Battling the Buddha of Loveis a work of advocacy anthropology that explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, a transnational Buddhist organization, as it sought to build ...the "world's tallest statue" as a multi-million-dollar "gift" to India. Hoping to forcibly acquire 750 acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh, the Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to "Save the Land."
Falcone sheds light on the aspirations, values, and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against the Maitreya Project. Because the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are converts to Tibetan Buddhism, individuals Falcone terms "non-heritage" practitioners, she focuses on the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists hailing from Portland to Pretoria. She asks how could a transnational Buddhist organization committed to compassionate practice blithely create so much suffering for impoverished rural Indians.
Falcone depicts the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy, and through her examination of these logics she reveals the divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar's potential futures.Battling the Buddha of Lovetraces power, faith, and hope through the axes of globalization, transnational religion, and rural grassroots activism in South Asia, showing the unintended local consequences of an international spiritual development project.
In their footsteps Falcone, Jessica Marie
Anthropology and humanism,
December 2023, 2023-12-00, 20231201, Letnik:
48, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Summary
A flash ethnography piece set at an Obon event in Hawai'i, “In Their Footsteps,” shows the way the author deploys dance as a method. By asking the reader to follow her through a day of ...fieldwork at a Soto Buddhist temple, the piece demonstrates how the anthropologist learns about the culture by absorbing and matching the movements of her interlocutors, both when they are dancing and when they are not.
Some Hindu immigrants to America — those who subscribe to Hindutva values — desire full rights and recognition in their adopted homeland even as they simultaneously demand that so-called "migrants" ...to India (that is, Muslims and Christians whose communities have flourished in India for hundreds of years) acquiesce to their vision of India as a "Hindu state." In an American racial landscape that structurally privileges whites, I argue that the cultural categorization of Hindu immigrants into a "lesser-than-whites" minority has only served to fuel the growth of Hindu supremacist groups in the United States. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with two Hindu American summer camps in order to show that some Hindu immigrants misrecognize and repress their own current alienation in a manner that has subsequently aggravated latent antipathies towards Muslim and Christian communities in India.
Summary
In this essay, I deploy anthropological theories of exchange to trace contemporary practices of theory exchange in the academy, most specifically in anthropology. I examine participation in ...various sites of theory exchange from classroom to conference, from citer to cited, and from writer to reader and back again. By explicitly deploying the theoretical toolkit of anthropology that we have at our disposal, we can and should simultaneously examine our own knowledge production practices with more deliberateness even as we seek to understand our subjects' varied worldviews.
Summary
In this essay, I deploy anthropological theories of exchange to trace contemporary practices of theory exchange in the academy, most specifically in anthropology. I examine participation in ...various sites of theory exchange from classroom to conference, from citer to cited, and from writer to reader and back again. By explicitly deploying the theoretical toolkit of anthropology that we have at our disposal, we can and should simultaneously examine our own knowledge production practices with more deliberateness even as we seek to understand our subjects' varied worldviews.
The Statue/MURTI Falcone, Jessica Marie
Battling the Buddha of Love,
09/2018
Book Chapter
By all accounts, the Maitreya Project was originally conceived by Lama Yeshe, who desired that a Maitreya statue be built in India as a way to give back to the nation that had offered refuge to the ...Tibetan refugee community. The statue itself was conceived of as a gift to India, a return gift of kindness for kindness. Lama Yeshe did not detail the specific height or breadth of the statue project; he only expressed his desire that it be built in Bodh Gaya, the place of the Shakyamuni Buddha’s enlightenment. Although the statue was originally supposed to be built
The Teachings/DHARMA Falcone, Jessica Marie
Battling the Buddha of Love,
09/2018
Book Chapter
FPMT is a transnational federation of local organizations that spans the globe and has a changing cast of characters, visions, and projects. Just a few decades old, FPMT is an institution in the ...process of constructing itself. This chapter will provide a brief overview of global Buddhist trajectories and movements and discuss where FPMT as an institution fits into the contemporary Buddhist landscape. I suggest that FPMT’s borrowings and transformations from Tibetan Buddhism have simultaneously created something new out of the old and also followed in a timeless Buddhist tradition of doing just that. This is a crucial part of
Epilogue Falcone, Jessica Marie
Battling the Buddha of Love,
09/2018
Book Chapter
In the fall of 2012, the Kushinagar statue that I had been studying, Maitreya Project 2.0, was canceled (MPI 2012). The MPI website announced the cancellation and the reshuffling of leadership. ...First, the project would leave Kushinagar altogether and shift back to Bodh Gaya, where MPI would make do with a smaller statue. Second, the CEO, Peter Kedge, would be replaced with a new leader, Nita Ing. A door was summarily closed. I could almost hear the cheers of my Kushinagari farming informants. It had been a few years since I had seen Raj, Shashi, and Aneesh, but I could
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