Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Religious Revivalism, Conversion, and Materiality in a Post-Communist Context

博士论文改进补助金：后共产主义背景下的宗教复兴主义、皈依和物质性

• 批准号: 1322330
• 负责人: Erik Mueggler
• 金额: $ 2.1万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-15 至 2015-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1322330&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Improvement; Grant; Religious

University of Michigan doctoral candidate Jin Li, supervised by Dr. Erik Mueggler, will explore how religious subjects are formed and transformed through the encounter with new religious discourses and material objects. Investigating the encounter between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists in the post-Communist era, this research poses the following questions: Why have Tibetan monks included Han Chinese (the dominant Chinese ethnicity) in their revival of Buddhism? Why have so many urban Chinese abandoned the secularist worldview cultivated by the state to convert to Tibetan Buddhism? Li addresses the questions by looking into a tradition in the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism, known as gter. Gter is an indigenous term for exploration that brings together the domains of landscape, materiality, human wayfaring and new religious imagination and interpretation. It has eventually formed new Buddhist subjects who weave together the religious ties between Tibet and China. This research will involve a combination of ethnographic methods: participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival research, analysis of conversion narratives and focus groups. The goal of these investigations is to understand how the religious domain created by treasure hunting can be seen as an assembly, which gradually comes into being through encounters between humans and things. In doing so, it will increase social scientific understanding of the relationship between subject formation, as indicated in conversion, and the broader material world. This research is important because it will provide a new way for theorizing religion in anthropology. It will also provide data on the newly emerged interaction between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists, a phenomenon that can give a different way to imagine the fraught relationships between Tibet and China. Given the 60 year history of the Tibet-China conflict and ongoing disputes about who leads Tibetan Buddhism, the phenomena of secularist Chinese converting to Tibetan Buddhism has wide-ranging implications. At a time when the Chinese economy is increasingly dependent on a capitalist model at odds with the fundamental premise of communism, it is important to understand the growing conversion of secularist Chinese to any religion, particularly one tied so closely to political independence of a disputed territory. Supporting this research also supports the education of a graduate student.

密歇根大学博士候选人Jin Li，由Erik Mueggler博士监督，将通过与新的宗教话语和物质对象的相遇来探讨如何形成和转变宗教主题。在调查后共产主义时代藏族与中国佛教徒之间的相遇时，这项研究提出了以下问题：为什么藏族僧侣在复兴佛教的复兴中包括汉族中国人（主要的中国种族）？为什么这么多城市中国人放弃了国家培养的世俗世界观转变为藏族佛教？李通过研究藏族佛教的宁玛教派中的传统来解决这些问题，称为格特。格特（Gter）是探索的土著术语，它汇集了景观，物质性，人类路线以及新的宗教想象和解释的领域。它最终成立了新的佛教主题，他们将西藏与中国之间的宗教联系结合在一起。这项研究将涉及民族志方法的结合：参与者观察，半结构化访谈，档案研究，转换叙事分析和焦点小组。这些调查的目的是了解如何将寻宝所创造的宗教领域视为一个集会，该领域逐渐通过人类与事物之间的相遇而逐渐成为大会。通过这样做，这将增加对主体形成之间关系的社会科学理解，如conversion依与更广泛的物质世界所示。这项研究很重要，因为它将为人类学的理论化提供一种新的方式。它还将提供有关藏族与中国佛教徒之间新出现的相互作用的数据，这种现象可以提供不同的方式来想象西藏与中国之间的关系。鉴于西藏 - 中国冲突的60年历史以及关于谁领导藏族佛教的持续争议，世俗主义中国人转变为藏族佛教的现象具有广泛的影响。 在中国经济越来越依赖于共产主义基本前提的资本主义模式的时候，重要的是要了解世俗主义中国人向任何宗教的conversion依日益增长的conversion依，尤其是一种与有争议领土的政治独立性紧密相关的宗教。支持这项研究还支持研究生的教育。