Asian Religions and
Cultures initiative seeks to bridge disciplinary gaps
Smithsonian scholar Vidya
Dehejia introduced her audience to Bhuvaneshvari, the
Granter of Wishes, in a 17th-century Indian painting and
talked about how that piece and more than 120 other works
of art were virtually transformed by their inclusion in a
recent exhibition she curated in Washington, D.C.
The special slide lecture
in Annenberg Auditorium on April 20 was co-hosted by the
Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies, the Society for Art
and Cultural Heritage of India (SACHI) and the Asian
Religions and Cultures (ARC) initiative, the newest
interdisciplinary entity on campus.
By linking university
programs with community groups like SACHI, the initiative
aims to bring together scholars and individuals with
interests in Asian cultures who don't often have the
opportunity to associate. Together they can explore
religions and cultures that tend to fall between
disciplinary cracks.
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"There's a lot of
work in Asian studies that goes on at the Institute for
International Studies and in political science and
economics, but there's very little interaction on campus
between those areas and the humanities," says Carl
Bielefeldt, a professor of religious studies who is a
specialist in 13th-century Zen Buddhism and co-director
of the Center for Buddhist Studies. "We see the new
initiative as a bridge between the social sciences and
the humanities, and also between the premodern tradition
and contemporary culture and society."
Housed at the Center for
Buddhist Studies and supported by the Department of
Religious Studies and the Center for East Asian Studies,
ARC recently received $200,000 from the President's Fund
for the first four years of operation. Bielefeldt and ARC
co-director Bernard Faure, the George Edwin Burnell
Professor of Religious Studies, will be doing extensive
fundraising to establish a permanent endowment that will
help to support conferences, lectures, visiting scholars,
publications, workshops, exhibits and performances.
"We're looking at a
wide range of areas that are not well represented on
campus, such as South Asia, Chinese religions and
Islam," Faure says.
Faure will co-direct ARC
with Gregory Schopen, a specialist in Indian Buddhism,
Hinduism and South Asian studies who currently teaches in
the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at
the University of California-Los Angeles and who will
join the Stanford faculty next fall. Irene Lin, assistant
director of the Center for Buddhist Studies, will oversee
administration.
ARC takes its title from
the "Asian Religions and Cultures" series that
Faure, Bielefeldt and Schopen currently are editing for
Stanford University Press. Designed to redefine Buddhism
and other Asian religions by examining them from the
methodological perspectives of anthropology, literary
criticism, art history, philosophy and cultural studies,
the series aims to break through the tendency to isolate
Asian religions into compartments of spiritualism or
Orientalism. The press will publish the first volume in
the series next fall.
This week ARC is
co-hosting two lectures that will help to carve out the
initiative's niche on campus:
- David Stronach of the
University of California-Berkeley will talk about
"Herodotus, the Battle of the Eclipse in 585
B.C. and the Current Excavations at
Pteria/Kerkenes Dag in Cappadocia" at 7:30
p.m. today in Building 260, Room 113.
- Gurinder Singh Mann,
holder of the Kundan Kapany Chair in Sikh Studies
at the University of California-Santa Barbara,
will talk about "Sikhs Since Independence:
Politics, Community, Communalism" at 7:30
p.m. tomorrow, April 27, in Building 200, Room
305.
By co-sponsoring the talks
with the community-based Silk Road Study Group and the
campus-based South Asia Initiative, ARC is establishing
the kinds of relationships that the directors see as its
particular strength.
"We'd like to bring
both academic figures and public figures to campus,"
Faure says. "And we're hoping future conferences
will be of interest to both academics and the
public."
In Fall Quarter, ARC
co-hosted a major conference on early Indian religions.
Next year faculty associated with the initiative will
organize a conference on the origins of Mahayana Buddhism
in India, with a conference on Tantrism across Asia
scheduled for the following year.
Faure and Bielefeldt also
would like to see ARC fund postdoctoral scholars who come
to Stanford for a year or two to work on books and teach
courses.
"We've already
attracted Japanese Buddhism scholars who come with their
own funding," Faure says. "If we had additional
funding, we could meet them halfway and provide them with
connections and with a good place to work."
Religion has had a
profound impact in Asia, from its influence on popular
beliefs to ancient philosophies. Faure says new spiritual
movements continue to be central to daily life in Asian
countries, and he points to the recent endowment of the
first chair in Shinto studies at the University of
California-Santa Barbara as one indication of the growing
academic interest in contemporary beliefs and practices.
"After the [second
world] war, Shinto was seen as being too
nationalistic," Faure says, by way of example.
"But Shinto is an important aspect of Japanese
religion, and it finally is now emerging as a legitimate
scholarly enterprise."
For more information about
the Asian Religions and Cultures initiative and a
calendar of upcoming events, visit the website at www.stanford.edu/group/scbs/ARC. SR
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