Research & Article

This paper examines a Christian ancestor cult amongst the descendants of some of the first Northern Thai converts to Protestant Christianity. I firstly describe the yearly ancestor ritual, which Christians say is performed to pay homage to their ancestors, and discuss the significance of Christian ancestors for group organisation. I then suggest that the Christian ancestor cult originated in a late nineteenth-century transformation of ideas relating to Buddhist mortuary practices and ritual practices concerned with the matrilineal spirits (phii buu njaa), synthesised with rudimentary Christian understandings about death and the person ofthe deceased. Finally, I argue that Northern Thai Christian beliefs and ritual practices are not the result of assimilation into Thai cultural patterns, but constitute creative cultural responses to the broader social context.