Gender, Spirits, and the Future of Spiritual Meaning in Lower Northeastern Thai Folk Culture
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This conceptual article examines the relationship between gender, spirits, and the future of spiritual meaning in Lower Northeastern Thai folk culture. It aims to explain how spirits function as cultural and moral structures, how gender and gender diversity are negotiated through spirit-related practices and mediumship, and how spiritual meaning is being re-signified under changing social conditions. The study employs a qualitative conceptual approach based on the review and thematic synthesis of relevant scholarship in anthropology, folklore, gender studies, Thai cultural studies, and spirit mediumship research. The analysis shows that spirits are not fading remnants of tradition, but adaptive cultural infrastructures that continue to shape moral life, ritual legitimacy, and community interpretation. It also finds that spirit-related roles may provide culturally intelligible spaces for negotiating gendered difference, although such recognition remains conditional and uneven. The article concludes that the future of spiritual meaning in Lower Northeastern Thailand is shaped less by disappearance than by ongoing symbolic reconfiguration as local communities renegotiate gender, morality, and personhood.
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