Chontida Poonpipat

My doctoral project, supervised by Professor Kate Crosby and Professor David Gellner, examines the Thai Theravada Buddhist meditation practices in Britain, through Anthropological methodology. Traditional Thai meditation is little documented in contrast to the Buddhist-derived Mindfulness that began to gain global popularity from the 1970s onwards. Yet the Thai practices were transmitted to the UK earlier, beginning in the 1950s, and they offer very distinctive features including a greater focus on physical transformation and on the attainment of deep meditative states. They reflect a greater range and diversity of techniques with histories going back centuries.

They include both old and new forms of Thai meditations, demarcated by a radical shake-up during the colonial period that caused once-popular pre-modernisation methods to be less emphasised. Yet Britain, with its early reception of a variety of Thai traditions, as well as its combination of secular, Diaspora and convert practice groups, is an obvious place to conduct research on these practices, both to understand Buddhist practices and communities, and in order to expand the spectrum of meditation traditions available to future researchers, including those in psychology and cognitive science.

I completed my BBA in International Business (1st class Hons) at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and MA in socio-cultural Anthropology (Distinction), at Durham University, and my research interest are meditation and Theravada Buddhism.