Professor Raphaël Liogier, from the Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, will present a keynote address for the conference, “Buddhism in Canada: Global Causes, Local Conditions”:
“Buddhism and the Hypothesis on Individuo-globalism”
Date: Saturday, October 16, 2010
Time: 5:00pm – 6:15pm
Place:Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Auditorium
In the advanced industrial countries, new religious movements (NRMs) are often presented as expressions of the deregulation of belief systems, or as manifestations of the atomisation of belief. Research carried out within the framework of the Observatoire du Religieux (World Religion Watch) over the last decade seems however clearly to demonstrate that, in contradistinction with the idea of a multi-coloured, chaotic patchwork of diversity reigning among new religious groups, and despite or beyond surface phenomena, on the contrary the NRM display a fast-developing trend towards an increasingly widespread dogmatic uniformity common to most advanced industrial countries, a phenomenon which we have already designated under the umbrella term of individuo-globalism’. I first had the intuition that there was a multiplication of religious ways of believing or religious aesthetics, rather than any phenomenon of a true plurality of beliefs, when working on the westernization of Buddhism some fifteen years ago. More precisely the idea occurred to me after analyzing a long interview I had carried out with a Zen Buddhist who, to substantiate his choice of what he posited as his practice, stated that Zen was quintessentially sober, black and white, strict, straight, that everything was a question of posture, etc. I was unable to detect anything in his discourse related specifically to Buddhist doctrine, or even remotely so. Later on, among westerners adopting Tibetan Buddhism, I was to observe something of a roughly similar nature. Conversely, in Tibetan Buddhism, such subjects will tend to appreciate the colourful atmosphere, the music, the fact that one dresses in purple, that one can sit however one likes, that you are even (in some groups) free to leave the meditation room when you feel like it (which would be inconceivable in the middle of any Zen teaching seminar). It appeared, in fact, that western Buddhism is at the center of the construction and diffusion of this new, uniform religious orthodoxy (belief system), specific to advanced industrial societies, with its multiple (essentially 3) ways of believing (that is, religious aesthetics). This is related to the process of cultural globalization in which westernized Buddhism is widely participating.
Professor Raphaël Liogier is the Director of the Observatoire du religieux (Religious Observatory) and of the Masters Program for Religion and Society at the University of Aix-Marseille (France), where he teaches Sociology and Theory of Knowledge. He received his research-based masters degree in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and his PhD (National doctorate) in Sociology (Aix-Marseille University). He has published over 40 articles and eight books, including:
- Être bouddhiste en France aujourd’hui (Being Buddhist in France Today, Hachette, 1997), which was the first sociological inquiry on Buddhism in France;
- Le bouddhisme mondialisé: Une perspective sociologique sur la globalisation du religieux (Globalized Buddhism: A Sociological Perspective on the Globalization of Religions Ellipses, 2004); and
- Une laïcité « légitime »: La France et ses religions d’Etat (A “Legitimate” Secularism: France and its State, Entrelacs, 2006), relating to beliefs, religious manifestations, and the ambiguous relationships between science and religion as well as between politics and religion.
For the last 15 years, Liogier’s research has focused on Western Buddhism and New Religious Movements in the West. He is an official expert in Social Sciences for the European Commission founding projects. He is the founder of the English website world-religion-watch.org. More recently, Liogier’s research concentrates on the sociological evolutions of beliefs in ultramodern societies, and, in a more philosophical perspective, the cognitive basis and the meanings of beliefs. In his forthcoming book, Souci de soi: Conscience du monde (Care of the Self: Consciousness of the World), due in March 2011 with Armand Colin publishers, he argues that a new mythology is spreading in a more and more uniform way across advanced industrial societies. He will organize the 31st Congress of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion at his university in July 2011 on the theme he proposed: Religion and Economy in a Global World (http://conference.sisr-issr.org/).
This event of the Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program is made possible by the generous support of The Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation, in collaboration with the Institute of Asian Research and the Department of Asian Studies. Additional funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Numata Foundation.
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