Topics in Buddhism (319-0-21)

Topic

Queerness, Spirits, and Ghosts: Buddhism in Southe

Instructors

Ray Buckner

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 4-410: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Queerness, Spirits, and Ghosts: Lived Buddhism in Southeast Asia:

This course, "Queerness, Spirits, and Ghosts: Lived Buddhism in Southeast Asia," explores how Buddhist deities and ghosts animate everyday religious life and practices of devotion in contemporary Southeast Asia. From fear and anguish to safety and calm, Buddhist deities and ghosts inspire a range of emotions in devotees who turn to them for help— when they are suffering from illness, seeking protection from war, undergoing financial challenges, and more. These more-than-human beings, from the Thai ghost Mae Nak to the Burmese Buddhist wizard Bo Min Gaung, create physical and emotional bonds with humans, together constituting a cosmos filled with human and beyond-human presence.

Taking a lived religion approach, we will study how ordinary religious people practice a Buddhism that remains tethered to the spirit world even as state governments ban religious practices related to these spirits. We will also investigate major 18th-21st century religious modernization efforts, when colonial powers aimed to replace indigenous and supernatural beliefs in ghosts and deities with a purely rational and human-centered Buddhism (now singularly focused on the Buddha), situating these religious transformations in broader contexts of European colonialism throughout mainland Southeast Asia.

We will study how these religious modernization efforts transformed local conceptions of Buddhism while failing to rid Thai, Cambodian, Lao, and Burmese people of their relationships with spirits and ghosts. Foregrounding ethnographic studies and queer and trans Thai contemporary film (where queer people often become ghosts after death), we will investigate how living religious practitioners continue to exist in intimate relationships with the more-than-human realm as they make offerings of fresh flower garlands, red Fanta soda, lipstick, money, and more to the ghosts who provoke fear and the deities who offer them protection.

The course counts toward Religion, Law and Politics (RLP) and Religion, Sexuality and Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentrations.

Teaching Method

Class Attributes

Ethical and Evaluative Thinking Foundational Disci
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
SoC Additional Distro