Child Spirits in Thailand: The Intimacy of Kumanthong and Luk Thep

Propitiating, or “adopting” child spirits is a traditional practice in Thailand that briefly joined a transnational trend in the mid 2010s of adopting dolls that had the look and feel of the realistic reborn dolls that were trendy in the United States in the 1990s. These “angel dolls,” or luk thep, are a recent innovation in the diverse practices of propitiating child spirits that highlight the intimate, familial, and affective dimensions of these spiritual practices. In recent decades new iterations of child spirit propitiation have emerged focusing on intimacy with the spirit, and the shifting aesthetics of the material form away from human remains or abstractions, to increasingly life-like or appealingly child-like material forms, and the increasing interest in mass-produced commodity forms of child spirits. A new-animist analytic identifies within these practices forms of personhood that are inter-dependent and relational.