This ambitious and original book continues McDaniel's examination of situated knowledge in Thai Buddhist practice. He focuses on the stories, practices, beliefs and material culture surrounding the nineteenth-century monk, Somdet To, and the ghost, Mae Nak. By drawing on film, murals, manuscripts, printed texts, interviews, participant observation, rituals, statues, liturgies, amulets and photographs, McDaniel reveals the enduring relevance of a nineteenth-century monk and a ghost in contemporary Bangkok and beyond. Each of the stories, objects and practices with which McDaniel is concerned holds value not only for itself but for the relation it holds with other events, people, places and objects.

McDaniel focuses on Thai Buddhist engagement with Somdet To and Mae Nak as expressions of religiosity in central Thai Buddhism; he is concerned to explore how engagements with such figures reflect daily practices of relatedness. His argument is based on the principles of the repertoire: he develops a palimpsest of considerations of Buddhist accretions – arguing against the static analysis of texts, rituals and so on, he proposes that the notion of a cultural repertoire provides us with a useful tool for understanding the accumulation of religious sources by which agentive Buddhists navigate and make sense of the world, often in contradictory and uncategorizable ways. Repertoires are personal and unique – they may be internally inconsistent and contradictory and include a person's experience, memories, and the stories that one inhabits as well as the reality one touches. These repertoires are evolving, constantly shifting, engaged with and negotiated through individual practice and reflection. The notion of a static or bracketable Thai Buddhism remains ever forestalled. His focus for such potentially abstract theory is the grounded and ubiquitous practical technologies of Buddhist worship, practice and protection.

The chapters focus in turn on people, texts, actions and objects. Each may be read independently of the others but reading them together provides an elegant illustration of the theory of accumulative repertoire developed throughout. The first chapter is, in fact, less about people and more about how the hagiographic process is created by people – how the stories of Somdet To are produced, circulated and accumulated; the point being that there is no definitive or final biography of this famous monk. Somdet To's life is produced through multiple articulations linking in but not limited to ideas surrounding Thai nationalist discourse and the everyman. The second chapter is again about cumulative and contested phenomena, this time focusing on the Jinapañjara Gāthā (verses on the Victor's Armor). By unpacking what makes a text sacred in Thailand, how it is employed and to what ends, McDaniel explores the meaning of Thai Buddhist efficacy, in the process questioning the use of terms such as “esoteric” and “tantra”. The third chapter considers Thai Buddhist rituals and liturgies. Here McDaniel continues his argument that there is great variance in Thai Buddhist liturgies and rituals and that they defy any interpretation as orthodox, homogeneus or state-managed. Chapter 4 focuses on images, amulets, shrines and murals. Continuing the concern with situated knowledge, McDaniel considers how these objects “act”, and also act in relation to that which is around them. This is an argument against theories of syncretism, localization or commercialization – all of which imply hierarchy for McDaniel. Rather, the cacophony in which each object is located reveals situatedness and accretion. Value is located through association with other objects, with the people who both gave them and give to them. That is to say, material culture is understood to participate in the social construction of reality and is incorporated into individuals’ religious repertoires. In the conclusion McDaniel expands his consideration of the repertoire and underscores his argument that engagement with saints, relics, rituals, magical practices, ghosts, and miracle stories are to be understood as being of central concern in Thai Buddhism.

In this work, McDaniel continues his meditations on the problematics of dichotomous categories in academic writing about Thai Buddhism. In his earlier work, Gathering Leaves (University of Washington Press, 2008), McDaniel persuasively argued against the notion of nineteenth-century canonical centralization and homogenization, demonstrating that while liturgical practice and texts in Bangkok were largely uniform during that time, the success of centralizing reform outside of the capital was limited. In that work he argued that centralist policies did not present a radical breach with earlier forms of education, that they were not effectively carried out in the rural north and north-east, and that education remained idiosyncratic and to a large extent influenced by the charisma of local monks. In tracing the history of curricula, textual practices, pedagogical methods, local rituals and continuities in monastic education throughout the period he argues that dichotomies between engaged/ascetic, scholarly/magic, urban/forest, while important at the level of discourse, were never clearly drawn in practice.

The Lovelorn Ghost adds further support to McDaniel's opposition to the use of dichotomous categories. For example, he argues against the notion of Buddhist practitioners being “impacted” by forces of globalization and modernization. He suggests that such an analytic approach creates a dichotomy of “victim–victimizer”, defines Thai Buddhism as static, and defines modernity far too narrowly. His ethnography forcefully underscores the point. In his exploration of Buddhist engagement with people, texts, rituals, liturgies, objects and art we see multiple moments in which Thai Buddhists pointedly defy categorization. By focusing on practices McDaniel seeks to avoid overarching theories and take seriously those things that practitioners themselves take for granted. In so doing, of course, he slips overarching theory in through the back door. His theory of cultural repertoire is persuasive and speaks directly to work developed in anthropology and the social sciences by scholars such as Bruno Latour, Harold Garinkel, Michael Carrithers and Martin Holbraad. This is a compelling and ethnographically rich consideration of situated knowledge. It will be essential reading for all scholars of Thailand, Buddhist studies and anthropology.