Nineteenth-Century Culture Change,” Journal of Asian
Studies 35 (February 1976): 203–220, and A. Thomas
Kirsch’s “Modernizing Implications of Nineteenth Century
Reforms in the Thai Sangha,” Contributions to Asian Studies
8 (1975): 8–23.The structure and ritual practices of established Thai Buddhism
are discussed in Kenneth E. Wells’s Thai Buddhism: Its Rites
and Activities (1939; reprint, Bangkok, 1960). Jane Bunnag’s
Buddhist Monk, Buddhist Layman: A Study of Urban Monastic
Organization in Central Thailand (Cambridge, 1973) de-
scribes establishment Buddhism as she observed it in the old
capital of Ayutthaya ̄. On the government’s control and use
of the Thai sangha in the twentieth century, see Yoneo Ishii’s
“Church and State in Thailand,” Asian Survey 8 (October
1968): 864–871; my “Buddhism and National Integration
in Thailand,” Journal of Asian Studies 30 (May 1971):
551–567; J. A. Niels Mulder’s Monks, Merit and Motivation,
2d rev. ed. (DeKalb, Ill., 1973); Somboon Suksamran’s Po-
litical Buddhism in Southeast Asia: The Role of the Sangha in
the Modernization of Thailand, edited by Trevor O. Ling
(London, 1977); and Tambiah’s World Conqueror and World
Renouncer.
The theology of Phutthatha ̄t is examined at some length by Louis
Gabaude in “Introduction à l’herméneutique de Buddhadasa
Bhikku” (Ph. D. diss., Sorbonne, 1979); also see
Buddhada ̄sa’s Toward the Truth, edited by Donald K. Swear-
er (Philadelphia, 1971). Phra Ra ̄tchawaramun ̄ı’s Phut-
thatham (Bangkok, 1982) has been reviewed at some length
by Sulak Sivaraksa in the Journal of the Siam Society 70
(1982): 164–170. The role of A ̄ca ̄n Man, his disciples, and
other meditation masters in Thailand have been analyzed by
Stanley J. Tambiah in The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and
the Cult of Amulets (Cambridge, 1984). Also see Jack Korn-
field’s Living Buddhist Masters (Santa Cruz, Calif., 1977).
My article “Millennialism, Therava ̄da Buddhism, and Thai Soci-
ety,” Journal of Asian Studies 36 (February 1977): 283–302,
discusses the major millennial uprising in modern Thai his-
tory. Somboon Suksamran in Buddhism and Politics in Thai-
land (Singapore, 1982), as well as in his earlier Political Bud-
dhism in Southeast Asia, Tambiah in World Conqueror and
World Renouncer, and several of the essays in Religion and Le-
gitimation of Power in Thailand, Laos and Burma (all cited
above), discuss political monks. Sulak Sivaraksa’s A Buddhist
Vision for Renewing Society (Bangkok, 1981) brings together
several of the author’s essays written in English. On religious
and ethical self-consciousness of some Thai in the context of
political-economic change, see also my article “Economic
Action and Buddhist Morality in a Thai Village,” Journal of
Asian Studies 42 (August 1983): 851–868.
New Sources
Benjamin, G., C. Chou, and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural
and Social Perspectives. Singapore, 2002.
Hayashi, Y. Practical Buddhism Among the Thai-Lao. Melbourne,
2003.
Hughes, J. Faces of Culture: Explorations in Anthropology. Queens-
land, 1993.
Kamala, T. Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-
Century Thailand. Honolulu, 1997.
Keyes, C. F., et al. Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Mod-
ern States of East and Southeast Asia. Hononlulu, 1994.
Mulder, N. Inside Thai Society: Religion, Everyday Life, Change.
Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2000.
Rhum, M. R. The Ancestral Lords: Gender, Descent, and Spirits in
a Northern Thai Village. DeKalb, Ill., 1994.
Taylor, J. L. Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological
and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailand. Singapore,
1993.
CHARLES F. KEYES (1987)
Revised BibliographyTHEALOGY. In 1979 Naomi Goldenberg first used the
word thealogy to denote feminist discourse on the Goddess
(thea) rather than God (theo), proclaiming in her book
Changing of the Gods (1979) that “we are about to learn what
happens when father-gods die for a whole generation”
(p. 37). Although father-gods are, in fact, alive and well in
the world’s religions, thealogy has become widely known to
scholars of religion and gender and of emergent religion as
a provocation to a spiritual and political shift away from the
androcentric (male-centered) theological paradigm. Instead,
thealogy offers a group of largely participant, experientially
grounded texts that explore the many dimensions of female
becoming: that of the Goddess, of women, and of nature as
encompassing both of these.
Although thealogy is a product, at least in part, of the
neo-romantic hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it
is also and more immediately a feminist project. Like Chris-
tian and Jewish feminist theology, thealogy developed from
both the nineteenth-century proto-feminist vision of the
feminine as a redemptive locus of moral and spiritual value
and the sexual egalitarianism of the second wave secular
women’s movement. Rejecting the wholesale secularism of
early second wave feminism, but drawing on the separatist
elements of radical feminism, thealogy developed the femi-
nist criticism of religion as the divinization of masculinity
(patriarchy having, as Kate Millet once put it, “God on its
side”) not to relinquish the divine as such, but to repudiate
exclusively masculine models of the divine.
Insofar as it serves the contemporary Goddess move-
ment, thealogy might be said to be the discourse of a new
women’s religion (one of the very few living women’s reli-
gions in the world today). Thealogy has emerged from a net-
work of groups and journals, and from a small but growing
academic literature with a predominantly North American,
British, German, and Australasian readership. Although
thealogy can now be studied in universities up to the doctoral
level, it is itself resistant to the reintroduction of any totaliz-
ing monotheism or to any merely feminized conception of
God. Rather, it is derived from feminist reflection on
women’s experience and on the sacral power of femaleness.
There is no authoritative tradition or corpus to which the
thealogian must defer. It is a nonprofessional, non-normative9098 THEALOGY