The Materiality of Blessings in the Anthropocene: Fusion and Rupture in Transecological and Transdimensional Relatedness in Asian Highland Ecosystems
Workshop on the 14th of April, 2021, 4 PM CET
Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies
at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Presentations by Charisma Lepcha, Mabel Gergan, Kalzang Bhutia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko and Trine Brox
In the Himalayas and Mongolia, the mountains, rivers, lakes and forests that are part of highland ecosystems are animated by transdimensional forces that bestow blessings, generating the conditions for human and nonhuman flourishing. Human inhabitants, in turn, maintain their relatedness with their ecosystems through institutions, rituals, and narratives. Colonialism, nation-state building, and neoliberalism have fundamentally altered these forms of relatedness. Resource extraction regimes and new technologies have challenged practices that ensured mutual flourishing and responsibility for all beings present in these ecosystems. This panel will examine forms of continuity, erasure and emergence of new forms of relatedness by drawing on interdisciplinary case studies that critically consider the role of materiality in the shaping of identity, ethics, and reciprocity between humans and ecosystems across temporal scales. Charisma Lepcha begins by looking at the multiplicity of religious practice in Sikkim with a particular emphasis on the interaction between mountain worshippers and institutionalised religious forms. In the second paper, Trine Brox discusses the usage of plastics to protect Tibetan Buddhist ephemeral votives in the Himalayan mountain town of Dharamsala, suggesting that while plastic materials protect and prolong the precious that they hold, they also raise discussions about disposability, non-perishability, pollution, and material doubt. Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko takes up the materiality of offerings by considering the proliferation, problems and potentials of polyester offerings in Mongolia. In the fourth paper Mabel Gergan explores the tensions between Indigenous/Tribal groups’ relationships with territorial sovereignty with the interests of Hindu nationalists and marginalised migrant populations and religious minorities in northeast India. Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia considers how interrelatedness between trees and humans in Sikkim has been impacted by environmental change and deforestation, which renders trees as inanimate fuel for human benefit. Together these papers highlight the new fusions and ruptures in human-environment relations and conceptions of sacred ecologies across Asian highland ecosystems.
A Riwo Sangchö ritual underway in a sangbum on top of a residence, west Sikkim, 2020. Photo courtesy of Meewang Gyatso Takchungdarpa.
Abstracts
Charisma Lepcha
Mountains, Monasteries and Multiplicity of Religious Practices in Sikkim
Sikkim is a majority Hindu dominated state but the image of a Buddhist Sikkim is most visible to the imagination of many. Often times it is the tourist brochures and guide books that are filled with photographs of monasteries, prayer flags, and Buddhist motifs that construct the image of Sikkim. Prior to that, the indigenous people worshipped nature and believed in the various malevolent and benevolent spirits praying and appeasing them when necessary. Buddhism arrived with the advent of Tibetan rulers and the establishment of Namgyal dynasty as Mt. Kanchenjunga soon became the guardian deity –appropriating nature into the Buddhist worldview. In due course, the different waves of migration also brought Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhisim and various other organized religions to the state.
In that, Sikkim has been an inclusive space for various religions interacting and co-existing and the people are seen to be deeply religious in their external manifestations. If early anthropologists’ recorded the traditional Lepcha religion and Buddhism forming a double layered religious system; today one can see the coming together of Buddhism and Hinduism in temples like the ‘Saraswati-Dolma Mandir’ in fifth mile, Gangtok. We can also take example of Biswakarma Puja in Sikkim as perhaps the most observed ritual performed by people from different religious backgrounds. Likewise, the rising trend of “traditional” religions from among various ethnic groups under the Nepali banner that focuses on the environment has also created a new set of religious practices. This paper looks into the multiplicity of religious practices in Sikkim from mountain worshippers to the organized institutions making way for syncretised practices and now a return to nature. It will make an attempt to explore how the physical landscape of Sikkim is embedded in the religious practices and beliefs of the people as they experience it.
Mabel Gergan
Indigenous Himalayan Futures in Troubled Times
In the current political conjuncture in India, heightened nationalism and an aggressive developmentalist agenda are undermining Indigenous territorial sovereignty. In India’s eastern borderlands, Indigenous/Tribal groups have responded to these troubled times through a valorization of their ties to sacred ecologies and an animate, ancestral landscape. However, a critical appraisal is warranted since in this charged political climate, Indigenous territorial rights are being weaponized to argue for the curtailment of the rights of “outsiders”, including religious minorities (such as the figure of the “Bangladeshi Muslim”) and migrant populations. With the Hindu Right gaining a foothold in this region, we are likely to see an intensification of such divisive politics, and a greater degree of collusion between Indigenous/Tribal elite and corporate state interests. Some would argue that modern notions of indigeneity are inherently exclusionary, predicated as they are on colonial and state categories and its “politics of recognition”. In this troubled context, this paper attempts to think through the radical potential of Indigenous “relations and relationality” with an animate, vital landscape, and the possibilities/limitations of translating this into a more just and ethical relationship with non-Indigenous minorities and marginalized groups in the Indian Himalayas, and beyond.
Kalzang Bhutia
The Forest as Protector and Resource: Arboreal Relationality and Environmental Change in Sikkimese Forest Religiosity
Forests occupy a large amount of territory in the contemporary state of Sikkim. However, their ubiquitousness should not be interpreted as a signal that Sikkimese communities are inherently environmentally friendly. Historically trees have been exploited as fuel for human use; but they have also fueled forms of interspecies relationality and sustained ecosystems, health for multiple species, folklore, history and ritual life. Just as trees have different parts – the roots, the trunk, the branches, and the foliage – so do Sikkimese relationships with trees. In this paper, I will draw on Buddhist ritual literature, oral sources related to traditional forest management, and state-level forest management materials to examine the complexity of tree religiosity in contemporary Sikkim, demonstrating how human-tree relationality evades politicization and state control in the Anthropocene and offers an alternative local environmental ethics.
Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko
Zombie Trash, Mummy Materiality: Rethinking Monster Waste in the Anthropocene
In the presocialist period (before 1921) Mongolian Buddhist offerings were perishable. They were generally made from dairy products and other items that decompose, such as barley grains and prayer scarves made from silk. Where they were enduring, such as the rocks placed on the sacred rock cairns that stand atop Mongolia’s mountain passes, they discoursed with invisible beings who would protect and assist in the procurement of good fortune for those who passed. In the contemporary period, religious items are often mass produced in China and are cheap and easy to purchase. Many ritual items are now made from materials which cannot decompose. Unlike the sacred rocks whose stability marks the sanctity of the landscape, store-bought imperishable items, such as polyester prayer scarves and food offerings wrapped in plastic, take on a new kind of materiality that lingers problematically. Distinct from ordinary waste, when Buddhist offerings resist entropy they can take on a new kind of status. Buddhist items that become imperishable can become powerful, potentially negatively altering the fortunes of those who mistreat them. As most Mongolian Buddhist rituals aim to purify spiritual contamination or the karmic results of bad actions, the synthetic materiality of sacred items has a complicating effect on these rituals: the process of carrying out ritual purification can itself lead to further pollution, both spiritually and materially. This paper will explore how the material properties of items used in Buddhist rituals can create ecological and spiritual contamination, complicating, inverting or reinforcing different understandings of their symbolic properties.
Trine Brox
Plastics for the precious: Some observations on the usage of plastic materials in Tibetan Buddhism
The paper discusses the increasing presence and impact of plastics in the sphere of religion, asking: What are the material and imagined properties of plastics that allow them to be incorporated into the sacred domain? How are religious experiences mediated by plastics? What are the consequences of plastics’ increasing presence? The paper distinguish between the affects and enactments of plastics – not only in terms of how plastic materials are experienced but also how they enact their material properties even beyond our sensual experiences of them – how they have problematic and endless afterlives. The discussion pivot around the usage of plastics to protect Tibetan Buddhist ephemeral votives as observed along a circumambulation path in the Indian Himalayan town, Dharamsala. The paper suggests that all the while plastic materials protect and prolong the precious that they hold, they also raise discussions about disposability, non-perishability, pollution, and material doubt.
The workshop is closed for participation.
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