Intersubjective Affect and Embodied Emotion:

Feeling the Supernatural in Thailand

julia l. cassaniti
Washington State University,
julia.cassaniti@wsu.edu

abstract

In this article I argue for increased attention to the supernatural as a site for
inquiry into, and elaboration of, affect. In attending to how and when people
encounter ghosts in Thailand, affect is approached as a moving, interpersonal field
of wishes and desires. These wishes and desires circulate within intersubjective
spaces, and are sometimes experienced as coalesced, embodied emotions. In
highlighting such an orientation, affect (at least in Thailand) can be understood as
not just an intersubjective project but also a spiritual one. I suggest that we pay
special attention to this quality of the supernatural as an affective force and to the
intersubjective, affective currents of emotion.
k e y w o r d s : Thailand, religion, supernatural, intersubjectivity, phenomenology

Phenomenological experiences of religion can tell us much about cultural varia-

tion in the social construction and expression of affect. This is particularly so for
the case in Thailand, where people relate to the supernatural (and to each other)
in a cultural landscape intersubjectively thick with the affective interactions and
intentions of others. Analyzing the supernatural as part of a social, interpersonal
landscape illuminates the ways that feelings and their articulation circulate in
Thailand and suggests new perspectives on emotion and affect.
In their seminal text, The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory
Seigworth emphasize how theories of affect “have progressively left behind the
interiorized self or subjectivity,” suggesting that the interiorized self or subjectivity
serves as the traditional site of research on emotion, to instead “unfold regimes of
expressivity that are tied much more to resonant worldings and diffusions of feel-
ing/passions” (2010:8). Rather than separate subjectivity, affect theories focus on
“voices that forcefully question the privilege and stability of individualized actants
possessing self-derived agency and solely private emotions within a scene or

Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 26, Issue 2, pp. 132–142, ISSN 1053-4202, © 2015 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/anoc.12036

132
intersubjective affect and embodied emotion 133

environment” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010:8). In such a perspective emotions

are represented as private, individual, and self-derived, different from the diffuse
intersubjective (rather than subjective) forces of affect. Brian Massumi similarly
speaks of affect as interpersonal, with emotion coalesced into individual bodies:

[Affect] escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential

for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions
fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage, are the capture and
closure of affect. Emotion is the intensest (most contracted) expression of that
capture. [Massumi 1996:562]

Perspectives on affect as distinct from emotion are offered in different theoretical

lineages of affect theorists, from Spinoza (1985), Deleuze (1997), and Massumi
(1994), to Freud (2001 [1886]), Tompkins (1963), and Sedgwick (2003), but the
qualities of fluid movement and intersubjectivity are central to each of them. It is
here in its effusive intersubjectivity that affect becomes a useful tool for under-
standing what is happening when someone in Thailand meets with the ghostly
energy of the supernatural.

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supernatural encounters
There are hundreds of kinds of spirits in Thailand, filling storybooks and movie
plots. Almost everyone in Thailand has encountered some feeling of the supernat-
ural or knows someone who has. The supernatural, most often referenced by the
Thai word phi, or spirit, is an enormously elaborated cultural realm, interwoven
with individual desires and the felt experiences of human beings (Johnson 2012a;
Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2011; McDaniel 2011). Over a period of several months,
sitting outside under raised homes, in kitchens, and in living rooms, people related
to me their spiritual, supernatural encounters. I asked questions that emphasized
the phenomenological aspects of experiences: sights, sounds, shaking, lightness,
and so forth. “Have you ever encountered a ghost or something from the supernat-
ural realm?” “What happened? What did it feel like?” In asking these questions,
my goal was to cast a wide net across a range of locally followed spiritual and reli-
gious traditions, including those from the tuu dong tradition of wandering forest
monks, moh phi (spirit doctors), moh song (spirit mediums), yoh reh bhut (a Japa-
nese branch of Buddhism practiced in the area), and the Thai Buddhist sects of
Santi Asoke and Dhammakaya, as well as a range of distinct lineages descending
from the many monasteries in the region.1
Some narratives of supernatural encounters resonated with cultural narratives of
ghost stories in the United States: a wispy, transparent woman in white brushing
her hair near a vanity chest in a house; a strange sound like rattling chains coming
from an attic. They described a deceased person wishing to make his or her pres-
ence felt on the living. However, many other stories did not fit this mold of an
134 anthropology of consciousness 26.2

individual ghostly being. Rather, they portrayed ghostly desire as a disembodied

free-floating feeling. Sometimes the “ghost” being described was not even
deceased. Kob, a librarian at Chiang Mai University’s Department of Humanities,
for example, told me the following story about a woman she had met a year
earlier:

Last year I met a woman from Chiang Mai. She introduced herself to me . . .
She’s a really good Buddhist. She invited me to go to her house, but I didn’t
go. She gave me something to eat . . . She knew everything in advance. She
had a power over me. Even when I would talk to her on the phone, she knew
what I was thinking, like someone is controlling your mind. Sometimes she
would shout at me, “You have to do this and that!” and I would feel so bad.
She would be in a weird mood at that time—she didn’t want to help me. At
first I thought she was my friend, but then another time, on Skype, she said, “I
have a lot of things to do.” . . . I felt like I was not myself. I worried about my
brother at that time, so I was more open to something controlling me . . . It’s
about energy. Every time you go to see a moh duu [a palm reader], you ask,
“Will I be able to get the scholarship?” and all they say is “You can.” Then
you can feel calm and do the work.

In her narrative Kob did not mention a supernatural being, exactly. There was
no spirit, no nonhuman, nonliving agent from another realm that was haunting
her or interacting with her. She assured me that the woman she was talking
about in her narrative was very much alive. Kob knew my research project
well: she had worked on the translations, had helped to administer my surveys
to her students, and had read many of their replies. She knew I was interested
in ghosts, or phi in Thai. It was not that she did not understand the question.
Still, her interview seemed odd—not like a “ghost story” at all but more of a
difficult interpersonal situation.
Initially, I was tempted to discard Kob’s and other “different” narratives of energy
and affect as ethnographic anomalies, or “outliers,” but the more I heard about
such emotional energy from other informants the more I realized that they were
pointing to a locally articulated model of ghostly affect. What was supernatural
about Kob’s story was not the woman she talked about per se but the influence, or
affective force, that this woman had on her. I started to pay more attention to the
affective quality of ghostly encounters and the free-floating “energy” described as a
felt substance of the supernatural.
In Thai, energy is called palang, and in narratives of the supernatural palang is
often discussed with the word jit, or “mind.” Supernatural energy is connected to
the mind; “palang jit,” people say, “the energy of the mind.” The energy of the
supernatural can be free floating, not necessarily associated with an individual.
“I’ve never met a ghost, exactly, but there’s energy all around,” a man named
Uthen said, “it’s like energy of different things out there.” I heard similar
responses: “I’ve never met [ghosts], exactly, but I can feel the energy sometimes,”
intersubjective affect and embodied emotion 135

a man named Jiew said, “all the time. Yes, touch, like that, I can feel it on my
skin.”
The energy that people talk about has to do, for the most part, with feelings, or
desires, wishes, and attachments. Often the energy is understood as a kind of resi-
due, described as actions and attachments that one had (or has) in life. I spoke
with a man named Kamin who runs a small artist colony in the outskirts of
Chiang Mai and who connected supernatural energy with desire. “I don’t know
about ghosts like in the movies,” he said, “but yeah for sure there’s energy. It’s
energy that continues life. It’s ghost energy all the time.” He elaborated: “It’s like
when you want something, like ‘I want to eat right now,’ or ‘I want to have sex
right now,’ it’s that energy, in us.” This energy, it is thought, escapes and perme-
ates the social landscape. When one encounters ghosts they are, in a very real
sense, encountering, or affected by, the free-floating, inchoate desires and feelings
of others.
A man named Chinnaworn, who had just disrobed after spending 30 years as a
monk, offered a similar story to Kamin’s. He focused on actions that come from
the negative expression of desire: “You know the five Buddhist precepts?” he
started out rhetorically.2 “Let’s say someone breaks one of the five precepts; let’s
say they steal. And they’re sitting with you, eating, just like we are now. They’re
80 percent human and 20 percent ghost. So you’re eating with part of a ghost.”
Kamin’s and Chinnaworn’s responses counter the idea of the supernatural as dis-
tinct entities, entities that almost by definition are no longer “alive.” Chinnaworn
ended his discussion saying: “Ghosts are in my heart sometimes.” He did not elab-
orate, but his description was personal: he had recently been disrobed from the
monkhood involuntarily, probably because of an infraction he had made.
Kamin and Chinnaworn’s stories of ghostly energy appear different than other
narratives and are not directly about emotions: they are both about desire and
intention. But in both Kamin and Chinnaworn’s narratives, energy is created—
specifically affective energy. The two men use the word phi to describe this
energy, and it is this energy of escaped desire that is understood to be encountered
when one encounters a ghost.
In some narratives the “ghostly feeling” is understood to originate from someone
who has died, like the ghostly energy of children who died and wished to make
their presence felt through rattling sounds in an attic that a student spoke of, hav-
ing stayed at, a haunted building on the Andaman Sea after the tsunami that had
killed so many people and made the place rife with ghosts. In others it comes
from something alive, as in Kob’s account of strange feelings encountered through
her friend. Sometimes people spoke of a person-like being who almost embodied
the ghost, as in the account of a deceased Cambodian couple that scared a stu-
dent’s mother who had come across the spirits while walking in a rice field. The
mother started shaking uncontrollably on the ground until the spirits were
appeased through Buddhist merit making. The spirits had once owned the land
and felt abandoned. In other cases, it takes the form of a sensed intensity of desire,
such as the personal action feelings described by Kamin and Chinnaworn, or it is
136 anthropology of consciousness 26.2

encountered as free-floating feelings described by Uthen and Jiew. However, in

each of these narratives, the emphasis is on an emotional quality that the infor-
mant encounters or by which he or she is affected.

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affective as the intersubjective part of emotion

The ghostly energy of the supernatural in Thailand is encountered as felt experi-
ence, but are these energies affective or emotional? What do we gain, if anything,
by separating these two terms in analysis? In one sense the two may not represent
experientially distinct phenomena at all, especially among language groups that do
not have clear direct translations of either of them. However, in a second sense,
marking an analytical distinction may offer insight into otherwise neglected aspects
of experience, pointing to the intersubjective movements in which feelings travel.
In everyday speech and even in theoretical works on emotion and affect, the terms
are often used interchangeably; it may be the case that rather than simply not under-
standing their differences, they may instead reflect similar areas of experience. This
is especially true when we want to describe felt experiences, as I do, among a group
speaking a language in which there is no clear translation of either “affect” or “emo-
tion.” The narratives collected on supernatural encounters were recounted to me in
Thai (and sometimes Northern Thai, a “dialect” of the official national language,
along with some Pali words from Buddhist philosophy.) As no English terms were
used it is not clear from my sample when (if at all) a subject was thinking of an expe-
rience as “affective” or “emotional.” The verb ruu suuk, “to feel,” aligns with the
English term for feeling and was used by people often in their descriptions, carrying
the meaning of both “to feel on the skin” and “to feel on the inside”; ruu suuk
encompasses what we might consider to be emotional or affective qualities. Beyond
that, terms used to describe moods and sensations in general do not fit English cate-
gories.3 Hammering out distinctions between “affect” and “emotion” may therefore
be a semantic issue best left for linguistic anthropologists or theorists studying Eng-
lish-speaking populations rather than for ethnographically focused or comparatively
oriented psychological anthropologists. Fixing a distinction between the two may
not be as necessary or as crucial as some affect theorists (e.g., Massumi 1995) might
suggest.
However, in the second sense, distinguishing affect may usefully illuminate an
area of emotional experience not always attended to in the analyses of emotions.
If we think of affect as reflecting the intersubjective, transpersonal, and moving
qualities of feeling, we can make use of it less as an experientially distinct phe-
nomenon and more as an emphasis, or even reminder, to attend to those quali-
ties of feeling that are part of emotional experience. The accounts of the Thai
supernatural serve as an example of this usefulness. They emphasize the parts of
supernatural encounters that may be central to the experience but could be
glossed over or ignored in analyses of Thai ghosts that just attend to the interior-
ized, individual emotions they engender. Ghostly energy causes what we would
intersubjective affect and embodied emotion 137

consider to be emotions, but the energy of ghosts is something different than

emotion. One encounters free-floating affect, autonomous from the body from
which it originated. It is intersubjective, felt (often on the skin), and from that
turned, elaborated, or “coalesced” (Massumi 1995:91) into emotion. An emotional
quality is suggested when Kob said she felt bad when the woman shouted at her
or when the student was scared when his mother encountered the spirits of the
Cambodian couple. But the feeling of the energy itself is more significant than
the emotional aspects of feeling bad or scared. The quality of the felt supernatu-
ral may be thought of as affect, with its interpersonal energy travelling in the
space between people and becoming coalesced into an emotion within individ-
ual bodies.
In Thailand people often “bump into” a ghost in such a way. A woman named
Waew talked about coming across the energy of a ghost at a well when she was
young:

I was nine years old, and had gotten dengue fever. I was in the hospital when
I met with a ghost. My eyes got really, really wide and I opened my mouth so
wide the edges of my mouth started bleeding. I bit my tongue so hard they
had to come and put a wooden bit in my mouth to keep me from cutting off
my tongue. [She demonstrates the eyes and the bloody edges of her mouth
wide open and the bit.] I talked in an old man’s voice. I said I killed myself.
My brother was there, he told me what happened. We figured out what had
happened—there was a well I’d been to a while before the incident, and when
I was pulling up water I’d stuck my tongue out and bit it, and that’s when the
ghost hit me. [She jerks back, like getting physically hit.] It turns out he’d
been an old man living there who had killed himself. He wandered around the
wells, circling them, and I was just standing there when he ran into me. Then
later, in me at the hospital, he talked.

Residual feelings of the dead man lingered as energy around the wells, which
Waew had inadvertently run into.
It is not that someone just happens to come across free-floating feelings of others
and bumps into those feelings. Usually the interaction between one’s own emo-
tional state and the affective feelings of others are intimately bound together,
pointing to affect’s intersubjective workings. Uthen described it this way:

I think it is a relationship. If I have a relationship, for me it’s about

mindfulness or the power of mind. Of Julia, of me, of the person who I have
ever have had or have a relationship with, something like that. It will involve
some kind of mindfulness, mental power, something that connects one to
another. There won’t be a connection with people I don’t know—like I won’t
feel a supernatural or spiritual connection to [a friend’s friend] because I don’t
have a mental connection with him. But if something happens to you (Julia),
I would know.
138 anthropology of consciousness 26.2

The “normal” connections of human relations are always present, but they are
not usually characterized as “ghostly” per se unless one’s mind is open to this
influence, either through a lack of mindfulness or illness or somehow otherwise
unsettled. “If one encounters ghosts it means he is weak in his mind, without
mindfulness,” Uthen said later, using the Pali Buddhist term sati for mindfulness
to describe mental strength and lack of mental weakness. “It’s a link, it can be
felt.” The power gained through Buddhist meditation is thought to help control,
and keep away, ghostly energy. A man named Pon talks about this connection
after seeing an old woman of questionable ontological status: “Around the time
my grandmother died I saw an old woman. She wanted me to have sati, mind-
fulness. My mind was all over the place. I didn’t see it, but I felt it. Another
time I encountered a ghost, I didn’t have any energy when I saw it, I was tired.”
A man named Khru Singha, discussing his encounter with the supernatural in a
similar sense, ending his narrative with, “At that time I was sick, and so my
mind was weak.” Others included similar descriptions of their weaker than
normal mental state. The fact that Waew was ill, or “weak” as she told it, was
very relevant to why she ran into the ghost. Waew did not explicitly know the
man who died, but she felt a connection to him through the intersection of
place and time.4
The intersubjective, affective nature of the supernatural in Thailand that I am
pointing to here is reflected in almost all ghostly encounters in the country. It is
recorded in dozens of “affective ethnographies,” or narratives about ghosts, even
when the focus of such reports are not directly about emotion itself. In The Love-
lorn Ghost and the Magical Monk (2011), Justin McDaniel discusses emotional
attachments that a young man has to his wife in the most famous ghost story in
Thailand, Nong Nak; the man’s feelings for her blind him to the fact that she
has died and haunts him as a ghost until he finally puts his feelings to rest with
the help of a Buddhist monk. In Tort, Custom and Karma (Engel and Engel
2010:2), a man passes by the scene of an accident and, letting his mind (or feel-
ing) linger on the scene, the ghostly energy of the newly deceased enters him
and causes him to lose focus at work, gouging his arm at one point on the factory
machine until he made merit to clear his mind, quite literally, of the ghost. A
young woman is killed by lightening in Nancy Eberhardt’s Imagining the Course
of Life (2006:61), and the woman’s surviving family members worry that their feel-
ings of sadness might cause the ghost to “call them” and scare away their own
life-sustaining spirits. Ghosts and the New City (Johnson 2012b) and Ghostly
Desires: Sexual Subjectivity and Thai Cinema (Fuhrmann forthcoming) similarly
link feeling (related to economics and sexuality, respectively) to the creation of
energy that is encountered by others as part of the affective landscape of the
supernatural.
Each of these encounters describes affect, as differentiated from emotion, in an
“expressive landscape” that is felt in bodies but is neither private nor solely subjec-
tive. The residual, free-floating, left-over energies of the Thai supernatural can be
intersubjective affect and embodied emotion 139

thought of as empirically felt examples of the affective mediation between bodies

and their social spaces.
In making such a claim about the intersubjective movement of affect it could
be argued that along with other scholars of affect who separate it from “emotion,”
I am referring to an old and outdated model of emotion, a model that approaches
emotion as reflecting individual, private, interior states that is no longer (if it ever
was) approved of by anthropologists. If so, the need to distinguish affect from emo-
tion is not as necessary as affect theorists might suppose. Since the writing of Lutz
and White’s seminal article “The Anthropology of Emotions” in 1986, psychologi-
cal anthropologists and cultural psychologists have regularly paid attention to the
social, or intersubjective, construction of emotion. Psychological anthropologists of
emotion have consistently argued that factors such as “environmental determi-
nants,” “communication,” and “normative social appraisal,”—to note a few from
Richard Shweder’s list (Shweder et al. 2008:415; see also Luhrmann 2006)—are
central components of emotional experience, which are in need of attention.
Some affect theorists (e.g., Ahmed 2004) who do not feel the need to separate
affect from emotion similarly emphasize emotion as interpersonal action rather
than solely psychological disposition. We may be tempted therefore to conclude
that the “affective turn” is simply running new words over an already well-marked
territory of emotion research. But the issue is less about a choice of word and
more about what kinds of qualities are attended to in seeking to understand experi-
ence. Regardless of whether the intersubjective, transpersonal quality of feeling we
are calling affect is seen as a componential quality of emotion or is considered
separate from it, the attention to this quality is useful for a better understanding of
cultural articulations of feeling. Affect serves as an analytically useful addition to
emotion research and the stable and interiorized states in which emotion tradition-
ally trades because of its emphasis on intensely felt, moving forces of intersubjec-
tive feeling.

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conclusion
It is here that the two theoretical trajectories of affect theory and emotion theory
meet. Gregg and Seigworth intimate as much at the end of their introduction to
The Affect Theory Reader. They ask, “How might emotion—taking on then decid-
edly affectual qualities—be reconsidered without requiring place-positions for sub-
ject and object as the first condition?” (2010:8). Attention to affect effectively
pushes theorists to pay more attention to the public, interpersonal, but still embod-
ied fields through which feeling travels. In such a perspective affect can be seen
as part of, rather than separate from, emotion. Affect may find its most useful
place as part of the larger theoretical project that studies the experience of emo-
tion. The case of the Thai supernatural and its intersubjective flows of energy
serves as an example of how affect works as distinct from but still part of emotional
experience.
140 anthropology of consciousness 26.2

Attention to affect in these and other accounts of ghostly encounters in Thai-

land allows us to problematize the sometimes overly dualistic, hegemonic binaries
of deconstructionist theories often found in poststructural and postmodern perspec-
tives (Hemmings 2005:556), including “power” versus “resistance,” or “repressive”
versus “subversive” modalities of social life. In connecting shared social ideas to
physical experiences, affect helps us to understand the interrelationship of not only
ghosts and people but also of shared culture and private minds. It moves discus-
sions of power away from the controlled and the controller and into the more bod-
ily realm of felt pushes and pulls and moods between people. The unconfined,
free-floating quality that trips people up in Thailand and is experienced as some-
times powerful emotions suggests the importance of paying attention to the cultur-
ally variable and locally articulated ways that feelings and desires escape the body
and meet, or affect, each other.

&

acknowledgments
Research for this chapter was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Stanford
University and made possible through Stanford’s Culture and Mind Postdoctoral Fel-
lowship. The author thanks Ian Skoggard, Tanya Luhrmann, Justin Van Elsberg, and
Emily Zeamer for their contributions to the development of this article, along with the
panel members and participants of the “Affect Theory” and “What’s Up With Affect?”
panels at the 2011 AAA and 2012 SPA meetings.

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notes
1. Data collected draws from 20 oral interviews in Jangwat Chiang Mai and 100 questionnaires at Chiang Mai Univer-
sity, along with narrative encounters related spontaneously in everyday conversations in Northern Thailand, where I
have been conducting ongoing ethnographic research since 2002. Some people I interviewed I had known for years;
others I had met only for the first time as friends of friends. Rather than exoticized stories told to a stranger or analyses
of third person reports, these narratives represent personal discussions within the everyday lived reality of their home
and community. For more on the supernatural in Thailand drawn from this dataset see Cassaniti 2015; Cassaniti and
Luhrmann 2011, 2014; Robbins et al. 2011. Experiences described might fall under what could be considered medita-
tion, on the one hand, or ghostly encounters with spirits, on the other, but my aim is not to try to separate out reli-
gious categories like “Buddhism” and “animism,” respectively—I approach these traditions like most people do in
the Mae Jaeng as necessarily intermingled. Varied experiences don’t typically occur at the same time, but they do
occur within a wider framework understood more broadly as part of the local spiritual landscape.
2. The Five Precepts are injunctions against lying, stealing, killing, sexual misconduct, and intoxication.
3. “Emotion!” Ajarn Somwang Kawesufong, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at
Chiang Mai University, said in English, scoffing at the word when I asked him about it, “Emotion is just Eng-
lish-language psychological academic vocabulary.” English-speaking scholars also have trouble capturing phe-
nomena variously termed emotion and affect. But as the territorial possessors of powerful English-language
scholarly publications, these scholars usually demand that experiences related in languages translate feelings into
one English term or another, rarely taking seriously the idea that emotion or affect might not just be experienced
“differently” elsewhere but that people might not fit their experiences into categories we can easily label emotion
or affect at all. This vagueness is not necessarily something we should aim to force into English categories.
4. The connections one has to others draws not only from the present lifetime but also, through belief in contin-
ued rebirths, from past lives. Place is also strongly connected to supernatural encounters; the connection is still
intersubjective affect and embodied emotion 141

intersubjectively felt, but the energy is rooted or tied to particular locations. In his interview Uthen talked
about staying away from Kwan Phayao, the lake by his house:

Sometimes I’ve felt like someone wants to push me to fall from the stairs at the lake, and if someone wants
to push me I think I might be really hurt or die if you look at the place. It’s, like, intention, but not a
person. I feel like goosebumps or cold, something like that. I feel like it’s dangerous. Sometimes my heart is
beating so fast.

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