Potency and Paperwork: Capricious Spirits, the Testimony of Everyday Experts, and Administrative Routine in the Kingdom of Siam, 1782–1868

To placate powerful spirits, manage miraculous phenomena, and prophecy the future, royal courts across the premodern world maintained in-house experts. In Siam (Thailand), these experts took the form of Brahmin ritualists and senior Buddhist monks. However, these palace denizens knew little about the potent objects and powerful spirits beyond the palace walls. So, to better understand and manage these scattered phenomena, court officials turned to a ragtag assortment of locals who claimed specialized knowledge. And to gather, translate, and interpret that knowledge, the court relied on its usual bureaucratic processes: taking testimonies, conducting legal hearings, circulating correspondence, and submitting petitions to the throne.

With a focus on the first four reigns after the kingdom’s capital was moved to Bangkok (1782–1868), this paper examines the administrative side of knowledge production about spirits and other phenomena categorized as “unnatural” in Thai-language sources. It considers three cases of such happenings to which Siam’s officials responded by interrogating marginal figures such as commoners, provincials, and foreigners: (1) the record of a legal inquiry into a young village woman whose body was allegedly possessed by the spirit of a dead princess, (2) a report summarizing an elderly provincial official’s instructions on how to manage the miraculous qualities of the Buddha’s footprint shrine, and (3) a petition by court officials, largely drawing on “rumors,” to expel the powerful, but capricious, spirits of Buddha images captured from other kingdoms. In each case, the paperwork can be read against the grain, revealing the roles of marginal figures in consciously or unconsciously shaping state intelligence about unnatural phenomena. Through these bureaucratic modes of collecting, translating, reformatting, and preserving this intelligence—as well as in the deliberations and decisions about subsequent actions the kingdom should take—knowledge about the kingdom’s unnatural resources was produced.