 |
|
| Book Review: "Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas," by Kim Gutschow | ||
| 作者 | Shneiderman, Sara |
|---|---|
| 出處題名 | American Ethnologist |
| 卷期 | v.37 n.3 |
| 出版日期 | 2010.07 |
| 頁次 | 605 - 606 |
| 出版者 | American Ethnological Society (AES) |
| 出版者網址 | http://americanethnologist.org/archives/ |
| 出版地 | New York, NY, US [紐約, 紐約州, 美國] |
| 資料類型 | 期刊論文=Journal Article; 書評=Book Review |
| 使用語言 | 英文=English |
| 附註項 | Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas. By Kim Gutschow. Harvard University Press, July 15, 2004. 376 pages. ISBN-10: 0674012879 ISBN-13: 978-0674012875 |
| 摘要 | Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas . Gutschow, Kim . Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press , 2004 . 360 pp . Nuns in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition are subordinate to their male counterparts—from the Dalai Lama down to the youngest monastic initiate—because monks maintain a self‐replicating upper hand in the gendered economy of merit that undergirds Buddhist life in the Himalayas. So argues Kim Gutschow in this important contribution to the anthropology of Buddhism, which challenges the dominance of such gender‐determined structures of inequality by documenting them in vivid ethnographic detail. Gutschow's description of the lives of Buddhist nuns in Zangskar, a mountainous region of India's Jammu and Kashmir state, reads as a matter‐of‐fact account of the material realities that lead to women's socioeconomic exclusion from the top levels of Buddhist institutional life in practice rather than as an abstract theological critique of Buddhism's ambivalence toward gender. This approach does much to “parse a middle way” (p. 220) through the polarized terrain of extant scholarship on Buddhist women, much of which falls into one of two camps: “those who seek to deconstruct Buddhism for its innate sexism and those who search to recuperate its most usable aspect” (p. 220). Being a Buddhist Nun adds substantively to our ethnographic knowledge of gender, economics, and kinship in the Himalayas and South Asia, as well as to theoretical debates over the relationships between theological ideals and institutional practice, ritual and social power, and economic and symbolic capital. Despite a long‐standing scholarly and popular interest in the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns, which has generated several articles and memoirs (i.e., Anna Grimshaw's 1994Servants of the Buddha)—not to mention films, websites, and nonprofit projects—this is the first full‐length ethnography to at once engage with Himalayan nuns’ experiences in depth and situate them within a broader social field that extends beyond the nunnery walls. Hanna Havnevik's 1989 monograph focuses on the structure of a nunnery within a South Indian Tibetan refugee community but does not explore the questions of economic and familial relationality with the surrounding monastic and lay communities that comprise Gutschow's primary focus. For this reason alone, Gutschow's book will quickly become required reading for students of the anthropology of Buddhism and the Himalayas, as well as for students of comparative religion who seek to understand the social dynamics that shape Buddhist lives, both male and female. Two initial chapters locate Gutschow's work within the broader fields of Buddhist and South Asian Studies, respectively. The latter contains valuable ruminations on the pernicious role of caste within Buddhist communities that are often wrongly presumed to be egalitarian. It also argues for the value of engaging with individual Himalayan communities on their own historical and political terms, rather than collapsing them into the overused and underspecified rubric of “Tibetan societies.” Chapters 3 and 4 on “The Buddhist Economy of Merit” and “The Buddhist Traffic in Women” contain the heart of Gutschow's argument, and display her ethnographic and analytical skill at its best. She demonstrates how the Buddhist ideology of merit—which in theory does not discriminate between rich and poor because the spiritual value of generosity is supposedly calibrated to relative rather than absolute means—in practice leads to the consolidation of wealth among a privileged few, whom in the case of Zangskar are always men. Because monks are perceived as occupying higher‐status positions than nuns (because of a complex set of historical, social, and theological conditions), laypeople perceive the former as more productive fields of merit and, therefore, concentrate ever greater economic and ritual power in the hands of the alread |
| ISSN | 00940496 (P); 15481425 (E) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01274_18.x |
| 點閱次數 | 82 |
| 建檔日期 | 2017.05.23 |
| 更新日期 | 2020.02.11 |
建議您使用 Chrome, Firefox, Safari(Mac) 瀏覽器能獲得較好的檢索效果，IE不支援本檢索系統。
