“Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t?”

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.