Imagining the Course of Life: Self-Transformation in a Shan Buddhist Community. Eberhardt, Nancy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

2006. xi +208pp.

Reviewed by: Jacquetta Hill, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Nancy Eberhardt begins her account of Shan concepts of human development by talking about funerals and curing rites. It’s a clever ploy, a challenge to her reader: to set aside usual Western notions that the self follows a linear course of change, like an arrow released at birth (or for some, at conception). By contrast Shan funerals accent Buddhist visions of selfhood as recursive: bound to endure cycle after cycle of rebirth and redeath. And healing rites dramatize the central theme of Shan ethnopsychology: the imperative need to maintain a separation between the life-world and spirit-worlds by reattaching the ‘soul’ or life-force to the body whenever the soul is tempted to stray into those other worlds.

Eberhardt is a gifted ethnographer. During her dissertation fieldwork in a Shan community in northern Thailand she immersed herself in the arenas of childhood providing a vivid portrayal of Shan children’s struggles to acquire moral knowledge and sophistication. A decade later, returning to the community for a year, she looked and listened for the ways that Shan expectations about human development are rehearsed in daily conversations, enacted in religious activities, and embedded in the social structuring of community life.

She participated in everyday activities, observed rituals, took household surveys and carried on formal interviews.  (A minor grumble I have is that the book does not include an appendix with a description of the protocols and procedures she used).  But as often is so in good ethnographic work, she finds that her most revealing data are her notes on the unsolicited remarks about selves and human development that she heard while people were making everyday commentaries on their lives and the lives of those around them.

Her approach draws on trends in late 20th and early 21st century psychological anthropology urging more careful study of local discourses to reveal local ideas about personhood in action and change and about the causes and effects of human conduct. Most directly, Eberhardt draws from Catherine Lutz’s writings about the idea that in most societies one can discover “a finely tuned analysis of how emotions are understood to work” that is based on an explicit conceptualization of the course of human development. Eberhardt also draws on scholarship in Buddhist studies and Southeast Asian anthropology as a way to relate her local findings to regional and global concerns.

In Buddhism one must strive endlessly to accrue “merit” in hopes of being reborn into a higher selfhood (or not be reborn into a lower one). Shan funerals teach that one should also contribute merit to others, especially loved ones. Adding merit to those newly deceased can give them speedy and unturbulent passage into the nether world. Otherwise they are likely to linger nearby---breaking away from this life is so hard to do---or to return as wandering souls seducing the living to go with them.  So if you publicly vent deep grief, if you dramatize your longing for the departed---perform in ways that Euro-Americans think necessary for regaining emotional balance and “closure”---you are in harm’s way of soul loss and you expose others near to you to the same danger.

One of the most fascinating sections of the book---on infancy and early childhood---opens not with birth but with stories of rebirth. Some versions of Buddhism portray the soul as fated to slog through many cycles of rebirth in animal form before becoming entitled to be born again human. Shan stories of rebirth by contrast suggest that rebirth can come soon and that one can recognize who has been reborn---most often a recently deceased member of the household or its extended kin.

Why are so many ceremonies directed to the good health of the household’s youngest members? Why do cotton strings circle every child’s wrists and neck?  In a child the khwan, the soul or life-force, is not yet firmly attached to the body; it can easily stray away with the phi, the wild spirits that lure souls into the forest and spirit world.  Spirits, children, and forest are spoken of, even feared, as ‘wild.’  Strings and healing practices are techniques for keeping the life force where it belongs. And child development is envisioned as a process of domesticating the soul.

The capacity to generate merit varies with one’s phase in life. Younger adults, saddled with supporting a household, inevitably must (despite good intentions) violate the precepts of Buddhist morality; and incur demerit. Only retired elders---“temple sleepers”---can concentrate their energies on making merit. Passage into and out of this world are times for the greatest transformations of personhood; others must help the newborn, the old are able to help themselves.

Gender and status enter into the process in an array of ways. For example,

one of the more complex and colorful Shan ceremonies takes place when young boys are ordained as novice monks. The standard interpretation is that this is a male passage rite into adulthood and an opportunity for men to accrue merit. Eberhardt shows that it is more than that. Women are not so ordained, but mothers (and others) who sponsor and organize the ceremonies gain merit for themselves by contributing to the merit-making of others.  Boys provide this special opportunity to their mothers and even young women look forward to it as a peak event in their own lives.

In graceful style and with telling examples Eberhardt again and again conveys lessons the Shan can teach us about envisioning the transformations of self---that the life course is larger than life, and that nobody transits life as a monad: our changes are inextricably entwined into the changes of the selves around us.

For several decades now ethnopsychology has benefited greatly from research done on Southeast Asian islands. Eberhardt’s study in Thailand  helps correct a paradoxical absence of studies of child development,  self and life course in mainland Southeast Asian studies.  And it offers  a gem of a book to engage undergraduates’ interest and imagination.