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Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China
The centrality of death rituals has rarely been documented in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism. Bringing together a range of perspectives including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, this edited volume presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. While the contributions show that the ideas and ritual practices related to death are continuously transformed in local contexts through political and social changes, they also highlight the continuities of funeral cultures. The studies are based on long-term fieldwork and covering material from Theravāda Buddhism in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and various regions of Chinese Buddhism, both on the mainland and in the Southeast Asian diasporas. Topics such as bad death, the feeding of ghosts, pollution through death, and the ritual regeneration of life show how Buddhist cultures deal with death as a universal phenomenon of human culture.
The Anthropology of Moralities
Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other's morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit and focused attention until recently, when accelerated globalization often resulted in the collision of different value systems. Observing, describing and assessing values cross-culturally, the authors propose various methodological approaches to the study of moralities, illustrated with rich ethnographic accounts, thus offering a valuable guide for students of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies and for professionals concerned with the empirical and cross-cultural study of values.
Nothing
The three extended essays in this book provide a set of much-needed inquiries into the connections between Buddhism and critical theory. Both Buddhism and critical theory struggle with the same contemporary forces, from ecological peril to psycho-social violence, and they both offer radically negative critiques of the present as well as utopian postures toward the future. Like other books in the innovative TRIOS series, this one offers readers ambitious essays produced through long-standing conversation among three challenging thinkers. The first essay, by Marcus Boon, explores the politics of sunyata or emptiness as they emerged from 1936 to 1976 in the wake moments of political crisis for ...
Of Beggars and Buddhas
An exploration of subversive, ribald variations of the most important story in Theravada Buddhism.
Merit and a Sense of Home.
This book provides an insight on the Buddhist way of Thai temple life in German Diasporic context. It is based on input from several Thai Buddhist communities in Germany where the first-generation Thai transmigrants construct and form a sense of belonging by actively participating in temple life. It also explores the multifaceted role that Thai temples play in the lives of Thai transmigrants. Moreover, this book combines the anthropology of diasporas with Buddhism and identity.
Changing Lives in Laos
Changes in the character of the political regime in Laos after 2000, a massive influx of foreign investment, and disruptions to rural life arising from improved communications and new forms of mobility within and across the borders have produced a major transformation. Alongside these changes, a group of young scholars carried out studies that document the rise of a new social, cultural and economic order. The contributions to this volume draw on original fieldwork materials and unpublished sources, and provide fresh analyses of topics ranging from the structures of power to the politics of territoriality and new forms of sociability in emerging urban spaces.
Transnational Death
With so much of the global population living on the move, away from their homelands, and in diasporic communities, death and mourning practices are inevitably impacted. Transnational Death brings together eleven cutting-edge articles from the emerging field of transnational death studies. By highlighting European, Asian, North American, and Middle Eastern perspectives, the collection provides timely and fresh analysis and reflection on people’s changing experiences with death in the context of migration over time. First beginning with a thematic assessment of the field of transnational death studies, readers then have the opportunity to delve into case studies that examine experiences with...
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism offers a comprehensive collection of work by leading scholars in the field. They examine the historical development of Buddhist traditions throughout the world, from traditional settings like India, Japan, and Tibet, to the less well known regions of Latin America, Africa, and Oceania.
The Copy Generic
An illuminating look at the concept of the generic and its role in making meaning in the world. From off-brand products to elevator music, the “generic” is discarded as the copy, the knockoff, and the old. In The Copy Generic, anthropologist Scott MacLochlainn insists that more than the waste from the culture machine, the generic is a universal social tool, allowing us to move through the world with necessary blueprints, templates, and frames of reference. It is the baseline and background, a category that orders and values different types of specificity yet remains inherently nonspecific in itself. Across arenas as diverse as city planning, social media, ethnonationalism, and religion, the generic points to spaces in which knowledge is both overproduced and desperately lacking. Moving through ethnographic and historical settings in the Philippines, Europe, and the United States, MacLochlainn reveals how the concept of the generic is crucial to understanding how things repeat, circulate, and are classified in the world.
Haunted Modernities
In 1973 twenty-five young women drowned in a ferry accident on their way to work in factories in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone. Their remains were recovered and interred collectively in what came to be called the Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb. Without a husband’s ancestral hall where they would have been laid to rest, the spirits of these unmarried women were considered homeless and possibly vengeful, and so the Maiden Ladies Tomb was viewed as a place to be avoided—especially by young men traveling alone, fearful of encountering a female ghost searching for a husband. Over the years, numerous plans were made to revamp the tomb site; finally, in 2008, at the urging of loca...
