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The Vegetarian Festival and the city pillar: the appropriation of a Chinese religious custom for a cult of the Thai civic religion

The Krabi Provincial Administrative Organization, in co-operation with the Krabi provincial government (southern Thailand), has since 2006 organized a conjoint street procession of the Chinese shrines in the province, in the course of their Vegetarian Festival, to a prayer at the Krabi City Pillar. Two heretofore unrelated rituals, one a popular Chinese custom, the other a cult of Thai civic religion, with roots in Indian Brahmanism, were thus amalgamated. The conspicuous conjoint procession, bringing together the discrete processions of numerous shrines dispersed throughout the province, transformed the character of the shrines' processions, and superimposed an encompassing Thai cosmography upon the localized cosmic images engendered by the festival rituals in the individual shrines. The spectacular event, featuring pierced or otherwise self-mutilating spirit mediums of the various shrines, made Krabi a potential competitor with the established centers of the festival, Phuket and Trang, for the patronage of domestic and Chinese diasporic devotees; but the ‘gruesome’ and repetitive character of the mediums' performances seems to impair the chances of the conjoint procession of becoming a major attraction for Western tourists. This article relates the context, process and consequences of this appropriation of a popular Chinese custom for a Thai civic cult and discusses it in terms of a comparative framework for the study of change in tourism-related festivals.