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Paper short abstract:

Culturally variable models of mind suggest that healthy minds are constituted to various degrees through the influence of others. In Thailand these orientations extend past the human. Here I draw on locally-salient cosmological views to point to some of the more-than-human aspects of mental health.

Paper long abstract:

In Buddhist communities of Thailand the mind is understood to be prone to fly off and become scattered when one is unwell, with rituals offered to bring it back and restore the person to health. These moments of discord are sometimes seen as less than fully human: they are reflections of a state of mentality more akin to that of ghosts or animals than to that of a healthy and fully ‘mindful’ human being. Based on 15 years of ethnographic research on religion and wellness in a small Northern Thai community, I argue that these local conceptions of the mind influence understandings of what it means to be healthy, and inspire projects of self-development that are oriented to them. Through this attention to models of the mind and their implications for wellbeing in Thailand I suggest new perspectives for psychological anthropology, ones that reach beyond the human to speak to the wide spectrum of consciousnesses encountered in anthropological fieldwork.