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| Book Review: "Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New Zealand," by Sally McAra | ||
| 作者 | Shannan, Jonathan H. |
|---|---|
| 出處題名 | American Ethnologist |
| 卷期 | v.37 n.3 |
| 出版日期 | 2010.07 |
| 頁次 | 613 - 614 |
| 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 | Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New Zealand. By Sally McAra. University of Hawai`i Press, 2007. 208 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8248-2996-4 |
| 摘要 | Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New Zealand . McAra, Sally . Honolulu : University of Hawai`i Press , 2007 . 208 pp . In Land of Beautiful Vision Sally McAra explores how a community of Buddhist converts organizes itself in contemporary New Zealand. She asks, how do people imagine and reimagine their connections to place in an era marked by mobility and nomadic subjectivities? What is the role of settler history in forming the conjuncture of white (Pâkehâ) and indigenous (Mâori) spiritual traditions and relationships to place in modern New Zealand? What is the role of material culture in negotiating the vernacularization of a universalist spiritual tradition? She addresses these and other issues through a compelling mixture of narrative analysis, reflexive ethnography, and historical research to present a thorough picture of the contradictions as well as hopes involved in the creation of a community of Buddhist practitioners in New Zealand. In the process her study sheds light on what happens to the people and the locale to which Buddhism is brought, as well as what happens to Buddhist practices when transplanted into a New Zealand spiritual landscape already inhabited with spirits and a charged history of colonial and postcolonial transformations. Chapter 1, “A New Tradition,” situates the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (referred to throughout somewhat infelicitously as FWBO) in the context of Buddhist practices in Europe and Asia. She traces the origins of the group in the British convert Sangharakshita (né Dennis Lingwood) and its subsequent growth to become among the largest Buddhist communities in Britain. The order is steeped in notions of personal growth and self awareness as pathways to Enlightenment, befitting, as the author notes, the high modernist character of many groups competing in the contemporary spiritual marketplace. The author includes herself in this chapter as a fellow seeker, a fourth‐generation “Pâkehâ” (European New Zealander) who maintains an open and eclectic attachment to Buddhist practice and was for a time a member of the FWBO group. In chapter 2, “Unplugging from the Grid,” McAra outlines the character of religious practice and the role of Buddhism in New Zealand, then traces the complex arc of the establishment of the FWBO community center called Sudarshanaloka outside of the city of Auckland. She reveals the contradictions inherent in the plan to create a space of spiritual transformation in a land already inhabited by indigenous spirits. For the FWBO members, the relationship with the land is both central to their creation of a spiritual home and a highly charged arena for playing out colonial and postcolonial tensions in New Zealand society. These themes are further explored in chapter 3, “A Spiritual Home,” which examines the sometimes tense relationships between the FWBO centers in Britain and New Zealand, and between European New Zealanders (who often self‐identify as Pâkehâ) and indigenous New Zealanders (Mâori), especially in terms of their relationships to place and the larger question of whether Pâkehâ can ever truly be considered as “natives.” Thus, Sudarshanaloka becomes a locus for struggles over what it means not only to be a Buddhist in New Zealand but also a Pâkehâ because most Buddhist in New Zealand are of settler background. McAra implies that in many ways the assertion of a national Pâkehâ identity through attachment to the land—a form of settler indigenization—is a direct response to Mâori attempts to reclaim their rights to the land. The FWBO center thus becomes a site for the negotiation of these contradictions. The heart of the text lies in chapters 4 (“Unsettling Place”) and 5 (“The Stûpa Is Dhardo”). Here McAra explores the spiritual and ecological sensitivities of the growing community. Her argument centers on the establishment of Sudarshanaloka and the reconceptualization of the land as Buddhist space. Giv |
| ISSN | 00940496 (P); 15481425 (E) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01274_24.x |
| 點閱次數 | 109 |
| 建檔日期 | 2017.05.23 |
| 更新日期 | 2020.02.11 |
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