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In this article we compare the encounter with the supernatural-experiences in which a person senses the immaterial-in ailand and in the United States. ese experiences appear to be shaped by di erent conceptions of the mind. In the US, there is a sharp, natural division between one's mind and the world; in ailand, individuals have the moral responsibility to control their minds. ese di erences appear to explain how people identify and sense the supernatural. In the US, it is an external, responsive agent; in ailand, it is an energy that escapes from an uncontrolled mind. Here we approach phenomenology-the experience of experience-comparatively, identifying patterns in social expectations that a ect the ways in which humans think, feel, and sense. We take an experiential category of life that we know to be universal and use it to analyze cultural concepts that in uence the enactment and interpretation of feeling and sensing.

In this article we seek to develop a common theoretical language and stake out particular positions on key issues in the growing debates about the anthropological study of morality. First, we advocate for a pluralistic stance in approaches to moral variation – one that maintains the possibility of moral realism and at times even argues explicitly for it. Second, we work to define the domain of morality in more detail, especially in its relation to other domains of experience, including personhood, emotion, and life course. Third, we argue for a new approach to the issues of freedom and moral action. Together, these arguments articulate key conceptual areas of concern for anthropologists interested in morality, and we suggest some theoretical stances on each of them.

In his highly influential book Wherever You Go, There You Are (1995) Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests a particular kind of person revealed through mindfulness: a “you” to be found wherever you go. But who are “you”? Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in northern Thailand, this chapter demonstrates that for many people there is no “you” exposed through Buddhist mindfulness practices, but instead local articulations of ideas about anattā, or non-self. “Spirits” of the person, called khwan, are also implicated: khwan are thought to be vulnerable to dispersal due to a lack of mindfulness, resulting in possible mental disorder. Through an analysis of the multiple constructions of the person in Thailand, the chapter argues that the “you” revealed in mindfulness has less to do with what is scientifically or even religiously real, and more to do with the authority of culturally constructed claims about what that “you” looks like, wherever you go.