ARI Working Paper Series

Couples experiencing infertility in Thailand visit a range of sacred places and shrines to seek supernatural intervention to improve their karmic status, propitiate wronged spirits or intervene in their fate. Based upon ethnographic observation and interviews with 31women and 13 men couples undergoing assisted reproductive treatment in four Thai clinics in 2007-8, this paper describes the ‘fertility pantheon’ – the intermingled religious assemblage from Buddhist temples to Chinese shrines, nature spirits, Hindu Gods and Royal spirits. Little is written about the visitation to shrines for health and fertility reasons, possibly due to the gendered nature of academic writing on Thai religion in which issues of gender and reproduction have attracted little attention. Pursuit of intervention by various spirits and deities at shrines may also be read as a resort to alternate powers outside of authorized Buddhism, in particular for women in that it does not require male intermediaries such as monks. Female deities are particularly important in this regard. These magico-religious practices should not be considered vestiges of ‘tradition’ but equally modern expressions of religiosity, coexisting with high tech assisted reproductive treatment. Indeed both forms of intervention share elements of enchantment in which faith and hope in technology or the manipulations of the supernatural follow a continuum of action undertaken in the quest for a child.