We are fortunate to have two prominent visiting scholars on religion and culture in Asia / Southeast Asia/ Indochina. It is an open seminar and you are all welcome to join us.
Date and Time: Thursday March 3rd, 2011 p.m.3:00-6:30
Place: Inamori Memorial Hall, 3rd floor, small meeting room II
http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/about/access_en.html
Topic: “Ritually Caring for the Dead in Contemporary Cambodia.”
Speaker: Professor John Clifford Holt, CSEAS Visiting Research Fellow from Bowdoin College
Topic: A Controversial Return from Exile: Moving the Body of an Anti-colonial Activist Back to Today’s Vietnam
Speaker: Professor Janet Hoskins , CSEAS Visiting Research Fellow from University of Southern California
*Professor John Holt is a specialist on religious cultures of the Theravada Buddhist tradition, and has authored many books on Buddhism in Sri Lanka and more recently in Laos (Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture). Rather than looking at doctrines and institutions, his interest is to look at popular rituals and practices, contextualized in social, economic and political dynamics.
*Professor Janet Hoskins is best known for her work on Sumba in Eastern Indonesia (The Play of Time:Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange 1993, winner of 1996 Harry J. Benda Prize). Her current work has been on Caodai religion as practiced both by Vietnamese in the U.S. as well as in Vietnam.
Abstract
"Ritually Caring for the Dead in Contemporary Cambodia" (Professor Holt)
My current book project, the one that I have been given to the opportunity to work on while taking up residence at the CSEAS, consists of a comparative study of lay Buddhist rituals in Sri Lanka, Burma,
Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. My theoretical aims are: 1) to analyze comparatively dimensions of Buddhist religious expression that have been relatively neglected previously in the field of Buddhist Studies; 2) to explore how the nature of popular lay Buddhist rituals are affected by and yet clearly articulate social, economic and political change; 3) to emphasize how these rites are generally more concerned religiously with the problem of assuaging proximate conditions of dukkha (unsatisfactoriness or suffering) rather than with teleological realizations of nibbana; and 4) to write a book on Theravada that is not primarily focused on doctrine, monasticism, meditation, or soteriology; instead, I am trying to provide a portrayal that is more reflective of how Buddhist religious culture is understood and practiced by preponderant masses of laity in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. The rites I am studying are rites that are generally regarded as the most popular public Buddhist rites in their respective countries. These include the asala perahara in Sri Lanka, kathina in Burma, pchum ben in Cambodia, pi mai in Laos, and bun phravet in Thailand. (I am not completely sure about my Thai focus yet.) During my seminar presentation, I will first explain how my experiences in Sri Lanka, especially with regard to observing the asala perahara, gave rise to my more general theoretical aims (as stated above). I will then proceed to the heart of the presentation, which is to give a reprise of the specific issues I am focusing on in my study of pchum ben, the annual 15-day ritual in which Khmer lay Buddhists ritually care for the dead, especially their deceased kin. I will describe the current liturgy and logic of the rite, the ritual’s historical vicissitudes (including its origins in ancient Indian brahmanical contexts, possible Chinese influences and reasons for its current ascending popularity), and what substantial aspects of the Buddhist religious path especially are in play.
"A Controversial Return from Exile: Moving the Body of an Anti-colonial Activist Back to Today’s Vietnam" (Professor Hosins)
Nationalist aspirations for a new nation were fused in early 20th century French Indochina with a new religious movement, Caodaism, that promised to reconcile East and West. Pham Cong Tac, the most famous
Caodaist leader, was charismatic and controversial, and his influence has been compared, both favorably and unfavorably, to that of a "Vietnamese Gandhi". This paper looks at his combination of ritual stagecraft and political statecraft to fuse them into a new vehicle for realizing autonomy under the French colonial regime.
The significance of his life story has resurfaced in contemporary Vietnam because of a relaxing of constraints on religion and the 2007 return of his remains to his homeland and the sacred city that he helped build. After half a century in exile in Cambodia, this move was part of an effort on the part of the Vietnamese government to normalize relations with religious groups, and especially those like Caodaism (Vietnam’s third largest religion, with 3-4 million followers) identified with an anti-communist history.
The presentation will include showing clips from a 2008 documentary “The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California” produced by Janet and Susan Hoskins which documents this controversy.
