Arnika Fuhrmann, “Buddhist Melancholia: Trauma, Agency, and Pleasure in a Southeast Asian Transmedia Archive”
This paper investigates “Buddhism” as a framework for negotiating agency and pleasure in situations of great distress. In particular, I examine a large transmedia archive of Southeast Asian cultural production and practices that inhabit a counterdoctrinal sphere of Buddhist expression and deliberation. These texts and practices are more conventionally described as narratives of haunting, but their stories of loss and ghostly return are always Buddhist-informed. I use the notion of Buddhist melancholia to designate their deferral of the detachment from a (lost) object that Buddhist orthodoxy requires. In the stories and practices examined, everything happens within this space of deferral. I am interested in how Buddhist melancholia serves to outline counternormative ways of inhabiting negativity and temporality and previously untheorized modes of thinking about trauma and agency.
The specificity of Buddhist melancholia can be traced to the central position that the concept of impermanence occupies both in Buddhist thought and in its nondoctrinal citation in cultural production and vernacular practice. In the archive under review, trauma is marked by temporalities of endurance. Sustaining ambiances of traumatic loss throughout, the texts and practices studied also require and enable a different kind of agency for the subject. I aim to track the relation between the temporalities of trauma and the ever more canny agency required of the subject in these stories with reference to Buddhist canonical as well as psychoanalytically informed understandings of trauma and personhood.
Angela Zito, “The Filial, the Familial, the Gendered and the Cultivated”
Over the longue duress of the past two millennia, Europe and China shared a growing interest in the materiality of experience, and underwent shifts in their cosmologies. They aimed the strictures of governance at a different level of human experience, and thus perforce, produced people whose sense of selfhood would have been differently organized. No less sophisticated, no less coercive, no more or less “modern” in one place than the other—simply different.
Thus it is not sufficient to simply note that the family has always been important in China—one must ask how so? To what degree? More important than what else? I cannot completely answer those questions today. But I would like to outline a hypothesis that links together the increasing early modern Chinese judicial emphasis upon family through the growing emphasis upon sexed gender difference to deep background historical shifts in the discourse of xiao or filiality. I’ll start with that background, then move back to judicial shifts in the 18th century.
I ask how, in China, have notions of li/ritual, self-cultivation, institutions of family and filiality along with practices of gender distinction formed a sense of personhood and how that has shifted over time. What role might Buddhism have played in this shift? I will present a part of this complex project today.
Nirmala S. Salgado, “Tradition, Power, and Community Among Sri Lanka Buddhist Nuns”
Studies of Buddhist monasticism have often focused on the rules that monastics are expected to observe when living in community and interpretations of canonical disciplinary texts and their commentaries. The question remains as to how monastic rules and disciplinary texts are translated and used in the training tradition of novice monks and nuns. In what sense are “rules” to be observed? How the do texts work in the training of young monastics? How are embodied practices understood to be morally transformative in making possible particular dispositions and abilities? How do power and the authority of tradition limit and enable particular forms of life?
The focus of my paper is on how contemporary Buddhist nuns live in tradition and in terms of communal practices. I am interested in how seemingly routine daily tasks and apparently self-evident markers of female monasticism such as attire, comportment, and training practices are transformed in response to societal questions which nuns confront. Even nuns who wish to renounce society are limited by such questions. My interest is in how relations of power, essential to practice in a community, can help to address how a discursive tradition works in Buddhism.