Saturday, October 16, 2010, 2:30pm – 3:30pm
“Separate Communities in Thailand’s International Meditation Centers.”
Brooke Schedneck (Arizona State University). Paul Numrich and Wendy Cadge have written about the phenomenon of parallel congregations in American Buddhist temples, where native-born American practitioners were involved in the same temple space as Asian-Americans, yet each group participated in different activities at different times. The American-born practitioners mainly use the temple space to practice meditation while the Asian-Americans mainly participated in ceremonies. My research draws on this scholarship to analyze a similar phenomenon in Thailand taking root in international meditation centers, which host both Thai and foreign meditators. Instead of parallel congregations, I use the term separate communities, since both Thai and foreign groups are involved in similar activities and follow similar schedules yet form distinct communities. This phenomenon is more complex than in North America because in Thailand both groups meditate, live, and eat together. It is the difference in practices such as orientation, receiving the precepts, interviews and instruction, chanting and bowing, which constitute a more subtle and complicated expression of separate communities. During my field research at each site, I drew on ethnographic methods of participant-observation and open-ended interviews with meditation teachers. For this paper I use my fieldwork from three centers in Chiangmai, Thailand, which use the same meditation method and are under the authority of the same teacher, yet each expresses the idea of separate communities in different ways. I conclude that even in a Buddhist country, the Euro-Americans that I primarily focus on still constitute a separate group that are accommodated for by the international meditation centers of Thailand. Because of their non-familiarity with the culture and traditions of Thai Buddhism, they are treated as a separate community by the teachers and among themselves. My research will investigate Euro-American meditators’ experiences when they are considered the ‘ethnic’ and how living within a Thai Buddhist meditation center and temple presents unfamiliar challenges to their cultural background. All of this encourages and allows them to form separate communities from the Thai meditators who live and practice alongside them.
“Are You Buddhist?: ‘Westerners’ in India Travelling on the Path of the Buddha.”
François Thibeault (Université du Québec à Montréal). Based on field research and interviews conducted with “Westerners” in India from December 2009 to June 2010, this paper focuses on identity with reference to Buddhism in general and to tradition in particular. From the outset, the concept “Westerner” is relativized within the framework of globalization and travel. Two general groups of people were constituted while realizing the interviews: people practising Tibetan Buddhism, and people practising Vipassana meditation within the tradition of S. N. Goenka. The practitioners of the former group usually choose the Buddhist identity for themselves, and ascribe it to their tradition. Those of the latter group generally reject the Buddhist identity, both from the individual and the collective standpoints. The analysis of how each group observes itself and the other sheds light on the social reality of “Buddhism.” The formation of identity implies how one communicates about oneself to others, and how communications about Buddhism stemming from particular traditions shape one’s relation with “the” Buddhist identity. I hold that the distinctions between the two groups of practitioners (with regard to calling oneself a Buddhist or not) are located within and beyond the modernism-traditionalism dichotomy. By discussing the notion of a “global Buddhist system,” I propose to look at “Buddhism in the global society” from a non-typological perspective different from that offered by the “two Buddhisms” model (which poses objective distinctions between a “Western-convert” Buddhism and an “Asian-ethnic” Buddhism).
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