Search

Begin New Search Topic Religion Content Type Video

1. In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms

Author:
Matthew W. King and Gray Tuttle
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
Speaker's Bio: Matthew King is an Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies and Director of Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is also a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute for 2022-2023. His research examines the social history of knowledge in Buddhist scholastic networks extending across the Tibeto-Mongolian frontiers of the late Qing empire and its revolutionary ruins. Much of his published work has focused on encounters between Buddhist scholasticism, science, humanism, and state socialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He is also broadly engaged with methodological revision in the study of religion and Buddhist Studies, and in revisionist theoretical projects associated with the critical Asian humanities. King's first book Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019), was awarded the American Academy of Religion Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies book award, the Central Eurasian Studies Society's 2020 Best Book in History and Humanities, and the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize (Specialist Publication).
Topic:
Religion, History, and Buddhism
Political Geography:
Eurasia and Asia

2. The Seventh Dalai Lama's Residence in Kham with Yudru Tsomu

Author:
Yudru Tsomu and Gray Tuttle
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
The Seventh Dalai Lama’s residence at Gartar Monastery (Mgar thar dgon, མགར་ཐར་དགོན། ), beginning in 1730, greatly affected the relationship between the Kham region and the Tibetan government as well as the Qing court’s control over Kham. The Dalai Lama’s interactions with various indigenous leaders, local monasteries, monks and lay people increased the influence of the Geluk school in Kham, and also inspired their support for the Dalai Lama. Measures adopted by the Qing court to protect the Dalai Lama, such as stationing troops and inspecting check-points, also strengthened Qing control of Kham. After the Dalai Lama left for Tibet in 1735, Gartar Monastery continued to serve as a religious and cultural center of northern Kham, having the function of “civilizing” and “enlightening” the neighboring regions that were far away from the political center. Successive abbots of Gartar Monastery—all the way up to 1920—came from Drepung Monastery in Lhasa; they and the monks of Gartar influenced, interfered and controlled the local affairs of Gartar and other regions in Kham. In particular, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gartar Monastery, together with the Tibetan commissioner in Nyarong, was able to assist the Tibetan government’s efforts to extend its sphere of influence in Kham.
Topic:
Government, Religion, History, Buddhism, and Dalai Lama
Political Geography:
Asia and Tibet

3. Teaching Tibetan Buddhism in the Western Academy with Jan Willis

Author:
Jan Willis
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
Through personal and practical anecdotes from her own life and teaching, Dr. Jan Willis describes in this talk how, over the course of fifty years, she both learned and taught Tibetan Buddhism in undergraduate academic settings in the West. Looking at the obstacles and challenges of teaching an “esoteric” religious tradition, the talk is as much about pedagogy as about Tibetan Buddhism.
Topic:
Religion, Pedagogy, Buddhism, and Tradition
Political Geography:
Asia and Tibet

4. The Buddhist Dream Tale: Past and Present

Author:
Francisca Cho and Seong Uk Kim
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
Kim Manjung's Kuunmong, or Dream of the Nine Clouds, was written by a scholar-official and he turned to the Buddhist trope that "life is nothing but a dream" in order to express his doubts and disappointment about the Confucian social structure in which he lived. The speaker argues that the dream tale turns the act of fiction writing into a Buddhist philosophical exercise, and she will draw out this argument by considering how the medium of fiction functions in a ritual way. In this vein, she brings the dream tale into the present by considering the experience of cinema as an analogue. This event is cosponsored by the Center for Korean Research and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Topic:
Religion, Arts, Culture, and Literature
Political Geography:
Asia

5. A conversation with Loden Sherab Dagyab Rinpoche

Author:
Loden Sherab Dagyab Rinpoche, Pema Bhum, and Riga Shakya
Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
This event was co-hosted by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University and The Latse Project, with funding and administrative support from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Dagyab Rinpoche, one of the few living Tibetan witnesses of the 1950 advance of the People's Liberation Army into Chamdo, was just nine years old when Chinese Communist authorities urged him to participate as one of the high-ranking dignitaries (zhuren) for their first conference in the region. He then went on to study at Drepung Loseling Monastery in Lhasa until his escape to India in 1959. In this talk, Rinpoche describes his experience of this important historical juncture.
Topic:
Religion, History, and Memory
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Tibet

6. A Pilgrim’s Diary: Khatag Dzamyag’s nyindep and Tibetan diary-keeping practices

Author:
Lucia Galli and Gray Tuttle
Publication Date:
05-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
This presentation offers an overview of diary-keeping practices in the Tibetan literary and historical milieus by taking as a case study the personal account of a 20th-century Eastern Tibetan trader named Khatag Dzamyag (Kha stag ’Dzam yag, 1896-1961). Belonging to the diaristic genre of nyinto (nyin tho)/nyindep (nyin deb), the work lends itself to multiple approaches. Recent studies in the literary field have already marked the existence of a hybrid form of (auto)biographical narratives, in which the factual and the fictional merge, mix, and intertwine. Facts are constantly subject to manipulation through processes of narrativization, selection, expansion, and omission that all together contribute to the coming into play of fiction. By taking life stories as a metaphor for the phenomena of human life, mind, and action, (auto)biographical narratives thus become a means of “doing living”, i.e. a way to understand the meaning of life while acting, thinking, and living it. Taking a narratological approach, Dr. Galli will reflect upon the dual structural core of Dzamyag’s autobiographical first-person pronoun – as self that is both “narrating” and “narrated”, extending the discussion to the way in which traditional structures and institutions of self-representation are actively engaged and reinterpreted throughout the nyindep.
Topic:
Religion, History, and Narrative
Political Geography:
Asia and Tibet

7. Organized Shinto’s Efforts to Restore the Imperial Rescript on Education in Postwar Japan

Author:
Hirokazu Yoshie and Paul Kreitman
Publication Date:
12-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
In the 1960s, the Association for Shinto Shrines—comprising 98% of the shrines nationwide—began running a decade-old campaign to reinstate a prewar symbol of emperor-centered nationalism, i.e., the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo). Member priests petitioned prime ministers and other LDP politicians, published manuals for adults and picture books for children, and held summer camps for young students. These efforts were based on a modern translation into which the organization had rendered from the originally archaic rescript. Puzzlingly, this modern paraphrase completely concealed the authorship and centrality of the Meiji emperor, leaving only generic words of patriotism, which apparently defeats the purpose of the restorationism. His presentation makes sense of the campaign by analyzing organized Shinto’s discourse with it and considering its broader historical context. The narrative starts from the US occupation era (1945-1952), when the official invalidation of the rescript by Americans left conservative Japanese aggrieved. After failed attempts to revise the new constitution (1952-1964), the restoration movement gathered momentum amid left-leaning campus activism in around 1970. Convinced that it was a result of America’s ideological colonization, the Shinto organization argued that the restoration would serve to overcome that negative influence. But they tried to do so without disrupting popular sovereignty of postwar Japan, which required dilution of the text’s politically incorrect elements. The talk ends by suggesting the significance of looking at prewar legacies in our understanding of the role of the monarchy in postwar Japan.
Topic:
Education, Religion, History, and Shintoism
Political Geography:
Japan and Asia

8. Religion and Politics in Japan after the Abe Assassination

Author:
Levi McLaughlin and Benjamin E. Goldsmith
Publication Date:
10-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
Turmoil following the shocking murder of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō on July 8, 2022 by a gunman who bore a grudge against the Unification Church (UC) has reinforced the fact that we must attend to religion in order to understand politics in Japan. In this talk, Levi McLaughlin (North Carolina State University) will contextualize revelations about the UC and its political connections as he surveys how religions and religion-adjacent activists in Japan exert a decisive impact on vote-gathering, policymaking, and party politics. McLaughlin will draw on his ethnographic and historical research to provide an overview of Shinto-affiliated nationalists (including the lobby organization Nippon Kaigi and its signatories), Buddhists (including Soka Gakkai and its affiliated party Komeito), and other actors to reconcile the incommensurate image of Japan as non-religious with the persistence of Japan's religiously-inspired political engagements, and he will discuss precedents for the moral panic that has surged in the wake of Abe's assassination to interpret ways Japan's religion/politics nexus is now developing.
Topic:
Politics, Religion, Assassination, and Shinzo Abe
Political Geography:
Japan and Asia

9. The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
MIT Center for International Studies
Abstract:
Sahar Aziz: Kleh Visiting Distinguished Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law
Topic:
Religion, Discrimination, Racism, and Freedom of Religion
Political Geography:
Global Focus

10. A Genealogy of African Islamic Modernity

Author:
Wendell Hassan Marsh
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Rutgers University School of Law
Abstract:
African Islamic modernity is a discourse, a historical condition, and a project that highlights the entanglements of African racial identities, Islamic forms of life, and modernity as the globally hegemonic mode of social, economic, and political being. While there are many lineages by which one might trace the story of entanglement — situated differently in various locations, traditions, and contexts — the contemporary nation-state of Senegal is the ideal setting to think through these relationships. It is a space marked by a millennium of Islamic presence and over five centuries of integration in the global economy sequentially defined by the trans-Atlantic slave-trade, colonization, and neoliberal economic structural adjustment. It is also a space in which conflicting Africanist and Orientalist discourses have competed to represent a society that consistently escapes both constructions. Between and beyond these discourses, there is an important national discourse that narrates a story of modernity in three key episodes: 1) Islamic revolution that enshrines Islamic principles of governance, 2) anti-colonial messianism that carves out an autonomous space of Islamic economics, and 3) Racial accommodation in which the colonial state and Sufi orders negotiate the terms of the social contract. In this talk, I will show how these episodes together constitute a history of the present.
Topic:
Islam, Race, Religion, History, Hegemony, Colonialism, Discourse, and Modernity
Political Geography:
Africa and Senegal

11. Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places

Author:
Laurel Kendall, Lesley Sharp, Max Moerman, and Myron L. Cohen
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
Paintings, statues, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities and sometimes they are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bali, Indonesia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art market commodities and museum artifacts. The two discussants approach this discussion of animated images from two different but intersecting directions. Max Moerman is a scholar of Japanese religion whose work focuses on visual and material representation. Lesley Sharp is a medical anthropologist with an interest in material culture whose recent work has focused on organ transplants and related questions of “life” and “death.” As moderator, Myron Cohen brings a broad knowledge of East Asian popular religion. The event is organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and cosponsored by the New York Southeast Asia Network.
Topic:
Religion, Arts, Culture, Spirituality, Museums, Magic, and Mediums
Political Geography:
Indonesia, Asia, South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bali

12. Book Launch: Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China

Author:
Nicole Willock and Gray Tuttle
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
In the aftermath of the cataclysmic Maoist period, three Tibetan Buddhist scholars living and working in the People’s Republic of China became intellectual heroes and were renowned as the “Three Polymaths”: Tséten Zhabdrung (1910–1985), Mugé Samten (1914–1993), and Dungkar Lozang Trinlé (1927–1997). Lineages of the Literary, by Nicole Willock, reveals how the Three Polymaths negotiated the political tides of the twentieth century, shedding new light on Sino-Tibetan relations and Buddhism during this turbulent era. An interdisciplinary work spanning religious studies, history, literary studies, and social theory, Lineages of the Literary offers new insight into the categories of religion and the secular, the role of Tibetan Buddhist leaders in modern China, and the contested ground of Tibet.
Topic:
Religion, History, Leadership, Literature, Secularism, Buddhism, and Social Theory
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Tibet

13. Book Launch: A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery

Author:
Dominique Townsend, Janet Gyatso, and Lauran Hartley
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
A Buddhist Sensibility sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes. Townsend traces how tastes, values, and sensibilities were cultivated and spread by Tibetan Buddhist teachers of the Nyingma School at Mindröling monastery in the 17th century and onwards, showing what it meant for a person, lay or monastic, to be deemed well-educated. Combining historical and literary analysis with fieldwork in Tibetan Buddhist communities, this book reveals how monastic institutions work as centers of cultural production beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally deemed Buddhist.
Topic:
Education, Religion, History, Buddhism, and Cultural Production
Political Geography:
Asia and Tibet

14. The Muslim Resolutions: Bosniak Responses to World War II Atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a talk with Hikmet Karčić, genocide scholar and author of The Muslim Resolutions: Bosniak Responses to World War II Atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, June 2021). Moderated by Tanya Domi (SIPA/Harriman Institute).
Topic:
Genocide, Religion, Discrimination, World War II, and Humanitarian Crisis
Political Geography:
Europe and Bosnia and Herzegovina

15. Muslims in the 18th-Century Habsburg Cities: The Social Integration of an Unincorporated Population

Author:
David Do Paco
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute and East Central European Center for a lecture by David Do Paço, István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University (Harriman Institute and Department of History). This lecture explores the social life of unincorporated populations in community-based societies, and analyzes how they used the social fabric of global cities to compensate for their administrative marginality, and still have a political impact. It specifically focuses on Muslims in port, continental, and recently reconquered cities in the Habsburg Empire throughout the 18th century to overcome the traditional opposition between “Islam” and “Europe,” and to support the development of inclusive memory policies. It examines the multiple affiliations of fragile populations and offers a new history of foreigners in early modern Europe. It thus fits into the perspective of a new urban history from the ground up and advocates a trans-imperial and global history of Central Europe. David Do Paço is István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University (Harriman Institute and Department of History) and a historian of the Habsburg Empire in the 18th century. His research lies at the intersection of urban history, diaspora studies, and historical anthropology. He defended his Ph.D. in 2012 at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and has since been a EUI Max-Weber Fellow and a CEU-IAS Core Fellow. In 2015, he published his first monograph, L’Orient à Vienne au dix-huitième siècle, as part of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (Voltaire Foundation). That same year, David joined Sciences Po where, among other responsibilities, he directed the departmental seminar in European History. At Columbia University he is working on his new project “ESLAM: European Societies in the Light of Apolitical Muslims.” He has recently contributed to the Historical Journal, Urban History, and the International History Review.
Topic:
Religion, Minorities, Urban, Cities, and Integration
Political Geography:
Europe and Habsburg Empire

16. The Tumultuous Decade: Recapping a Decade of Polling in the Middle East

Author:
Paul Salem, James Zogby, and Nahida Nakad
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Middle East Institute (MEI)
Abstract:
The Middle East Institute (MEI) is pleased to co-host a virtual panel with the Arab American Institute to launch The Tumultuous Decade, a book by James Zogby, co-published by Zogby Research Services (ZRS) and the Middle East Institute, which presents and analyzes the results of the last ten years of public opinion polling across the Arab World, Turkey, and Iran. The book delves into the responses of individuals from the region on a variety of issues including the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Israel- Palestine conflict, Iran’s regional role, and the fate of the “Arab Spring.” How do respondents across the region view the proper role of religion? What are their top political priorities? And how do they assess the involvement of other countries in the Arab World? “The Tumultuous Decade” examines how views on these and other critical issues have changed during the past decade and then asks how the resultant findings can be integrated into the policy discourse relating to the Middle East, especially within the context of popular uprisings and conflicts?
Topic:
Religion, Public Opinion, Arab Spring, and Polls
Political Geography:
Middle East

17. Panel 1: Islamophobia in the United States: Race and Religion

Author:
Moustafa Bayoumi, Sahar Aziz, Zain Abdullah, and Zareena Grewal
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Rutgers University School of Law
Abstract:
This panel was part of the "Global Islamophobia in an Era of Populism" conference.
Topic:
Islam, Race, Religion, and Islamophobia
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

18. The Historical Compromise Between Civil State and Religion in Post-Revolution Tunisia

Author:
Yadh Ben Achour
Publication Date:
01-2017
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Columbia University World Leaders Forum
Abstract:
This World Leaders Forum program features an address by Yadh Ben Achour, Professor at Carthage University, Former President of the High Authority of the Revolution (Tunisia), Member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee, followed by a question and answer session with the audience.
Topic:
Civil Society, Islam, Religion, Popular Revolt, and Arab Spring
Political Geography:
North Africa and Tunisia

19. Diwaniyya Voices Podcast: Arab Christians

Author:
Alona Ferber and Wadi'a Abu Nasser
Publication Date:
01-2016
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
Abstract:
Podcast episode produced by the Moshe Dayan Center in 2016. Featuring Alona Ferber interviewing Wadi'a Abu Nasser.
Topic:
Religion, Culture, Oral History, and Podcast
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

20. Salafism and the Islamic State

Publication Date:
05-2016
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
The Islamic State (IS) is often identified as the world’s leading proponent of Salafism, or fundamentalist Sunni Islam. But, as Dr. Jacob Olidort points out, most of the world’s Salafis are not violent or politically active -- in fact, they explicitly condemn both. In this illuminating video presentation, Institute Soref Fellow Olidort provides an introduction to Salafi thought, describes the emergence of the Salafi movement, and deconstructs the Salafism of IS. This is essential viewing for anyone interested in the ideological roots of IS and how it diverges from other Islamist groups. Dr. Jacob Olidort, an adjunct professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, received his BA in Middle Eastern studies from Brandeis University, his AM in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from Harvard University, and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern studies from Princeton University. Dr. Olidort has spent nearly two years in the Middle East, including a Fulbright Scholarship in the UAE and field work on Salafism in Jordan. He has given presentations and has briefed on Salafism and on countering violent extremism to various academic and policy settings. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, the National Interest, and Lawfare, among other publications.
Topic:
Islam, Religion, Violent Extremism, Islamic State, and Salafism
Political Geography:
Global Focus