Julia Cassaniti
Biographic Data
| ID | 88488 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julia Cassaniti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julia |
| FAMILY NAME | Cassaniti |
| SIGNATURE | CASSANITI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington State University |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-1242-4254 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 156 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Past present: A letter from the editors
Will Work, Won't Work? Getting Things Done in Buddhist Thailand
The Secularization of Mindfulness in Southeast Asia
Is mindfulness a secular practice, or is it Buddhist? The answer depends on who you ask—and what kind of person they want to be. As mindfulness has spread globally, extracted from Buddhist contexts that have influenced its rise, certain mental associations with it become lost, while others are mapped onto the psychological spaces left open. For Buddhists in Southeast Asia, and for others around the world, the stakes are high: when certain meaning…
A burning issue: Spirits of land and capital in Thailand's agricultural haze crisis
Air pollution created by agricultural burning has become a critical environmental problem across Southeast Asia, but the solution to it remains unclear. In this essay I discuss the haze crisis in a small community in Northern Thailand, and show how an increase in contract farming is accompanied by a decrease in agricultural spirit rituals. I argue that this change represents a broader shift in the cosmopolitical ecology of the region, as large ag…
A chance encounter: Making Meaning From Coincidence
Silent suasions: Interpersonal mediation in Thai meditation
Discourse is the typical modus operandi for persuasive practices, but silence also has an important role to play in many religious contexts. In this essay, I examine how silence works as a mechanism of persuasion in Thailand, where Buddhist logics of meditation permeate social life. Through a close analysis of a meditative retreat at Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Thong Voravihan in Northern Thailand, I suggest three ways that silence comes to create its …
The Precarious Spaces Between Us: The Exchange of Food and Merit in Thailand's Affective Moral Economy during the Covid‐19 Pandemic
In the middle of 2020, Buddhism in Thailand looked quite different than it had just prior to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Monasteries had closed their doors to the public, and monastic ordinations ceased. The institution of Thai Buddhism stayed relevant, however, largely by promoting a quite unusual practice. In addition to the typical religious activity of lay followers offering food to monks, and receiving merit from the monks in return, the path tha…
The sounds of silence: Thai meditative practice for personal and political change
In the middle of Benjamin Tausig's (2019) Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, amid the clamor of crowds protesting military suppression and the voices of those who would not be silenced, the narrative suddenly becomes quiet. Tausig focuses in on a man named Kittisak Janpeng (Diew) sitting silently among the protestors. He was protesting without words, a nonverbal reaction to political violence. By meditating, Tausig tells us, "Die…
Memory, ghosts and the good life: Sati in Theravada cultural contexts
Mindfulness in its English rendering brings together a mix of historical influences, from Zen to Romanticism to yoga. Still, the most central concept from which it draws is sati, a Theravada Buddhist Pali term first translated as mindfulness over 100 years ago. This article reports on the findings of an ethnographic investigation of sati in the Theravada-majority countries of Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the concept is widely used for a…
Mindfulness and culture
Mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, is simultaneously championed as a mental health tool and critiqued as a form of neo-liberal subjugation in media representations. Here, anthropology is well positioned to contribute to and meaningfully alter these contemporary debates. Anthropologists' focus on the relationship between psychological categories and culturally embedded ethical practices offers a welcome corrective…
Keeping it together: Idioms of resilience and distress in Thai Buddhist mindlessness
Mindfulness is increasingly lauded as a mark of well-being around the world, but less often is its opposite, mindlessness, articulated in discussions of mental health. In Thailand, where people follow the kinds of Theravāda forms of Buddhism that have inspired today's global mindfulness movement, "mindlessness" is understood as a culturally salient mark of distress. In this article I address what mindlessness looks like for people in and around t…
Mind
The mind is considered to be the seat of an individual's cognitive and emotional functioning. The study of the mind has traditionally been relegated to philosophy and psychology, where it typically takes on universalist connotations, but work in cross‐cultural psychology and psychological anthropology has increasingly shown our minds to vary significantly in both form and function as a result of the shaping forces of culture
Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community
Asanha Bucha Day: Boring, Subversive, or Subversively Boring
The first sermon given by the Buddha after his enlightenment is commemorated each year in Thailand with a celebration known as Asanha Bucha Day (Asalha Pūjā in Pali). Monasteries are often full on the day, but many people find the sermon unmemorable, even boring. To better understand the meaning of the sermon within the context of its reception this article presents one sermon in full given at one monastery on Asanha Bucha Day in Chiang Mai, and …
Intersubjective Affect and Embodied Emotion: Feeling the Supernatural in Thailand
In this article I argue for increased attention to the supernatural as a site for inquiry into, and elaboration of, affect. In attending to how and when people encounter ghosts in Thailand, affect is approached as a moving, interpersonal field of wishes and desires. These wishes and desires circulate within intersubjective spaces, and are sometimes experienced as coalesced, embodied emotions. In highlighting such an orientation, affect (at least …
Moralizing emotion: A breakdown in Thailand
Emotional practices serve as privileged sites for moral action in a Buddhist community in Northern Thailand. In this article I draw out some of the theoretical implications of this emphasis for the study of morality, combining an anthropological focus on moments of moral breakdown with a psychological claim about the importance of emotion in moral practice. I do this through a case of emotions experienced surrounding a Northern Thai man afflicted…
New directions in the anthropology of morality
In this article we seek to develop a common theoretical language and stake out particular positions on key issues in the growing debates about the anthropological study of morality. First, we advocate for a pluralistic stance in approaches to moral variation - one that maintains the possibility of moral realism and at times even argues explicitly for it. Second, we work to define the domain of morality in more detail, especially in its relation t…
The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences
In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (e…
Agency and the Other: The Role of Agency for the Importance of Belief in Buddhist and Christian Traditions
Belief is important in some religious experiences and not in others. Why? I address the question here through an analysis of belief in two different religious communities in Northern Thailand. In the Northern Thai Buddhist community of Mae Jaeng the Thai term for belief is rarely evoked, while in the nearby Christian community of Mae Min it occurs often. Tying belief to ideas about causation, I argue that the different prominence of belief in the…
Encountering the Supernatural: A Phenomenological Account of Mind
In this article we compare the encounter with the supernatural—experiences in which a person senses the immaterial—in Thailand and in the United States. These experiences appear to be shaped by different conceptions of the mind. In the US, there is a sharp, natural division between one's mind and the world; in Thailand, individuals have the moral responsibility to control their minds. These differences appear to explain how people identify and se…
Richard G. Condon Prize Toward a Cultural Psychology of Impermanence in Thailand
How do people in a northern Thai community think about the central Theravada Buddhist concept of anicca (a Pali term referring to impermanence)? Different interpretations and applications are explored through conversations with 27 monks and laypeople in the town of Mae Chaem, Chiang Mai Province. Authoritative dis-course, occupation, life experience, and personal concerns were all found to be involved in the ways that people in this community use…
The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences
In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (e…
New directions in the anthropology of morality
In this article we seek to develop a common theoretical language and stake out particular positions on key issues in the growing debates about the anthropological study of morality. First, we advocate for a pluralistic stance in approaches to moral variation - one that maintains the possibility of moral realism and at times even argues explicitly for it. Second, we work to define the domain of morality in more detail, especially in its relation t…
Richard G. Condon Prize Toward a Cultural Psychology of Impermanence in Thailand
How do people in a northern Thai community think about the central Theravada Buddhist concept of anicca (a Pali term referring to impermanence)? Different interpretations and applications are explored through conversations with 27 monks and laypeople in the town of Mae Chaem, Chiang Mai Province. Authoritative dis-course, occupation, life experience, and personal concerns were all found to be involved in the ways that people in this community use…
Moralizing emotion: A breakdown in Thailand
Emotional practices serve as privileged sites for moral action in a Buddhist community in Northern Thailand. In this article I draw out some of the theoretical implications of this emphasis for the study of morality, combining an anthropological focus on moments of moral breakdown with a psychological claim about the importance of emotion in moral practice. I do this through a case of emotions experienced surrounding a Northern Thai man afflicted…
Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community
Agency and the Other: The Role of Agency for the Importance of Belief in Buddhist and Christian Traditions
Belief is important in some religious experiences and not in others. Why? I address the question here through an analysis of belief in two different religious communities in Northern Thailand. In the Northern Thai Buddhist community of Mae Jaeng the Thai term for belief is rarely evoked, while in the nearby Christian community of Mae Min it occurs often. Tying belief to ideas about causation, I argue that the different prominence of belief in the…
Intersubjective Affect and Embodied Emotion: Feeling the Supernatural in Thailand
In this article I argue for increased attention to the supernatural as a site for inquiry into, and elaboration of, affect. In attending to how and when people encounter ghosts in Thailand, affect is approached as a moving, interpersonal field of wishes and desires. These wishes and desires circulate within intersubjective spaces, and are sometimes experienced as coalesced, embodied emotions. In highlighting such an orientation, affect (at least …
The sounds of silence: Thai meditative practice for personal and political change
In the middle of Benjamin Tausig's (2019) Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, amid the clamor of crowds protesting military suppression and the voices of those who would not be silenced, the narrative suddenly becomes quiet. Tausig focuses in on a man named Kittisak Janpeng (Diew) sitting silently among the protestors. He was protesting without words, a nonverbal reaction to political violence. By meditating, Tausig tells us, "Die…
Keeping it together: Idioms of resilience and distress in Thai Buddhist mindlessness
Mindfulness is increasingly lauded as a mark of well-being around the world, but less often is its opposite, mindlessness, articulated in discussions of mental health. In Thailand, where people follow the kinds of Theravāda forms of Buddhism that have inspired today's global mindfulness movement, "mindlessness" is understood as a culturally salient mark of distress. In this article I address what mindlessness looks like for people in and around t…
Encountering the Supernatural: A Phenomenological Account of Mind
In this article we compare the encounter with the supernatural—experiences in which a person senses the immaterial—in Thailand and in the United States. These experiences appear to be shaped by different conceptions of the mind. In the US, there is a sharp, natural division between one's mind and the world; in Thailand, individuals have the moral responsibility to control their minds. These differences appear to explain how people identify and se…
Memory, ghosts and the good life: Sati in Theravada cultural contexts
Mindfulness in its English rendering brings together a mix of historical influences, from Zen to Romanticism to yoga. Still, the most central concept from which it draws is sati, a Theravada Buddhist Pali term first translated as mindfulness over 100 years ago. This article reports on the findings of an ethnographic investigation of sati in the Theravada-majority countries of Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the concept is widely used for a…
Mindfulness and culture
Mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, is simultaneously championed as a mental health tool and critiqued as a form of neo-liberal subjugation in media representations. Here, anthropology is well positioned to contribute to and meaningfully alter these contemporary debates. Anthropologists' focus on the relationship between psychological categories and culturally embedded ethical practices offers a welcome corrective…
Silent suasions: Interpersonal mediation in Thai meditation
Discourse is the typical modus operandi for persuasive practices, but silence also has an important role to play in many religious contexts. In this essay, I examine how silence works as a mechanism of persuasion in Thailand, where Buddhist logics of meditation permeate social life. Through a close analysis of a meditative retreat at Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Thong Voravihan in Northern Thailand, I suggest three ways that silence comes to create its …
Richard G. Condon Prize Toward a Cultural Psychology of Impermanence in Thailand
How do people in a northern Thai community think about the central Theravada Buddhist concept of anicca (a Pali term referring to impermanence)? Different interpretations and applications are explored through conversations with 27 monks and laypeople in the town of Mae Chaem, Chiang Mai Province. Authoritative dis-course, occupation, life experience, and personal concerns were all found to be involved in the ways that people in this community use…
Encountering the Supernatural: A Phenomenological Account of Mind
In this article we compare the encounter with the supernatural—experiences in which a person senses the immaterial—in Thailand and in the United States. These experiences appear to be shaped by different conceptions of the mind. In the US, there is a sharp, natural division between one's mind and the world; in Thailand, individuals have the moral responsibility to control their minds. These differences appear to explain how people identify and se…
Agency and the Other: The Role of Agency for the Importance of Belief in Buddhist and Christian Traditions
Belief is important in some religious experiences and not in others. Why? I address the question here through an analysis of belief in two different religious communities in Northern Thailand. In the Northern Thai Buddhist community of Mae Jaeng the Thai term for belief is rarely evoked, while in the nearby Christian community of Mae Min it occurs often. Tying belief to ideas about causation, I argue that the different prominence of belief in the…
Moralizing emotion: A breakdown in Thailand
Emotional practices serve as privileged sites for moral action in a Buddhist community in Northern Thailand. In this article I draw out some of the theoretical implications of this emphasis for the study of morality, combining an anthropological focus on moments of moral breakdown with a psychological claim about the importance of emotion in moral practice. I do this through a case of emotions experienced surrounding a Northern Thai man afflicted…
New directions in the anthropology of morality
In this article we seek to develop a common theoretical language and stake out particular positions on key issues in the growing debates about the anthropological study of morality. First, we advocate for a pluralistic stance in approaches to moral variation - one that maintains the possibility of moral realism and at times even argues explicitly for it. Second, we work to define the domain of morality in more detail, especially in its relation t…
The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences
In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (e…
Asanha Bucha Day: Boring, Subversive, or Subversively Boring
The first sermon given by the Buddha after his enlightenment is commemorated each year in Thailand with a celebration known as Asanha Bucha Day (Asalha Pūjā in Pali). Monasteries are often full on the day, but many people find the sermon unmemorable, even boring. To better understand the meaning of the sermon within the context of its reception this article presents one sermon in full given at one monastery on Asanha Bucha Day in Chiang Mai, and …
Intersubjective Affect and Embodied Emotion: Feeling the Supernatural in Thailand
In this article I argue for increased attention to the supernatural as a site for inquiry into, and elaboration of, affect. In attending to how and when people encounter ghosts in Thailand, affect is approached as a moving, interpersonal field of wishes and desires. These wishes and desires circulate within intersubjective spaces, and are sometimes experienced as coalesced, embodied emotions. In highlighting such an orientation, affect (at least …
Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community
Mind
The mind is considered to be the seat of an individual's cognitive and emotional functioning. The study of the mind has traditionally been relegated to philosophy and psychology, where it typically takes on universalist connotations, but work in cross‐cultural psychology and psychological anthropology has increasingly shown our minds to vary significantly in both form and function as a result of the shaping forces of culture
Keeping it together: Idioms of resilience and distress in Thai Buddhist mindlessness
Mindfulness is increasingly lauded as a mark of well-being around the world, but less often is its opposite, mindlessness, articulated in discussions of mental health. In Thailand, where people follow the kinds of Theravāda forms of Buddhism that have inspired today's global mindfulness movement, "mindlessness" is understood as a culturally salient mark of distress. In this article I address what mindlessness looks like for people in and around t…
Memory, ghosts and the good life: Sati in Theravada cultural contexts
Mindfulness in its English rendering brings together a mix of historical influences, from Zen to Romanticism to yoga. Still, the most central concept from which it draws is sati, a Theravada Buddhist Pali term first translated as mindfulness over 100 years ago. This article reports on the findings of an ethnographic investigation of sati in the Theravada-majority countries of Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the concept is widely used for a…
Mindfulness and culture
Mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, is simultaneously championed as a mental health tool and critiqued as a form of neo-liberal subjugation in media representations. Here, anthropology is well positioned to contribute to and meaningfully alter these contemporary debates. Anthropologists' focus on the relationship between psychological categories and culturally embedded ethical practices offers a welcome corrective…
The Precarious Spaces Between Us: The Exchange of Food and Merit in Thailand's Affective Moral Economy during the Covid‐19 Pandemic
In the middle of 2020, Buddhism in Thailand looked quite different than it had just prior to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Monasteries had closed their doors to the public, and monastic ordinations ceased. The institution of Thai Buddhism stayed relevant, however, largely by promoting a quite unusual practice. In addition to the typical religious activity of lay followers offering food to monks, and receiving merit from the monks in return, the path tha…
The sounds of silence: Thai meditative practice for personal and political change
In the middle of Benjamin Tausig's (2019) Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, amid the clamor of crowds protesting military suppression and the voices of those who would not be silenced, the narrative suddenly becomes quiet. Tausig focuses in on a man named Kittisak Janpeng (Diew) sitting silently among the protestors. He was protesting without words, a nonverbal reaction to political violence. By meditating, Tausig tells us, "Die…
The Secularization of Mindfulness in Southeast Asia
Is mindfulness a secular practice, or is it Buddhist? The answer depends on who you ask—and what kind of person they want to be. As mindfulness has spread globally, extracted from Buddhist contexts that have influenced its rise, certain mental associations with it become lost, while others are mapped onto the psychological spaces left open. For Buddhists in Southeast Asia, and for others around the world, the stakes are high: when certain meaning…
A burning issue: Spirits of land and capital in Thailand's agricultural haze crisis
Air pollution created by agricultural burning has become a critical environmental problem across Southeast Asia, but the solution to it remains unclear. In this essay I discuss the haze crisis in a small community in Northern Thailand, and show how an increase in contract farming is accompanied by a decrease in agricultural spirit rituals. I argue that this change represents a broader shift in the cosmopolitical ecology of the region, as large ag…
A chance encounter: Making Meaning From Coincidence
Silent suasions: Interpersonal mediation in Thai meditation
Discourse is the typical modus operandi for persuasive practices, but silence also has an important role to play in many religious contexts. In this essay, I examine how silence works as a mechanism of persuasion in Thailand, where Buddhist logics of meditation permeate social life. Through a close analysis of a meditative retreat at Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Thong Voravihan in Northern Thailand, I suggest three ways that silence comes to create its …
Past present: A letter from the editors
Will Work, Won't Work? Getting Things Done in Buddhist Thailand
Philosophy (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · History (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works) · Buddhism (9 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (8 works)