Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand

In contexts of severe illness in Northern Thailand, many conceive of themselves as combinations of beings assembled through the binding ethical force of karma. Scholars working in many world areas have built frameworks for understanding “complex” (distributed, partible, fluid, transient) personhood. In this article, I bring these frameworks into conversation with ethical theory to ask how one can make sense of ethical action when one is always already partly the other. For many in Northern Thailand, the answer is an ethical and hauntological choreography ; rather than relying only on rational frameworks for right action or cultivating individual ethical dispositions, people seek to assemble optimal elements—other people, beings that have become components of themselves, material objects infused with ethical force—into scenes where the residual karmic “stickiness” of all can be unmade. This unmaking is achieved through a form of forgiveness and kindness that moves beyond individual agency. [ personhood, ethics, ontology, haunting, Buddhism, Thailand ]