[Buddha-l] book on Tibetan 'discipline'

[Sally McAra]

Thanks Dan, I hadn't seen this -- it sounds fascinating.


On 17 October 2013 16:24, Dan Lusthaus <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Has anyone seen/read this book? If so, any thoughts, reactions, comments?
> Dan
>
> http://www.ucpress.edu/book.**php?isbn=9780520269477<http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269477>
>
> Discipline and Debate
> The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery
> Michael Lempert (Author)
> Available worldwide
> Paperback, 238 pages
> ISBN: 9780520269477
> April 2012
> $28.95, £19.95
>
> The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence,
> compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn
> their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh methods to make
> monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist
> reformers-like the Dalai Lama-adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as
> natural rights and individual autonomy. In the first in-depth account of
> disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, Michael Lempert
> looks closely at everyday education rites-from debate to reprimand and
> corporal punishment. His analysis explores how the idioms of violence
> inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons
> but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. Bringing the
> study of language and social interaction to our understanding of Buddhism
> for the first time, Lempert shows and why liberal ideals are being acted
> out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of
> liberalism as a globalizing discourse.
>
> Michael Lempert is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University
> of Michigan.
>
> Introduction: Liberal Sympathies
>
> Part I. Debate
> 1. Dissensus by Design
> 2. Debate as a Rite of Institution
> 3. Debate as a Diasporic Pedagogy
>
> Part II. Discipline
> 4. Public Reprimand Is Serious Theatre
> 5. Affected Signs, Sincere Subjects
> Conclusion: The Liberal Subject, in Pieces
>
> "Discipline and Debate offers both a vivid picture and a painstaking
> analysis of social and linguistic practices of traditional and
> post-traditional monastic education among Tibetans living in India." -Guy
> Newland, author of Introduction to Emptiness: As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa's
> Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path
>
> "Ethnographically rich, interpretively acute and generative, and always
> lucid and compelling, Discipline and Debate is a singular contribution.
> Lempert moves with insight from detailed examinations of the language of
> monastic debate to broad gauge considerations of diasporic Tibetan Buddhist
> entanglements within its contemporary exilic world." -Don Brenneis,
> Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
>
> "This extraordinary study sets a new standard for the study of the links
> between culture and social interaction. No one who cares about the study of
> religion, language or modernity-or who cares about the place of interaction
> in cultural theory-should miss this book." -Joel Robbins, author of
> Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea
> Society
>
> It won the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion.
>
> His University of Michigan page
> http://www.lsa.umich.edu/**anthro/people/faculty/ci.**
> lempertmichael_ci.detail<http://www.lsa.umich.edu/anthro/people/faculty/ci.lempertmichael_ci.detail>
>
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>



-- 
Sally