Imagining the Course of Life: Self-Transformation in a Shan Buddhist Community

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life incontemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to thecomplexities of Theravada Buddhism, as it is actually lived andexperienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of humandevelopment and a theoretical consideration of how anyethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing onlong-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, NancyEberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course areconnected to local constructions of self and personhood. In theprocess, she draws our attention to contrasting models in theEuro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we thinkabout the trajectory of a human life.