Buddhist Ritual as “Connectionwork”: Aesthetics and Technologies of Mediating Religious Belonging

Abstract

In September 2016, the Himalayan Buddhist festival Naropa 2016 took place in the Northwest Himalayan region of Ladakh, India. This article analyzes the spectacular aesthetics of the Naro Gyen Druk ritual, the focus of Naropa 2016. Drawing on ethnographic documentation of this ritual, I consider the role of ritual aesthetics in provoking affective, emotional, and bodily experiences among participants and their felt connections to the 12th Gyalwang Drukpa, the charismatic leader of the Drukpa Kagyü organization. I introduce the term “connectionwork” to emphasize how Buddhist conceptualizations of connections, drelwa (‘brel ba), bring to light how ritual and performances of charisma either work or fail to work in establishing religious belonging among Himalayan and international participants. Connectionwork helps to emphasize not only the work to organize and orchestrate religious rituals with the intention to institute religious belonging, but also the agential role that participants play in charismatic ritual performances.

Makna Persembahan Pada Ritual Api Homa Bagi Umat Buddha Vihara Vajra Bumi Giri Putra Desa Segaralangu, Kecamatan Cipari, Kabupaten Cilacap

“…Masyarakat dalam menjalankan agamanya dapat dilakukan dengan berbagai macam kegiatan, salah satunya adalah melaksanakan ritual keagamaan. Ritual yang dilaksanakan bertujuan untuk mendekatkan diri kepada Tuhan Yang Maha Esa, demikian seorang umat beragama dalam menjalankan agamanya tersebut (Williams, 2021;McBridge, 2019). Sebagian umat beragama dalam menjalankan ritualnya atau bersembahyang dilengkapi dengan tata caranya, selain itu juga persembahanpersembahan yang dipersiapkan sebagai pelengkap dalam bersembayang.…”

The Aesthetics and Emotions of Religious Belonging: Examples from the Buddhist World

“…The specific cases we examine extend from socio-historically embedded "traditional" Buddhist communities (Brox 2021;Caple 2021;Kolata and Gillson 2021) and emerging or expanding lineage traditions (Townsend 2021b;Williams-Oerberg 2021) to stigma-laden "new religions" (Baffelli and Schröer 2021;McLaughlin 2021). The authors treat each case as a carefully contextualized site within which to explore our shared questions about how it feels the way it does to belong to a Buddhist community and how these communities' constituent aesthetic practices guide their participants' understandings of themselves.…”

“…It can also include the care taken in the preparation of a dish of rice and beans (Kolata and Gillson 2021); the dedication of working through basic exercises to perfect instrumental technique (McLaughlin 2021); the sorting of sounds, smells, and sights as one shops in a market (Brox 2021); or even the act of rising to one's feet when someone enters a room (Caple 2021). The upheaval of extraordinary events can precipitate the formation of new communities and connections (Baffelli and Schröer 2021;Townsend 2021b;Williams-Oerberg 2021). But bonds between members are sustained and shaped through everyday aesthetic forms and emotional practices, as well as through their refusal (Caple 2021;Kolata and Gillson 2021;Williams-Oerberg 2021) or appropriation (Brox 2021).…”

“…The upheaval of extraordinary events can precipitate the formation of new communities and connections (Baffelli and Schröer 2021;Townsend 2021b;Williams-Oerberg 2021). But bonds between members are sustained and shaped through everyday aesthetic forms and emotional practices, as well as through their refusal (Caple 2021;Kolata and Gillson 2021;Williams-Oerberg 2021) or appropriation (Brox 2021). This is so even if, as McLaughlin indicates, changing institutional dynamics can render precisely what it is that members belong to less clear.…”

“…As she emphasizes, people not only belong to, in, or with religious communities, but must negotiate their belonging as particular kinds of community members and in relation to attendant aesthetic norms and feeling rules. Moreover, how belonging is sensed, experienced, and practiced is entangled with other categories of social being, such as ethnicity or nationality (Baffelli and Schröer 2021;Brox 2021;Williams-Oerberg 2021), gender (Kolata and Gillson 2021), and cultural distinction (McLaughlin 2021). The articles push us to include a range of intersectional components in our analyses of how Buddhist belonging, and religious belonging more generally, is practiced.…”