Literatini

I’ve been working on the anthropology of literacy, especially in Himalayan Buddhism, since 1989 – my first significant paper at Chicago was on the relationship between manuscript rituals and scholastic practice in classical Indian Madhyamika. It’s not an easy subject to locate; I’ve offered papers in a wide range of contexts – the Western AAR in 1991, the 2001 Rema(r)king the Text conference at St. Andrews, the 2004 conference in honour of Richard Gombrich – but I was only able to publish this material this year, as a chapter in Die Textualisierung de Religionen ed. J Schaper. At the CRASSH conference it turns out that Hildegard Diemberger and Steve Hugh-Jones were giving a paper on the anthropology of digitizing Tibetan manuscripts. Our two papers segued nicely; I gave a brief account of the argument from ritual origins for the nature of Mahāyāna literacy, then looked at the Hyakumanto Dharani and Thunder Peak Pagoda, then went on to look at digital prayer wheels and hacking code for VR constructs to include mantras.

There are other people working on this problem. Kristina Myrvold at Lund works on the Ādi Guru Granth Sahīb among Sikhs, and organized a conference on manuscript rituals that I had to drop out of. That will, I hope, become a book. The Schaper volume includes comparable studies on Judeo-Christian textual practices, and I certainly remember Mary Douglas’ visit to Aberdeen in which she talked about an intricate pattern in the Old Testament.

Actually, it’s at least four problems just within Mahāyāna Buddhism. There’s the early material; there’s the Newar material; the Tibetan material; and the East Asian material. All the practices are related and distinct. Gregory Schopen and Paul Harrison have both written about the links between Mahāyāna and literacy, and I refer to their work in my piece. David Gellner published a careful study of the recitation practices at Kvaḥ Bāhal in the 90’s at the same time I was surveying all the different recitation cults around Nepāl Maṇḍala. Tibetan practices are fundamentally different to Newar or Indian, and alongside Diemberger and Hugh-Jones, one should probably look at Yael Bentor’s articles on consecration. Apparently T Barrett has been writing on the Chinese materials, which then should be put alongside Glenn Dudbridge’s articles as well as L. Carrington Goodrich in the 40s and the useful piece in Architectural History by Guo (1999) on the construction of rotating libraries.

I really should put a bibliography up somewhere.

Forward in all directions

While I strongly doubt anyone actually reads this blog, I’ve re-loaded lots of old entries that got lost as a way of marking time today. They date back to March 2007.

I admit, I thought twice—well, seven or eight times—before re/committing to the GoogleBorg. I may yet find another home for all this; the very principle of inserting advertising into your ordinary socialization, as happens on Google searches or Facebook, disgusts me. It is not enough to commodify our own internal, and perfectly ordinary, sufferings and call them neuroses in order to extract payment for their remedy (Freud the bourgeois capitalist!); now our own ‘face’ in cyberspace has been colonized by adverts. But for now there is now choice; I can’t afford to pay for yet another subscription cyber-service.

Do we pay to have a face? Do we subscribe to our clothing? To be able to speak? But we pay for premium online presence, for programming tools, for ringtones. Late capitalism indeed. FOSS it all! Though even that has infelicities…

It’s been a few months since I was at the British Library. They’ve instituted a bag search at the door. Given the recent brouhaha over British Transport police searching Scottish of some other sort, I began to wonder if the BL was being viewed as a target or as a hotbed of dissension. It could go either way, really; the BL of necessity employs a wonderful range of people – over lunch I had a lively conversation with Ramesh Dhungel about the Hodgson archives in Nepali and heard the usual two dozen languages around me in the Africa and Asia reading room. So is it the priceless holdings of the BL, or the suspicious foreigners that hang around there? At this point I am so confused and ashamed by the anti-terrorism mania that I cannot guess.

Now, my university—Aberdeen—has developed a habit of hiring ex-BL staff to major appointments – both the new head of IT and the new head of the library are ex-BL people. Hmm. I will have to watch the security policy at the new library verrrry carefuly indeed.

Frustrating then, to find that of all the books and articles I needed, almost none of them were available, even at the BL!. If anyone out there has issues of Maha Bodhi, the journal of the Maha Bodhi society, from 1955-65, do please let me know. Otherwise I will have to go begging for funds to buy them on microfilm.

Reading with Tanglewest

Odd to think how old patterns repeat. I’m sitting in the front room with Tanglewest who couldn’t sleep; she’s reading a Gerald Durrell book. Bhavana and I have agreed to institute a reading hour before dinner and the bizarre thing is that I’m in a house crammed with children who all love reading. Raymond’s eating Tintin books like biscuits; Eleanor shouts for her Tiger Who Came to Tea. It may not be Rancho Escondido but it’s remarkably civilized nonetheless. The weather’s been blisteringly hot, though Donmouth being what it is the heat is invariably answered with a dose of haar. All in all rather pleasantly Californian illusion. Wonderfully, this is Scotland and we don’t have Ku Klux Klan rejects littering the streets, buffoon politicians whose only professional credential is their equity card, or endless landscapes of arid suburb linked by writhing, stinking gridlock. I do miss the burritos and the hummingbirds.