[Buddha-l] Lamas and such

[JKirkpatrick]

I decided to try typing Lamaism 1990s into Google scholar.
Besides a few anthropologic sources, one arrives at this JSTOR
page by no less a Buddhologer than Donald S. Lopez, Jr:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/179336  
 The title of the article is "Lamaism and the disappearance of
Tibet," Society for Comparative Studies in Society and history,
1996.  
He wrote, the "...term has a long history in the west, a history
inextricable from the ideology of exploration and discovery that
the National Gallery cautiously sought to celebrate [referring to
an exhibition catalog text]. Lee [author of article in cat.]
echoes the nineteenth century portrayal of Lamaism as something
monstrous, a
composite of unnatural lineage, devoid of the spirit of original
Buddhism (as constructed by European Orientalists). Lamaism was a
deformity unique to Tibet, its parentage denied by India (in the
voice of British Indologists) and by China (in the voice of the
Qing empire), an aberration so unique in fact that it would
eventually float free from its Tibetan abode, an abode that would
vanish.
	In the discourse of the Christian West, the term Lamaism
often appears in syntactical proximity to the term Roman
Catholicism...." This feature has already been noted on this
list.

Also browsing other entries I notice that a large number of the
entries refer to Mongolia and or China. Authors include a range
of different fields, not just anthropology.

Joanna

==============


On Dec 6, 2009, at 3:05 AM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

>> He did, in 1987. Probably written before that c. 1985? So
someone 24 
>> years ago was still using that wording.
> 
> Steve, go to http://scholar.google.com and type "Lamaism 2004"
(or any 
> four-digit number between 2000 and 2009) and then wade through
the 
> pages of scholarly publications by respected scholars in
respected 
> journals who are using the word "Lamaism" (or related terms).
Some are 
> reprints or older scholarship, but the term has not completely
gone 
> out of vogue. If you do a different type of search of "Lamaism"
on 
> google scholar you will discover that it was used by scholars
in a 
> variety of fields quite heavily through the early 90s), when
its use 
> drops off somewhat  -- wonder why.  (30s through 70s was the
period of 
> heaviest use)