Research & Article

This essay seeks to invigorate ethnographies of rural Northeast Thai-Lao (Isan) villages with a discussion of villagers’ imaginative lives. The essay’s three parts describe imaginative worlds constructed by the people as part of their daily and ritual lives. It is divided into three parts. The first part proposes that Isan villagers create space and shift time through the annual construction of occasions in which routine spaces become imagined new spaces, exist in different times as well as in the present, and carry new meanings. In the second part I describe a particular series of events in which I participated, which echo to this day, showing that the daily world of the Thai-Lao provides for perceptions of alternate realities with alternate causations. I also mention but do not discuss Isan story-telling and folk-tales as providing a source for alternative images. In the third part I discuss people’s daily lives and, rather than seeing them as particularly Buddhist or particularly accidental, show how a Western metaphor implying imaginative space and time has percolated into the deepest understandings of why these people act as they do.