Beyond Buddhism and animism: A psychometric test of the structure of Burmese Theravada Buddhism

Anthropologists and religious scholars have long debated the relationship between doctrinal Theravada Buddhism, so-called ‘animism’, and other folk practices in southeast Asian societies. A variety of models of this relationship have been proposed on the basis of ethnographic evidence. We provide the first psychometric and quantitative evaluation of these competing models, using a new scale developed for this purpose, the Burmese Buddhist...