Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper explores the transpacific formation of the 'War on Prostitution' agenda and the fear of the yellow peril, perceived as both the sexual and moral peril, examining the confluence of gendered and religious ideologies that underpin migration-control policies. In elucidating the dynamics of what Espiritu, Lowe, and Yoneyama (2017) called 'transpacific intimacies and entanglements' in the construction and dissemination of a moral panic concerning "Asian sexual slavery," the paper delves into how constructs of morality, intricately linked with state apparatuses, have been utilized to demarcate the limits of permissible conduct for women, especially targeting individuals deemed 'immoral' by state and religious entities.The paper focuses particularly on the influence of American foreign missions in East Asia and local political and religious discourses that have further categorized and controlled women based on perceived moral failings, scrutinizing the implications these measures have had on the broader discourse of migration and moral regulation

This paper is concerned with how race and religion are taught, explicitly and implicitly, as theological concepts in American religious spaces to those identified as Asian American Christians, and how Asian American Christians, especially young adults, interpret, embody, and map these theologies onto material existences. Of specific concern and focus in this presentation are the results and ramifications of such explicit and implicit teachings in relation to experiences of hurt, manipulation, and exploitation that go unspoken or belatedly noticed. At the heart of this paper is a deep concern with violence: the violences that are or are not permitted, unto oneself or within a community, by the ontological embodiment of being an “Asian American Christian.” After analyzing and interpreting public-facing visual, audio, and literary media, this paper then envisions, and elevates the ways others are envisioning, embodied lives and practices outside of the dominant narratives of political and institutional participation.

This paper examines the corporeality of diasporic Asian subjects in North America engaging in acts of public protest in solidarity with local or transnational groups experiencing displacement and colonial seizure of land. Examples of these range from NYC’s Chinatown protests against local gentrification to Asian-American and Asian Canadian protests in solidarity with Palestine against war and displacement. I first consider these protesting Asian bodies function as a counter-image to stereotypical conceptions of Asian bodies as invisible, apolitical, or subservient. Then, I draw from decolonial theology and decolonial theory to argue that these diasporic Asian embodiments serve as a site of decolonial ethical construction that bridges the theoretical chasms between diaspora theory and decolonial/Indigenous studies’ views of the relationship between body and land. A new ethics of diaspora-decolonial solidarity emerges in diasporic Asian bodies that serve as sites of protests against displacement.

Does the Buddha possess a mind? Does the notion that the Buddha acts spontaneously imply that the Buddha lacks a mind? This paper posits that the Buddha can maintain cognitive faculties while interacting with sentient beings without the need for deliberation. This is attributed to the Buddha's mind consisting of two layers. At the foundational layer of the dharma-body, anchored by mirror cognition, the Buddha continuously perceives both emptiness and the specific characteristics of all phenomena. At the upper layer of the enjoyment-body and the transformation-body, the Buddha engages with sentient beings without deliberate thought because, along the path of cultivation, a bodhisattva has mastered and internalized all the essential skills for interacting with sentient beings. Thus, the Buddha's mind resembles that of a person deeply immersed in perpetual meditation on the same content, fortified with an armor that effortlessly deflects any external disturbances.

In classical Buddhist philosophy and contemporary scholarship alike, it’s said that a buddha’s awakening is a “non-conceptual gnosis” (nirvikalpakajñāna). In this paper, I’ll offer a challenge to this assumption based on *Śāntarakṣita’s Tattvasiddhi. *Śāntarakṣita claims here that a buddha’s omniscience (sarvajña) must involve mental constructions; that is, it must be savikalpakajñāna. Against Dharmakīrtian orthodoxy, he argues that any cultivation that involves mental constructions will per force result in an awareness-event that involves mental constructions. I’ll explicate *Śāntarakṣita’s defense of this, showing that it crucially depends on our interpretation of the “vividness” (spaṣṭatā) of awareness-events that result from long-practiced cultivation. Vivid awareness-events, he argues, are devoid of conceptual content, but nevertheless involve distinctions and mental constructions that make the skillful immersion in practical undertakings possible. Finally, despite the heterodox nature of the claim, I’ll suggest ways it might help us understand the relation between habituation and buddhahood more generally.

This presentation explores the ways in which the two, late Indian commentators on the Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti, Raviśrījñāna (the 12th -13th centuries) and Vibhūticandra (the 13th century) sought to explicate the ultimate nature of the Vajrasattva’s mind by exhibiting the multiple interpretative approaches to a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of 812 names and attributes of Mañjuśrī lauded in the Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti. Being the masters of the Kālacakra tantric tradition in India, which sees the ultimate nature of the Buddha’s mind as the cause, path, and result, those two interpreters structured their explanations and exegesis of the Vajrasattva’s mind in terms of the three, aforementioned ways in which it expresses itself as well as in accordance with their own understanding of the purpose and function of both, the nature of the Vajrasattva’s mind and the essence of the Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti.

The Buddhist path is aimed at awakening, and the mind of a buddha is often characterized as omniscient.  So, the Buddhist path is a path to omniscience.  But what is that omniscience like?  There is no consensus.  Some say that this omniscience consists in a complete cessation of thought, in a state of insentient automaticity.  Others say that it involves the simultaneous awareness of every detail of the universe, past, present and future. And some simply affirm that a buddha's mind is inconceivable.  I will address the question from the standpoint of those who would take the Buddhist path seriously in the context of contemporary Western culture: "What would any omniscience to which we could rationally aspire be like?"  I will argue that we can develop a recognizably Buddhist account of that omniscience that is consistent with what we know about human beings, but that is soteriologically non-trivial.

Drawing on historical documents, archival materials and literature, this study will explore the pivotal role played by Lady Elsie Louise Washington Mason. Mason's work uniquely as a Pentecostal black woman alongside her husband, C. H. Mason, founder of Church of God In Christ (COGIC), advocated for social justice and racial equality during a tumultuous period in American History. A critical analysis of Mason’s contributions will highlight the often-overlooked intersection of Pentecostalism, feminism, and nonviolent activism along through sharing her biography. This will serve as an example to elicit the need for more marginalized stories of Pentecostal women to be written. The lessons from her struggles, and grit as a marginalized Spirit-empowered woman can be applied in the ongoing struggle for equality. Her exemplary life and work reveals the ongoing tensions of the intersections of race and gender and the ever evolving need to implement change within Pentecostal denominations. 

The history of American Pentecostalism, particularly within Black Holiness-Pentecostal denominations, is often narrated through the lens of the 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles. While this event is significant it is but a partial historical narrative. Pioneering women, often overlooked, played vital roles in laying spiritual, logistical, and communal foundations for Pentecostalism's proliferation. This paper expands scholarly treatments by examining the contributions of Mother Mary L. Tate, the first African-American woman bishop, whose story challenges patriarchal norms within religious historiography. Despite her groundbreaking episcopal leadership, Tate's narrative is marginalized, highlighting the need for a reevaluation of entrenched gendered power dynamics in religious history. Drawing on Keri Day and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's work, our inquiry aims to unveil the silenced past and illuminate Tate's significant contributions to the Holiness-Pentecostal Movement.

This paper investigates the disrupted expectation within Pentecostal Colombian families that their children inherit and reproduce their Pentecostal religious practices and beliefs. Using Sherry Ortner’s theory of moral agency and in-depth interviews as ethnographical tool, the paper explores the evident intergenerational change in function, understanding, significance, and practices of Pentecostal traditions between pre-millennial generations (grandparents and parents) and post-2000 generation (Gen Z) and the conflict-tensions that such changes produce in a Colombian family. The results focus on the factors that influenced Gen-Zs to re-interpret or abandon the core worldviews of Pentecostalism, factors such as 1. the formation of personal identities in the information/technology era, 2. unfulfilled expectations when participating in Pentecostal churches and 3. drastic changes in the meaning of Pentecostal theologies and practices amid the Colombian context. The paper concludes that Pentecostal traditions might serve as a source of both agency and constraint according to the functions assigned by each generation.

This paper presents a description of the pre-colonial view of women in leadership particularly in the religious context and traces how Western biases impinged upon Filipino religiosity that discriminates women in relation to their religious roles. Also, this paper explains how and why the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement was instrumental to the re-emerging of women leadership in the religious context: first, the understanding and experience of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement on the empowering of the Holy Spirit to both men and women; second, the compatibility of the Pentecostal and Charismatic view on women and the Filipino religious consciousness; and third, the acknowledgement of the significant contribution of women ministers/leaders in the growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic movement in the Philippines as history informs us.

The academic study of religion and social theory in general are in the midst of what has been called “the practice turn,” that is, a shift of focus in theorizing human behavior that treats embodied social practices as the matrix from which all meaning and subjectivity grow. My aim is to argue that the practice turn is best served by a philosophy of mind that avoids dualism but nevertheless retains the category of beliefs, understanding them as conditioned by and emergent from the actions of material entities. In this paper, I use the defense of the category of belief in Jacob Mackey’s Belief and Cult -- and in particular, the “dual process” or “dual system” distinction he uses between two types of belief, one non-reflective or spontaneous, the other reflective or deliberate -- to make this case. 

In Belief and Cult (Princeton UP, 2002), Jacob Mackey provides a wide-ranging, interdisciplinarily grounded defense of the category of belief in general and a robust representational and intentional version of the notion in particular. In my contribution to this panel, I examine Mackey’s treatment of the notion of belief, primarily in Part I of the book, mainly as it engages in contemporary debates and live issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neurosciences. In particular, I examine the import of theories of belief coming from contemporary philosophy of mind that seek to downplay belief’s more strictly representational aspects and ground it more directly in action, habit, and experience, perhaps the dissolving the very foundational dichotomy between “belief” and “practice/ritual” that has come to organize the study of Roman religion and its presumed contrast with Christianity as Mackey tells it.

Mackey (2022) argues for a theory of religion that incorporates a concept of belief as an “Intentional state,” and as a condition of possibility for religious emotion, practice, and collective action. I connect his thesis to insights from pragmatism and critical realism, traditions which have been gaining attention in social theory but are absent from Mackey’s discussion and could help advance religion scholarship that recognizes practice and belief go hand-in-hand. Specifically, I discuss what Mackey’s project might gain from engaging with Peircean theories that entail the reality of belief and of intersubjective knowledge, as well as critical realist metatheory, to which Mackey’s project already bears a resemblance.

My paper places Jacob Mackey’s argument about belief in conversation with anthropologists of the Ontological Turn like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Martin Holbraad, and Peter Skafish who problematize the way that ethnocentrism persists in the form of tacit positivisms in the study of human difference. These anthropologists have advanced a methodological “perspectivism” which problematizes precisely the language of “representation,” “perspective,” and even “world” and “its object” upon which Mackey relies to defend “belief” as a universal form of cognition. As a means of reform, these anthropologists suggest replacing talk of multiple views with talk of multiple worlds. I will show how Mackey’s work can be in constructive conversation with the Ontological Turn, particularly in the context of the latter’s challenge to a representationalist account of belief and the “worldview” model of difference it underwrites.

In an essay on horror films, Stephen Prince uses classic theories of taboo from Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach to argue that what is presented as truly horrific is the breakdown of systems of order. Violence is typically perpetuated by outside, inhuman agents of chaos, suggesting that boundaries are sacred and the status quo must be maintained. Not surprisingly, horror films by marginalized creators often see things differently. The works of acclaimed Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, for example, present evil as entrenched in colonial society. But this evil is also complicated, a perspective reflected in his film’s ambivalent portrayal of boundaries, and of chaos. In this presentation, I will use theories of taboos to examine the varied boundary crossings in Barnaby’s two features, Rhymes for Young Ghouls and Blood Quantum, to understand what these films have to say about evil, and what it means to be human.

This paper discusses three films by Austrian directors duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. It analyzes how the films *Ich seh, Ich seh* (AT 2014), *Die Trud* (AT 2018) and *The Lodge* (US/UK 2019), all of which feature horror elements, portray the family and incorporate religious symbols and narratives to tell their story. The focus is on how religious references are staged, adapted and changed, as well as the way in wich the family and generational or gender roles are portrayed. The study aims to contribute to research into the question of how media convey norms and values in relation to religion and family in contemporary horror films. The analysis is centered on the meaning-making processes that arise in the interrelationship between horror films and religious symbol systems. Methodologically, it is based on cultural studies approaches to the study of religion as well as on methods of film analysis.

Since its release, the film Godzilla Minus One (2023) has received much critical acclaim for its screenplay, visual effects, performances, musical score, and notably, social commentary. The impact of this film can arguably be attributed to the powerful and complex portrayal of the Japan’s post-World War II trauma and the national guilt that riddles their society. In this paper, I make the case that Godzilla Minus One successfully encapsulates the “grief horror” subgenre and denies the audience the cathartic release from the horrors that they’ve experienced. By invoking Derrida’s idea of hauntology, I argue that Godzilla functions as a specter of World War II that continues to haunt Japan and its people that can never be completely exorcised. Ultimately, the persistent return of Godzilla provides an accurate reflection of Japanese sentiments regarding the aftermath of the atomic bomb and the inescapable trauma that continuously pervades their nation.

This paper examines the lives and work of a group of emigrant Iranian computer scientists in the US specializing in the “debiasing” of AI systems. Focusing on the concept of "bias," as entangled with both their professional and personal lives, I argue that amidst their debiasing efforts, the line between Islamic and anti-Islamic bias often becomes blurred. Through my ethnographic encounter, I explore the relationship between "bias" in the language of numbers and bias as felt by the subject. In the former, bias can supposedly be articulated, quantified, and mitigated. In the latter, bias manifests as an emotional residue, resistsing the orderliness of algorithms and numbers, with deep roots in a complex interplay of history, memory, and emotion. In exploring this terrain, I address the complexities within the concept of bias in relation to Islam at the intersection of AI and the broader liberal project of debiasing citizens at large. 

In this article, I examine how I utilize a collection of "skillful means” informed by Buddhism, namely a collection of practices encompassing reflexive choices and decisions, positioning, and creativities that are situationally tailored for and derived from interacting with Chinese Buddhist diasporas in French Canada in the context of digital social media throughout my digital fieldwork. I use ethnographic vignettes to illustrate how these practices, afforded by the Buddhist ideas, digital possibilities, and ethnographic reflexivity, are crucial to constantly navigate, negotiate, and devise new strategies for pinpointing digital field sites and conducting participant observation. More importantly, I highlight the digital affordances one could leverage as both a researcher and a practitioner to actively build visibility and voices in the researched digital communities. I further reflect on how these dynamics can uniquely affect the researched individuals and communities. Finally, I point out the caveats and pitfalls this approach can bring.

While much phenomenological work has been undertaken concerning questions of techno-virtual-being-in-the world, very little ethnographic work has applied a Heideggerian hermeneutic to the question of virtual “solicitude,” or the type of “Dasein-with [that] remains existentially constitutive for Being-in-the-world [and] must be Interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of care; for as ‘care’ the Being of Dasein in general is to be defined” (Being and Time, 1927). The literature concerned with Heideggerian accounts of virtual inhabitation and video game play have either failed to recognize the constitutive nature of Being-with, a type of sociality, to Being-in-the-world or have foreclosed the possibility of fostering authentic social relationships within virtual worlds by virtue of virtual technology use itself. The present work seeks to rectify this prior dearth in the literature by countering these latter claims of socio-existential inauthenticity in technologically mediated virtual worlds by way of an existential ethnography of video game play.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the board game CULTivate and the video game Cult of the Lamb. In it, I focus on their gameplay and mechanics (e.g., the actions a player may take) to decode how these games have implicit theories of what cults are and how cults work. It situates these games and their implicit theories within recent debates on the rhetoric of cults and their representation in popular media. This paper concludes with suggestions about research at the intersection of Religious Studies and Game Studies with a focus on the design and experience of game mechanics.

The Satanic Cult conspiracy theory alleges that Satan-worshipping cults exist and threaten society. It has underpinned multiple witch hunts and moral panics from the early Middle Ages to the 1980s ‘Satanic Panic’. Today its narratives have appeared again, popularised by seemingly united communities of conspiracy theorists across social media. This paper analyses the role of social media in legitimising contemporary Satanic cult conspiracy theories, and the relationship between its 'followers' and those that they demonise. It emphasises both how its theorists weaponise ‘Satanic cult’ accusations against others, but also – paradoxically - how they have themselves also attracted ‘the cult label’. This paper ultimately questions the extent to which we can determine whether online conspiracism today can be considered a form of  ‘new religion’, or even ‘belief’ at all, and whether or not it really matters.

The urgent prioritization of resistance has recently reemerged as a prominent feature in religious and social ethics. This paper simultaneously celebrates this theme and argues for its integration with two others: reimagination and reconstruction. Though distinct, these tasks are interrelated. Resisting injustice and oppression, in their ideological underpinnings and material effects alike, is essential; resistance by itself, however, risks devolving into reactive pugnacity, ceding the initiative to malefactors. An expanded imagination, which envisions abundant life on the other side of the struggle, is also indispensable for social change; yet, reimagining alone is likewise insufficient, since isolated from action, it can function as escapist fantasy. Meanwhile, amidst institutional and societal unraveling, people need somewhere to live; thus, rebuilding—short-term and long-term, conceptual and communal, structural and systemic—is in order. Such reconstruction only finds coherence, however, in tandem with the deconstructive ground clearing of resistance and the creative foresight of reimagining.

This paper compares two narratives of resistance—one advocating for violence, and the other nonviolence, one a pastor from a marginalized group and another a consummate “insider.” Henry Highland Garnet was a New York Presbyterian minister and black abolitionist who famously argued for slaves and other Black Americans to take agency for their own liberation. Christian Führer was the Lutheran pastor of the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, who used nonviolence to resist the East German state and help bring about its downfall through the “Revolution of Candles.” Historically, such narrative studies have been seen as “too sectarian,” but by expanding the inquiry beyond internal communal narratives to include legal and hegemonic narratives that shape and impact the path of resistance, comparison yields a deeper understanding of why narratives of resistance find expression in terms of reform or revolution. I argue that, by illuminating the constant interplay of narrative worlds within structures of power, privilege, and repression, such comparisons not only open new fields of inquiry for narrative ethics, but are capable of expressing normative claims about the conditional nature of law and justice, while utilizing emerging scholarship in law, human rights, and social justice.

Nonviolence is widely assumed to be the most effective form of religious-moral resistance. I argue this assumption is (1) ahistorical and (2) harmful to ongoing struggles to create positive social change worldwide. More specifically, I focus on how contemporary environmental activism is rendered ineffective due to its blind allegiance to nonviolence—a fidelity that religious studies and ethics have done little to assuage. I propose we change this, starting with examining why strategic acts of violence (property) might not simply be permissible but moral and necessary given our climate crisis. First, I provide a counter reading of the civil rights movement—one that shows that the possibility of violence was essential to creating social change (e.g., 1964 Voting Rights Act). I then turn to Eco-Leninism, Antonio Gramsci, and just war theory to construct a foundation for religious ethics to reflect on strategic violence’s moral role in seeking climate justice. 

In a climate of increased educational surveillance—much of it powered by the white Christian religious right—this paper argues from the lineages of feminist of color history and critical pedagogy that it is necessary to support innovative sites of education outside traditional academy. To that end, I discuss the contemplative and critical pedagogies I have used to build alternative classrooms for Christian clergy to study at the intersections of feminist/queer/anti-racist historical change and religious history. This paper suggests that studying how and why these histories of change have been erased is itself a vital democratic habit. I link scholarship in ethnic studies, feminist studies, and religious history to explore how teaching clergy and empowering their creative public voices in justice work—from racial justice in the U.S. to Palestinian rights— is one model of enacting transformative, innovative education and contesting anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQI, and anti-BDS laws.

Drawing on the radical pedagogical thinking of Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004), this presentation explores the tension between pedagogical authority and pedagogical authoritarianism.  Through an exercise drawn from my classroom teaching, we reflect on the ways utopian freedom so often inverts into dystopian unfreedom, and think about the authority of the teacher as necessarily frail, contingent, and messy. The goal (both in the classroom and in the AAR presentation) is to live at the border between a facile anti-authoritarianism and a despairing return to authoritarian order, allowing students—led to this point through the authority of a pedagague—to find the freedom and responsibility of mutual accountability.

This paper traces the development and on-going assessment of a six-year experiment teaching community organizing as a required ethics course in graduate level theological education, and harvests insights useful to others seeking to integrate community organizing or other activist arts into theological and religious studies education. Assessment draws on recorded evaluations by students, faculty and guest instructors who are community organizers, and on three theoretical fields: community-organizing theory developed by feminist and Black women organizers, critical pedagogy, and decolonial theory. Questions arise: How can courses in community organizing address white supremacist undergirdings of theological and religious studies education, and neoliberal mentalities impacting morality? What are guidelines for teaching social change arts in academic curricula? What are relationships of community organizing to traditional fields in theology and religious studies? What are criteria for courses with explicit political implications that are required courses? What role may arts play in the pedagogy?

Ethnographic writing is what anthropologists do. But interlocutors? This paper develops a response to intellectual projects encountered in the field that come uncomfortably close to the ethnographer's own terrain. By engaging with these intellectual projects on their own terms, I argue that Buddhist Studies offers models for the anthropologist of Buddhism to better approach textual cultures of expertise and intellectualism. Likewise, ethnographic engagement offers opportunities for Buddhist Studies to expand the scope of intellectual practices, especially who gets to count and how. Instantiated through reference to para-ethnographic writings and my own fieldwork on domesticity within Newar Buddhist cultures of expertise, I offer a methodologically plural and dialogical approach that emphasizes the complexity and perplexity of any iteration of a text or performance of an interlocutor.

This research shows the practical importance of abhiññā (supernatural powers) in the Southeast Buddhist tradition. As a contemporary example, I focus on a Burmese Buddhist meditation technique formulated by the Burmese monk Pa-Auk Sayadaw (1934-). Supernatural powers, though acknowledged as one of the Buddha’s and Buddhist saints’ venerated qualities, have been marginalized as an unorthodox practice unessential for Buddhist liberation. Similarly, in Myanmar, the exhibition of supernatural powers has been suppressed as animistic magic by the government during the nation-rebuilding time. The devaluation of the practice is still evident after different Buddhist meditation techniques of Burmese origin became popular worldwide. The Pa-Auk meditation technique teaches supernatural powers to all practitioners as elective but requires it for prospective meditation teachers. I examine how teachers and practitioners understand the values for the true path through my observations and interviews with them at different branches of the Pa-Auk meditation centers since 2018.

What might lay-Sri Lankan Buddhists who engage in charitable giving to the poor as merit-making practice and American convert-Buddhists who engage in mindfulness practice to explore racialized dukkha share in common? They both consist of Buddhists practicing the Theravada tradition in vernaculars that depart widely from the normative philological evaluative take on what does and does not constitute “real” Theravada Buddhism. Thinking comparatively on ethnographic research conducted in these widely different socio-historical contexts, this paper explores how as an anthropologist, the Buddhist social life exemplified by these two contemporary case-studies— often relegated to the marginalia of what counts as real Buddhism—surface an important problem in the field of Buddhist Studies. Namely, the tendency to judge contemporary Buddhist vernaculars against a canonically based conception of orthodoxy. On a more personal note, the paper also explores the complexities of being an ethnographer and a native “Buddhist” studying contemporary Buddhist marginalia.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, hagiography (rnam thar) is a vast and popular genre of literature that tells the life-stories of Buddhist figures. Although hagiographic literature itself points to a complex relationship with oral narratives, scholars tend to categorize hagiography as written expression that is both stylized and distinct from history. This paper examines two ethnographic accounts of the life of a religious master – one oral history given by a 25-year-old lama and another account by his teacher. The lama presents a life that is filled with self-doubt, non-religious desires, and fatigue with his position. His teacher presents a narrative of miracles, extraordinary signs and an exaggerated educational history. This paper examines oral history as a dialectic process between intersubjective interlocutors, suggesting that by understanding this dialogic process we must rethink the stability of the hagiographic text and imagine the narrative interests of hagiographic-ethnographers of the past.

This paper looks at chanting, marginalia, and intertextuality in the making of Myanmar Buddhist nuns, preparing them for the government monastic exams. I demonstrate the need to understand both Buddhist texts themselves and how these texts are used, shaped, practiced, and in turn how these processes influence Buddhist knowledge communities. I find that understanding marginalia and chanting is instrumental in understanding the changes that have occurred in the transfer of knowledge within the last few decades. Without the observation, participation, and the questioning of teachers, students, and their methods and practices, we would only see scribbles on a page with no context.

This paper explores the often-overlooked phenomenon of spirit possession, in the Kathmandu Valley, among Newar Buddhist women, known as dyaḥmāṃ. Despite their integral role in local Buddhist practices, their practices, as those of other spirit mediums in the Buddhist world, often find themselves at the margins of what gets to count as Buddhism. Drawing on ethnographic data and vernacular texts, this paper challenges the dichotomy between possession and Buddhism, arguing that possession is a vital aspect of Buddhist practice rather than its other. By examining collaborative rituals between dyaḥmāṃ and Buddhist priests, the paper demonstrates how possession traditions are deeply intertwined with mainstream Buddhist beliefs and ethical norms. Additionally, it advocates for a more inclusive approach to Buddhist studies that incorporates vernacular texts and ritual perspectives, thereby expanding our understanding of what constitutes Buddhism.