Week Seven - Religion

Rituals & Politics of Life and Death

Frederick Klaits Assistant Professor at University of Buffalo

Dr. Klaits' animating questions center on why, how, and with what consequences people
come to feel that their well-being is or is not bound up with that of others. His research
investigates these issues in medical, religious, and political dimensions.

Carole McGranahan Professor of Anthropology, History,

and Tibetan Studies at the University of Colorado

Thinking of 20th-21st century Tibet histories and

experiences as imperial in a global sense in relation to the
CIA, British India, and the People’s Republic of China is a
key part of McGranahan’s work.

Sara Lewis Elizabeth Luce Moore Postdoctoral Fellow

Anthropologist of religion and medicine specializing in Tibet and South Asia. Teaches in
the area of religion, healing and medicine. Her courses are interdisciplinary and engage
approaches and methods in anthropology, religion, Buddhist Studies, and global health.
Asking as Giving: Apostolic Prayers and
the Aesthetics of Well-Being in Botswana
● In Botswana, styles of asking constitute forms of giving
○ Through banter, the two parties establish their equality - the right to ask and to refuse
○ Forms of asking can signal the askee’s autonomy (i.e. Would you like to do X?)
○ Gives the other person a part of their self (voice, words)
● Prayers to God are a form of asking/giving
○ Spoken prayers can be ways of both entreating assistance from God and other people, and
asserting a capacity (which cannot be taken for granted) to make others speak and sing as
one wishes them to do.
○ Makes one’s voice and words lodge in one’s interlocutor → form of self-assertion
● Aspects of a range of verbal and non-verbal signs, acts, and gestures that
communicate persons' engagement in one another's well-being and ill-being
○ Serious requests for assistance → shows that interlocutor is viewed as equal
Trauma and the Making of Flexible Minds in the
Tibetan Exile Community
● Bio-looping as “the interplay between self and society [...] whereby
individuals change their behavior to match a culturally constituted category.
○ Tibetan methods of coping reverse the loop - support each other in the letting go of negative
emotions
○ Change the way one thinks when the situation cannot be changed
● Trauma is political - foundation of international human rights campaigns
● Methods of coping with suffering tied to Buddhist beliefs
○ Suffering as opportunity to purify bad karma
○ Lojong or “mind-training” techniques
■ Anger and resentment as harmful to oneself
■ The desire to take on the suffering of others
■ The impermanence and constant change of everything in reality
This is actually a quote by
Haruki Murakami.
Truth, Fear, and Lies: Exile Politics and
Arrested Histories of the Tibetan Resistance
● Concept of “historical arrest”
○ “The apprehension and detaining of particular pasts in anticipation of their eventual
release”
■ Not erased or forgotten, but archived for future use (p. 2)
○ “A practice in which pasts that clash with official ways of explaining nation, community, and
identity are arrested, in the multiple senses of being held back and, thus, delaying progress
but also, in the ironic sense, of drawing attention to these pasts.
○
● Need to create a coherent refugee community/identity
○ Tibetan world is divided by regional and religious affinities
○ Some nationalist histories are closely tied to various factions
■ Chushi Gangdrug resistance movement versus official Tibetan government
Truth, Fear, and Lies: Exile Politics and Arrested
Histories of the Tibetan Resistance
● History-making as based on cultural practices and conditions
○ Tibetan Buddhist tradition of “treasure teachings”
○ Devotion to the Dalai Lama and “the community-ordering principles and practices enacted
through him and by extension the exile government” (p. 8)
○ Attempts to suppress the cultural processes that facilitate remembering
Discussion questions
1. Is there something special about religion that enables its functions in the three
readings? Or, what distinguishes religion from other social institutions?
2. Religion did not seem to play such an overt role in the third reading on the
arrest of histories. What are the subtle ways in which religion patterns the
lives of these Tibetans?
3. For the reading on trauma, are there universal mental/physical conditions, or
are they all culturally-constituted categories? How may the encouragement of
each other to “let go” be considered a form of giving?
4. What would you have done if you were in the position of Frederick Klaits,
where he was asked to give his interlocutor a large sum of money to maintain
their friendship?