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Introduction
This paper has two main purposes: first, it presents an account of Buddhist 'nuns' involved in the teaching of Pali language, and in a form of Buddhist Higher Education (Abhidhamma--a term explained below), in Bangkok in the early 2000s, phenomena which seem to have gone unnoticed in the western ethnographic record. Second, it reflects in a deliberately open-ended manner on both the emic-Buddhist and etic-interpretative vocabularies which have been used to describe these women and their social role(s) and status(es). Readers who are familiar with the topic will understand the need for inverted commas around the word nuns; others will not, and we explain what is involved briefly below. We hope that our discussion of both emic and etic terminologies will help in making sense of the sociological complexities involved, and also in providing an orderly way to progress beyond the simple binary opposition between laity and members of the Buddhist monastic Order (the sa[LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH DOT ABOVE]gha), especially as it has been used in the study of Buddhism under the influence of Weberian comparativism. We aim to go beyond the lens of victimizers/victimized in thinking about 'nuns,' and to celebrate the large and increasing numbers of Pali-scholar 'nuns' in modern Thailand.
'Nuns' have existed, for example, since at least the nineteenth century in Burma and Sri Lanka, and in Thailand for much longer.1 But a striking characteristic of the twentieth century, especially in its second half, has been the greatly increased number of women adopting this role, and in particular the greatly increased number of younger women doing so.2 Previous scholarship on this phenomenon in Sri Lanka and Burma has adopted a Weberian approach: Gombrich and Obeyesekere saw such women as an example of the more general phenomenon of the 'laicization' of modern (and modernist) Buddhism3; Houtman on Burma, Holt on Sri Lanka, and Cook on Thailand have turned the tables and referred rather to 'monasticization,' in relation to the increasing practice of meditation by laity and 'nuns'.4 The use of both terms can be defended: but perhaps we need not simply choose between one or the other term from a Weberian binary opposition,...