made, for those onto-epistemologies making that distinction) it, which, as expanded on in the previous chapter, leads to the highly scientific problematic of how to write so that a text's effect won't be reduced to old models. Write, compose, montage in ways that opens connections with the text's outside. There is more, once foundational mytho-imagery and conceptual infrastructure such as that of Hobbes is unearthed, composing can become active in demonstrating (part of) the ontological presuppositions generally naturalized. Especially when montage principles are applied, when different parts operationalize different ontological conventions, theories and cosmological frameworks. As researchers with varied backgrounds (Hui 2016, Verran 2002, Zhan 2011, Farquhar 2002, Law & Lin 2018, Jensen & Morita 2012, de la Cadena 2015, Escobar 2020,

<footnote n="24">²⁴ It is here that those who unquestioningly reproduce the representational image of language and thought see little but speculation gone wild, which serves as a pressing reminder that doing humanities without a complex engagement with different theories of how language operates and relates to its outside is a highly ideological endeavor, a continuing naturalization of conventions shown to be</footnote>
Bobbette 2019, Aulino 2022a, Redfield 2000, Abrahms-Kavunenko 2019) have demonstrated, that which appears to the senses, seems to be simply given independently, does so as part of complex arrangements and links to cosmological frameworks and emergent technologies which themselves can very well be multiple and shifting. Other worlds, other propositions of how worlds work are no longer easily relegated to the dustbins of history with the only reality that can propagate itself being the modern bourgeois occidental capitalist hetero-patriarchal one. Science, specifically that of humanities, those activities that seek to engage the more immaterial production, can cease being the activity of containment of otherness through basic acknowledgment of its existence without worlds and differences actually ever meeting of equal terms. The move from epistemology (the world is treated as already finished) to an ontological politics is one that recognizes human and non-human activity in the co-constitution of things, of the world as it develops. (Stengers 2018a) It's the awareness that it didn't happen overnight that the entities that populate the contemporary world jumped out of a the Middle Ages with the radical break of Enlightenment (again that image of thought based in one radical change that prevents the perception of the hard work and violence that went into the creation of Modernity). Innovation, even the one assumed to have happened with European modernity bringing a new era of moral purity and rational perfection for those allowed to imagine themselves as part of it, doesn't instantaneously spring out of Zeus like glorious Athena. The world transforms continually. So did the Medieval world mythologized as radically other (yet curiously continuous) by those composing the foundational mytho-realities of today.<fnref n="25" /> Any researcher worth that label today knows that there very much was technological, social, imageric and all manners of other innovation and development prior to self-proclaimed modernity before Europe was invented. Worlds shape futures and possibilities cross-pollinate. Entities are not determined by their relations, by how they came to be, but can enter into new connections. And all manners of interactions transform.

"What if Western evolutionary and ecological sciences had been developed from the start within Buddhist instead of Protestant ways of worlding?" asked Donna Haraway (2016, 176) in a footnote. And I seek here something in that direction, except as connected to technologies of representation and media, looping in different ways back into more conventionally anthropological inquiries into bodies, perceptions and practices. In the terminology of STS (Jensen & Morita 2017a), one can treat all of this

<footnote n="25">²⁵ In fact, the common framing of the Middle Ages as simultaneously other (violent, dark, excessively Christian) to Modernity and a basically same precursor where much later categories such as nations, the human, etc. are assumed to exist is one of the typical two-forked contradictions foundational of the constitution of the Moderns. It maps neatly on Enlightenment Rationalism and the Romantic reaction to it. What connects both is the positing of European exceptionalism untouched by any outside.</footnote>
as *ontological experiments* or *practical ontologies*. In other words, worlds are enacted across boundaries of seemingly separate entities. The world is far larger and more varied than any theory (which nonetheless are parts of the world), any inquiry, any however complex and multi-actorly project can ever contain, so each newly composed entity whether it is a text, an image, a concept, a camera or any other tool, operationalizes certain connections and makes others impossible, makes them disappear. As Haraway wrote in the manifesto for cyborgs (1991), "Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections – and it matters which ones get made and unmade." Hobbes project was such an experiment, looking into the future, hiding some things. As a plethora of researchers (Anderson 1991, Karatani 2014, Tambiah 2013, Clastres 1989, Viveiros de Castro 2020, for Siam: Morita 2017) meticulously demonstrate time and (time) again, it is a particularly modern ontological practice to project a political ontology (including the preexistence of the individual/society distinction) onto the past, including a nature-culture separation, where ancient empires and non-state societies would be a merely secondary deviation from the liberal, post-Westphalian ideal-type norm. When indeed, it would appear that not even these modern states ever actually fulfill that ideal. Written for the contemporary researcher, these ontological engagements here are speculative experiments in how the world might work otherwise. At least so long as these experiments don't straightforwardly contradict what can be verified with current reality securing tools and technologies. The conventions of analytical realist writing already speculate about how a world might work, only they don't care to acknowledge that reality is much messier than the one they perform, and simply naturalize the complex web made of entities such as an individual subject preexisting any relations and technologies, the nature-culture divide, writing and words in general as essentially without effect on the world, the conservative/progressive divide (when in practical fact conservatives and reactionaries too very much project futures, and reduce or fantasize pasts), states and money as simply existing and self-evident, the neutrality of concepts, a unified reality and all of those other things naturalized, kept out of view in a particular cosmology propagating itself as eternal as the Christian God.

The experimentation I attempt here takes Buddhist ritual spaces as sites of encounters between media technologies, cosmo-practices and various concepts and imageries. It also seeks to address that space between reality and reality-perception produced, which to me has been hitherto undertheorized and which Buddhist tradition offers many a tool to grasp and articulate. I treat what I encountered in fieldwork (which extends far beyond the conventional realist conception of a field out there to include
all manners of research and encounters pertinent to enacted openings) experimentally, working to find a
speculative angle without reducing the new to the old, the particular to the obvious. In the good
tradition of anthropology, I experiment with comparisons and contexts. Again, the distinction between
two modes of anthropology appears in a way that doesn't treat either as obsolete, but rather as doing
something similar yet different. The variation introduced is done by keeping a one part stable, while
introducing change in different ones with the goal being defamiliarization of conventionality: "Instead
of constructing the context surrounding the object, Frazer drew readers' attention to the resemblance
between bizarre practices of savages and descriptions in familiar texts such as the Old Testament.
While Malinowski created distance between readers and the object of study in order to put the latter in
context, Frazer drew on familiar texts and contexts he shared with readers." (Morita 2012, 43) Both of
course employed rhetorical strategies to keep difference at bay, something that keeps operating in most
research that implicitly keeps positing an independent reality out there. What follows here is a mixing
and mangling and mingling and montaging of what can be compared and how, including the
comparative tools themselves. As new entities appear in the world, so too do new similarities, all too
often projected independently of what made them appear in the first place, and with them differences,
all the while others disappear. Thought and infrastructure of thought, worlds and texts, concepts and the
concept of concept, all on the same place being able to interact in unexpected ways. On some level, this
has always been the bread and butter of anthropology, with its *persuasive fictions* (Strathern 1987) and
fabulations. "Henri Bergson and later Gilles Deleuze called it 'fabulation': the making of fictions
sufficiently vivid and intense to be capable of intervening in and reshaping reality. This involves not the
representation of a world assumed to be already given, independent of its figuration through texts,
images, or other media but rather the participatory carrying forward of material world-forming
processes in which human acts of creativity are always already implicated." (McLean 2017, x) The
anthropologist of fabulation makes it abundantly clear in his exciting work on Scandinavian mytho-
imagery and the biological and geological problems of today: the task now is to treat fictions of
different human and not-so human potentialities as continuous with evolution, as solutions to specific
problems drawing on local histories of imagination and all kinds of tools, which researchers today have
the infrastructure and capabilities to actualize and make workable in order to find new ways of dealing
with the problems made by our society. Fact is, at some time Odin existed, the entity was not the same
as the one constructed by Moderns since the time of the Romantics, neither is it different. Odin
emerged, as all beings do, no matter how immaterial, as a solution to problems faced by particular
lives. As conditions changed, some entities continue as mostly stable transformations while others
disappear quietly or violently. In other words, a little speculative fabulation or science fiction is part of the process of the becoming of worlds, of forms and (a)sentient beings. A practice that “is never the expression of an already formed identity (whether individual or collective).” (Ibid., 39) One oriented toward the future, addressed, as per Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994, 109) writing on geophilosophy, to the “people to come and the new earth.” Deities and other such entities come to be part of evolution and can be repurposed (ontologically, performatively) not just as subservient to the eternal truth of science or reactionary romantic fantasies of ideal-type Gods as if unrelated to material realities and more-than-human problems. All this without projecting an evolutionary cosmology as the one and only final way of the world, but instead focusing on fostering collaborative encounters with peoples with other knowledges of the world, of living other worlds that criss-cross modern conventions and separations. (Povinelli 2016) That is crucial here, for those that simply reproduce these conventions and/or leave some of them out, cannot become generative interlocutors, for they merely support the one world hegemony and offer little to deal with more-than-human problems.

My goals here meanwhile are not as lofty and do not aim to offer pathways to dealing with global problems of today. I merely seek to find some ways to see the immediate world otherwise, to find lines of flight for other futures in the present on the field where media technology, ritual (as intensified iteration) and Buddhist cosmological potentialities speculatively meet. A sort of “theory-fiction” perhaps, neither related nor unrelated to such speculative work as Reza Negarestani’s (2008) rewriting of petrol in terms of Middle Eastern cosmologies. Something that has to deal with all kinds of fields, and slowly or rapidly build connections where there might have at first seem to have been none, flitting between pasts and presents. Science as fiction: “Both science and popular culture are intricately woven of fact and fiction.” The problem of fictionality in any endeavor returns. Donna Haraway elaborates on a constitutive issue for modernity, namely the relationship between fact and fiction. Both relate to human action and are “implicated in a dialectic of the true (natural) and the counterfeit (artifactual).” Fiction is the active form of the act of fashioning, of making. Meanwhile, fact as a word referring to past action, “masks the generative deed or performance.” (Haraway 1989, 3–4) Fact as something done, as something to be neutrally recorded. Fiction as something inventive, opening up to other possibilities, but always threatened by the possibility of outright lies (the inventions projected onto the other sourced not from complex engagement but from established cliché that just feels right for the casual reader). Much must be reimagined, reconceived, for the world as it is appears as natural because of the complexity of the connections already made, the concepts and imaginaries that mutually
support each other and seem to logically flow from one into the other. Only dealing with a small portion of a world, secluded from the rest (as positivists do) will not make the cut, or rather it will make the cut in a way to hide what is happening. New connections must be forged, even if they at first might seem out there. Hobbes's and others' fictions once also appeared to be. Pasts and futures intertwine, causality is not as straightforward as it at first might seem. Something Buddhist thinkers have known and demonstrated for a long time. In times when that old mytho-imagery crumbles in face of overwhelming evidence for a much higher complexity of worlds and the mediatic restructuration of materiality, and what once seemed so given as to not appear to the senses at all, one does well to keep techno-feminist words present: "The open future rests on a new past." (Haraway 1991, 41)
03. On Images and Other Encounters

A particularly potent image sticks to my memory, one encountered while engaging historical research of Christian encounters with locals in Southeast Asia. It expressed a constant uncertainty for the Jesuits acting in the region centuries ago. Some among the indigenous populations would recoil in front of Christ on the cross, others at the very least unable to understand how a regular man might be all that the Christians say, even others understanding this figure as that of Devadatta, Buddha's schismatic cousin. Evidently, the image constructed by the Jesuits, containing the image/figure of Christ on the cross, expresses a problem: Christ does something different to different people. It is not merely a question of interpretation, a second step after sense-perception. Reactions are immediate, whether fearful or disinterested. Explanations are put together later. Rationalization is always one step behind, in danger of mistaking itself as source. What is seen is already different. It is not self-same. Appearance is an effect of relations, which include the body and corporeal memory sourced from the environment to which something appears. This is different from somebody like me, who isn't a Christian in the strongest sense of the word. Somebody who can't see Christ as anything but human, but immediately, when I see Christ on a cross, I see Christ and not merely a human. The figure is ubiquitous, one cannot but be a Christian in Europe, as the imagery is everywhere, and only secondarily denounce this element. In other words, keeping the common analytical distinction, ontologically, I remain Christian in some significant ways (for now), even if epistemologically, I definitely am not. It is impossible for me to even imagine a perception of a body on a cross and not literally see Christ, whatever I later think of that. This isn't to deny any materiality, it's not like subjects are free to project onto the world whatever they want. It simply means that anything that is perceived is already more than itself, for it is co-constituted by the perceiving organism and its capacities.

This is a very anthropological problem, in that it concerns a meeting of worlds through human bodies. (Viveiros de Castro 2011a) The worlds that meet are not only conceptual, but also sensory, aesthetic. Concept, percept and affect combine in the human bodies that come together in this image. And I here today, reading age-old writings of a French Jesuit enter this image, combine it, fill it with others, to smooth over the gaps left by writings. The body that enters the construction of research most actively is not an outside to the final product. As my research for the writings on the following pages went on, regardless of my initial intentions, the problem of the image and how what is immediately
seen as already different came to the forefront. It is a topic that as far as I know has never been tackled
in this manner, and is what connects all of the chapters, what is explored in various contexts and as
different possibilities within and between them. As it hasn't been undertaken yet in any significant way,
there is no ready-made conceptual framework to deal with it, no image of thought to presuppose.
Indeed, I am certain that the very framing of my research, combining, among others, anthropology,
media theory, film philosophy, and Buddhist aesthetico-conceptual experimentation is what made this
inquiry appear in the first place.

Encounters are stacked here, we might use the image of Russian dolls, one inside the other. But
that would be somewhat misleading, as they fit neatly and cannot become part of other dolls. Here, we
have images within images, encounters within encounters, and they can connect to others, and maybe
that connection, let's think it in terms of montage, will make a new image apparent, one that otherwise
wouldn't have been there. I operationalize this analogically to what Deleuze & Guattari enable to think
through Kafka and Borges: "According to Borges, it is not only that something new and unique
emerged when Kafka brought together this unique series of precursors in the production of his major
works. Also, and perhaps more interestingly, Kafka's writing creates new connections between these
earlier writers, connections which would have remained utterly imperceptible and hence non-existent
had Kafka never written his own work." (Smith 2018, 102) It is these encounters between worlds as
images that do something, as coincidental they may be. They make appear what otherwise would have
been imperceptible. "Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of
recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a
demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever
tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed." (Deleuze 1994, 139) Searching for this,
this something where the apparently quotidian, unshakeable, so eternal that imperceptible, is what I
consider among the central tasks of anthropology. I encounter the image of Southeast Asian peoples
encountering the image of Christ, provoking thought in me, searching the memory of the world, the one
accessible to me, to find adequate answers, in reading, looking, exploring, constructing. To explain
away what appears, such as the ignorance of natives in face of a self-evident Christ, one could easily
turn to ready-made images, clichés such as that of the ignorant native. Challenge to Western common
sense contained. But instead of containment masquerading as success, I seek failure. Not ready-made
cultural images of immediate recognition, but that situation where recognition breaks down, so that
thinking as a creative act might commence. A thinking that establishes new connections, subverts
habits, makes the self-evident appear arbitrary. Difference, not sameness. So once a situation where all
that fails forces itself, the construction of something entirely new, cobbled out of pieces that were here
before and a little something extra. It would be insufficient to think of all this as encounters between
conscious human actors (itself one of the main clichés of our time). What encounters far exceeds the
human, indeed does not need it, the human bodies are just parts – but they happen to be those parts
through which I am able to think more easily, given that I share most of their composition. This to me
is how I came to understand anthropology, once the representational world is left behind: not as a study
of man in general, but a study of things in the world as a human, from the point of view of a human
body. This human body is never self-same, and different human bodies, as mentioned, perceive
differently.

One has to leave behind the notion of a general human body, a general human, made particular
through context but basically the same, only a few qualities removed. Anthropologists have repeatedly
demonstrated that not only do conceptions of body, its borders, capacities and relations differ wildly,
but also that these differences have very verifiably different effects on people's reactions to how bodies
are treated. (E.g. Mol 2002, Lock & Farquhar 2007; also important is the stabilization of epigenetics as
a field and the feedback between body and environment down to the molecular levels, see e.g. Lock
2013)<fnref n="26" /> Each body and what it can perceive becomes singularly. Precisely because they compose
locally of different sources, which include past images, figures, gestures, attentions. But even figures
compose differently, as “divisions of nature and culture which are specific to modernity and its sciences
work through a material-semiotic clot that embeds the figure of matter in spacetime.” (Verran 2009,
172) The very separation from background is already a non-universal operation, even if here, it will
keep operating, as for now I am unable to do and write differently. This is why the concept of the
multiple, which will do some important work in the text again and again, is so ground-breaking: a thing
is more than one and less than many. The versions partially map on to each other, and partially they
don't. Like the infamous duck-hare image, where it is one shape but two animals, and neither can be
seen while the other appears. And things are made *infra*, not *meta* from above but in the messy,

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Developments in fields such as biomedical anthropology or other investigations into the functioning and successes or lack thereof of sciences and scientific imaginaries dominating society are potent reminders of how fantasy- and myth-based Modernity remains. This is not surprising as cliches and myths make life easier, reduce complexity to something manageable in daily life. The problem is the myth of rationality, already achieved perfect knowledge and objectivity imagined to be possessed by (almost) every human body coming to be formed in the institutions of this society.</footnote>
unstable between. "This is dizzying work. Things that seem to be essential for generalizing – 'knowers' and 'known abouts' – disappear. New sorts of entities emerge." (Verran 2001, 158)

As work went on, I came to decide to leave the concept of the image somewhat undertheorized, making use of its polysemy, taking it from one complex scene to the other. Leaving a clearer, philosophical articulation for future work. Here, I will lay out a minimal mapping of its potential, as the concept has come to be while doing this research. On a most general level, I take image to be a metastable set which includes parts (sub-images themselves complex) that have come to be habitualized or naturalized in certain regions of the world. These can overlap, as hegemonic images are made to travel, but can also have minimal connection, as in worlds of small scale societies. An image, following Deleuze (1989), is also temporal, a slice of time (qua change) that affects other images. An image to me, here, in so far as it relates to conventionally understood human consciousness and perception, has a pre-conscious part that operates immediately (and is constituted of past images, becoming stable through series of repetitions) and a conscious part, that can be accessed through active remembering (which is not memory per se, as here I follow Deleuze's Bergsonian conception of the term). To differentiate further, an image is made by random cuts and techno-cultural connections; if, following Strathern (2002), Melanesian realities are such that each body is seen not as an instance of a general body but through the decorations that connect it laterally with other decorations, it is still an image, just what is immediately seen and montaged/edited/associated together will differ from my own immediate habit.

To reenter the image from the beginning (which is actually just a part of the image, connected conceptually, but not sensorially to what is occurring here), the indigenous body reacting immediately to Christ on the cross is the preconscious part of image doing its work, and the indigenous body coming to think and argue about what that human figure on the cross might be or do, is the conscious aspect. It is what in many philosophies would be termed recognition, and is but a small part of what is happening. Though here too, new connections, associations can be formed. Images, much like everything, emerge from relational differences, and precisely because of this are not only not self-same, but also differ locally and as history. Thus, there is no general human (image), it will differ for each body in each place at each time. It is not prudent to locate image, recognition and reality-construction inside the human body (as Deleuze argues in the cinema books against phenomenology, which
operationalizes an image where the human illuminates what is basically dead matter), but rather all is
image. And, crucially, for Buddhist teachings, imaging and imagining are separate but not separable,
imagination always being co-constitutive of imaging, and vice versa. (Fan 2020) What is seen is never
simply a direct imprint, the past and the speculative combine. Figurations operate everywhere.<fnref n="27" />
Figurative artworks have that special capacity to multiply a locally constituted image and make it
circulate far outside the borders of their original constitution. None more of course than those made of
technologies that appear to make direct imprints of what is in front, in other words that constitute an
image in such a way that the untrained human eye can't preconsciously grasp a difference between
technologically produced image and outside reality. Perhaps, there is even mutual cross-pollination as
constructed images come to condition what is seen otherwise. Such technologies take conditioned
slices, leaving as much out as remains in, and can't in any way store much of what is there in a
situation, including emotions. As mentioned above, it takes endless repetitions of certain images for
them to have any stabilized effect on how bodies compose perception. With technologies of
reproduction such as photography and moving images, the energy needed to create such images which
can circulate and change worlds wherever there is adequate infrastructure, has minimized infinitely.
The same goes for the energy needed for their repetitive presence in the sense-worlds of human bodies.
The energy referred to here is that of human creativity. This is not to diminish the ecological and even
geological formatting of the earth to make such infrastructure possible. (Parikka 2015) As any reader
will be aware, not all images, much like humans and other species, have the same freedom of travel, as
it is Western images, and those formed specifically in certain regions of the United States by the most
hegemonic of actors, that move around much more freely and much further than any others. When their
repetitive accumulation reaches a certain degree, they can come to act in ways close to their region of
origin. In other words, once images (and accompanying frameworks) of Christ come to be ever-present
in a new area of the world (usually through direct imperialism), locals will indeed start seeing Christ
and not just a man. Images created in the region that came to challenge and change me, meanwhile
travel only very infrequently and in such limited amounts as to their idiosyncrasy to be almost entirely
erased, only at times being grasped conceptually, only rarely aesthetically. That is the presence of
Buddhist imaginaries in the West remains comparatively minimal and as such unless a body
specifically engages Buddhist worlds with the aim of changing the way it sees the world, these images

<footnote n="27">²⁷ “Figurations are performative images that can be inhabited. Verbal or visual, figurations can be condensed maps of contestable worlds. All language, including mathematics, is figurative, that is, made of tropes, constituted by bumps that make us swerve from literal-mindedness. I emphasize figuration to make explicit and inescapable the tropic quality of all material-semiotic processes, especially in technoscience.” (Haraway 1997, 11)</footnote>
and conventions will appear against an aesthetically Christian ground.

Additionally, figures can be separated through the operations of the complex nervous system of bodies, even as they mesh in materiality. Figure is something else than that which directly and exclusively tied to one specific material composition. It is a slice of a situation, an abstracted shape that passes through different layers and makes it possible to connect what is proper to these layers. This is the figurative. While the figural, following Brenez (1998) and Lyotard (1971), is the articulation of the figure within an (artistic) medium, proper to the potentials of the medium and the materials used, disregarding the limits a figure would have in a different sphere, such as the organic body. In other words, while a figure such as a specified human body might be referred to with the same words in the discursive realm, its composition in oil painting will differ from that in film, and with it the potential forms it might take. The common operations of language make it easy to forget that while a word appears the same, it is the composition of each situation that actually makes words real and heavy. Materiality enables different figural expression. In cinema, freed from the organic body, composed of a succession of (at times impossible) images, figures can take on forms they wouldn't be able to as tied to organic bodies. These in turn have creative potentials that a cinematically formed figure doesn't. It's the figures that migrate through these differing materialities, and are conceptually subsumed under a term in the discursive realm. One should not fall prey to the misapprehension that these are the same images (in the above sense) or bodies. In ethnographic writing, image encounters are translated into writing, and figures are what makes it possible to connect these different media spheres, detect analogous patterns, apprehend similarities based in convention. But these media ecologies are different, as the materials composing them are always unique. One may read the word Buddha, but it will be a very different thing, depending on the reader – even for the same reader, as in one of bodily continuity, when systematically engaging potentials of what Buddha is and looks like, Buddha will be a different thing with each iteration.

The figure of the Buddha or monks, as shaped in classical arts, but also in cinema and more recent media, does not have to be realist in any conventional sense. That is, the forms don't have to follow organic conventions of what is and isn't possible according to this or that code. Indeed, the limits to these figures are posed by conceptual conventions (often laid out in texts, whether transmitted orally or written) and material/technological conditions, innovations. Such is apparent to those who
have traveled to areas where this particular tradition has had significant influence in how the world has come to work. As opposed to Christian worlds, where massive statues of Christ or saints are few and far between, Buddhas seem to have little limits when it comes to size and location. And, of course, once awakened through following correct practice, one can see an entirely different world, outside of what a regularly composed human body is able to. Buddhist tradition, with its almost infinite amount of sūtras, further differs in another mediatic way: there is no one truth, no one event, to be at the center of everything; development, change, is part of that tradition, even if the karmic laws (inaccessible by untrained sensory equipment) continue to operate. Such manners meanwhile are difficult to access merely by going somewhere and looking or interviewing. Seeing takes practice and practice transforms. It is the confluence of percepts and concepts, the mixing of these from different traditions, that make such simplicities apparent. What is seen is and is not what is seen.

As has hopefully become clear, image, and problems connected to it, are anything but easy to delineate or to concisely clarify. The concept of the image, to paraphrase and slightly tweak Deleuze & Guattari (1994), is composed of other concepts, and while metastable, has around its edges zones of indiscernibility, where it overlaps with other images. Ironically perhaps, this is not dissimilar to how Tambiah (2013) has described the operation of mandalas in galactic polities of premodern Southeast Asian realities. The image as percept, as that which connects to and through the senses, I will treat analogically. In that each image (always specific, overdetermined, unlike a concept which is sensorially empty) is composed of other images and zones of indiscernibility. As the reader proceeds, concepts and percepts connect with what can be mobilized from habit, from the worlds one inhabits and of which one is inhabited. Habit here includes preconscious prediction, enabling a stable and continuous experience, while the world is an excess which each body's senses reduce for patterns to emerge. The same activity is done by the connected nervous system with its intensified region of the brain. In order to function, information has to be filtered, otherwise there will be only noise. A signal, information, is always a reduction of what is there. As this is research, the interest in finding something new pertains to intellectual and conscious operations, and the encounters sought so as they may enact an unprediction for the patterns of recognition, do so on a level where conceptual certainty brakes down. While sensory certainty can also be shocked and break, this is forms a much smaller of the present inquiry. Be it, that quite a few rituals, not to mention artworks, or just movements through the excessive hustle and bustle of Bangkok at times acted that way upon the body that is writing here. Habitual, automatic predicting is
a repetition of patterns with variations too slight to appear as breaks or dissonances, it's a preconscious selection of information to constitute what will appear (that is have an effect on the senses and nervous system) in the first place. All the while, one should be aware that the future is open, it has not yet happened, whatever comes next is always uncertain and new, to some degree. Only sometimes the image that follows cannot compose in a way to ensure a smooth continuation. Still, even in the most secure sensory experience, the information contained in what is apprehended far outdoes anything that can be put into words. One learns this when attempting to write down every little detail one sees at the moment or that is contained in a frame of a film.

A description of an image will always differ from a sensory image. They have different functions, different effects and are made of different parts. For somebody who has never been to Bangkok, much of what I write will be empty, and inserting a literal image (as is sometimes done in ethnographies) here or there will not help, because it is only when sights and sounds and all other senses encounter worlds repeatedly, that other worlds become memories and pre-consciously connect with words. This to me, is one of the basic and somewhat undervalued powers of cinema – it forces an encounter with images different from what we have been taught, unlike writings, which may tickle the imagination, but this imagination will be filled with transformations of what is known, and not provoked into sensorial thought by what is unknown. Once again, empirical encounters can make aimed transformation happen, at least to those bodies that have not been hardened into preconsciously dismissing the new or immediately transforming it into the known, even before any more active consciousness sets in to do the same.
04. From Media to Mediation

This is not a summary nor an overview of media theory or (German) media philosophy in all its variety and possible contradictions.<fnref n="28" /> This, much like the previous explorations of contemporary potentials of anthropological inquiry, is a short expose aimed at those that have not concerned themselves systematically with these fields that reconfigure most of what came before. It will create a general understanding as to what role media thought plays here and how it enables a new kind of research.<fnref n="29" />

The medium is the middle or mediator. All etymologically related words, of perhaps little
explanatory value that nevertheless serve to intensify a position with a relation that tends to be
overlooked. It is an object of study (media as technology), an approach (to old objects of study; media
archaeology) and a performatively rhetorical thing polemically engaging outdated orientations such as
humanism or most kinds of realism, such that cling to tenets long demonstrated to be untenable.<fnref n="30" />
“Media, then, is many things, ranging from a verbal club liberally applied to those stuck in old
meaning-seeking paradigms to a kind of conceptual defamiliarization tool designed to break the
narcotic spell deviantly servile technologies cast on their users.” (Winthrop-Young 2013, 13) The term
medium furthermore is used in anthropological and related literature for a type of person that
communicates with the dead.<fnref n="31" /> While all are connected and overlapping, it is the middle one that I want
to stress most: media as an approach. The middle is essentially relational and as a conceptual
experiment can be applied anywhere, which is why it holds revolutionary potential and regardless of
the differences between all kinds of media theories connects them. It enacts a radical reorientation or
recomposition of thought and world. Once one learns to think and perceive in terms of media and
mediation, nothing remains the same as one's world transforms and hidden metaphysical pretensions
often claimed to have been wiped out appear to be happily operational in the most so-called secular of
philosophies and sciences.<fnref n="32" />

<footnote n="28">²⁸ For a detailed discussion of the difference, see Winthrop-Young 2013, 2014.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ A note for media theorists: concurrently, the position from which these pages are mostly written, is from that of a human body, so many media theoretical discussions are of little import, as it's more about 'culture,' how conditioned humans claim to conventionally experience or approach 'media technologies' and not so much whether the computer is a radically different entity than cinema.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Here one can discern an affinity with posthumanism, which is multiple itself, and while much of it is Deleuzian, there is also foundational research that is not. (E.g. Hein 2016, but countered by Murris & Bozalek 2019) So, in keeping with what I propose on these pages in general, philosophies are incompatible until new objects are created that make them compatible, which of course transforms all of the entities related.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ The connection between the two has been explored in the anthropology of Thailand. (See e.g. Morris 2000)</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² The way Latour conceives of mediators and intermediaries is relatable to and not incompatible with what I write. (See</footnote>
Thinking said middle is hardly a recent practice, what is new is taking it, in all it's slipperiness, as an object of and for thought. This would be so, because the middle is the carrier of a message, of content, and disappears in the act of communication. The middle is not a 'thing,' a stabilized object easy to grasp and define. As something between, it is fundamentally heteronomous (Krämer 2015, 34), which makes much media theory easily resistant to facile reductivism, essentialism as well as generalization. In difference to signs, "[w]hen something is viewed as a medium, however, it behaves in the exact opposite way: what is perceptible is usually the message itself, and the message is also what matters most in the media event. The message is thus considered primary, while the medium itself is secondary; it neutralizes itself, becomes invisible and disappears in its (noise-free) use. In the semiological perspective, the meaning is 'concealed' behind the sensible; in the mediological perspective, on the other hand, the sensible is 'concealed' behind the meaning." (Ibid., 35) One would want to pay attention to the phrasing, as 'something is viewed as a medium' – again, it is not artifacts out there, that are simply media (technologies), it's more and less than that. While semiology would look for the invisible meaning behind the material/aesthetic sign, a mediology looks for the physical, material medium that carries the meaning. Obviously, the continued use of '-logy' is also put into question. This, when logically extended, comes to imply that the meaning is not simply independent of material carriers, in other words how thoughts are noted (including, say the style) is not a neutral ground that simply disappears.³³ Media by way of disappearing in the process of communicating, cannot serve as any fundamental ground: "no media a priori is to be established, and media are thus not to be located within the frame of ultimate justifications." (Ibid., 39)

As the media theorist Alexander Galloway (2012, 13) elaborates, it is perhaps more prudent to write of mediation than media, as the former is processual, so as not to fall into the trap of positing media as specific technologies, as things out there, later to be classified and analyzed by quasi positivist research. The conceptual move hidden therein is a classic misapplication inherent to the dogmatic

<footnote>Latour 2005a, Verbeek 2005) Deleuze's relation to mediation is much more complicated here. (Smith 2006, but Grusin 2015) However, systematically elaborating on this would turn the attention away from other matters of concern, thus I will leave a detailed discussion of meditation in these two indispensable thinkers to be followed through references.

³³ Again, one might noticed the parallels to materialist posthumanism, as in the famous dictum of Karen Barad (2007), it matters how matter matters. And, in relational anthropology, Marilyn Strathern (1992, 10) coined a similar phrase: "it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas." So to think something with the idea of media instead of essence, will produce a different kind of thought, a different object in thought even, as the (disappearing) idea that is in the middle is co-constitutive. Whether a Buddhist tenet is thought starting from liberal individualism or from within a relational world, makes for very different, if related, thought.</footnote>
image of thought, namely the primary positing of something while disregarding it's primary positing by one's thought in the first place, thus being able to pretend it is simply out there. A relational media thought would notice that that which disappears is precisely the first positing of something without having to substantiate this first event. The most basic operation is the positing of an independent reality or a thing out there that is fully and directly represented by one's thought and writing. The act of connecting elements, of selecting something out there and connecting it with an idea and narrative a body is putting together, disappears. One veers dangerously close to theology and the first move of a world (or thought) created out of nothing. It is in fact a naturalization of Christian tenets in allegedly non-theological practice like philosophy or research in general. Following the media philosopher Friedrich Kittler (2010) media technologies (such as writing) store, process, and transmit, and this non-relational way of positing their existence (and qualities) can make it impossible to notice the presence of theories of mediation in older thought. (Galloway 2012)<fnref n="34" /> This leads to a connected tendency: “For Kittler also harbors a deep-seated interest in another ancient yearning of philosophy, one which is as old as it is powerful. It is the desire to reduce the many to the one.” (Ibid., 16) Which is, again, one that prioritizes object over medium – the middle disappears, what one is left with is stuff out there. However, “[a] philosophy of mediation will tend to proliferate multiplicity; a philosophy of media will tend to agglomerate difference into reified objects.” (Ibid., 17) Thinking in terms of mediation, a media theory not a theory of media, engenders the possibility of media thought appearing in unlikely places. “The Greeks indubitably had an intimate understanding of the physicality of transmission and message sending (Hermes). They differentiated between mediation as immanence and mediation as expression (Iris versus Hermes). They understood the mediation of poetry via the Muses and their *techne*. They understood the mediation of bodies through the ‘middle loving’ Aphrodite. They even understood swarming and networked presence (in the incontinent mediating forms of the Eumenides who pursued Orestes in order to ‘process’ him at the *procès* of Athena). Thus we need only look a little bit further to shed this rather vulgar, consumer-electronics view of media, and instead graduate into the deep history of media as modes of mediation, a task that with a bit of luck will be accomplished presently *vespere et mane*.” (Ibid., 15) Mediation is a process of the world, and nothing is reducible to one. In terms of relationality, it is important to note the way I treat the appearance of new objects, material or immaterial or any combination of these. The formation of something new in the non-teleological, acentral evolution (qua complex intra-action between bodies and environments) of cosmos means that

<footnote n="34">³⁴ This can be more conceptual, as the *tò metaxú* in Aristotle, or imageric as the Cartesian self modeled on the magic lantern (Galloway 2013, 14–15).</footnote>
in things that were there before new aspects or possibilities appear, part of the virtual becomes actualized. One can notice it in the imagery that populates philosophies. Materiality, the sensory, the imageric is never simply disconnected from thought, much like the material that makes up a book, a writing system, etc. Anybody that attempted to open up material reading objects from the past, before the standardization of writing systems through new technologies (which include ideas) will be aware. Or indeed as anybody trying to listen to speech in circumstances of high noise will be aware, meaning is not always easily gathered. All takes energy, even as habitualization diminishes energy expenses. Depending on the signal to noise ratio, entirely new meanings based on strong misunderstandings based on preconsciously preconceived notions of what might be communicated in order to shape the noise into signal can appear. There is a game people play, called Chinese whispers in English that makes playful use of these conditions. Once a central stabilizing element is dispensed with, and communication continues along a temporal line, what is whispered from ear to ear in suboptimal conditions transforms rather rapidly. Understanding, meaning, translation are all entangled in materiality and habits. The sensory system and neural networks are material and mediate. Buddhist teachings and practices are actually concerned with this middle, with how senses come to construct what appears. The relation between such elements was, in Occidental tradition already formulated by Walter Benjamin, who “is seen as a pioneer in the discovery of a conditional relation between technics and art, technology and perception, media, and the senses.” (Krämer 2015, 40)

As for the following pages, media theory and mediation are of invaluable importance for at least two reasons. First, they enable to reconceptualize the activity of the anthropologist and the tools used in anthropology (and related fields), and make appear all that which supports the production of knowledge but disappears in the process of creating knowledge according to academic standards. That is, all the technological infrastructure, all the techniques employed, etc., to a much larger extent in more complex ways than the self-critical strands of anthropology have hitherto done. This is done in a way that actually acknowledges the material continuity of the world, while remaining aware of cosmological/ontological incompossibility,<fnref n="35" /> and concurrently acknowledging the random cuts or discontinuities made in order to be able to produce any knowledge. With it, a different image of the world appears, one that will sharpen as the accumulation of sentences, concepts and imagery will

<footnote n="35">³⁵ The Deleuzian version of Leibniz's concept is used here: “We must therefore understand that incompossible worlds, despite their incompossibility, have something in common – something objectively in common – which represents the ambiguous sign of the genetic element in relation to which several worlds appear as instances of solution for one and the same problem.” (Deleuze 1990, 114)</footnote>
increase. And, secondly, they enable to reconstruct a Buddhist thought alternatively to what Buddhist studies of all strands (analytical philosophy and phenomenology being dominant) continue to do, namely taking the starting point of an individual subject as simply existing and (in case of phenomenology) secondarily problematized. Buddhist thought, Buddhist worlding, as (re)constructed by modern science, is quite clear on the construction of human perception, the role of body and its contact with the environment, and of it not being the ultimate ground. The uncertainties about perception and reality are distributed very differently than in the Christian-Secular versions commonly employed in research, as will be expanded on later. The challenge is to find tools to articulate this without falling back onto conditioned experience as is commonly done. What connects almost all (introductory and advanced) accounts of Buddhist thought is a realist assumption: reality as experienced by a Modern generalized is the starting point of inquiry and there is nothing to experimentally shift and decentralize this. Only with the occasional third-world Marxist<fnref n="36" /> account is there any questioning of conventional liberal subject based reality as self-evident ground (Sankrityayan 1970). Even in teachings so intently built around the decentralization of subjectivity and so-called natural perception, when grasped by modern allegedly scientific means the liberal subject and its (latent) idealism continues operating silently or even loudly. It is one thing to start there, with thought, because that is where one out of necessity has to commence (as the Buddha pointed out, since otherwise one falls into senseless metaphysical speculation that cannot be verified), it's another to never be able to really transform it. When mind-body comes to be in different variations in different worlds, one cannot continue using the neutral body or mind as a general thing, or structures of perception as if all that ultimately remained stable, all transformation happening without fundamentally changing a body. Learning to think and perceive in terms of all that which disappears in the process of something appearing, whether it be a message, a theory, a description, a concept, enacts such a reorientation that it becomes evident that the concept as image of thought operationalized, is a distinctly modern European one with its Greco-Christian genealogy.<fnref n="37" /> Thinking with mediation is a decolonial path out of the Christian legacy of the One and a final unmovable ground that keeps its iron claws sunk into fidgeting of mere mortals having encountered other worlds and ways of thinking but not always having tools to

<footnote n="36">³⁶ The most common approach among Occidentals is to show that Buddhist and Marxist ethics, at least the Western humanist Marxist ones, are compatible or very close. (E.g. Struhl 2017, Slott 2011) This to me is beyond the point, because in doing so both of them are reduced to a version of liberal humanism, leaving intact the whole conceptual infrastructure the problematic side of which (i.e. inherent exclusion via reduction to one, or the immediate projection of universalism before even inquiring into counter examples) continues to be disavowed.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ The Christian heritage in contemporary research and Occidental common sense will be explored in detail later on in the text.</footnote>
generate something forceful from these openings. Decolonization is open-ended, a goal is to create the conditions for multiplicity and variety in academic research, so as not to fall back onto the one-world world model, held together by reification, essentialization and the one, hiding the very practices that constitute those illusions. This is one such experiment that seeks to build an alternative, incompossible, partially overlapping, in other words a differentiation through incommensurable encounters made generative, the success of which will only show itself in an unknown future. It is also a thought that affirmatively operates a world-in-the-making instead of continually positing an independent, already finished one.
## 05. Buddhist Conceptual Alternatives

When wading through the endless pages devoted to the study of Buddhism, one must not even prance in the down to earth accounts by anthropologists to encounter a conceptual betel nut that is anything but easy to crack, indeed that seems to be a nut fashioned of stone. As postcolonial and other critical research has increasingly demonstrated, Buddhism was not simply found out there in the world, but is rather a Western invention (however much it is stabilized today as a category qua thing that operates in the world) with nefarious implications for history and all manner of peoples. (King 1999, McMahan 2008, Masuzawa 2005, Josephson 2006) Moreover, those doing research among the actually living, when having spent enough time among and acted in appropriate manners to be trusted by them, come to understand that people have come to learn to say certain things that appeal to Western Buddhists and non-Buddhists that are very different from what is actually practiced or thought. (Cassaniti 2015, 2018) The farang body more often than not brings with itself preconceived images of what Buddhism is and what Buddhists are and forcibly goes on to immediately transform what is encountered conform with their preconceptions. Whatever doesn't fit, is dismissed or posited as external to a true Buddhism, as something corrupted by locals. What if instead one were to take the complexity of contradictions as fact and relate it to one's own tacit assumptions about world, humanity or morality so as to transform one's own limitations and contradictions? As long as a world out there is posed and then related to an ideal to which it must conform, colonialist othering won't end. The farang, a term that arrived through Persian (from at first Franks specifically, later Westerners in general) in the Thai vocabulary, likes to come to places that have age old histories in a certain tradition and then arrogantly teach them about what is and isn't right in a tradition that the white person has only recently picked up through books or some learned Western monk with similar attitudes. In short and apart from evident Orientalism and the like, the entitlements of scientism as culturalized norm render blind to the creative affordances of any environment one moves in. Instead Buddhism is modeled on the conventions of the concept of religion (i.e. the ideal-type is posited as primary), the latter term itself evolving and changing with the times (without this being acknowledged). Religion, something developed with Christian modernity, of course reinscribes many divisions not found out there in the world beyond the Occident.<fnref n="38" /> Dualisms such as

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Masuzawa (2005) demonstrates how religion is a matter of classification developed from some older Christian versions of dividing the world. Classification, separation, hardening of boundaries, sometimes even creating them out of thin air has always been the work of colonizers, and when steeped in Buddhist thought, it appears to have been central for Christianity: clear separation between Christians and non-Christians (as identity), the latter being Christians-to-be in the expansionist cosmology of Christianity and its contemporary secular version. Classification as ontologized separation continues operating in the constitution of fields of research, making the existence of entities like religion or Buddhism</footnote>
religion and state, private and public, religion and science, modernity and premodernity, while having
their pragmatic and indeed emancipatory reasoning given the histories of Christianitas and the
development of modern states and ideas, such as those found in Hobbes's work. By way of the imperial
restructuring of the world, the introduction and development of modern governing and state building
techniques, first within colonial empires, then in emergent modern national states, such divisions came
to be parts of reality all over, even if never easily mapping onto their outside. Indeed, it is the (partially)
Buddhist worlds of so-called Eastern Asia where Western categories regularly break down, where
'reality out there' investigated empirically keeps resisting the image created by (Western) researchers
and their propagated common sense. (Southwold 1978, Josephson 2012) For example, "the Thai
religious field is characterised by multiple ritual and cosmological domains - including but not limited
to Theravada Buddhism, Brahmanism, Chinese divinities, spirit possession, divination and astrology."
(Jackson 2020, 9) And while some claim these "maintain distinct, bounded and differentiated
identities," (ibid.) this extends at best to the composition of spaces, thought what I encountered while
doing research is not that easily separable in each instance. The challenge here is to pose the problem
so that it appears generatively.

It is suggested to use *kala-thesa* "which can be understood as ‘contextual sensitivity,’" (ibid., 9) literally meaning ‘time and place’ and showing a conception of the world where there is no neutral space or time within which sentient beings go about their affairs, but rather one where each section of space-time has its own rules and features, tying it to a relational logic of local hierarchical social organization. The different processes of mixing and combining that *kala-thesa* enables and can to some degree explain can happen within various contexts, in one ritual event or something much wider. What combinations appear depends one whether one, as a researcher, follows spaces, individuals, teachings, gestures, rituals, etc. In other words, it depends on what is kept stable and what can change within an analysis. As will be apparent, despite the occasional suggestion of including concepts drawn from local practices, I consider that most critical researchers (in fields organized around Buddhist topics) did not manage any actually generative engagement, mostly due to an unquestioned anthropocentrism, idealism (in how discourse is treated) and naive realism (in that the world is always taken as untouched

<footnote>more real and ignoring critical work easier. The issue is most obviously a category mistake: the positing of a concept and
then pretending it is somehow found out there in the world without the work done by the positing of the concept in the
first place. Religion, today, is real, it is just something different than is assumed by common sense.</footnote>
by research and the categories employed) that forecloses the possibility of becoming aware of all the
new things that are brought into the world in doing research, as well as in forging new realities such as
nation states, culture and, indeed, religion(s). All too often image as representation of world and world
continue to be confused.

As many have noted, the similarities between different Buddhist worlds were anything but
immediately apparent. In the words of one of the prime critical Buddhologists: “European explorers,
missionaries, and soldiers had encountered Buddhists for centuries in all parts of Asia, yet only
belatedly came to recognize the religion of these various peoples as somehow the same thing, as
something that they would come to call Buddhism.” (Lopez Jr. 2005, 2) It took decades, centuries even
to construct such scientific objects as to see immediately see the connections between artifacts
appearing in what today is Japan, India, China, Thailand. The world changed as new things came to be,
making some connections instantly visible and others disappear. Other people than Western(ized)
scientists will see entirely different connections, realities.<fnref n="39" /> Some of it was fed back into these regions
(mostly through colonialism or neocolonialism, both drawing on scientific knowledges and
classifications that they then materialized in Buddhist regions), of course transforming, changing the
worlds in directions other than would've happened without this contact. The world differentiates, there
is not a One above or apriori to tie it all together and make it all stable in a way that produces the
illusion of eternal stability.

Still, Buddhism as a meta-stable entity has been created and does its work in the world. One can
ignore it (but to what ends), one can critique it (as a negative movement, leaving the control of its
futures to others) or one can experiment with it, creatively, take it to places where it 'doesn't belong.'
As long as Buddhism will be treated as a thing out there to be categorized and not as a wealth of
resources to make different worlds, ways of thinking and doing that can be tested and developed by
applying it to new elements in the world, the engagement will be nothing but colonial – a work of
containment and reduction. So, instead of a negation of a Western term (and its continually colonial and

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Unfortunately, for now, there is little research to parallel that done in relation to Amazonia in this mode of ‘reverse anthropology.’ (Cf. Kopenawa & Albert 2013) My work here is an attempt to put together a variety of sources to make such a reversal possible as it emerges from distinctly Buddhist worlding.</footnote>
colonizing effects), to paraphrase ‘Asia as Method’ scholarship, it can be deployed in ways that are, to
adapt Warwick Anderson (2012), more tactical engagements with the Western elements of the concept
of Buddhism. According to Kuan-hsing Chen (2010, 223), the “task of Asia as method, then, is ‘to
multiply frames of reference in our subjectivity and worldview, so that anxiety over the West can be
diluted, and productive critical work can move forward.’” Multiplication of frames of reference is
crucial, so as not to reduce the world to one, but also to enhance the (decolonial) possibilities of the
so-called West. Much like Buddhism, Asia was also invented and carries with it more than just traces of
its European origins. And, like Buddhism or any such entity, Asia is a category that is multiple,
heterogeneous, operates relationally and contextually. Depending on the inquiry, it can be held
somewhat stably in the background, or undergo active transformation. As Atsuro Morita (2020)
stresses, a focus when using such laden terms should be on continuous transformations. Furthermore,
one shouldn't mistake a category for a different thing out there, in the world, for that would be an all
too common a category mistake. The category is the thing out there already. Something Buddhist
teachings have been productive to point out for centuries – if only Buddhist studies researchers would
manage to apply what they glean from such texts to their own practice. Modern science in its continued
application of a dogmatic image of thought is very much built on category mistakes and confusions due
to its tacit idealist realism and tendency toward thinking first in terms of separate entities with clear
origins and any kind of mixing later. As another Chinese STS researcher (Fan 2016) points out,
growing up in the Taiwan of the 1980s, things of all origins are already mingling, gathered from around
the world. The world happens, there is no primary purity and secondary defilement. A medical
anthropologist working creatively the fields of Thai realities, Felicity Aulino (2020a, 2022) keeps
working through Thai realities and minds, modeling much of it on the influential Buddhist scholar
Buddhaghosa (5th century Indian subcontinent) to show how reality doesn't have to be either or, to show
that worlds and practices and thought don't have to turn around the One, Truth or any other mono-
concept to the exclusion of others.<fnref n="40" /> Treating Buddhism as method is a way to draw on these other

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ To be clear, the One as immanence (via Deleuze-Spinoza) is a very different one. It is not sameness but as (potential) connection/communication/interaction of all. The insidiousness of the common sense (Christian) One is that it claims one world, but denies any actual communication and change happening between elements it doesn't recognize as its own. It is a transcendent One, untouched and expansive (or better: eyes are closed so that it can be pretended it is unchanging). As such, capitalism appears as a distinct development of Christianity, for it too connects with everything but only as a one-way street. One world is posited primarily, while alterity is posited in the same movement (but conveniently forgotten). “The disaster of world history is that capitalism was never the progressive unwinding of patrilineage through a series of generalized exploitative relations associated with a trans-cultural exogamy, leading to an uncontrollable eruption of feminine (i.e. migrant) alterity into the father's heartland, and thus to the emergence of a radical – or ethnically disruptive and post-patriarchal – synthesis. Instead, kinship and trade were systematically isolated from each other, so that the internationalization of the economy was coupled with an entrenchment of xenophobic</footnote>
possibilities of conceptual and imageric (infra)structuration in ways that ought to be at least partly intelligible to those weaned on the reality that there are religions simply out there and that this is a neutrally descriptive statement, and not one that actively transforms what is.

Studying all manner of sources, one thing becomes as clear as Buddha's heart-mind: prescriptive and normative statements about Buddhism are not a productive way to approach this different world. For one, it becomes apparent that if anything, this is a tradition that thrives on hybridity and change. It is clear from the teachings themselves, the way it spread mostly along trade routes, with representatives often being called by rulers, as apparently it came with prestige as well as governing tools (for a Thai-based discussion, see Baumann 2020), and even when its 'missionary' potentials were tapped, this was not done through violence and forced expansion (how could it be, as there is no lay conversion in this tradition!). As is known from contemporary sources, when unsuccessful in preaching the dhamma, monks would just leave a village be. (Keyes 1993) The way societies where Buddhist teachings played an important role came to be, namely pluralist or multiple, with all kinds of practices and spaces next to each other, even in the lives of individuals, where it is common in all areas to practice rites from all kinds of traditions in one day even. This can be noticed today too, in Bangkok and elsewhere, even after the emergence of a purer and more state-related Protestant Buddhism. Of course, this doesn't mean that there aren't individuals or families to be found that would adhere almost exclusively to Buddhist practices. Any claim to fully exempt a possibility would be non-sensical. And it is precisely this enduring variety of combinations that stands against Western conceptions such as (religious) identity, even if a Thai today will tell you they are Buddhist. Such statements ought not to confirm the preconceived image of the world a Westerner has, but rather lead to posing a variety of questions that would lead to a transformation of one's own world to include possibilities that were hitherto external to it. That, indeed, would be a scientific attitude worth its name and lofty ideals. On these pages, the term *Buddhadharma* or Buddhist teachings will be used for such historical and (continuous if changing) contemporary Buddhist practices, teachings, worlds, while Buddhism<fnref n="41" /> will do

<footnote>(nationalistic) kinship practices, maintaining a concentration of political and economic power within an isolated and geographically sedentary ethnic stock.” (Land 2012a, 62) The promise of universality (making everything same, but at least somewhat equal), undercut by radical in/out group distinction as hierarchy has been central to the operations of Christianity. In other words, one Nature (the realm of capital accumulation), but different cultures (the humans to be exploited) are assumed. This makes it possible to naturalize separations in the creation of so-called value (transformation of what was into other entities enmeshed with immaterial things such as ideas) and to deny to active participation of the culturalized others, as if all had always sprung from those owning capital.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ This would be what Viveiros de Castro (2004b) terms ‘controlled equivocation,’ namely to make discursively present a</footnote>
for the scientific construct and the significantly Christianized, solitary version Westerners practice more
often than not exclusive of the myriads of entities, monsters and deities typically tied to Buddhadharma
as it came to be practiced into worlds outside and before the poorly protestant Buddhist world
habitually imagined by Moderns today.<fnref n="42" /> At times, the term *Sasanaphut*<fnref n="43" /> will appear, the Thai version
of Buddhadharma, when something specifically Thai will be operationalized.<fnref n="44" />

Just to give a taste of a world not built on exclusion – though hierarchies may appear – a few
examples will follow: “One could even argue that the early Chakri kings, with their Mon, Persian, and
Chinese blood were foreign invaders into an ethnically diverse set of villages that was turned into
Bangkok/Thonburi and that the ethnic minorities of the early city were the Siamese.” (McDaniel 2018,
132–133) Malay, Mon, Lao communities were not merely within the original mandala, but even within
the original fortress, itself built by foreign workers. The mandala, that Hindu-Buddhist tool of
government and spatial organization, “was simply mapped over an already diverse urban core by an
already ethnically diverse royal family.” (Ibid., 133) Furthermore Muslims were part of the royal
family, and mosques were to be found in the city, with Persian, Cham, Malay, Indonesian and other
communities being important. (van Roy 2016) King Rama III himself, one of the most important
Chakri kings, had a Muslim mother, a descendant of a Persian sultan who had founded a kingdom on
today’s southern Thailand. (Formichi 2020, 34) The Persian connection has been studied particularly
well. (Marcinkowski 2005) “King Rama III did not deny or hide his mother’s religion or ethnicity.

difference in homonyms that usually disappears. Western 'Buddhism,' academic or not, is not the same as Buddhist traditions that go way back. Neither is it entirely different.

<footnote n="42">⁴² The positing of Buddhism as a thing out there, often to be found in the earliest and thus truest texts follows the well-known pattern: posing eternal essence with changes being secondary and unimportant, ironically going very much against any kind of Buddhist thought. Buddhism thus conceived is Christianity with (non-controversial, compatible) Buddhist decorations.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ “śāsana (Skt.; Pali, sasana). A term used by Buddhists to refer to their religion. It has a range of possible translations, including teaching, doctrine, and as ‘Buddha-sasana,’ ‘the teachings of the Buddha’, especially in the context of their historical continuity as religious tradition.” (Keown 2003, 255) Note that Thais call Christianity *sasana christ* or, the teachings of Christ, and Islam *sasana islam*, the teachings of Islam, translating ‘religion’ as something more of ethical guidelines and institutions to follow, rather than something akin to truth and identity (and thus less exclusive of other teachings). With such a concept of ‘religion’ operating (when speaking English), it is of little surprise that Thais in general speak of adhering to other religions as being fine, as long as we all try to be good people. This is obviously a rather radical transformation of religions of the One, of Truth, of anything ultimate.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ The anthropologist Martin Southwold (1983) proposes to translate *Buddha Dharma* as reality and *Buddha Sāsana* as ‘Buddhism as a spatio-temporal phenomenon’ or ‘Buddhendom’ as an analogy to ‘Christendom.’ It is the onto-epistemological operations of dharma (as both world/reality/cosmic order and the correct teaching about it discovered by the Buddha) which make me favor it over *sāsana* which while partly overlapping, does not make it possible to engage multinaturalism, for it can easily be integrated into a one-world world framework.</footnote>
Indeed, he promoted it openly. His very first act as king, before any military or building plans, was to elevate his mother as Queen Srisulalai, making her the highest-ranking Muslim in Thai royal history. Second, he built a mosque in her honour, not far from Ton Son mosque.” (McDaniel 2018, 135) She was treated as a Buddhist after her death and honored for her Muslim heritage during her life, which points toward a different cosmopractice than the one Christian-Seculars like to project. Different ethnicities also came to practice Buddhadharma, such as the Persian Bunnag family that sponsored Wat Prayun. King Mongkut is another example from the elites, he “was not merely inspired by the Mon – he worked to incorporate their Buddhist knowledge and language into the heart of Siamese Buddhism.” (McDaniel 2018, 140) These are always shifting worlds and practices not turning around the verification of and by the One. The Hindu influence is known to have been of particular importance, with very popular shrines active even today, historical use for governmental purposes (including important roles for Brahmins) and the appearance of countless deities in constituent Thai Buddhist texts as well as vernacular suttas, jātakas and many other ostensibly Buddhist documents, not to mention the numerous shows on Thai television dramatizing Hindu materials. Thus, “one cannot begin to understand Bangkok without seeing it as essentially diverse and not a Siamese city that happens to have some other ethnicities because of historical circumstance and benign acceptance.” (McDaniel 2018, 138) This forces a different conception of religion, ethnicity, identity, etc. – in short reality. When one opens any of the general histories of the area, both continental and pelagic, it's impossible to overlook that the whole of Southeast Asia was, before Modernism (and the essentialist feedback of Western scientific categorization of identities, religions, ethnicities and nations as exclusive affairs with the truest versions of teachings to be found in the oldest documents) at least, a region where the world operated in a different way than we are used to. (Reid 1988, 1993; Hall 2010a; Lieberman 2003, 2009)

So how to deal with such a reality, when one doesn't just want to force a pattern on it that clearly doesn't fit? Perhaps one even wants to reconfigure the analytical tools, ensure a creative feedback from elsewhere that transforms the capacities of one's own world. Researchers on Southeast Asia (with import far beyond these boundaries) have developed certain ways to deal with the mind-boggling variety of the region. Benedict Anderson, famous for developing the Imagined Community concept, in that very book mentioned how states create categories in order to better govern. On the example of Rome and its relation to the Germanic outside, the anthropologist James C. Scott
demonstrates how the creation of such categories can go hand-in-hand with military efforts not
necessarily to fully integrate that outside, but to enforce a reaction from groups of peoples to organize
in a way that is legible for the state system. (Scott 2009, 2017) He elaborates such problematics based
on research with the peoples of Southeast Asian continental highlands he calls Zomia (derived from
Zomi, a common Tibeto-Burman term for highlander), to similarly show how states (ancient or
imperialist) seek control through the establishment of categories, often knowing that these are not
straightforwardly descriptive of a much more complex reality (e.g. the various Chinese empires and
governing tools created there, but this is lost on most of us realist representationalist Moderns). Words
do things, so do concepts, so does infrastructure, laws, and other technologies. They did and do so in
Europe too, where nations or ethnicities with clear boundaries also had to be created. The Western
category of Buddhism is one such entity that seeks, in order to govern and pacify, to put order into a
world where humans and non-humans are anything but easily classifiable. That science cannot be done
without categorization may be one thing, that researchers tend to mistake analytical or governmental
categories for simple realities out there, is another. As European colonialist regimes expanded and
complexified by learning from challenges, they had to create ways of ruling those subjugated (abroad
and at home), among them are of course national, religious, etc categorizations, made more real
through such things as passports, etc. The census and one's identity being materialized into a document
somewhere harden boundaries wherever one goes. When new things are formed in the world, the world
changes with it. Precolonial empires made for different realities than what we have today, when the
either/or essentialism derived from Christianity was normalized not just in Europe, but in many other
parts of the world. Despite this, moving around Bangkok, it is clear that people continue to practice all
kinds of activities a regular ivory tower scholar would immediately consider as incompatible. And
conceptually they might even be, but people don't live logically consistent lives, as any half aware
scholar ought to realize about themselves (once they turn their gaze away from proclaimed ideals
toward analyzing their life as it happens), and maybe other peoples do live more consistent lives than
one reared in Euro-American realism might think, albeit with different logics than some worlds have
habitualized projecting universally. After all, has not that always been one of the powers of the
conceptual and practical tools developed by the anthropological tradition, namely to show how humans
and the worlds we (co)create might be different?
The Anthropologist, Media and the In-Between
## 06. A Temple in the Jungle

Challenges. Even though the image was composed at what was in no way more than a mile or two from where he had been staying, the world couldn't have felt more different. Indeed, as he had noted in his digital fieldwork notebook, meaning folder on his drive, this place half-concealed in trees instilled in him an appreciation for concerns some Bangkok university students, who spent a previous weekend at the resort where he was volunteering as what turned out to be a social media expert so as to create the illusion of giving something to the local community in return for the opportunity to do research, experienced as significant. They had told him they go to the bathroom together for fear of encountering ghosts, *phii*. They being young people of all genders. Younger than him by a few years even, still studying at a technical university in the capital. On his way to that place he came to realize he had passed the fork in the road before without ever noticing there was a temple down this particular path. After all, it looked like a dirt road to nowhere, or alternatively to a private residence, and on his bicycle the paved roads looked like a safer bet for now. Especially with all the stray dogs barking and trotting about when not lying on the ground. And anyways, he was supposed to have time to explore by himself and there was not much there in this settlement in the Western mountains at the end of the railway. Instead of going out and about, trying to establish contacts and gather experience, he was made to sit in an office with nothing much to do. So much for volunteering. The temple down the dirt path situation had come to appear as a variation of his encounters with Thai practices: things are not exactly hidden or forbidden, but if you don't know how and where exactly, you won't notice. A world quite different from his own. Or maybe he would come to realize the same was true at home, if he only looked at it through eyes trained in Thai worlds. Riding a bicycle in this elongated village (*mu ban*) with a waterfall at the end of the railroad that passes over the river Kwai would have made him an obvious outsider even if he hadn't looked like a *farang*. This role he had to play, which admittedly also had its perks, as some local workers kept inviting him to drink with them, made him supremely conscious of not wanting to transgress. Going down the dirt road to God knows where seemed a little early after less than two weeks. The employees at the resort kept reassuring him they would show him around, so why press on? In time, uncertain paths will become more stable. He becomes aware of the necessary reliance on others and their good will. He acknowledges that he can't ever be sure his research plans will come to be as planned.
*Movement*. That day, it was all a rush. The woman who had promised to take him to the temple and a driver friend showed up nine-ish, and immediately almost dragged him with. They came unannounced, much earlier than the time they told him the day before. In the pick-up, still startled and slightly disoriented, he asked about the time with his rudimentary Thai skills and some gesticulating. They told him now was the best time, they had confused the day of the week. It was Thursday, Jupiter day in Thai and not Mercury day Wednesday. He saw the tall grass and the small fields passing by much more rapidly than ever before. This was a direction he had only explored on bicycle, never by car. After a turn right, the driver slowed down slightly, hit the turn signal and entered that dusty path that led into the forest. From here, the ride took about four minutes give or take and by this time he had managed to gather himself enough to enter the present motion and focus on the surroundings beyond their general impression, it was turning again. Just as the car was turning, he noticed the literal sign he hadn't seen before. *Wat Tha Sao*. Written in white on brown, as is common for temples (wats), with an arrow pointing down the dusty path that also looked like a private entrance. The reason for the blind spot turned out to be obvious, it was only noticeable from the opposite direction than he always took. The dogs, half feral, lying on the junction didn't help either. When on a bike or on foot in the Thai countryside, it seems prudent to think twice before disturbing them. Dogs that don't seem to have a mode between lethargic apathy and aggressive barking at anything and everything that moves and is still. Dogs that slowly trot to the side of the road when a car passes, but like to howl and run after any bicycle, when they are not too lazy to get up at all. They don't guard a place, they don't say: no this is forbidden. They just languish and serve as a reminder for the *farang*: your habits differ from those dominant here. It will take some time to acquire implicit knowledge that makes everyday life smoother. Dogs are as much part of the Thai rural landscape as random shrubs along the roads. Later he found some solace in the prescient words of Roy Wagner:

> The immediate problems facing the beginning fieldworker are not likely to be academic or intellectual; they are practical, and they have a definite cause. Disoriented and dazed as he may be, he often encounters a good deal of trouble in getting settled and making contacts. If a house is being built for him, all sorts of delays occur in the work; if he hires assistants or interpreters, they fail to show up. When he complains about delays and desertions the usual lame excuses are offered. His questions may be answered by obvious and deliberate lies. Dogs bark at him and children may follow him about in the streets. All these
circumstances stem from the fact that people are usually uncomfortable with a stranger in their midst, more especially with an outsider who may be crazy, dangerous, or both. Often they create difficulties for him as “defenses,” to keep him at a distance or at least stall him off while he is considered and examined more closely. (Wagner 1981, 14)

This time, based on the assurances from previous days, he thought they were going to attend regular chanting or some other sort of well-attended practice. He had come here, to the mountains by chance, searching for a volunteering position in an area not yet overrun by anthropologists like the north and northeast of Thailand. He was not traveling along established anthropological infrastructures, but rather entering the field in its polyvalence from an uncertain and unstable position he aimed at mobilizing to achieve a multitude of displacements. He knew by now that some aspects only show themselves when certainty breaks down. At this time he had yet to build a complex image of Thai Buddhist rites and places, get a feel for differences and variations, unlearn to think in terms of the one and the manners of thought where the world is subsumed under the representation created in science and popular orientalist imaginaries. To take these as disparate elements that connect, transform, appear and disappear as new encounters occur, to form the experience of a world together with impressions made during fieldwork. The world moves and what is stabilized as given in scholarly literature might no longer fit, if it ever fit at all.

*Unpresencing*. The image goes like this. In Thai popular fantasy fare monks can give off dark vibes and battle all manner of evil beings. (Ancuta 2011, 2012) Here there are no evil beings, he thought already being educated about some ghosts, but there might as well be. The Thai Buddhist temples he had hitherto experienced had been full of light and color. Open spaces with even more open wall areas where windows would be in cold countries. Interiors one enters freely, without guidance, at one's own convenience. Here, shadows were the dominants in shaping temple spaces and nothing felt open. By the time sunshine heavily filtered through the thick greenery hit the back of the room, shapes were barely being formed. Behind the seated monks, all receded. There were five of them, arranged in an L-shape. Behind two of them emptiness opened up onto the outside. Only one of the orange clothed spoke, except for the two or three times the youngest looking monk, stooped over a bowl of food as if he were about to fall down, uttered a few words. The other three just sat there and ate. Didn't even glance at him. In this dim room, brooding, the faint light from the small windows dispersing. He
kneeled on the floor, just a bit lower than them. Behind him he sensed the presence of the driver and the lady that helped him get here. Bows, prostrations, all three of them. Seated and immobile. Any sort of concentration proved impossible for him. At the time, he found it ironic, only later would he develop theories to articulate such situations. A monk talked and he with his basic Thai couldn't understand, couldn't make out any known phonetic form. The two behind him seemed to want something. What it was is anyone's guess. Not yet habitualized to common behavior in a wat. Still stunned by the whole image, locked into its estranging stasis. A large, even obese monk was there, at the lower end of the L, wall opening behind his back. His whole body looked as fallen into itself. The monks ate and barely moved. Neither unfriendly, nor friendly. They just were, just like the statues were. Absently present. This was the future calling, at the moment, all was unnerving. An atmosphere of empty foreboding, dispelling any image of Buddhist monks in the twenty first century, casting its own magic as if from a different time. Only after, his body will move back to where it was living, the images will come back and raise awareness of the rapid slowness. Arrival, be rushed into the temple, sit down, monk says words, a small chant, blessed food is passed, he takes what they tell him, they all leave. The food in little plastic boxes will be delicious. He managed only one question as they nigh thrust him out: Can I take pictures? NO! (He knew there are pictures on Google Maps, not Street View, pictures made by visitors.) No. Back to the car. Captured in this imposed speed appeared another one, the one that took shape later, the one of statuesque monks, distant in their slowness, as if from another world. By the time it will slither out of the past image into the present one, trigger his thought, all will have changed a little. Time passes. A real encounter changes one. A week or so later, he will leave for the capital. Life in the mountains turns out to be unbearable. Not much to do outside of standing under the waterfall. Always under the pressure of being in the office, pretending to work even as there is no work, just procrastination. No clear instructions either, nor feedback, just chaos even as the pace of life was comparatively slow. Chaos experienced comes from contradictory movements, blockages and disorientation coming from other conventions. In order to get anywhere, to any of the temptingly idiosyncratic temples around, one must know how to ride a motorbike as public transport in the mountains is minimal. He didn't know how to ride that machine and wasn't eager to learn while going to remote areas. He won't return to that temple. Maybe the second time around it would have been different. Maybe he would have been less determined by the speeds and rhythms imposed by others.

*Cinema*. This image of overdetermination in a temple kept haunting him, it had thrown
overboard all of the conceptions of possible ethnographic encounters in his imaginative tool-kit. As it
kept returning, it took on itself clearer contours, not as an image but as a problem. Deleuze (1989,
49ff.), when thinking through a specific cinematic proposition, formulates such events as forks in time.
Moments, grasped only retroactively, moments that split the flow in time in different directions.
Bifurcations. Instants that were often negligible, examples of habitual activities for all but one entities
assembled there. A life and thought were inadvertently changed. Such events keep returning qua
involuntary memory from the past as images that insert themselves into the habitual succession of life
as images and in this montage keep enacting their specific differentiation in the evolving present. Long
before sitting down to write the words on this page, he had come to connect these two lines, one of
thought, the other of image. Perhaps these pages are an act of exorcism, a taming of the unruliness of
some of the images that stuck, and coming to terms with their strength. To transform them, gather them
into an entity capable of acting, of being productive within a research framework.

*Memory*. The temple turned out to be a strange beast, in its absent presence. All that is written
here was done so based on notes taken from memory without any other aides. The monks said it was
forbidden to take pictures there, even though in the past clearly someone had taken them. Pictures made
and uploaded by regular laypeople. When using street-view to try and replicate the curious
displacement of that day, he noticed that this map ends at that canine occupied crossroads. The Street
View car never took a turn down this dusty path. Exploring the digital rendering much later, he doesn't
remember seeing the two flags nor some of the architecture on the images. Memory is a fickle thing, or
perhaps the view accessible online was taken at a very different time – it's impossible to tell. Each
mnemo-generative medium accessed here, whether it's the capacities of the personal body to store and
access memories (their making already conditioned by interests, habits, and attention), an image
memory automatized (conditioned by map-making conventions, technology, and access), written
memory in a fieldwork notebook (conditioned by the very limited connection between words and
images in terms of complexity) has its own capacities and limits. Personal, interior memory as
constituted within a biological body is continuously transformed by life as it is being lived,
technological, exterior memories once stored (whatever the support system) tend to be less prone to
continuous transformations, and so they introduce a different temporality, a different world into the
present much more so than personal memory (at least the non-Proustian kind). Which of course
continues to be a reason, together with being interpersonal and to some degree verifiable, for why they
are employed in scientific endeavors such as anthropology. Yet, it is futile to establish what exactly was
there, especially if wanting to do so at the expense of other versions, it is nonsensical to reduce the
variety of effects a situation had, the many different memories it became, to one. A different kind of
question begs itself, even whole new worlds open up once the operative concern with a simple,
consistent, exclusionary reality has been done away with. Here, it is the mis/alignment between the
different speeds constitutive of the world that came to appear as a generative point of inquiry. The
relative change of memory and of material conditions (each medium and its compatibility with
surroundings dissipates in its own temporality) in relation to each other is what makes some things
appear and others disappear. The almost full and decidedly material outside determination of the
ethnographic position he found himself here made it impossible to follow up on any of the plans he had
made when conceiving his then future, now past research in the *Wat Tha Sao* (translated as Temple
Posture Pillar). Reality moves at different paces, is engendered as every varying dynamic, something
that all too often gets lost when translated into the written medium, especially in its academic form,
which tends to take full advantage of the relative stability language and words and unified textual
codification offer. It makes the world as lived appear much more easily accessible and available for
interpretation than it is. The mistake, as Buddhist tradition has been teaching for centuries, is to base an
understanding of the world in these conditions of instability. In other words, it is to mistake a
linguistically generated image of the world for the world itself. Confusing information for the world, or
alternately rejecting information and image as wrong simply because it's not the world as represented is
an all too common practice.

*Dynamics*. What is aimed at here, is to delineate some of the conditions necessary for noticing in and beyond ethnographic practice. Paying attention, the arts of noticing are something to be learned and refined, and if one gets to know cinema in its endless variety, one can also improve in these arts, because cinema as it passes through more decidedly avant-garde practices teaches to see anew. In other words, to construct a shared set of conditions, it is necessary to think through different assemblages and which types of attention they enable. Cinema and media theory here appear as indispensable components for an anthropology of movement, because they have been honed on a medium that tackles movement directly, has movement as a problem at its very center. (Deleuze 1986) And mediation in general is a problematic intrinsic to anthropology: “An anthropology that refuses to accept the universality of mediation, that reduces meaning to belief, dogma, and certainty, is forced into the trap
of having to believe either the native meanings or our own.” (Wagner 1981, 30) The technology of cinema does many things, and one of the things that came into the world with it, is the ability to see anew. To speed up and slow down, enlarge and reduce, cut and splice and put together. Turn it into a frenzy, so that a body gets lost in the wild dynamics affecting the sensory apparatus, or stabilize it to such an extent that even the minutest change becomes perceptible. Rites and their dynamics actualized therein also do that. (Kapferer 2004) The way a body that enters a ritual assemblage is composed and guided shapes experience and thought. Different rites and different traditions are composed differently. This is not a general theory of ritual, not just because such propositional ways of thought are hardly adequate in the 21st century. Mainly it is because once an understanding of (ritual) dynamics is added to the conceptual and perceptual toolbox of a researcher, it becomes self-evident that dynamics are everywhere, that the world is dynamics, and bodies move from spaces that form and are formed in different ways, of which more classical conceptions of ritual are but one framework among many. As this is written in words, it is important to remain aware that as different words do different things, so does reality become different according to which words are used, for words co-constitute reality. Approaching a so-called ritual situation will yield different effects based on how it is approached. For those who attend without tools and aims of a researcher, those experienced in local practices and conventions, researchers with a classical concept of ritual as a distinct entity, researchers with a deconstructive awareness, for each of these a somewhat different ritual will appear, will come to have an effect. Within the latter groups, a major difference will crop up between researchers who have a more performative, differential understanding of concepts and words, than for those for whom words transparently describe what is out there. I'd wager in some cases the same ritual event might almost be unrecognizable as such in texts produced under such different conceptual circumstances. Other issues will also arise, and hence events will have differing effects that might overlap to some degree, especially so long as the effects followed are close in time to said event. As time goes on, as distance between effects and event grows, issues will increasingly disperse and it might even become difficult to trace causes back to this event. Buddhist tradition offers a wealth of tools for sentient beings to engage with this issue and help create a more adequate understanding of (non)self and world. This will be a continuous focus on the following pages, blending in and out at times, but not disappearing. Interdependent arising, paṭiccasamuppāda: All that is emerges from complex webs of cause and effect, from which quite evidently follows that whatever is, is singular and compositionally complex. It is the act of conceptual, semantic or symbolic grasping that makes it seem to the untrained that there are
basically identical things out there, as particular instances of general categories.

*Speculation*. All of this leads to the necessity to somehow define science, specifically ethnographic practice and the mutual relation with anthropology, since the problematic of integrating movement and change into the conceptual framework of a scientific endeavor that takes as its goal the gathering (first translation as reduction from excess of information of life) and the second translation of material from the medium of sensory experience into written language has not been tackled heretofore. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro rephrased the relation between ethnography and anthropology fittingly: “We could perhaps, in this case, rename the discipline ‘field geophilosophy’ or (in reference to our armchair moments) ‘speculative ontography.’ In any case, the relevant onomastics would continue to be Greek — a detail that, there is little need to add, is neither accidental nor inconsequential from an anthropological point of view.” (Viveiros de Castro 2011b, 129) Anthropology remains, for now, in a transformative extension of an Ancient Greek (as well as Hellenized Roman) lineage imagined as such not much more than two centuries ago. (Critchley 1995) The same is evident for media philosophy that will be drawn on more explicitly later. (Krämer 2015) This is regardless of whatever new cosmo-logics have been produced by scholars researching these imaginations of the past. The influence and continued presence operates on another level. Later, experiments will be done, in order to demonstrate what could happen, if some of the more often than not Greco-Christian lineages were to be replaced by Buddhist ones. Throughout, thought will teeter on the brink between “field geophilosophy” and “speculative ontography,” switching codes, keeping the translations operating as present as possible, that is translation as equivocation. “Equivocation appears here as the mode of communication par excellence between different perspectival positions – and therefore as both condition of possibility and limit of the anthropological enterprise.” (Viveiros de Castro 2004b, 5)

*Control.*

The distinction is a crucial one, though, from the standpoint of how an anthropologist comes to understand and explain the situation he experiences. The fieldworker's belief that the new situation he is dealing with is a concrete entity, a “thing” that has rules, “works” in a certain way, and can be learned, will help and encourage him in his attempts to come to grips with it. And yet in a very important sense he is not learning the culture the way a child would, for he approaches the situation already an adult who has effectively
internalized his own culture. His efforts to understand the subjects of his research, to make them and their ways meaningful, and to communicate this meaningful-ness to others, will grow out of his abilities to make meaning within his own culture. Whatever he “learns” from his subjects will therefore take the form of an extension or superstructure, built upon that which he already knows, and built of that which he already knows. He will “participate” in the subject culture, not in the way a native does, but as someone who is simultaneously enveloped in his own world of meanings, and these meanings will also participate. If we recall what was said earlier about relative objectivity, we remember it is the set of cultural predispositions that an outsider brings with him that makes all the difference in his understanding of what is “there.”

If culture were an absolute, objective “thing,” then “learning” it would be the same for all people, native as well as outsider, adult as well as child. But people have all sorts of predispositions and biases, and the notion of culture as an objective, inflexible entity can only be useful as a sort of “prop” to aid the anthropologist in his invention and understanding. For this, and for many other purposes in anthropology, it is necessary to proceed as if culture existed as some monolithic “thing,” but for the purpose of demonstrating how it is that an anthropologist attains his comprehension of another people, it is necessary to realize that culture is a “prop.” (Wagner 1981, 16)

To follow the late Roy Wagner, research is about the question of what is controlled. When doing fieldwork and writing an ethnography, it is important to approach the field with a belief that what one does will yield some truths. Not eternal truths, but truths as knowledge that is valid within currently functioning research paradigms. One has to bracket one's awareness that it is all constructed, ideological, historical, fabulated. If one were to always approach the field not as a 'thing,' but as something constructed by the researcher, one would too easily slip into actively (not implicitly) inventing the field. It of course is always co-constructed by what the researcher body brings and the things encountered. This is a question of the attitude a body takes while doing research. With an attitude always aware of the invention going on, of how what is encountered and selected is already conditioned, one might fail to notice any resistances by local occurrences and instead take it all as mere projection of one's own culture. This is what the Writing Culture people pointed out, and it is something that can happen all too easily with those without any awareness of this process, with those
posing an independent reality, an independent researcher and independent methods as existing. With
Wagner, what makes the method so potent, is that both the invention and the world encountered oprate
concurrently, without assuming the priority of any (the common realist and anti-realist fallacy). Which
part is being held stable makes for different knowledge production:

When we use the nonconventionalized and differentiating controls of nature in this way,
we objectify and recreate our collective Culture with its central ideology of the “natural”
versus the “cultural” and artificial. When we use these controls in the study of other
peoples we invent their cultures as analogues not of our whole cultural and conceptual
scheme but of part of it. We invent them as analogues of Culture (as “rules,” “norms,”
“grammars,” “technologies”), the conscious, collective, “artificial” part of our world, in
relation to a single, universal, natural “reality.” Thus they do not contrast with our culture,
or offer counter-examples to it, as a total system of conceptualization, but rather invite
comparison as “other ways” of dealing with our own reality. (Ibid., 100)

This incorporation as self-invention would disappear the moment the field is too consciously engaged
as constructed, when the controlling entity is theory. However when experimenting with knowledge so
attained, that which is the controlling entity becomes freed and speculation is enabled, and the writing
of that which is becomes a consciously creative endeavor. Hence, speculative ontography. Figure and
ground can be reversed in countless ways. “To engage this move in critique, we must become familiar
and comfortable with figure and reality as simultaneously both contrivance and context [...]” (Verran
2005, 35) From any composition some elements remain stable, they are reiterated with negligible
variation, and come to serve as ground against which other elements appear to change, they are figures
to be experimented with. Some of the experiments done on the following pages aim at making into
figure elements that are hegemonically perpetuated as ground, as self-evidently existing and stable.
This is a continuation of anthropological practice, set as it is at the meeting of words, only informed
and transformed by encounters with media theory and thought made possible by cinema.

*Field.* Much of the Thai landscape is constituted of what appears as rice fields to the eye of
someone untrained in Southeast Asian agricultural practices. And it has been changing over the
centuries in ways that are not immediately obvious, unless one learns to perceive the empirical with
concepts and cosmologies. (Baker 2003) The immediately given, the sensorial, is mediated too. It is
constructed, as Buddhist teachings have been raising awareness about for centuries. Meditation, not the
occidental kind however, has been concerned with practices that make this apparent not merely
intellectually but in the very physical sensory corporeal constitution of experience. The practical and
conceptual field one goes to as an anthropologist is one that has to be cultivated. The Latin *colere* (to
cultivate), from which the world culture is etymologically derived, opens up philosophical possibilities
for thinking culture more as a naturecultural practice than something people have. (Krämer &
Bredekamp 2013) Much like working the field transforms it and leads to the growth of produce to
sustain other bodies, so does working the ethnographic field transform it and hopefully yield produce to
sustain others and help them cultivate whatever is needed. All comes to be formed from and in relation
to other elements, it's just more challenging to notice with less material things such as writing and
thinking, the products of research, and if stabilized enough to not immediately disperse into parts of
other things, what is formed reenters the circulation of the world to enter into new connections. In a
more Deleuzian language, this can be phrased as reterritorialization of objects (always partially)
encountered onto the assembled montage that is this work, things transformed into information
becoming parts of new assemblages. A thing, an image of the thing (in the conventional sense), a
description or mention of that things are all slightly different if connected entities, and each has other
capacities to shape what it will come into contact with, each as a body can affect different sets of types
of bodies. An encounter in all its complexity splits and multiplies as its occurrence gets stored in ever
greater sets of media – if only a few human and animal bodies are present, the causal reach will mostly
perpetuate through direct encounters with these bodies, and if it was very unremarkable for
participants, the effects will be negligible. But if it somehow makes it into an object that can travel
independently and reproduce the information put together as an effect of what happened, say as a
journal article, its reach and power increase rapidly. Diffractive multiplicity in complex webs of
causation and contact all the way. Object-images as conceived here are not merely visual, but aural,
cosmological or conceptual ones too. In fieldwork encounters all these are important, even as language
has been overstressed to the detriment of other elements all too often. This is an issue for too many
reasons to list here, so you will keep to only a few. Interlocutors have varied motivations when talking
to the researcher, they may want to lie, make jokes (not necessarily being aware that the researcher is
unaware of the joke), become used to Westerners denigrating their knowledge and only saying what
they already know the (not as inquisitive nor open as they like to project themselves) *farang* wants to
hear. People might also just not know much about the subject at hand. It is well-known in some research circles that most people practicing different kinds of Buddhist activities don't know much about them and they don't seem to care, at least not in the same way Occidentals obsessed with purity and clear cut categories do. That is because practice is the concern here and not any sort of logos. Thus, as an aspiring fieldworker observant, part of the language one has to learn is to see with Buddhist concepts and figures, which is precisely what disappears when reality is approached primarily through language and its material constitution is taken as self-evident, unified and irrelevant.

*Translations.* As for a foundational issue and one that is still typically mystified in anthropological textual production, the ironic description by an anthropologist decades ago is on point: "Someone may have studied French at school for six years and with the help of language-learning devices, visits to France and exposure to the literature and yet find himself hardly able to stammer out a few words of French in an emergency. Once in the field, he transforms himself into a linguistic wonderworker. He becomes fluent in a language much more difficult for a Westerner than French, without qualified teachers, without bilingual texts, and often without grammars and dictionaries." (Barley 1983, 44) Even if one were to become a linguistic wonderworker, which will only happen if the researcher also follows local, contemporary and historical, popular and elite (but still public) cultures, and anything in between, as there is infinitely more to any society than language and language itself is anything but a unity, one will remain partial. What is gained through such transformation is a ground against which local complexities and innovations can appear that would otherwise remain invisible (Tsing 1994). Over the years, a realization has dawned about how elitism vis-a-vis the cultural production of the other, especially when it comes to pop culture, prevents scholars from even becoming aware of the issue that culture (in the sense of art, etc.) significantly shapes worlds, and cultural objects that came to be formed in very distant places travel and can be impactful in a new place. Something typically of concern for film studies, visual studies or comparative literature is no less part of society as humans and religion or other more typical anthropological subjects. The field is constituted of countless elements with language being just but one among them, and this won't change regardless of how much linguistic reductionism emanates directly from the ideological, idealist conditions and misconceptions of Occidental modernity and its foundational (ethnic nationalist) myths. Language itself, or rather the practice and constitution thereof, composes of various elements, such as imagery, concept, word, grammar, habit. Its use pulls elements together and is transformed by it. Language in the
narrow, idealist sense does not so to speak cut it, as it cuts off the imagery and other associations that
make their appearance with more complex engagements with worlds – all that overlapping, meshing,
fluidly flowing into other worlds. Again, a common miscategorization occurs for those reared in the
metaphysics of the Moderns: the separation of language as an entity is a necessary operation to study it
and to perceive patterns and such, and generates new knowledge and even linguistic possibilities,
however that does not mean that language simply exists separately and cleanly delineated somewhere
out there.<fnref n="45" /> Tools had to be created in order to separate language as an entity in the first place, however
much it appears self-evident today. The way we learn languages co-constitutes how we come to think
(of) them. These conventions may habitually disappear from sight, which doesn't deny their operativity.
Then there are the translations that continue to operate in whatever is being done, the awareness and
continuing presence of which is a challenge to integrate into a text (in order to undermine the
aforementioned metaphysics). What the employed words are combined or rather combineable with, is
not a given but something that changes in history and ontology. What is and is not an adequate
knowledge of language comes to be redefined, and unclear if thought in relation to some kind of
implicit ideal of what knowing a language means. Thus, it becomes important to gain awareness of the
limitations of one's skills and what can and cannot be gleaned based on these limits. And, when putting
together writing, to make clear the fault lines out of which a text is composed.

*Middle*. It is the fault lines that interest him, given the stated implicit goal of working at the edges of a number of disciplines. When an object is composing it is crucial for it to gain some sort of consistency, otherwise it is in danger of falling apart rapidly and becoming integrated into other compositions without effectuating any significant change in them, without creating any friction through resistance. It will only undergo change itself. These pages will be a balancing act between two movements – a centralizing one aimed at holding together and a decentralizing one aiming to destabilize any easy ground against which to understand figures. The words, images, styles and structures that will be used do both movements at once, it is the force by which they do it that differs. We are always already in the middle, we start there. The middle here is a world where most people

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ It is the positing of ruptures that characterized the cosmo-practice of the Moderns: “Modernity comes in as many versions as there are thinkers or journalists, yet all its definitions point, in one way or another, to the passage of time. The adjective ‘modem’ designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. When the word ‘modern’, ‘modernization’, or ‘modernity’ appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. Furthermore, the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are winners and losers, Ancients and Moderns. ‘Modern’ is thus doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished.” (Latour 1993, 10)</footnote>
don't know 'about' Buddhist teachings, and when asked a direct question, a common answer is to
designate a monk. And monks like to delegate to senior monks. Of course, there are well-read
enthusiasts among laypeople. Many may be unable to speak about or in the name of Buddhist
teachings, but they certainly know what and how to do. It's said to be an orthopractical tradition after
all. Interviewing will get you only so far. Observation is the name of the game. And finding the right
conditions for said corporeally passive sensory activity. He is in the middle of something composed,
the composition of which he enters and co-shapes. The I too is multiple, not just in past and future, but
in the present – the 'he' employed here is neither accidental nor frivolous. I don't perceive and don't
intellectually construct any totality of the situation. I have unlearned the latter, after coming to
understand it's but a rhetorical trick of a certain metaphysical tradition. Thai ways enter into this
composition too, and so do the laboriously acquired conceptual and writing skills. This is not a
representation of a field out there. It is woven out of many sources and connects to many more, the
field as lived and transcribed by my past now changed self makes only for a part. However integral it
may be. There are always gaps anyways, gaps to be filled, gaps to be left. The shift enacted is into one
of these gaps, the disappearing middle of the imageric (in the sense used here) taken as its mediated
mediating own. Some things have to be slowed down, whether they be intensive or extensive, so that
the conditions for this composition can emerge, in the field experienced out there as well as the field
constructed on these pages. Bodies have to slow down and speed up, so some things can appear at all.
So they can be translated into a academic text. So they can be split in the present and come to act in
different spaces, far beyond where an encounter happened to occur. Thought too is dynamic. Let it be
bogged down by the strangeness encountered that doesn't lead to simple questions, much less answers.
Let it be propelled into unknown directions with the right question posed. Bifurcating along the way.
Creating. Appearing and disappearing. "Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite
speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a
virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to
disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite
speed of birth and disappearance. Now philosophy wants to know how to retain infinite speeds while
gaining consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency specific to it." (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 118)

*Image*. Perhaps it is necessary to continue (pre)figuring some of the philosophy of the image so
basic to this project. Deleuze's "argument dispenses with the usual way of distinguishing between
subject and object. There is no object distinguishable from its image, which is to say, the set of actions
and reactions that it incurs or to which it submits. This web of actions and reactions is ultimately
universal.” (Rodowick 1997, 29) A web of actions and reactions; funny, how accounts of Deleuze's
universe as metacinema take it in the direction of Buddhist teachings. Insofar as all phenomena arise
from a process termed interdependent arising, a kind of web imagery wouldn't be entirely out of place,
even if not developed per se in these traditions. In a world, where things are determined as actions and
reactions, any clear separation between image and thing falls apart. Moulard (2002, 329) notes that an
image thought with Deleuze's cinema books has two sides. The past that is, the present that acts. And
sometimes, they inverse each other. The past that is only acts when it becomes present as involuntary
memory. The past we as images regularly remember, whether corporeally habitual or as internal
memory, is not real past. It is present, since it is a habitual part of the action-image. Cinema composes
images by reterritorializing images present at a scene onto it's technical apparatus, realigning them in
new ways in order to produce new effects. The assemblages are multiple – more than one and less than
many. The image that assembled into this machine continues acting on other images in its own way,
while as part of cinema it comes to act independently, in other space-times, all the while not being
entirely different. Diverging series. On some level, even if words work differently from images,
something analogous happens with fieldwork. Images have an effect, come to be recomposed in an
ethnography in different series to act elsewhere. Figurality is one of the forms that connects, or perhaps
better grounds (however tentatively) the relation between ethnography and the presumed encounters
that gave rise to it. I will expand on figural thought later, mostly following Deleuzian cine-thinking of
researchers like Nicole Brenez (1998) and Vincent Amiel (1998). And, lastly, for now, the cinema
question enters the question of science and philosophy:

Science approaches chaos in a completely different, almost opposite way: it relinquishes
the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual. By
retaining the infinite, philosophy gives consistency to the virtual through concepts; by
relinquishing the infinite, science gives a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it
through functions. Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science
with a plane of reference. In the case of science it is like a freeze-frame. It is a fantastic
slowing down, and it is by slowing down that matter, as well as the scientific thought able
to penetrate it with propositions, is actualized. (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 118)
*Medium*. About a week later, he left this place in the Western mountains, near the end of the scenic railway going over the river Kwai, named after the local waterfall. The then current condition was not one to give him any hope for productive research nor a tolerable life. He headed to the capital on the wide river with it's high rises, overbearing heat, crisscrossed by canals and traffic heavy roads, where he hoped that research would come easier. Or at the very least living more manageable than in a mountain village, cut off from everything unless he would learn how to ride a motorcycle. There is much to learn and various skills to acquire, when entering new worlds. And sometimes, a body refuses, for this possible reality, this fork in time, never happened, he never learned to ride a bike and explore mountain temples, instead the later urban displacement proved prescient and he came to participate in such things he had never once read about in his years of study, even though when there, they often kept staring him in the face. Sometimes the thought that it pays to love cinema and learn to notice the sensory constitution of things crept up on him. Usually, he cast it aside, gathering there must be other reasons for obviously visible components of reality disappearing in the process of translation into research. Whatever the case, he was and you continue to be guided by the curiosity about the medium, the middle between given categories that makes them appear but in the very process disappears. What does this third element do with thought and research if one is to start experimenting with the appearing of such disappearing? As he arrived in the metropolis, he wasn't yet too aware of how much ongoing colonial legacies shape physical environments, even less how cosmologies are woven into the very fabric of the world. While modern Occidental delta engineering developed from a land-based conception of the world, here, deltas were seen as extensions of sea into land. (Morita & Jensen 2017) This had multiple effects. Here, houses used to be built on stilts, some were even rafts, floods were expected occurrences and the way jungle and urban landscape interacted was flexible. It is such “changes in the design of delta infrastructures over the past 100 years that have dramatically influenced the adaptability of cities to floods. Yet it is not only the built environments that have changed. The ‘natural’ delta environments have also been transformed due to the extensive construction of water management facilities, such as irrigation dams and canals.” (ibid., 121) Land-based engineering seeks to eradicate and control water flows, even in monsoon areas, and with this come other transformations that include transformations of the biological too, as trees and other plants become rarer. Bangkok is increasingly becoming hotter than surrounding areas, an occurrence termed with the self-explanatory ‘urban heat island’. (Khamchiangta & Dhakal 2019) As he arrived in the metropolis, he immediately
melted in the simmering heat of the streets.

Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness. (Land 2012b, 444)

*Infrastructures*. Cities that were once built around water in its local specificity, with cosmological frameworks shaped in their histories through adapting to singular problems posed by the developing landscape (and not a putative true Nature or Science), accepted the inevitability of floods in the flat Chao Phraya Delta, and infrastructures and architectures were built and experimented with accordingly. Occidentalization, which is something that historical modernization has so far imposed wherever it came to have enough power (Greenspan 2014) has as a central component an organization around the One, whether God, Nature or Truth. And an inbuilt transcendental assumption mistaking the material-semiotic conditions of emergent reality as but passive matter to be shaped by the true form. So cities and landscapes came to be reshaped according to imposed models, which made them so that at times they are nigh unlivable. Imposing models of architecture is an obvious ontological activity for those worlds, where things exist first and relations second, and thought and materials and compositions are not something to emerge from reacting to local conditions and problems, but merely hylomorphic idealism, where such entities can be put onto disembodied unhistorical hierarchies of general architecture. And the remedies to the heat are more of this Occident, as living with a/c (with all its detrimental longterm effects on the global scale) becomes normativized only to eventually worsen the situation. “Reducing air temperature, however, proved to be a more difficult undertaking than increasing it, and the practice only emerged in modern history.” (Redfield 2000, 220) Much of such misapprehensions of the situation has to do with the limits of human perception and the concurrent mistaken reduction of the world to that which appears to be immediately perceptible, more often than
not without noticing all the mediating technology that enlarges said world, only to again reify whatever newness emerges into the fantasy that the real simply precedes the human. Not only “Americans are vulnerable to this kind of manipulation because their belief in the reality of the nature invented through their Cultural controls is grounded in a conviction based on experience.” (Wagner 1981, 99) And this personal, onto-historically constructed experience is then retroactively extrapolated, generalized as universal.

*Reality.* Ignorance does not change that the world becomes without the human nor that reality is made and decentralized. It is not self-same, it's a more than one-world world. (Law 2015) This holds for all strata of emergence: “Henri Bergson, one of Deleuze's major philosophical influences, understands this as a skeletalization of objects: we perceive only that which interests us, is of use to us, that to which our senses have, through evolution, been attuned. That is, life, even the simplest organic cell, carries its past with its present as no material object does. This incipient memory endows life with creativity, the capacity to elaborate an innovative and unpredictable response to stimuli, to react or, rather, simply to act, to enfold matter into itself, to transform matter and life in unpredictable ways.” (Grosz 2008, 6) Again, a return to unprediction. It seems to be a central task for a future science that has first to unlearn its imperialism before it can begin creating ways of worlding that take into account its multiplicity and impermanence. Reality is anything but simple.

*Whither now?* Hence, the next chapter will engage realism, or perhaps it should rather be immediately said, polyrealism. (Skafish 2020) Thought as a limit point tackled from anthropology and cinema at the same time. Realism as the third that is simply assumed, but whose very constitution can be genealogically traced and the existence of which is never simply given. And it is with cinema, where the world as reality is slowed down, shaped into a somewhat coherent object and made graspable, or rather certain parts of the world, where this problem can be tackled. Before turning the page, or scrolling to the next chapter, a few inspiring words to ponder over, as they concisely express a central concept employed in this inquiry:

> Let me first clarify an important point. By “image” I do not simply mean “visual image,” though New Irelanders often show a predilection for the visual. A cultural image can be verbal, as in the tropes, conceits, and other word pictures that carry much of the force of
Shakespeare’s expression; it can be expressed in the nonrepresentational forms of music; or it can be kinesthetic or architectural, as it often is in New Ireland. An image has the power of synthesis: it condenses whole realms of possible ideas and interpretations and allows complex relationships to be perceived and grasped in an instant. (Wagner 2012, 535)