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

密歇根大学博士生金黎将在埃里克·米格勒博士的指导下，探索宗教主题是如何通过与新的宗教话语和物质对象的相遇而形成和转化的。这项研究调查了后共产主义时代藏传佛教和中国佛教徒之间的遭遇，提出了以下问题：为什么藏族僧侣在复兴佛教时会包括汉人(占主导地位的中国民族)？为什么这么多城市中国人放弃了国家培育的世俗主义世界观，转而皈依藏传佛教？李通过研究藏传佛教宁玛派的一个传统来解决这些问题。Gter是一个土著术语，指的是探索，它汇集了风景、物质、人类行走和新的宗教想象和解释等领域。它最终形成了新的佛教科目，将西藏和中国之间的宗教联系编织在一起。本研究将结合人种学的方法：参与者观察、半结构访谈、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寻宝创造的宗教领域如何被视为一个集合体，它是通过人与物的相遇逐渐形成的。通过这样做，它将增加社会科学对转化中所示的学科形成与更广阔的物质世界之间关系的理解。这项研究具有重要意义，因为它将为人类学中的宗教理论化提供一种新的途径。它还将提供有关西藏和中国佛教徒之间新出现的互动的数据，这一现象可能会让人们以不同的方式想象西藏和中国之间令人担忧的关系。鉴于西藏与中国冲突的60年历史，以及关于谁领导藏传佛教的持续争议，中国世俗主义者皈依藏传佛教的现象具有广泛的影响。在中国经济日益依赖与共产主义基本前提相悖的资本主义模式之际，重要的是要理解，世俗主义的中国人越来越多地皈依任何宗教，尤其是与一个有争议领土的政治独立如此密切相关的宗教。支持这项研究也支持研究生的教育。

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.