VIRTUE · Wealth, Virtue and Social Justice in Contemporary Tibet
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-01 → 2019-08-31
- EU contribution
- €200,195
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Wealth, Virtue and Social Justice in Contemporary Tibet
The VIRTUE project examined the relationship between Buddhism and ideas about wealth, virtue and the social good in contemporary Tibet, a ‘Buddhist’ society experiencing rapid state-led development, rising consumption levels and growing inequalities. As China has become richer, funds have flowed to monasteries on the Tibetan plateau. Growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism among affluent urban Chinese has been an important factor, but there has also been an upsurge in local religious giving concurrent with growing wealth and wealth disparities. Tibetans have poured resources – in some cases the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of euros – into a wave of new religious construction and escalating levels of expenditure on rituals and sponsorship of monastic events. Supporting the monastic community and building temples are among the most common forms of Buddhist generosity practice. Yet, their recent dynamics and scale have been the subject of critique and debate, including among monks and laypeople who have participated. Previous scholarship has examined doctrinal, sociological and economic dimensions of the Buddhist gift, while the ethnographic record gives us some insight into the diversity of religious giving. However, the idea that individuals and communities might make reflective decisions or judgments about the value of particular forms or modes of giving – and that these might change over time – has received little attention. When, why and how have religious-economic practices come to be the subject of moral reflection, debate and critique? What this can reveal more generally about Tibetan experiences of development and (changing?) conceptions of the relationship between wealth, virtue and the social good? How might this research on Buddhism and Tibet contribute to wider debates about value and exchange, commodity and gift, and religion and economy in the contemporary world?
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project examines the relationship between Buddhism and ideas about wealth, virtue and social justice in contemporary Tibet. The objectives are: a) to reveal central moral assumptions about value and the social good in a ‘Buddhist’ society experiencing rapid development, rising consumption levels and growing inequalities; and b) to use these findings to engage with wider theoretical debates about value and exchange, commodity and gift, and religion and economy. The relationship between Buddhism and economy remains an underdeveloped research area – indeed my project coincides with a drive at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies to address this gap. Although often imagined to be antithetical to contemporary consumer society, Buddhism has historically been intertwined with the economy and monasteries were dominant political and economic institutions in Tibet. In recent years increasing wealth has been flowing to Tibetan monasteries and monks in a hitherto unexamined variety of forms and modes, some of which have been the subject of moral reflection and critique. This upsurge in patronage has paralleled rising income and consumption levels, but also increasing inequalities, resulting from processes of Chinese state-led development. Utilising a unique and extensive body of ethnographic materials that I have collected during long-term fieldwork in north-eastern Tibet, I will document and analyse a variety of cases of patronage of Tibetan monastic Buddhism in their local contexts. Drawing for inspiration on the ‘moral turn’ in anthropology, my aim is to identify and analyse points of ethical reflection, tension and debate at the interface between Buddhism and economy. My hypothesis is that this will reveal underlying ideas about value and the social good; and that this will in turn help us to revisit and reassess both our understanding of Buddhism and theories of exchange, value and consumption dominated by economistic approaches.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET · KOBENHAVNCoordinatorDenmark
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/747673
- https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres/centre-for-contemporary-buddhist-studies/
Data: CORDIS, © European Union