CO-EXISTENCE · Buddhist-Muslim interactions/relations in Zanskar Valley (Ladakh District, Northwest India) under the impact of the Indian State, a globalising market and world-religious orthodoxies

Final Report Summary - CO-EXISTENCE (Buddhist-Muslim interactions / relations in Zanskar Valley (Ladakh District, north-west India) under the impact of the Indian State, a globalising market and world

For several decades, the Indian Federal State of Jammu-Kashmir has witnessed the political tensions between the Muslim majority and representatives of the Indian State erupting into outright violence. No attention has been paid, however, to communities in the region, in which for centuries a peaceful co-existence between adherents of Islam and Buddhism has been the standard social praxis. As a result, we have insufficient analytical insights into the social conditions and their ideological foundations that make such local societies resistant to an increasing religious fundamentalism of any kind, hence preclude such violence to erupt in the first place. The research reported here has addressed precisely this question. It focused on the socio-cultural dynamics of multi-religious communities in the region, in which the absolutist exclusiveness of world-religious discourses - including the political aspirations grounded in them - is rejected in favour of communal identities, which transcend the different world-religious identities of their members. To that end the researches of south-east Asian states and societies, conducted at the Institute of Social Anthropology and the Institute of Political Sciences of the University of Muenster have been employed as heuristic and explanatory models. Zanskar Valley is situated in the Himalayan Range to the southwest of Tibet, to the South of Afghanistan and to the Southeast of Pakistan. For centuries its population of some 13 000 Zanskari (a Tibeto-Burman language) speakers has been composed of both Sunni-Muslims and Mahayana-Buddhists. They interact in the context of ritualised exchange processes within the community, whereas the Muslims of old mediated the external political and economic relationships between the Tibetan-speaking Zanskar Kingdom and the Urdu-speaking Mogul empire, ensuring both the political independence of the former from the latter and a smooth supra-regional caravan-conducted trade. Also after the formal dismantling of the local kingdoms under the Indian State Constitution such functional differentiations of tasks and the ritualised exchange processes did not cease to be relevant. As a result the Zanskar Valley still stands out as a case of peaceful co-existence between two world religions. In spite of the fact that their respective theological orthodoxies would exclude one another, their adherents contribute to the maintenance of social cohesion and a ritual system of social reproduction. The Valley offered a privileged case to research the socio-cultural conditions under which such multi-religious communities function in practice. The researcher Dr Salomé Deboos therefore investigated the socio-cultural dynamics of the multi-religious communities of Zanskar, Leh and Kargil, in which communal identities transcend the different world-religious identities of their members. Instead of focusing exclusively on the processes of religious radicalisation and orthodox religious separation, the Dr Deboos' research concentrated on the social and ritual conditions that have counteracted - and in Zanskar Valley still counteract - such processes in the context of a North Indian Buddhist-Islamic population. Dr Deboos aimed to develop insights that would generate a precise understanding of the conditions, under which the prevailing forms of interreligious social cohesion yield to, respectively counteract, a radical separation between world-religious orthodoxies. These processes were not primarily studied from the angle of external political and/or economic influences and pressures on a local society ('radicalisation from without'), but from that of the social logic of their ritually enacted processes of exchange and reproduction. Employing an internal perspective ('resistance from within') the research produced an understanding of the social dynamics of communities that had upheld and valorised religious co-existence for centuries. Applying models from both social anthropological and political science researches of different Asian States and societies enabled Dr Deboos to bridge the gap between different disciplinary and theoretical approaches and thus contributed to a trans-regional understanding of the processes of cultural identity construction and the role of religious identity building in them. The fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between social anthropologists, political scientists and historians working on Asia at Muenster University provided a unique research environment. Taking part in training and research programmes at the Institutes of Social Anthropology and of Political Sciences enabled Dr Deboos to broaden the scope of her expertise in several ways. Firstly, by studying the advanced theoretical models developed from the comparative social anthropological analysis of South and south-east Asian multi-religious local societies it enabled her to deepen her analytical understanding of the social, political and economic effects of the current interreligious dynamics in the Himalayan region. Secondly, by applying the political science models - developed in the Muenster research group 'Transformation and conflict' - of the political interactions at regional, national and international levels in Asia to the political processes taking place in the research area Dr Deboos contextualised these processes within the regional and national political dynamics of the Federal State of Jammu-Kashmir and of the State of India and its neighbours. Conversely, she was able to bring in her expertise on the Himalayan region into the research programme 'Anthropolitics' run by social anthropologists and political scientists, thus contributing to their comparative analyses of the interreligious dynamics in Asia. The training and research supervision received at Muenster University thus provided an upgrading of Dr Deboos' theoretical interdisciplinary competence and methodological research skills, paving the way for a Habilitation focusing on this research project. In addition to the supplementary training programme in 'soft skills' (such as fundraising, project management, data presentation) that Muenster University has agreed to offer, these were the indispensable requirements for the successful professorial career in academia that was pursued. For further information please see http:// www.uni-muenster.de/ Ethnologie/forschen/projekte/project11.html online.

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