Communities of Absence: Emotions, Time, and Buddhism in the Creation of Belonging

Erica Baffelli,Frederik Schröer

doi:10.1163/15685276-12341635

Erica Baffelli, Frederik Schröer

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1163/15685276-12341635

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Abstract

Abstract This article argues that belonging can be characterized by absence. It explores this as experienced in two different geographical and historical contexts by two groups of actors: members of the early Tibetan diaspora in India (1959–1979) and former members of a religious group (Aum Shinrikyō) in Japan. The absence we conceptualize is double: it is not solely a spatial absence, but also a temporal absence in terms of the irreversibility of time. It is felt and articulated through emotions that play decisive roles in the constitution and sustaining of these communities. These communities as feeling communities are characterized by absence, but absence is simultaneously what makes them a community. This simultaneity allows our actors to create complex temporal frameworks by relating to reimagined pasts, different presents, and potential futures. Therefore, the article contributes to discussions of belonging by retheorizing the relationship between absence, emotions, and time.

Highlights

This article argues that belonging can be characterized by absence
Erica Baffelli works on new religious communities in Japan through interviews and the analysis of media practices, while Frederik Schröer is a historian of the early Tibetan diaspora in India, tracing its central concepts and emotions in discourse and practice through archival and public sources
In the case of the early Tibetan diaspora in India, we find a very different set of temporal relations becoming central to the feeling community

Summary

Moving into Absence

The formation of “communities of absence” can start with a distinct moment or event that creates a separation between what was there before and a new, radically different, condition characterized by absence. The account of her arduous escape into exile, like many of these early texts, uses moments of backward glancing to conceive of home and the left behind homeland as beautiful, pure, and far “above” the rest of the world As such, it reproduces tropes of a morally pure religious Tibet in isolation that connect to both Tibetan and Western concepts of the hidden “Shangri-la / Shambhala.” Such backward glances, written from the perspective of exile, anticipate the growing spatial and temporal distance, as when Taring recounts: “It was a beautiful spring morning, without wind, and still I could see the faraway hills of Lhasa. The feeling communities in which these emotions played dominant roles became communities of absence

Living in Absence

Conclusion