Gender and Resource Allocation: Monastic Education and Patronage in Drikung Kagyu Communities

This paper offers preliminary reflections on a larger study, in which I seek to outline the roles of education and gender in determining whether and how patronage patterns have shifted with the rise of nuns’ education in recent decades. The larger project addresses relationships among monastics, and between monastics and laity, in the Drikung Kagyu communities found across the Himalayas. This paper describes research outcomes from initial phases of ethnographic fieldwork and data gathering in Drikung monasteries and nunneries in Ladakh and Uttarakhand, It describes the ways in which this author’s presuppositions about lay patronage were reinforced, as well as some unexpected results, while attending to the necessary consideration of how research positionality can influence one’s findings. I focus on who (and who is not) choosing to join Drikung monastic communities, and details of the internal and external pressures that are changing the face of Drikung monasticism in the 21st century.