Craft, Currencies, and Ritual Orders in a Northern Thai village

The blog post discusses interactions between two different ritual, and monetary orders in a woodcarving village in northern Thailand. The first order ties together woodcarvers, traders, and buyers through the medium of several monetary currencies. People donate money in a woodcarving company to wooden figurines of Jesus, the Fo, Guanyin, Guang Gong commonly worshipped in China, and, most prominently, the Hindu God Ganesh. The monetary donations manifest the belief in the ability of Ganesh in bringing luck in craftsmanship and in business, and includes a variety of bills, including US Dollar, alongside various European, and Asian currencies. The money bills are collected and used to finance the annual Ganesh ritual, which conjures the local community, while contributing in increasing the prestige and business of the organizer. A second ritual held a few weeks later constitutes a cycle that is narrower in terms of its social and monetary diversity, but wider in temporal extension. The participants are employees and core suppliers of the woodcarving company. Here, money earned through market transactions of woodcarvings are injected into a wider temporal order by being donated to a Buddhist temple, and thus contributes in maintaining throughout time a wider religious order through the temple. In that sense, currencies from donations and market transactions are converted into ritual and market spheres in different ways and temporal stages.