Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper explores a contemplative theory of medical healing found within the Great Perfection (Rdzogs chen) tantra, the Unimpeded Sound (Sgra thal ‘gyur), and its 12th-century commentary linked to Vimalamitra. Recasting traditional Buddhist theorizations of the person in terms of “body, speech, and mind,” as a model of disease pathology and treatment, this system proposes contemplative yogic techniques of body, mantric techniques of speech, and attentional practices of mind for treating physical illnesses. The paper considers the ways that Great Perfection Buddhist contemplative-scholarly communities in the 12th century drew upon conventional Buddhist doctrinal knowledge frameworks—such as body, speech, and mind—to address the decidedly this-worldly concern of healing the human suffering of illness.

Certain Tibetan monks demonstrate signs of vitality or being “alive” for up to 10-20 days following clinical death. In recent years, scientists have initiated studies on this occurrence, monitoring their brain activity during what is referred to as their thukdam meditation phase. However, what exactly is this contemplative practice, and within what context is such a post-clinical death meditation undertaken? Mahāyāna Buddhism emphasizes that meditation focused on perceiving reality and cultivating compassion is significantly more potent when conducted with the "subtle mind" rather than the "gross mind," wherein conceptual states, including dualism, persist. The subtle mind of the mind refers to innate clarity of the mind that is nonceptual and nondual. This paper will explore the three main contemplative practices associated with thukdam meditation: tantric, Mahāmudrā, and Dzogchen practices. Following that, I will analyze them from a broader Buddhist philosophical and soteriological perspective.

Approaching the term ‘meditation’ in the American milieu, one encounters a wide range of use cases. Meditation is sometimes represented as a distinct religious practice, other times a perennial human behavior, and popularly a kind of secular wellness practice. Depending on the context in which one encounters the term, meditation can be a specific technique or a therapeutic category. As an intervention to make sense of these competing conceptions, one can articulate meditation as appearing either as a ‘technological’ or a ‘cultural’ artifact. These categories can represent alternating and conflated epistemic identities inherent in the approaches taken by researchers, educators, and practitioners of meditation. Providing this distinction for how meditation is treated in different contexts allows scholars to more accurately assess the state of the term within societies, and engage in reflexive inquiry into how epistemologies of meditation are informed by implicit expectations concerning each identity.

The Material Turn, within and outside of the discipline of Religious Studies, is marked by a significant high interest by female and feminist scholars as well as analyses of gender, the body and aesthetics that are centred in this approach. In this paper, I will reflect upon this gendered (or sexed?) distinction with the Religious Studies’ Material Turn. This will bring new and different insights to the question in how far the Material Turn is connected to a neo-phenomenology guised in feminist (essentialising) approaches to religion and in how far this feminist approach was part of its early and ongoing appeal to the discipline. To do so, I will give an overview of the development of the Material Turn/Material Religion and how it relates to gender and sex and specifically look at the works of David Morgan and Birgit Meyer.

This paper interrogates the material turn and its relationship to forms of post- or decolonial thinking through a close examination of the resurgence of interest in the “fetish” in religious studies. In recent years, the twin concepts of fetish and fetishism have become major terms for scholars of religion. In a striking departure from its historical use as a term of racist denigration, the fetish has been revalorized as a focal point of critical reflexivity along explicitly decolonial and materialist lines, distilling in its multiple functions the material turn’s broader intellectual and political ambitions. In this paper I capitalize on that exemplarity. Focusing on one early iteration of fetish-talk in religious studies, namely, the work of Charles Long and his “imagination of matter,” I use the fetish as a privileged lens through which to historicize the material turn and examine its enduring theoretical tensions. 

This paper asserts that recent and popular trends in the academic study of religion, together loosely designated by the tag “the material turn,” proceed from a mistaken rejection of deconstruction, and its associated semiotic conceptualization of textuality. After showing how deconstruction, especially its stakes for perception and cognition, is misunderstood and misrepresented in representative writings of the material turn, the paper shifts focus to the work of Paul de Man in order to counter the material turn’s mistaken opposition of deconstruction to materialism. De Man argues that it is precisely in language that materiality, denoting that which refuses “transform[ation]…into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment,” registers for the subject, albeit only ever in the mode of error. Against this more rigorous account of materiality, the so-called material turn scans as an uncritical flight into the refuge of aesthetic mystification.