Arts de parole — 2

Débats et joutes oratoires en Asie. Déclinaison Bouddhisme tibétain

animé par Michael P. Lempert (University of Michigan)

séminaire du 18 mai 2010

Michael Lempert, professeur invité à l'EHESS, présente en anglais son livre à paraître sous le titre:

Debate and Discipline.
The Language of Incivility in Modern Tibetan Buddhism

Synopsis

This research traces the career of the modern liberal subject in the Tibetan diaspora in India. Focusing on incivility in courtyard debate (rtsod pa), public reprimand (tshogs gtam), and corporeal punishment at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India, I show how received forms of monastic pedagogy and discipline have come to trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity.

Following his dramatic flight to India in 1959, the Dalai Lama began to fashion Tibetan Buddhism into a ‘modern’ world religion, stressing its commitment to rational inquiry and compatibility with empirical science (Lopez 1998, 2008)**. Above all, he declared non-violence and “universal compassion” to be Buddhism’s essence, a declaration that coincided with a political appeal: that the People’s Republic of China respect human rights in Tibet, that it turn back its policies of ethnic and cultural repression so that Tibet might enjoy, if not independence, at least a “meaningful autonomy.” As Adams (1998)* has suggested, the exiled Tibetan embrace of metropole human-rights discourse has obliged Tibetans to take seriously certain liberal-humanist ideals, including belief in the individual, autonomous, rights-bearing subject. These ideals, together with the liberal post-Enlightenment ideals of clarity, sincerity, and civility in speech—ideals that have entered Tibetan diasporic communities along several routes and whose genealogy stems to at least 17th-century England—often clash with Tibetan cultural sensibilities about how young monks should be socialized into their vocation. For debate, what should be done with the challengers’ histrionic anger when he hurls invectives at the seated defendant and uses blistering hand-claps that explode inches from the defendant’s nose? What of the practice’s unequal ‘rights’ of participation, like the fact that it’s the challenger who regulates topic flow and gets to ask the questions? What of reprimand and corporeal punishment, monastic practices that figurate hierarchical relations between interactants and thus also shape moral dispositions in seemingly nonliberal ways?

To draw out these tensions, I examine the semiotics of incivility at two ideologically opposed sites in the field of Tibetan religious education: (a) the conservative Sera Monastery in Byllakupe, south India, a bastion of traditionalism populated by several thousand monks, and (b) the smaller, self-consciously modernized “Institute of Buddhist Dialectics” in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and epicenter of Tibetan Buddhist modernism in India. This project draws on over 2.5 years of contact with Tibetans in South Asia that stretch back over two decades, with the core of the fieldwork being carried out in 1998 and 2000-2001. This project, based in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, argues that globalizing modernity cannot simply be studied as a set of circulating ideals and institutions but is played out in struggles over what these larger scale ideals and institutions materially look like in routinized events of face-to-face interaction.

*Adams, Vincanne. 1998. Suffering the Winds of Lhasa: Politicized Bodies, Human Rights, Cultural Difference, and Humanism in Tibet. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12 (1):74-102.

**Lopez, Donald S. 1998. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2008. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

 

Textes à l'appui dans le dossier Michael Lempert de la bibliothèque numérique

http://ehess.anglesdelasie.fr/bibliotheque/78/

en priorité pour préparer le séminaire

lempert_bookDraftExcerpts.pdf — Michael Lempert, Debate and Discipline. The Language of Incivility in Modern Tibetan Buddhism, April 2010. Please do not cite without author’s permission.

A note about the reading — I submitted as a .pdf draft most of my book. I prefer to share this work in progress with you rather than just give you a series of articles. This manuscript is currently under review, so it cannot be circulated outside this group.

The most relevant chapters for this talk are Chapter 4 (“Debate rescaled”) and Chapter 6 (“Affected signs, modern subjects”). It would be difficult to appreciate these chapters without reading the rest of the material, so that’s why I’ve included almost the whole book draft.

 

lempert_tibetan_debate.pdf — Michael P. Lempert, Denotational Textuality and Demeanor Indexicality in Tibetan Buddhist Debate, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 15, Issue 2, December 2005, pp. 171–193.

lempert_tibetan_theatrics.pdf — Michael P. Lempert, Disciplinary theatrics: Public reprimand and the textual performance of affect at Sera Monastery, India, Language and Communication, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 15-33.

lempert_conspicuously.pdf — Michael Lempert, Conspicuously Past: Distressed Discourse and Diagrammatic Embedding in a Tibetan Represented Speech Style, Language and Communication, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2007, pp. 258–271.

lempert_perrino_entextualization.pdf — Michael Lempert and Sabina Perrino, Entextualization and the Ends of Temporality (Introduction), Language and Communication, Volume 27, No. 3, 2007, pp. 205–211.

lempert_poetics_stance.pdf — Michael Lempert, The poetics of stance: Text-metricality, epistemicity, interaction, Language in Society, Volume 37, Issue 4, 2008, pp. 569–592.