Buddhist studies, on the whole, has not acknowledged, let alone addressed, issues of colonization, white supremacy, and the erasure of Asian people and cultures within the field.1
There are three main causes for this erasure: cultural narcissism, extractive capitalism, and the marketing of meditation programs and smartphone apps as a panacea for the modern psychological discomfort induced by living in a neoliberal economy. An excellent presentation of this may be found in McMindfulness by Ron Purser. He writes:
The Janus-faced habits of mindfulness discourse are part of this process of epistemic violence. To admit to being “Buddhist” becomes something to be wary of, or even embarrassed about, because it is saddled with “cultural” or “religious” baggage. The symbolic cachet of Buddhism can still be flaunted for commercial convenience, but only if the dharma is purged of its “foreignness” (though not its exoticness, which sells) by assimilating it under a scientific paradigm. The shameful history of Western imperialism and its violent crimes should really be declared as cultural baggage. Unless it is brought to attention, its underlying thought patterns influence mindfulness, which aspires to be a new scientific lineage of the dharma.2
What underlies this phenomena? The colonialist gaze towards Buddhadharma that has permeated the western academic reception of “Buddhism” since the 19th century. These days, the meritocracy underlying a Ph.D in Buddhist studies holds this degree as a key signifier that one is qualified to not only teach Buddhism but that one has the skills necessary to act in place of traditional teachers as a representative of dharma traditions. Such degree holders are awarded their degrees largely on 1) the merits of their ability to superficially master the fundamentals of the primary Buddhist languages, and 2) their ability to regurgitate both western gazes on the subject matter as well as present and interpret the work of classical scholars, such as Tsongkhapa, for western academic audiences, with little or no attention paid to whether these degree holders have adopted or integrated the key understandings of the traditions they are reporting on.
These days there are two terms fashionable in Buddhist studies: emic and etic. These two terms were coined by the linguist, Kenneth Pike, derived from a distinction he drew in linguistics between the “phonemic” and the “phonetic,” which he used to describe different approaches to analyzing language. These terms were soon adopted and repurposed by an anthropologist, Marvin Harris, in the forging of his anthropological theory called cultural materialism. The use of these terms then spread very widely into other disciplines, largely preserving Harris’ use of the terms to describe an insider/subjective gaze vs. an outsider/objective gaze.3 The application of these terms to religious studies, according to Mostowlansky and Rota, is largely the result of the work of Clifford Geertz. The crux of the matter is:
At the heart of the controversy lay the question of whether or not religious ‘insiders’ have privileged access to and understanding of religious matters.4
Today in Buddhist studies, one finds the terms emic and etic used to make precisely this distinction between insiders and outsiders.5 Those who have spent any time around Tibetans also know there is common distinction made between Buddhists and non-Buddhists, insider (nang pa) and outsider (phyi pa). These two terms describe perspectives on liberation. To the extent that the term etic, as it is presently used, derives from a materialist view of human culture, the academic perspective with its colonialist, neoliberal gaze and its etic approach to interpreting Buddhadharma, will certainly miss the key point of the Buddha’s message.
The danger lies, as Purser shows in McMindfulness, that the etic project is extractive, subordinating the voice and gaze of those who practice Buddhadharma in the interest of an asserted objectivity, which ignores the intersubjectivity of academic fashions themselves. People interested in Buddhism have to wade through fifteen decades of western writing about Buddhism, almost all of which is entirely from an outsider’s gaze. However, we can reverse that gaze, and take a critical approach to the Buddhist academic project itself, and identify the subjective assumptions of academia and point out that the academic approach to Buddhism is not only exploitative and colonialist in its present formation, but in many respects is just an exercise in forensic reportage with no relevance to our concerns as Dharma practitioners.
Kassor, Constance. Buddhist Studies Has a Whiteness Problem. https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/buddhist-studies-whiteness/
Purser, Ronald E. . McMindfulness (p. 88). Watkins Media. Kindle Edition.
Mostowlansky, Till, and Andrea Rota. (2020) 2023. “Emic and etic”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/20emicetic
Ibid.
Ibid. They point out that there is a long controversy generated by these two terms. I suggest that usage of these terms in Buddhist studies is lazy at best.
Hi Jacqueline:
Thanks for your remarks.
"Now I expect it's far less overt in Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies more generally."
It is pretty overt. For example, a well-known professor at an elite university recanted their personal involvement in Buddhadharma to secure a job.
Even well-meaning academics are forced into conducting their research through this fabrication of etic "methodology." I've read countless dissertations that spend 100+ pages describing their methodology, and others that never even address the source material they are writing about, spending their time going through reams of western academic writing before saying one signiricant thing.
At this point, sadly, Buddhology has become an entirely navel gazing enterprise where people spend all their time discussing what Schmithausen and Frauwellner said, etc.
My point is that we need to use emetics to eliminate this trend, and only comitted Buddhist practitioners can do this, and they cannot do it by caving to the dictates of modern historiography.
Modern historiography fails to take into consideration "difference" and "otherness," and subordinate other narratives through its own colonial power, concentrated as it is in western universities. This became more and more clear to me as I began to investigate indigenous writers who have face similar problems.
For example, my own teacher, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu tried to have his book "Light of Kailash" published by a serious western press. But the anonymous reviewers of his book, which is a landmark, dismisssed the book because it lacked a narrative consistent with prejudices of the modern Buddhist studies academy. They could not appreciate the novelty and brilliance of Norbu Rinpoche's research.
I think a lot of the emphasis on the etic perspective in the social sciences comes from a misplaced desire to steal the hard sciences' kind of legitimacy. Too many academics willfully ignore the subjectivity inherent in studying our own species, like they have some twisted intellectual inferiority complex. I saw it a lot back in the late 2000s when my then husband was working through graduate school in sociology. There was this sort of cold civil war between those who wanted sociology to be a hard science and those who saw the value in learning how people actually experience the world rather than ignoring the humanity of themselves and those they study in favor of objectification.
Now I expect it's far less overt in Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies more generally. But it's hard not to see strong echoes of that conflict in what you wrote here. They're both based in this cultural delusion we have that an objective, preferably scientific perspective is necessarily better in all (or at least nearly all) circumstances. It just sounds here like the wrong side ultimately won that war. You and I even demonstrate some subtle shades of it in how we talk about these things. I refer to "social sciences" as opposed to "hard sciences"--clearly prejudicial language--while you conflate a generalized "academic perspective" with this preference for objectivity above all, justifiable as such a generalization is under the circumstances. It's gotten in so deep its a tough thought pattern to break even when one is aware of it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of science. I was a physics major myself, even. Its methods are immeasurably valuable when used appropriately. But this idea that we can accurately study ourselves and each other any more deeply than on a gross physical/material level with the same kind of objectivity is madness. It's the very same madness that birthed scientific racism, eugenics, etc. Even entirely on its own terms, completely ignoring the insights of Buddhism on "objectivity", it's just completely self-contradictory nonsense. It demeans science itself as little more than an aesthetic and reduces the social sciences to a method to pointlessly reify our own worst delusions about ourselves and each other, painting unquestioned assumptions with a patina of false objectivity. That's all it's ever done. All it ever *can* do.