Books by Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah

No detailed description available for "Culture, Thought, and Social Action".

Contributions from scholars in anthropology, religion, and area studies -- stemming from research in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas - collected to represent a form of historically grounded, ethnographically driven social science that seeks to understand social phenomena by dialogically engaging global and local perspectives

The central actors in this book are some reclusive forest-dwelling ascetic meditation masters who have been acclaimed as 'saints' in contemporary Thailand. These saints originally pursued their salvation quest among the isolated villages of the country's periphery, but once recognized as holy men endowed with charisma, they became the radiating centres of a country-wide cult of amulets.