Buddhist Studies and Blogs
by Al
I wonder if there is something weird about the demographics of academic students of Buddhism or Buddhist Studies. Unlike a number of other disciplines that I can think of, there seem to be almost no blogs done by people working in Buddhist Studies. Out of those that blog, only one that I know of (http://earlytibet.com) is an actual academic blog.
Combine this with the fact that there really only seems to be one academic e-mail list for Buddhist Studies (H-Buddhism) and one gets the idea that people in Buddhist Studies are not a part of the net generation or not in favor its use in academia. H-Buddhism, additionally, is a moderated list with all posts vetted by its maintainer. Compare this to the lists focused on the academic study of Nature Spirituality or New Religious Movements, which are wide open to their members.
What gives?
When I got involved with Buddhist Studies, I expected that there would be this wide open community of people talking online as I had seen elsewhere in Religious Studies. For some reason, that just isn’t the case though.
(As an aside, if anyone can recommend some excellent books dealing with Religious Studies as a discipline that are foundational or on the use of ethnography in Religious Studies, I’d appreciate it…)
Comments
Al,
I think there are a number of reasons for why Buddhist Scholars tend not to discuss too much on the web, or make use of various social networking things. Charles Muller, one of the founders of the H-Buddhism list has written quite a bit on his experiences using various forums for discussion. You might want to check his website out for more information: http://www.acmuller.net/publications-etc.html
I think after reading some of Muller’s past experiences and frustrations it makes sense and is fully justifiable for H-Buddhism to be a closed list (as far as posting goes). Anyone is able to access posts made to H-BUddhism on the H-Net website. From personal experience it seems a number of people have done that, as I one received 30 emails from 3 people telling me how I misunderstood Jodo Shinshu, when I simply responded to a query looking for articles on Shin Buddhism and interfaith dialogue. (As an aside, if the people responding to me knew more about me, they would have known I believe interfaith dialogues to be a complete waste of time.) Had this been an open list, I wonder how many more emails I would have had to delete. Although this is one time experience, that others may or may not have had, it has been enough to cause me to hide my identity in most online discussions and kept me from making my own blog to share ideas and such.
Second, I think there are more blogs dedicated to Buddhist studies then one might expect though they tend to be more reflections on ones own research, as opposed to an open discussion. One enjoyable read of this type is http://wanderingdhamma.wordpress.com/ Others blogs that may fall into this catagory are Rev. Danny Fisher’s homepage at http://www.dannyfisher.org
Third, I think we in academia still are not quite sure if the digital world holds any sway when it comes to putting food on the table. Have you heard of anyone getting tenure or even a full-time academic post because of their work online? It may be in the future that this happens, however right now it seems that journals and books remain the place where ideas are discussed and given (more) careful consideration.
I’m just now starting in on “Critical Terms for Religious Studies” edited by Mark Taylor. The chapter on “Religion, Religions, Religious” by Jonathan Smith is fascinating, and it is particularly helpful in understanding how the idea of “religion in general” has evolved over time in western intellectual culture. Other chapters include “God”, “Modernity”, “Rationality” and even “Time”.
A similar title but slightly further afield is the little gem “Greek Philosophical Terms” by Francis Peters. I came across this while researching the history of the English/Latin term “compassion” and especially its relationship with the Greek term “sympatheia”, the entry for which is three pages long and is broken down into 8 subsections (with lots of references to extant primary sources). The entries for theion, theologica, and theos are also directly relevant to understanding the foundation for how religion is thought about in western culture.
If you come up with good titles I hope you will post something about them. Some of the books I have glanced through (but not more …) include:
The Myth and Ritual Reader: An Anthology by Robert Segal
The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (also Segal)
The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion edited by John Hinnells
A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodernist Age edited by Kimberly Patton (“The first thorough assessment of the field of Comparative Religion in forty years….”)
Relating Religion by Jonathan Z. Smith
The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism by Tomoko Masuzawa
I don’t think that there is a reason why Buddhist Studies is radically different than Religious Studies when it comes to these things though and there are vibrantly active and open e-mail lists for Religious Studies.
As to whether anyone has gotten tenure or a full-time job from digital work, who knows? I know so few people that get either these days, which is part of why I worry about my job future (and that of others) in academia. Where are all the peer reviewed, well established Buddhist Studies journals? There seem to be very few and I seem to recall a number of questions on H-Buddhism trying to establish what they are.
I have at least one friend that seems to consider Buddhist Studies (and anything related to the humanities) to be on a downward slope economically as research universities absorb most of the money and spend it on science and engineering.
Thanks, Apuleius. I know of a couple of those books but have not read any of them.
Well, thanks for your original post. It prompted me to go through my Amazon Wish List and drag out those religious studies titles! The one I am most likely to sit down and actually read (besides “Critical Terms”) is “A Magic Still Dwells”.
Happy hunting!!!
Hi Al,
I wonder how you’re defining “academic blogs” here? NellaLou over at Enlightenment Ward raised some similar questions a bit ago; but she seems to have a different sense of what an academic blog is and lists several.
http://enlightenmentward.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/scholarship-and-opinion-or-the-journal-vs-the-blog/
I would echo most of eld’s comments. And I would add that there’s really very little motivation to keep a blog for explicitly academic reasons. Most folks in academia see blogs in one of two ways — (1) a personal hobby, something harmless and fun; or (2) as a way of promoting one’s institution, not one’s personal scholarship. It’s really a question of motivation. I could write the most amazing piece of scholarship ever, something mind-blowing, and post it on my blog — and no one will take it seriously because it’s not “peer reviewed.” Being peer reviewed is our discipline’s quality control mechanism, for better or worse, and it is peer reviewed publications that count the most toward not only tenure but getting a job in the first place.
As far as what those peer-reviewed, well-established Buddhist studies journals are — I can think of a half-dozen off the top of my head: the Journal of Global Buddhism and Journal of Buddhist Ethics are both taken very seriously, and both are peer reviewed; the Journal of Contemporary Buddhism, the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, the Eastern Buddhist, the Buddhist Studies Review — most of these are published by various professional organizations. And that doesn’t include journals from related fields that certainly “count” within Buddhist studies such as Religion and American Culture (which has published quite a bit on American Buddhism) or Monumenta Nipponica (which publishes on Japanese religion more generally).
But I think the real issue has to do, oddly enough, with 9/11. In the late 1980s and early 90s, Buddhist studies (and anything having to do with Asia in general) was having its Golden Age. Funding was pouring in from all over the place. Once 9/11 hit, universities made a choice — funnel dwindling funds to Islamic studies that have a better chance of securing post-graduate jobs? Or Buddhist studies? As many folks have noted, Buddhist studies has been hit, and hit hard, by a general lack of funding for most of the last decade. And it is during this exact same time period that more and more people started using the Internet as a viable and legitimate means of scholarly communication and/or publication.
This decline in funding effected our discipline in a number of ways, but most relevant here are that the number of graduate students shrunk considerably and the amount of funding for new projects was virtually non-existent. What this means is that we’ve got a discipline dominated by an older generation of scholars who did not grow up on the ‘net (or have very different ideas about “privacy” and the Internet, about “traditional” publishing models, etc.), and a discipline that has no money to support a scholar who would want to start an online project (it may be “free” to start a blog, but it isn’t really, not from an institutional standpoint and not from the standpoint of a scholar who’s devoting his/her time to peer-reviewed publication). Given that reality, it’s really no surprise that Buddhist studies as a whole may be slow to adopt newer technology.
Are there any publicly available and reliable numbers concerning the drops both in funding and in numbers of grad students in Buddhist studies?