Chantal Croteau

CHANTAL CROTEAU, then a graduate student at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, received funding in October 2022 to aid “Kinship, Ghosts, and Tensions of Personhood in Southern Thailand,” supervised by Dr. Mike McGovern. The dissertation research investigates the subtleties of current Buddhist-Muslim relations in Phang Nga through a focus on two genres of history-telling widely practiced in the region: kinship histories, including lineages, stories of mobility, and narratives of autochthony, and histories of spirit encounters. Ethnographic fieldwork, digital research, and archival analysis have revealed that people living in Phang Nga address Buddhist-Muslim relations through stories of haunting, kinship, and home, situating these dynamics within logics of causality, moral obligation, and personhood. These dynamics unfold within a landscape heavily shaped by industries of extraction, first through the tin mining industry that brought members from different ethnoreligious communities together in arduous labor in the 19th and 20th centuries and then through the rubber and oil palm plantations that continue to structure the region’s economy today. The dissertation research traces dynamics of Buddhist-Muslim relations through this landscape of extraction, highlighting how relations are maintained or undermined through history-telling practices, shape and are shaped by extractive industries, and unveil tensions of personhood in the region.