Stone Masters: Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia

Stone Masters: Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia is a new analytical perspective on stones and stone masters across Southeast Asia that extends and deepens the recent literature on animism. Stones and those who speak for and to them are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia, sometimes integrated into world religions, and sometimes not. Recent study of animism sees animist ritual not as a metaphor for ‘a community’ or commonly held values, but as a way of forming and maintaining relationships with occult presences understood to be very real. City pillars, statues, megaliths, termite mounds, mountains, rocks found in forests, stones that have been moved to shrines, all these make their appearance in this book, as do the territorial cults which can form around them. The contributors extend and deepen the recent exciting literature on animism to form a new analytical perspective on these cults across mainland Southeast Asia. And they do so in intriguing ways.

First, contributors play off the insights of the under-appreciated French scholar Paul Mus, who centered his ideas of religious change in Southeast Asia around notions of the power intrinsic to territory. Second, contributors look at relations between spirits and the state, a connection not usually developed in the literature on religion and the state or the literature on animism. And thirdly, this is not simply a collection of exemplary ethnographies, but a deeply comparative volume that develops its ideas through a meshwork of regional entanglements, parallels and differences, before entering into a dialogue with debates on power, mastery and the social theory of animism globally. As the ritual thanking of traditional guardians of a place is becoming more common in many societies, the lessons of the stone masters of mainland Southeast Asia make compelling reading, and open up new perspectives on religion, and ideas of territoriality and belonging.