Care and karmic stories

Abstract

This article elucidates a common relationship between care and temporality in contemporary Thai social worlds through attention to circulating narratives and their effects on both the experience of time and practices of care. I begin with ordinary stories about ghosts, spirit mediums, and past lives. These “karmic stories” make evident cause and effect across lifetimes. Through such karmic storytelling, particular values and an extensive set of entities emerge as salient for care, along with an expansive timeframe relevant for human affairs. Overlapping timescapes invite a flexibility of interpretation on both individual and collective levels. I argue that pluritemporality thus becomes a resource and mode by which care emerges and social change proceeds when moral and explanatory ambiguity is not denied but rather embraced.