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

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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.