Doctoral Dissertation Research: Moral and Ethical Resilience in Response to Institutional Secularization

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

The contestation between secular conditions and religious aspirations is at the heart of many contemporary political conflicts and disputes. This project examines how religious identities and practices are influenced by, and adapt to, new forms of institutional secularization. Ordinarily, researchers have concluded that secularism entails legal and administrative intervention into religious life. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, asks whether there are other forms of institutional and personal resilience in a context where secular governance is exceptionally strong. It also helps us to understand social and religious change in a part of the world that is critical politically and economically to the U.S. Yang Shen, under the supervision of Robert Weller of Boston University, will explore the link between institutional secularization and religious identity, and how those characterized as renouncers reconcile their monasticism with their religious identities. The project will identify the cultural assumptions, social structures and relations, and historical processes that constitute the key points of reference of Buddhist monasticism as a contemporary phenomenon, and also examine how Buddhist monasticism provides the public with a vocabulary and a space for constructing alternate life-worlds. The study is based on ethnographic research in three different contexts of Chinese Buddhist monasticism at a single site in East China: ritual-oriented temples, administration-centered Buddhist associations, and university-fashioned Buddhist academies. The project will analyze and compare how these three sub-institutions differently meditate, represent, and sustain a renunciatory way of life, by adopting a combination of ethnographic methods including participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and focused interviews, as well as building on local scholarship. This project builds on the current debates in the field of anthropology of religion and the anthropology of ethics to address questions regarding the resilience and robustness of socio-cultural systems. Aided by rigorous comparative methodology, it will challenge the current pervasive tendency to essentialize religious identity, in social theory as well as in public discourses, and instead offers new approaches to how religious identity forms through the continuous interplay between religious aspiration and religious institution. The project will help other researchers to understand how religious actors adapt in the face of changing social structures and conditions. The project will also advance our understanding of the institution-building efforts of religious actors in unfamiliar traditions in a more flexible way, and to understand better the workings of religious institutions and the ways in which they also transform themselves.