Doctoral Dissertation Research: Moral and Ethical Resilience in Response to Institutional Secularization

世俗条件和宗教愿望之间的争论是当代许多政治冲突和争端的核心。这个项目考察了宗教身份和实践是如何受到机构世俗化新形式的影响和适应的。通常，研究人员得出结论，世俗主义需要对宗教生活进行法律和行政干预。这个项目训练一名研究生如何进行严格的以经验为基础的科学实地考察，它询问在世俗治理异常强大的背景下，是否存在其他形式的制度和个人弹性。它还有助于我们理解世界上对美国政治和经济至关重要的地区的社会和宗教变化。杨申，在波士顿大学罗伯特·韦勒的指导下，将探索制度世俗化与宗教认同之间的联系，以及那些被定性为放弃者的人如何调和他们的修道主义与他们的宗教认同。该项目将确定构成佛教修道作为当代现象的关键参考点的文化假设、社会结构和关系以及历史进程，并研究佛教修道如何为公众提供构建替代生活世界的词汇和空间。这项研究是基于对中国东部单一地点的三种不同背景下的中国佛教寺院的民族志研究：以仪式为导向的寺庙，以行政为中心的佛教协会和大学形式的佛教学院。该项目将通过采用包括参与式观察、半结构化访谈和重点访谈在内的民族志方法，并以当地学术为基础，分析和比较这三个子机构如何以不同的方式思考、表现和维持一种放弃的生活方式。本项目建立在当前宗教人类学和伦理人类学领域的争论基础上，以解决有关社会文化系统的弹性和稳健性的问题。在严谨的比较方法的帮助下，它将挑战当前在社会理论和公共话语中普遍存在的将宗教身份本质化的趋势，并提供新的方法来研究宗教身份如何通过宗教愿望和宗教机构之间的持续相互作用而形成。该项目将帮助其他研究人员了解宗教演员如何适应不断变化的社会结构和条件。该项目还将以更灵活的方式促进我们对陌生传统中宗教行为者的机构建设努力的了解，并更好地了解宗教机构的运作及其自我转变的方式。

The contestation between secular conditions and religious aspirations is at the heart of many contemporary political conflicts and disputes. This project examines how religious identities and practices are influenced by, and adapt to, new forms of institutional secularization. Ordinarily, researchers have concluded that secularism entails legal and administrative intervention into religious life. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, asks whether there are other forms of institutional and personal resilience in a context where secular governance is exceptionally strong. It also helps us to understand social and religious change in a part of the world that is critical politically and economically to the U.S. Yang Shen, under the supervision of Robert Weller of Boston University, will explore the link between institutional secularization and religious identity, and how those characterized as renouncers reconcile their monasticism with their religious identities. The project will identify the cultural assumptions, social structures and relations, and historical processes that constitute the key points of reference of Buddhist monasticism as a contemporary phenomenon, and also examine how Buddhist monasticism provides the public with a vocabulary and a space for constructing alternate life-worlds. The study is based on ethnographic research in three different contexts of Chinese Buddhist monasticism at a single site in East China: ritual-oriented temples, administration-centered Buddhist associations, and university-fashioned Buddhist academies. The project will analyze and compare how these three sub-institutions differently meditate, represent, and sustain a renunciatory way of life, by adopting a combination of ethnographic methods including participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and focused interviews, as well as building on local scholarship. This project builds on the current debates in the field of anthropology of religion and the anthropology of ethics to address questions regarding the resilience and robustness of socio-cultural systems. Aided by rigorous comparative methodology, it will challenge the current pervasive tendency to essentialize religious identity, in social theory as well as in public discourses, and instead offers new approaches to how religious identity forms through the continuous interplay between religious aspiration and religious institution. The project will help other researchers to understand how religious actors adapt in the face of changing social structures and conditions. The project will also advance our understanding of the institution-building efforts of religious actors in unfamiliar traditions in a more flexible way, and to understand better the workings of religious institutions and the ways in which they also transform themselves.