Ghosts of Dansai
In Thailand's northeast Isaan region, many believe their lives are deeply entwined with the spirit world.
In Dansai, Loei, villagers will create masks made of sticky-rice baskets and coconut palm husks. They believe that doing so honours and pleases the ghosts who will bring them abundant rice harvests through the upcoming monsoon.
Here, agricultural cycles, communal rituals, and seasonal ceremonies function as both practical and spiritual systems, offering a framework through which uncertainty can be understood and negotiated. The success of a harvest is not only measured in yield but in the maintenance of balance between people, land, and the spirit world.
But Isaan is now at the forefront of Thailand’s environmental crisis.
This region is battling drought and desertification owing to shifting rain patterns linked to global warming. Farmers who plant early in anticipation of seasonal rains now find their crops dying midway through the season. Sparse rain also limits the dissolution of nutrients in the soil, while floods wash away topsoil, further degrading the already fragile land. This translates to lower yields, economic hardship for farmers, and a struggle to sustain livelihoods. These environmental changes are existential, disrupting the predictability upon which both agricultural practice and spiritual belief have long depended. Rituals that once aligned with seasonal cycles now exist within an environment that no longer behaves as expected.
This photo project, shot on medium format film, documents Dansai at this point of intersection, exploring how spiritual and agricultural practices persist under the pressures of climate change. It asks what it means to remain connected to a system of belief when the natural cycles it relies on are increasingly unpredictable. It also considers how communities negotiate this uncertainty, and how the act of farming, once a stable and cyclical practice, has become something more fragile.
Supported, in part, by the IMF’s “Visions of Thailand”grant and the Tourism Authority of Thailand.
