Dr. Marlane Guelden is an American anthropologist living in Thailand for over 25 years. She is the author of four books about culture and beliefs and holds degrees in Sociology and Public Policy Development from San Francisco State University and a MA and PhD in cultural Anthropology from the University of Hawaii.
Guelden’s professional career in journalism began as a newspaper reporter in Davis, California. Her deep curiosity about cultures brought her to Southeast Asia where she worked as a freelance photo-journalist in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand from 1984–1991. In Thailand, she became intrigued by popular supernatural beliefs chronicled in her book Thailand: Into the Spirit World (1995), later revised as Thailand: Spirits Among Us (2007).
After obtaining a doctorate, she continued an in-depth longitudinal study of an annual Nora ceremony held at a Buddhist temple in Phatthalung Province, considered the birthplace of Nora. She published two books Dancing for the Gods, Volume 1 and 2 in 2018, which are the only comprehensive academic studies in English of the Nora tradition. Then in 2021, the Nora performance was recognized by UNESCO as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” and faced new popularity and challenges. With Nora now being center stage as a kind of political ‘soft power,’ Guelden’s contribution has been to inform the public about Nora as an inherited identity and belief system in which spirit mediums play an essential role, rather than simply a colorful dance for entertainment. Guelden is retired and living in southern Thailand where she continues to participate in educational activities and exhibitions of her work.
Marlane Guelden’s archive is divided in two volumes reflecting two distinct eras in her life. The first series is her work as a photo-journalist in Southeast Asia from 1984-1991, which shows her developing interest in the mystic. Most the images were taken in Thailand and Malaysia with some in Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia.
The second series is from her return to Thailand in 2000 to conduct anthropological research on spirit mediumship, focusing on the Nora tradition, which she studied for the next 18 years. For practical reasons, she changed from 35mm slides to negative color film as a research tool for that fieldwork.
