Chapter 1: Beyond Conformity: An Anthropology of Empathy and Problem Solving for Understanding Complex Lives -- Part I: Narratives that Construct Linguistic Realities -- Chapter 2: How Do Shared Languages Create Personal Narratives? -- Chapter 3: How Do Stories Create Human Worlds? -- Chapter 4: How Are Differing Personal Realities Shared? -- Part II: Languages that Shape Thai Worlds -- Chapter 5: The Kohn and the Language of Social Obligation.-Chapter 6: Why Nirvana? The Manut and the Language of Solitude -- Chapter 7: Trans-National Solutions to a Local Problem: The Human Natures of Buddhist Consumers -- Chapter 8: The Meanings in Lives.

This book presents a unique approach to person-centered anthropology, providing a new form of practice theory that incorporates and explains sources of cultural change. Built around the learning and use of autobiographical narrative forms, it draws from, and expands on, phenomenological, psychological, and moral anthropological traditions. The author draws on extensive original fieldwork in Thailand to explore questions including: how Buddhism has dealt with the appearance of global capitalism; and why some Thais continue to pursue nirvana-oriented Buddhist practices when karma-oriented reward-systems seem to be more satisfying as a whole. Where previous person-centered ethnographies have explored the ways in which social forces cause individuals to conform to cultural norms, this work advances the analysis by focusing on how ideas are transmitted from individuals to into wider society. This book will provide fresh insights of particular interest to psychological, phenomenological and narrative anthropologists; as well as to researchers working in the fields of religious and Asian studies. Steven Grant Carlisle is Lecturer in Anthropology at California State University at San Marcos, USA. Dr. Carlisle specializes in anthropology of religion, psychological anthropology, and the study of narratives.