Ritual Technologies Research Articles

Interpersonal Karma: A Note

It has been twenty years since Jonathan S. Walters sought to dislodge the ingrained understanding of karma as a purely individual phenomenon. Since then, interesting work has been done on this issue, but less than one might hope and much of it siloed, addressing either texts or ethnography, either this region or that one. One of the most exciting aspects of a recent symposium on lived karma was the opportunity to explore these issues with scholars of widely varied expertise. One theme that emerged is what I will term “interpersonal karma.” Across the Buddhist world, we find not only that our relationships are constituted by karmic affinities, but also that in many contexts those relationships are seen as the media through which karma unfolds. These understandings not only provide frameworks for interpreting relationships but underwrite ritual technologies through which people can form, maintain, or disperse these affinities.

Heartbreaking anthropology hurts: Studying fertility rituals while struggling with infertility

SummaryEthnography involves using the self as the mechanism to try to understand others and their life worlds. How is knowledge and knowledge production affected by the apparatus of knowing, the ethnographer experiencing cataclysms in their personal life? In this article, I grapple with the fraught dilemmas of doing fieldwork on mother goddesses and ritual cults premised on the cultivation of fertility while experiencing infertility and undergoing assisted reproductive treatments (ART). My recovery from pregnancy losses and fertility failures was compromised by my research on fertility, which continuously resurrected my trauma. Juxtaposing research on ritual technologies with personal experience of biomedical treatments—different means to overcome the limits of nature to bring about reproductive success—I foreground the ceding of human control and agency demanded by both therapies. My ethnographic writing similarly loosened to admit emotions, ambivalences, and absences that I had normally excluded or edited out. Even as it provokes theoretical insights, to keep probing ongoing personal trauma has become unbearable. To salve heartbreak and to salvage some control has warranted rebuilding a few of the enclosures keeping the personal away from the professional.

The Leilatepe phenomenon (3900–3600 cal. BCE): A ‘Middle Ground’ between the Near East and the Caucasus

The Late Chalcolithic Leilatepe “phenomenon” in the Southern Caucasus has often been regarded as the product of Mesopotamian incursions into the region for the purpose of acquiring metals and semi-precious stones for trade.The material evidence has shown clearly that these migrations resulted in the development of both hybridised and altogether new ways of engaging with the world, including novel architectural, metallurgical, ceramic, lithic, and ritual technologies and practices.This paper approaches this period of intense cultural interaction from a practice theory lens, aiming to view the social dynamics and processes associated with the emergence of Leilatepe “culture”. In doing so, we draw from Richard White’s Middle Ground concept to illustrate how new social practices emerge when two cultural groups with distinct habitus come into close and sustained contact with each other. Our research indicates that, while trade was likely an important aspect of the Leilatepe phenomenon, a number of factors also point to a sustained migration or migrations by a broad swath of Mesopotamian society who arrived in the region due to a combination of push and pull factors, and did not just engage in extractive trade, but settled permanently, creating new social realities.

See yourself through these hands: The moving body as a portal to spirit possession. Working with ancient ritual technologies to create portraits of spirits, gods and mythic beings

My creative, somatic and spiritual praxis combines the deep somatic trance work of authentic movement with ancient ritual technologies such as those found in the 2000-year-old Greek Magical Papyri. This article describes these embodied processes in and with wild nature places to facilitate visionary states which are recorded through poetic writings, and subsequently expressed in highly detailed drawings of ancient gods and mythic beings. I explore the nature of creative inspiration, not only in my own writings and drawings but in others’ artistic endeavours, that leads me to consider whether what is present in any great work of art is an indwelling animate force; a spirit or god. Working with this question, I am compelled deeper into this intersection of movement, creativity and spirituality, and from there, my life seems to become illuminated from within. Even as we all move through increasingly difficult times, we must continue to let ourselves be danced by something greater; especially for all those who cannot. We must continually open the seams to allow the movement of some vast majesty that we may never comprehend. Then we ourselves become a living work of art. As such, our lives become a ritual offering of beauty.

Maria de Baratta’s 'Nahualismo' Revisited: Quantum Identity Politics, Crises, and Reconfigurations

While attention to the provocative composer Maria de Baratta has increased in the past few years, mysteries about her past remain. Solutions inferred from available data remain uncertain. However, uncertainty itself, and the attendant multiple possibilities, are academically and scientifically supported by quantum theory, postcolonial and new materialist feminisms, ritual technologies like those depicted in de Baratta’s ballet Nahualismo, and known practices of some of the most vaunted artists of our time. Together, these disciplines bring understanding of Maria de Baratta and her ballet into a more multi-dimensional, thus more complete perspective. Paradoxes and quirks in her expressions of the indigenous culture of El Salvador (of which she was a descendant) emerge more as strategic preservation than appropriation.

Analyzing Gospel

This article presents an analytical paradigm that employs the repetitive musical cycle known as “the vamp” to illuminate the interrelation of form, experience, and meaning in African American gospel music, focusing on music performed by gospel choirs with soloists. I argue that, more than just a ubiquitous musical procedure, the gospel vamp functions as a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts. As they perform and perceive the gospel vamp's characteristic combination of repetition and escalation, these believers coproduce sonic environments that facilitate the communal experience of a given song's textual message. Through close readings of four canonical songs from the gospel choir repertoire—Kurt Carr's “For Every Mountain,” Brenda Joyce Moore's “Perfect Praise,” Richard Smallwood's “I Will Sing Praises,” and Thomas Whitfield's “I Shall Wear a Crown”—the article examines the phenomenological implications of gospel's communal orientation, outlines the relationship between musical syntax, musical experience, formal convention, and lyrical content in this genre, and suggests that analyzing gospel offers a way of studying how many black Christians come into contact with the invisible subjects of their belief.

Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism ed. by Yael Bentor and Meir Shahar

Reviewed by: Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism ed. by Yael Bentor and Meir Shahar Geoffrey C. Goble Yael Bentor and Meir Shahar, eds., Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. xii, 450 pp. €125 (HB). ISBN 978-90-04-34049-7 Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism is an ambitious and promising volume that is exciting for several reasons. In addition to its stated purpose of considering the vast sweep of ritual technologies, soteriologies, and ontologies that fall under the rubric of Esoteric Buddhism, the volume also implicitly promises to reorient the commonplace association of Chinese and Japanese articulations of Esoteric Buddhism by instead considering Tibetan and Chinese Esoteric Buddhist traditions side by side. Consisting of seventeen individual essays grouped into seven parts, the book contains material that ranges temporally from the eighth century to the present day, and geographically from the Chinese Tang Dynasty, to the Dali Kingdom of presentday Yunnan, to Tibet, and the Western Xia. Part 1 of the volume consists of three essays concerning the origins of Esoteric Buddhism as read through Chinese materials. Charles Orzech reads eighth-century tantric ritual as performances that shape individual subjectivities through scripted liturgical actions of purification and confession in addition to visualizations, mudra performances, and mantra recitations. Heinrich Sørensen traces the development of Esoteric Buddhism “prior to the comprehensive structural and institutional formations reflected in the tradition associated with” Śubhākarasiṃha 善無畏, Vajrabodhi 金剛智, and Amoghavajra 不空 (p. 43). Lü Jianfu’s contribution similarly seeks to trace the emergence of “Esoteric” or “Tantric Buddhism” by tracking the shifting semantic meanings of the terms “esoteric teaching” (mijiao 密教) and “Tantra” (variously transliterated) in Chinese scriptural sources. Part 2 of the book, with contributions by Robert Sharf, Lin Pei-ying, and Meir Shahar, addresses Esoteric Buddhism in relation to other Chinese religious traditions. Sharf studiedly eschews the label “esoteric Buddhism” in favor of “Buddhist Veda”, a term he adopts in order to signal his interpretation of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism as a Brahmanicized ritual technology rather than a “tradition set apart by its distinctive teachings” (p. 86). This ritual technology, he argues, was characterized in part by the use of mantra and spell incantations, master-disciple transmissions, the trope of the luminous mind, precept altars (or mandalas), and a large pantheon of deities that informed the subsequent development of the indigenous Chan tradition. Lin Pei-ying identifies a number of elements in the Śubhākarasiṃha’s Essentials of Meditation (Wuwei sanzang chanyao 無畏三藏禪要; T 917) that are continuous with “Northern” Chan ideas and concludes that there was a “doctrinal affiliation between the Chan school and Esoteric Buddhism” (p. 144). Meir Shahar demonstrates the influence of Tantric Buddhism on Daoism and popular Chinese literature through a case study of Hayagrīva Avalokiteśvara, the Horse-headed Avalokiteśvara. [End Page 71] Part 3 contains essays addressing Tantric Buddhist scriptures in the Tibetan context by Dan Martin, Eran Laish, and Yael Bentor. Martin’s contribution is a consideration of the gya-log teachings of Padampa Sangye, teachings that generally involve stating the opposite of the intended meaning, or, as Martin presents it, teachings predicated on presumed unexpected causal relationships between internal practices and external results and vice versa; for example, “the basis of disease gets turned into one of the [seven] elements of the healthy body” (p. 203). Eran Laish takes the assertion of a non-dual, primordially pure (ka-dag) reality in Tantric texts as a fundamental challenge to the “prevailing Buddhist view” that sees consciousness as a state of delusion requiring purification and Yael Bentor’s essay is a study of how the practice of body maṇḍalas (the divinization or realization of the divinization of the body through tantric saddhana, emplacing or realizing deities within the body) was variously understood through their representation in polemical writings from the Sakya and Geluk traditions of the eleventh through the fifteenth century. Part 4 of the volume consists of essays by Shen Weirong and Ester Bianchi, whose contributions concern Tibetan Buddhism in China during the Ming Dynasty and the eighteenth to nineteenth century, respectively. Shen’s essay, a study of Chinese Ming Dynasty texts demonstrated to be translations from Tibetan...

Rediscovering the ritual technology of the placebo effect in analytical psychology.

Technology, viewed more generally, is a collection of skills and methods that are used to accomplish an objective of some kind. Modernity has produced many kinds of ever-expanding new technologies, but it is also evident that technologies can be lost or fall out of use. A cross-cultural survey of ritual reveals a rather startling observation: that while developed nations often exceed other cultures in terms of material technology, they often pale by comparison in their use of ritual technology. In this essay we will see how ritual is a powerful sort of technology that developed nations have mostly allowed to drift out of regular, vigorous use, despite its numerous psychological and biological effects. This tendency has left one of the rituals we still have - psychotherapy itself - to be bereft of some of the typical tools for concretizing the symbolic in recurrent patterns around the world. Jung himself could be accused of being somewhat anti-ritual himself, enmeshed as he was in the post-Protestant, post-Enlightenment cultural environment that defines the West in many ways. But these under-utilized elements of ritual technology may be a natural fit for Jungian therapy due to its use of symbols.

RITUALS OF NATURAL AND SOCIAL DISASTERS IN TRADITIONAL MENTAL ECOLOGY AND ETNOMEDICINE OF THE RUSSIAN NORTH

The paper represents new results of structural-semiotic analysis on syntactics, semantics and pragmatics of ritual-mythological «texts», which are included in subject-problem field of traditional mental ecology and sacred ethnomedicine of peoples living in the European North of Russia. The main purposes of the paper are investigation of ritual process of sacred space' creation (hierotopy) of temples built for one day in the North of Russia, revelation of «healing» («saving») mythopoetic semantics of the phenomenon of «one-day» temples building within folklore-ethnographical discourse, church archaeology and Russian religious-philosophical knowledge. Data base of the investigation is composed with «rituals of disasters», related with menace of epidemics, epizooties, social and natural cataclysms. Subject field of them may be determined as «ritual medicine of catastrophes». The main attention is paid to investigation of ritual technologies of sacred space' creation (hierotopies) within the process of one-day building of votive wonder-working temples on the Russian North. The motivation analysis of ritual one-day technologies reveals their relation to crisis, marginal situations, «troublous times», when all foundations of the universe is being destructed and chthonic forces of unhuman world, bearing diseases and death, bad harvest and famine, fires and natural disasters are rushing into human world. Special occasional rites (as sort of «ritual medicine of catastrophes») were performed to restrain the forces of chaos. Building of one-day temples was considered to be the most important technology of renovation of the universe.

The Buddhist Affirmation of Poetry and Locating a Thirteenth-century Fugen kōshiki in Liturgical Literature

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)There are two important ways that koshiki intersect with Japanese literature. The first nexus is the current recognition that koshiki themselves constitute a distinct genre within the broader category of Buddhist liturgical works.1 The interest of scholars of literature has been stimulated by the dawning realization that the language of these sacred works was shared with other genres of Japanese literature. The second conjunction involves the fact that several important early koshiki concern topics, particularly Japanese poetry (waka ...). The three-part Fugen koshiki in the collection of Todaiji Toshokan is a prime example of a koshiki concerned with waka. This work makes an unprecedented claim that explicitly links a Buddhist justification of poetry with the ritual technology of repentance (sange ...) before the bodhisattva Fugen ... (Sk. Samantabhadra).2 This spiritual technique had been developed in the Tendai tradition as the Lotus Repentance Rite (Hokke senbo ...), sometimes called the Samantabhadra Repentance Rite (Fugen senbo ...).3 This linkage between repentance before Fugen and a justification of poetry is not found in any other of several extant Fugen koshiki, nor is it seen in other koshiki. Indeed, it is not found anywhere in the voluminous corpus of Japanese literature concerned with Japanese poetry. In a leap beyond the bounds of logic, this koshiki strives to fuse faith in the power of Fugen to forgive transgressions with a recognition that the apparently sinful act of artifice can itself be sacred. In so doing, it clarifies a long-standing puzzle in a landmark work that is concerned with the Buddhist justification of poetry: why Fugen appears as the honzon ... , the central object of worship, at the gathering described in the famous Waka mandokoro ippongyo kuyo hyobyaku (hereafter Waka mandokoro hyobaku) of the Tendai preacher Choken ... (1126-1203).4Despite the Chinese tradition, also adopted in Japan, that privileged poetry as a sincere expression of the human heart and a spontaneous response to natural phenonena and human emotions, poetic creation might also be deemed one or another of the ten evil actions-false speech (Jp. mogo ...; Sk. m?sa-vada) or fancy talk (Jp. kigo ...; Sk. sa?bhinna-pralapa), and sometimes both at once, as seen in the plaintive words of Yoshishige Yasutane ... (933-1002) collected in Honcho monzui (snkbt 27, 351). Yasutane's views have been characterized as a truly agonized rejection of the literary (Yamada 2012, 68), and he is also said to have been the first writer in Japan to incorporate Bai Juyi's ... (772-846) dismissal of his mundane writing (Ch. shisu wenji; Jp. sezoku moji ...) as wild words and fancy phrases into Japanese liteature (Ch. kuangyan qiyu; Jp. kyogen kigo ...) (Osone 1998, 321). Evolving Japanese interpretations of Juyi's plea that those sinful words be transformed (tenjite ?) into praise for and propagation of Buddhism (sanbutsujo no tane ... and tenporin no en ...) fundamentally altered the understanding of the role of literature in medieval Japan.As artifice amounted to at best delusion and at worst prevarication and sophistry in the minds of many, it presented a dilemma to pious wouldbe authors of late Heian-period (794-1185) Japan. How were writers to pursue their way (michi ?), which was becoming a practice that provided a livelihood for poetic houses during the twelfth century, without transgressing the tenets of their faith? That century largely corresponds to the historical period known as the Inseiki ... (the period of the rule of retired emperors), 1068-1185. The discourse on the sinfulness of poetry is seen even in the most prolific poets of the era. In responding to a poetic topic taken from a passage in the Peaceful Practices chapter of the Lotus Sutra that warns against associating closely (shinkin sezare ... ) with those who compose worldly letters (sezoku no bunpitsu o tsukuru . …

The Enchantment of Agriculture: State Decentering and Irrigated Rice Production in Bali

This article explores state involvement in the ‘enchanted’ aspects of irrigated rice production in Bali, Indonesia. Modernising states invariably forward what Max Weber called the rationalisation and disenchantment of the world. In irrigation management, the Indonesian colonial and postcolonial states operated staunchly on this model. ‘Enchanted’ elements of Balinese rice production involving temples and rituals were assumed irrelevant and sidelined. Recently, however, bursts of state-funded construction of irrigation temples and shrines suggest a surprising shift. The post-Suharto decentralised state appears to be supporting the enchantment of irrigated agriculture. This article deals with the relationship between legislation under the decentralised state and ritual building activities in Balinese irrigation associations (subak). We examine how contemporary farmers view the new emphasis on ‘ritual technology’. Does it constitute decentralised support of the farmers' world, of local priorities and variance, or a new homogenising project?

Ritual revolutions: Temple and Trust networks linking Putian and Southeast Asia / 仪式革命： 联结莆田与 东南亚的寺庙与信任网 络

AbstractThis paper examines the historical formation and contemporary flourishing of certain temple and trust networks that emerged from the Xinghua area along the coast of Fujian province in the late 19thcentury, and spread across Southeast Asia over the last 150 years. This article examines three out of at least eight different networks that spread from this region to Southeast Asia (Fujiangsheng, Putianshi difangzhi, 2001). These are the 1) Spirit medium Altar Association networks; 2) extended lineage networks; and 3) Buddhist master-disciple networks. These ritual “trust networks” were constructed from cosmopolitical ritual technologies that were transportable, like the portable altar of a Daoist priest, the incense ash of a local god’s temple, methods of collective spirit medium training, or rites conducted before the spirit tablet of an ancestor or a master monk. This paper shows how these ritual methods were employed in a great variety of different political and multi-ethnic settings around Southeast Asia. These networks had a powerful impact on their founding villages and local cultures as well. Rather than simply preserving traditional forms, these networks engaged in continuous ritual revolution, constantly negotiating the forces of modernity within evolving ritual contexts.

The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism by Jacob P. Dalton (review)

Reviewed by: The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism by Jacob P. Dalton Matthew T. Kapstein The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism BY Jacob P. Dalton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 311. $40.00. In The Taming of the Demons, Jacob Dalton offers an innovative and provocative investigation of what he terms a "history of violence" in Tibet (or, more accurately, in Tibetan Buddhism). Dalton qualifies this project, noting that it "traces just one narrative line through a myriad of possibilities. The resulting story is a construction, and in places probably an arbitrary one determined largely by the present author's own interests" (pp. 18-19). All histories, however, are constructions, and Dalton's interests, arbitrary or not, touch upon troubling issues of considerable importance for our understanding of Tibetan religions. As suggested by the title of his book, Dalton's foremost interest is in the ubiquitous Tibetan theme of demon taming and its elaboration in ritual, narrative, history, and law. It is a leitmotif in the tales of [End Page 177] Buddhism's implantation and development in Tibet, of the activities of saints and wonderworkers down through the ages, of the founding of temples and pilgrimage sites, and of much more. In essence, Dalton's questions are: what accounts for the prominent emphasis on the violent quelling of demons in the Mahayana culture of Tibet—a culture that represents itself as fundamentally "compassionate"? And what lends coherence to its innumerable iterations of religiously sanctioned violence? In constructing his response, Dalton has chosen to privilege a selection of key texts, traditions, and historical moments. Of central concern to his account is the myth of the demon Rudra (Chapter 1, "Evil and Ignorance in Tantric Buddhism"), which originated in Indian Buddhist tantric tales of the Buddha's subjugation of the Hindu divinity Siva (usually called Mahesvara or Rudra in this context) and was enormously expanded in a scripture entitled the Mdo dgongs pa 'dus pa, probably a Tibetan apocryphon of the late first millennium. (Its lengthy retelling of the story of Rudra is translated in Appendix A.) The unbridled struggle of the gods and buddhas to defeat the monstrous Rudra provides a founding myth for Buddhist tantrism. This narrative is explicitly invoked, or at least plausibly presupposed, in a broad range of Tibetan tantric rituals, especially those seeking to control demonic forces. Parts of Dalton's account, as developed in Chapter 2 ("Demons in the Dark") in particular, depend upon material gleaned from his previous collaboration with Sam van Schaik at the British Library.1 One of the important conclusions of their work is that, despite the tendency of earlier scholarship to assign Dunhuang Tibetan manuscripts to the period of Tibetan imperial rule in Dunhuang (ca. 781-848), most of the tantric materials more likely dated from the post-imperial "age of fragmentation" (ca. 850-1000). (It may be remarked in passing that this corresponds with a more general trend in Tibetan Dunhuang studies to reassess the dating of the manuscripts, pushing a large proportion of them to post-imperial times.) In the present context, this provides Dalton with plausible evidence through which he argues that [End Page 178] tantric demon taming, as evidenced in the Dunhuang texts, becomes prominent only in post-imperial sources. Such materials subsequently gave rise to the well-known legendary accounts that were retrojected by later Tibetan historians to the imperial age. It is precisely the turbulence of the age of fragmentation, in tandem with the waxing hegemonic presence of the ritual technologies of the tantras, that generates the polarities upon which the myths of demonic subjugation depend. Dalton's argument in this respect reinforces a broad reappraisal within recent Tibetan studies of the relationship between the history of the Tibetan empire and its later mythology. But what is new and exciting in his contribution is his use of the Dunhuang texts, many of them previously unstudied, to clarify developments during the obscure "dark age" of the late ninth and tenth centuries. Indeed, illuminating the darkness is a key metaphor here, both for some of the sources Dalton considers and for Dalton himself. Tibet...

For a Compassionate Killing: Chinese Buddhism, Sericulture, and the Silkworm God AŚvaghoṣa

AbstractFor thousands of years in China, silk producers have developed ritual technologies and pantheons of deities intended to ensure healthy silkworms and abundant silk crops. Buddhist rites and deities have likewise long served the commercial interests of Chinese religionists, but so far we have little understanding of the relationships between the Buddhist institution and the ubiquitous sericulture industry. This essay represents the initial stages of a larger effort to investigate these relationships in premodern China. Here I examine a specific instance in which Buddhism was promoted as integral to silk production—as the true origin of the sericulture process, as the proper moral and soteriological framework within which to understand silkworm rearing (and killing), and as the ritual tradition most efficacious for sericulturists. These claims were advanced in medieval Chinese sources depicting the ancient Indian Buddhist patriarch Aśvaghoṣa as a local god of silk. Through this figure in particular, ...

Landscapes of the Ghost Dance: A Cartography of Numic Ritual

Recent historical and ethnographic research indicates that the study of ritual behavior could be greatly enhanced by combining parameters of place and landscape use with interpretation of material culture. This strategy is especially useful for identifying the archaeological record of ritual among societies that incorporated topographic features and natural resources into their liturgical order. In this article we apply a behavioral framework to the study of Numic ritual technologies. By intergrating ethnographic and historic data on the geography, practice, and material culture of the nineteenth-century Nevada Ghost Dance, we demonstrate how this framework helps to determine the configuration of a ritual place and its position relative to other ritual and nonritual places.

From the Associate Editor of Electronic Publications: "Ritual Technology"

From the Associate Editor of Electronic Publications: "Ritual Technology"