Comment

Comment by Ranjan Lekhy on December 23, 2009 at 3:04pm

Thanks, Piers! I would like to go through your recommended works.Yes, I remember Mark Turin. He must be worthy to read! :)

Comment by Piers Locke on December 22, 2009 at 11:15pm

Ranjan- for the anthropology of Tibetan Buddhism, you might like to consider the work of Charles Ramble and Geoffrey Samuel. And I very much recommend you watch Mark Turin and Sara Schneiderman's interview with David Snellgrove at:
http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/snellgrove.htm

Comment by Ranjan Lekhy on December 22, 2009 at 12:10pm

Thank you Piers for assisting me to understand Anthropology of Religion! Of course, I don’t have any kind of bias or prejudice towards Buddhism or Anthropology of Religion! However, I should clear that Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, are not my classification but during Buddha's time, were categorized. I think, by just judging Buddhists and explaining their cognitions, perceptions, rites and rituals, or cultural entities (or conventional realities as Buddhism say) cannot be understood the teachings of Buddha. For instance, Sherry Ortner ‘s works or even Anna Grimshaw's Servants of The Buddha. Anna’s title is very offensive in the first sight for the Buddhists! Buddha was against of any kind of slavery or service. Buddhist monks and nun are not servants of Buddha but the followers. There is no master or slave (servant) in Buddhism!

I’ve already confessed that I am ignorant in Anthropology of Religion. I need to understand and realize the fundamental concepts of Anthropology of Religion. Could you suggest me any handbook regarding Anthropology of Religion? Thanks!

Comment by Piers Locke on December 21, 2009 at 7:59pm

Ranjan- I think to suggest that anthropologists have studied with Buddhists but not studied Buddhism is perhaps to misunderstand the anthropology of religion. The distinction you make suggests one that might be sustained in Religious Studies, where for example, one might specialise in the doctrinal history of religious traditions as embodied in texts.

The holistic goals that have motivated the ethnographic endeavour in British Social Anthropology (along with the sociological influence of Durkheim and contributors to L'Annee Sociologique) have meant that anthropologists have tried to study religion not as a discrete domain, characteristic of western modernity, and which particularly emerged as a result of The Enlightenment, but rather as an aspect of human practice, belief and experience. This is relevant to US Cultural Anthropology aswell, exemplified by Clifford Geertz' approach in Religion as a Cultural System, in which he argues that we understand religion as something people do, suggesting a scheme that considers the relations between sacred symbols, ethos and worldview.

It is certainly true that earlier 'Buddhist ethnographies' were interested in the synthesis of animism and Buddhism in the classic village community study (Spiro, Tambiah etc...), which a Religious Studies scholar might be inclined to see as a degenerate form of a perhaps rather essentialised 'ism', but later there have been ethnographies explicitly concerned with Buddhist religious specialists in Buddhist institutions. An example would be Anna Grimshaw's Servants of The Buddha about a convent in Nepal.

It was perhaps in the ethnography of Hinduism that the study of religious
specialists emerged sooner - with Richard Burghart and Peter van der Veer studying with Vaishnavite Ramanandis, and Johnny Parry with Shaivite Aghoris.

From an anthropological perspective, The Three Jewels merely represents a categorical system, not unrelated to the ordering endeavour anthropologists themselves engage in. Similarly, one might argue that the Sanskritic systematisations of Hindu Brahmans constitutes a native anthropology of a kind.

N.B. I have not meant to negatively caricature Religious Studies (a cognate discipline for which I have huge respect), but rather to use it as a rhetorical counterpoint to respond to Ranjan's observations.

Comment by Ranjan Lekhy on December 21, 2009 at 6:29pm

Hi folks! Would you like to enlighten me about Anthropology of Religions? In the case of Buddhism, what I have found that the anthropologists have done their fieldworks among the Buddhist communities but not on Buddhism. Buddha, Buddhism and Buddhists are different jewels (tiratana in Pali).

Comment by John McCreery on November 9, 2009 at 6:30am

Francisco, thank you for those kind and encouraging words. Since I may have miscommunicated, I should be clear, however: There are both anthropologists who study Chinese religion and social historians and historians of religion who engage anthropological theories in what they write. The issue is that those who share this interest form an area studies community, whose work is rarely noticed, either in general introductions to the anthropology of religion or in work in the anthropology of religion conducted in other regions. This may reflect the ethnocentrism you mention or, alternatively, academic specialization and a body of classic works rooted in other places.

Anyway, thanks again for the support. Much appreciated.

Comment by Francisco Duarte on November 7, 2009 at 5:05pm

Sorry for putting myself in the middle of the conversation, but I think your point very interesting. In fact, we know that anthropology has a history of ethnocentrism, making the euro-american societies the center of the world, and the rest as the primitives (who, in a certain way, needed to be "civilized" and so on). The departure from this perspective initiated the study (in large scale, at least) of the very own societies who wanted to study the "others". In this auto-evaluation of the western self, maybe a lot of anthropologists simple forgott about the rest of the wolrd in this try to compreend themselves and their societies.
Also, the atheisation of China by the Mao politics (it was, of course, largelly uncessful) ensured that religion would not be very spoken about in that large country. It ensured that the studies about chinese religion would not be very prolific. And, indeed, it strikes me has very obvious that someone should be talking about chinese religion in anthroplogical terms.
I think your study will pioneer a strong branch of our science. Your fears are, of course, understandable, but someone must clear the path. Keep steady, I think you're on something. The best of luck.

Comment by John McCreery on October 30, 2009 at 5:27am

Jonathon, thanks, I will look these up. May I ask, however, for your response to the central claim I am making, that the anthropology of religion pays little attention to Chinese religions, despite their being the religions of a quarter of humanity? Here is where I feel most exposed to making a fool of myself. Does the claim seem fair to you?

Comment by Jonathan Mair on October 29, 2009 at 9:44pm

Hi John

Have you seen these?...

Chau, A.Y., Miraculous response : doing popular religion in contemporary China. 2006, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. xiv, 317.

Chau, A.Y., Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation. 2009, Oxford: Routledge.

Haven't seen the 2009 yet but the other one's good.

Best,

Jon

Comment by John McCreery on October 29, 2009 at 9:18pm

I have just drafted the following prologue for my presentation this coming November in Taipei. In it, I suggest that the anthropology of religion has a gaping hole, a lack of attention to Chinese religion. I would be delighted if anyone can point me to sources that demonstrate that I am about to make a fool of myself.

-------------
When Ray Scupin asked me to contribute a chapter on "Traditional Chinese Religion" to his Religion and Culture: An Anthropological Focus,it had been nearly a decade since I had looked at research on Chinese religion. Reviewing what had appeared in that decade, I was especially pleased to note the embrace of anthropological topics and concepts by social historians. Valerie Hansen's Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276 and Angela Zito's Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-Century China were particularly striking contributions. In both scope and depth, the study of Chinese religion appeared to be flourishing.
But approaching the subject from another angle, anthropological discussions of religion, I discovered that Chinese religion was rarely, if ever, mentioned. It is not hard to imagine why. The study of Chinese religion is, overwhelmingly, China focused. Other religions in other places are rarely or only briefly mentioned in studies in which Chinese religion is a major topic. Without systematic comparative studies, the study of Chinese religion remains largely a world of its own. The religious traditions that have shaped and continue to shape the lives of a quarter of humanity are, to anthropologists who study other traditions, of interest only to specialists in China.

It would be easy to sigh and to speculate that, in a world of information explosion and ever-increasing specialization, where serious contributions like those mentioned above require a combination of linguistic skills and scholarly dedication that precludes other interests, this trend is inevitable. But Chinese religions are, in fact, the religions of a quarter of humanity. An anthropology of religion that ignores them has a gaping hole to fill. Why that hole exists and what might be done to fill it is the question this paper explores by starting with another, apparently simpler, question.

I invite you to imagine a tourist visiting Japan. She has seen a number of Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines. Friends take her to Yokohama's Chinatown to eat dinner. On the way to the restaurant they stop for a look at a Chinese temple, the Guan Di Miao. The colorful baroque decoration of the Chinese temple contrasts sharply with the subdued elegance of Japanese Buddhist temples and shrines. The red face and wide-open eyes of the Chinese deity on this altar differs dramatically from the lowered eye-lids and meditative serenity of the Japanese Buddhas she has seen. She asks, "Why do Chinese gods look like that?" This paper examines how we might answer that question. Along the way it suggests topics for further research that might begin to fill that hole in the anthropology of religion where Chinese religions belong.

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