Living with the ancestors: Spiritual materiality and everyday heritage practices in Ban Chiang

Abstract

Management at living archaeological sites can favor a secular-scientific globalized perspective of heritage at the expense of describing complex and long-term relationships involving local people and their heritage landscapes. This is especially so in places of historical severance where current people have no direct line of descent to the ancient ruins. This research aims to bridge this gap by considering the Ban Chiang World Heritage Site in Thailand as a case study. Employing a qualitative approach rooted in ethnographic observation and Heritage Discourse Analysis (HDA), the study investigates everyday heritage practices and local discourses. The main discovery is that the Tai Puan community engages in “spiritual adoption,” a culturally advanced form of mundane heritage work whereby they reanimate sleeping dead artifacts and develop a metaphoric sense of kinship, making the unknown remains into spiritual ancestors. The study contributes to three key areas: Theoretically, it extends the concept of spiritual materiality beyond overtly sacred places to secular archaeological contexts; Methodologically, it demonstrates the utility of HDA in uncovering silenced local ontologies; and practically, it calls for a paradigm shift in heritage management from object-based preservation to the facilitation of living relationships between people and their layered, spiritual landscapes.