The invention of Kailas?

I'm not sure what it says about me, but I was thrilled to discover at the library today a new book which argues that Kailas has only been fêted as the world's most sacred mountain for a century or so. Alex McKay's Kailas Histories: Renunciate traditions and the construction of Himalayan sacred geography (Brill, 2015) doesn't just argue that our Kailas was only recently connected to ancient Indic traditions of a cosmic mountain, but that there are several Kailas in the Western Himalayan, one of which has a stronger claim to be the earthly manifestation of the supernatural Kailas. To me this has the ring of
truth. But why, and why should it make me tingle with delight? Is it just what a few decades of "the invention of tradition," including the "world religions," would lead one to expect? Or is there a hidden desecratory agenda to religious studies as I practice it after all, a principled raining on the picnics of those who claim to be able to transcend, or bypass, human-all-too-human history? I'm not proud of my delight here. While it's surely in part a joy at being able to engage with Kailas in the most serious way I know - historically, critically, with data, argument and contingency, getting beyond the level of ahistorical wish to the messy reality of life in time - it does also seem a little schadenfroh.

Kailashes

My next Kailash adventure starts in about 7 weeks, but I got a taste of what this iteration will offer in conversation today with a Nepali postdoc who has been leading preliminary research in the field. Among the places she recently visited was Kailash - a different one, this one in Far Western Nepal. It's at the lower left of this image, and resides in a small white temple on a hillside near giant trees. (We swooped in with Google Earth to retrace her journey there! You can too - start at Kolti, in Far West Nepal, and then seek out 29˚32’09.24” N / 81˚38’53.51” E.) The temple, like all temples in this area, is empty - no statue or ornamentation; the god possesses some of the pilgrims who bring it sacrifices. (This, incidentally, is apparently the only Kailash in Nepal who accepts blood sacrifices.) Tallikoti's Kailash mandu is surrounded by other gods, "ministers" nearer by and others at greater distance, each in their own small, ancient site, and has been a place of power for Nepalis for a long time - government leaders come here for blessing, and before them the kings and queens who led Nepal. A nearby spring offers Mansarovar water. When asked if he'd like to go to the more famous Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, the priest apparently replied: why?

That churning feeling

Perhaps you know this story. In the beginning, gods and asuras were struggling for an elixir of immortality - churning the world into being in the process - only to find a terrible poison rising to the surface. Shiva, perched in meditation atop Mount Kailash, came to the rescue, his throat turning permanently blue as he held the deadly poison there.

This picture accompanies the story in a book written by one of the Nepali participants in our project (it's painted by his son), but adds further details. The serpent is the attendant of Vishnu, who, in the telling of one of the Indian participants, had brought the desired elixir in the guise of a beautiful woman, possibly precipitating the churning. And here the serpent is coiled around Kailash the way ropes were, I gather, tied around the blades of traditional butter churns. Other accounts have the asuras using an inverted Kailash as a churning blade, though usually the mountain so used is not named as Kailash.

What really happened? I'll make sure to ask Shiva when we visit his abode again next August. But in the meantime I'm happy to be part of the churning as the India China Institute's "Sacred Himalaya Initiative" team works out coordinated individual and group research projects on various aspects of the glistening mount. It's a quite remarkable group with a remarkable range of experience and expertise. (And me.)

My inquiry will be about how pilgrims' experiences of the mountain is affected by the presence of pilgrims with other understandings of its nature and significance. My shorthand image of that is the experience pilgrims doing the kora/parikrama/circumambulation have of other pilgrims going in the opposite direction. (Buddhists and Hindus go clockwise, Bön practitioners go counter-clockwise.) I've not seen one of those ancient butter churns but from what I understand of the mechanism, isn't the blade turned first in one, and then in the opposite direction? Interreligious churning may go way back here...

Initial meeting

Mount Kailash has come to find me again. New School's India China Institute's Sacred Himalaya Initiative (full name of the project: Sacred Landscapes and Sustainable Futures in the Himalaya) today started a four-day planning meeting with scholars and policy people from India, Nepal, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and the US. A highlight of today's discussions was a presentation on the campaign for UNESCO World Heritage status for the trinational Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative being developed by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. (I.e., ICI's SLSFH is partnering with ICIMOD's KSLCDI.) Actually, the highlight was the ensuing discussion, which brought out the stakes and issues involved in a really exciting way. Let's hope the next days are as much fun!

Sites for sore eyes

Once upon a rather long time ago I wanted to grow up and work for UNESCO. (Then President Reagan withdrew US funding for it, and I had to make other plans!) UNESCO's back on my radar because of the World Heritage Site list. One of my New School colleagues has written a fascinating account of the ambiguities of what he calls "hybrid heritage" - sites which have both cultural and natural significance - and he's just joined the team for our continuing work on religion and environment in the Himalaya. The focus of the new phase, you'll recall, is Mount Kailash - for which a World Heritage status is apparently soon to be requested and will doubtless be conferred. I need to learn more about the issues! But today I heard a rumor that UNESCO heritage listing was being sought for temple fairs like the one I recently had the chance to attend in Jinze. "Living heritage" is another frought and fascinating category, and its interaction with Chinese government categories of valuable folk tradition (not religion, mind you) is intriguing too. Fun fun!

SLSFHI

My explorations in things Himalayan continue - we just got word that an extension of the "Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himala" (ERSEH) project has been approved. Say hello to SLSFHI, the "Sacred Landscapes and Sustainable Futures in the Himalaya Initiative"!

Inspired in part by ICIMOD's Kailash Sacred Landscape initiative, this means I'll be heading Nepalward once again later this summer, in Fall of 2015, and then for a two-month stint in the Summer of 2016. Mount Kailash will be a focus for scholars and policy makers from India, China and Nepal exploring questions of sacred geography, map-making, and various levels of the "policy sphere." More for me to learn! And another project for which getting my bearings in China will make a difference.

Kailash me to the mast

A few thoughts on my wending my way to Kailash may not be out of place as I gather myself for the trip.

The first thought is that (like many things in my life) the privilege of this journey seems something I don't deserve. Seeing or circumambulating the holy mountain is the lifelong dream of a fifth of the world's population. Kailash is the abode of Shiva, home of all the great Indian rivers, and the Mount Meru at the heart of the Buddhist cosmos. When I told my Indian friend L that I was going, she said, voice in a hush, "that is the one thing I wish to do before I die."

But the Kailash kora has never been one of those things I hope one day to be able to do. Part of that has to do with the mountain's mythical status - like Shangrila it seemed a place merely of fable, and it has indeed been all but inaccessible until recently - but only part. Another part, I should admit, is its connection to religions which don't particularly speak to me - Hindu and Tibetan. But Australia has taught me the importance of places. One thing I hope is to feel the power of this mountain, the power that has called people to it for millennia as an axis mundi - not that I know what I would do with that experience if I had it! I guess that's another thing I go to find out.

Of course, encounter with the mountain won't be unmediated. The way we'll walk has been trod by untold thousands of pilgrims over centuries (perhaps millions over millennia), bringing their prayers, penances, more generally their meanings. For Tibetan Buddhists there's no part of it that's mere stone - not that I'm likely to see this:

Buddhist lore claims that if the eyes are purified, the land transforms. In a small gap between stones– so runs a sacred guidebook– the high lama may perceive a great city, a lesser yogi a fine hut, and the ordinary eye a patch of rock and scrub. A perfect adept might gaze up at Kailas and discern the palace of Demchog with sixteen attendant goddess mountains, but he transfigures this view inwardly to a mandala peopled by bodhisattvas, the goddesses multiply to sixty-two, and he is guided to other knowledge as if layers of illusion have peeled away. ...

Knowledge of these half-seen inhabitants– their whereabouts and power– was codified in pilgrim guidebooks as early as the thirteenth century. A few are still in use. Their narratives have trickled down orally from educated pilgrims to illiterate ones, who seal them with reported miracles. These are the Baedekers of the pious. They lay a tracing paper over the physical landscape, transforming it with stories, ordering it into sanctity. So Kailas becomes symmetrical. It deploys four prostration sites, and its humble gompas are seen as shining temples at its cardinal points. Their statues and treasures are reverently inventoried. Every peak and hummock now assumes a Buddhist title. Meditation caves overflow with the visions of named ascetics, even to within living memory. Any abnormality of cliff or boulder– a chance stain, a weird hollow– is identified with the passage of a saint, or the deed of a local hero

Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet (HarperCollins, 2011), 193-4

I'm usually a sucker for places saturated with past pious use. I like to ride the swells of past belief. I hope that's not all I feel, though, second-hand religion.

So am I going on a pilgrimage after all? Our party of ten will include three Americans, five Nepalis (one a Nepali-American), a Tibetan and a member of the Bai minority from China. Beyond one of the Nepalis and the Tibetan, I'm not sure anyone is religiously interested in Kailash - but I may be surprised. We may all be. It may be that its interest, its charge, its claim aren't or aren't just "religious."

Can one go on a pilgrimage casually, or unawares? People stumble on sites of power all the time in the lore of world religions - but after that, others seek these places of power out in hope, gratitude, desperation. The journey becomes as important as the destination; the setting out, the leaving one's ordinary life, becomes in some ways as important as the journey. After life-changing pilgrimages like the Haj, people's very names change. (Some Hindus add "Kailash" to their name after completing this pilgrimage, I understand.) Many pilgrims go for a particular reason, their hopes of absolution from sin or the satisfaction of a fervent wish enhanced by the ardor and danger of the journey.

[T]he merit accrued from pilgrmage gets enhanced if besides the long distance and time taken, it involves undergoing and overcoming life-threatening situations. Thus, the arduous journey and the accompanying hardships and perils undergone by a pilgrim on the way bring correspondingly greatre reward.... Thus, mishaps, extremities of weather (including sub-zero temperatures, snow storms bitter cold, and blazing sun), bad roads, devastating landslides, avalanches, flooding, torrential rains, turbulent rivers, swept away bridges, hunger and thirst, dangerous passes over high ranges, and occasional attacks by bandits and wild animals are generally seen as enhancing the value and merits of pilgrimage.

K. T. S. Sarao, Pilgrimage to Kailash: The Indian Route (New Delhi: Aryan Books, 2009), 3

This describes the long, treacherous route taken by Hindu pilgrims up through the Himalayas on foot, many of whom aim to arrive at Kailash for auspicious days in still wintry April. We're going in a clement season in comfortable Toyota landcruisers, and walking only for the three-day kora itself. There may be road problems - always a possibility in the Himalaya - but Chinese roads are apparently much better than Indian or Nepali, and the Tibetan plateau is flat and dry. Compared to the traditional pilgrim's hardship-filled journey, it'll be a breeze. And its cost is minimal in time, not to mention expense - my way is paid by the Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya (ERSEH) project.

A voice in the back of my head is saying that you get out of a pilgrimage what you put into it, that a low-cost pilgrimage is a contradiction in terms, a wasted opportunity. It needs not only to be rooted in your own religious-cosmic geography and intentional but should involve sacrifice, preferably a big one. Before the arrival of modern technology - planes, cars, Chinese roads - Mount Kailash was a place one couldn't get to without significant hardship. (I haven't mentioned that dying en route was the ultimately significant and effective sacrifice.)

Part of why ERSEH is going, I gather, is that the international tourist-industrial complex is chomping at the bit, eager to make Kailash as easy of access as Bodh Gaya, Shangrila, Hong Kong Disneyland. Billions of Hindus and Buddhists have have been waiting for the chance - and more and more can afford to do it in style! Hardship pilgrimage is a thing of the past. Why not fly or luxury bus in, stay in a five-star hotel, get whisked around the famous mountain by helicopter (maybe one day you'll be able to glide in a monorail!), and still get back to your luxury suite in time for world-class cuisine and a soak in a Manosarovar-spiked spa? The governments of Nepal, India and China have signed an agreement declaring Kailash a "sacred landscape," and this is the moment when is determined what exactly that will mean. That project is mainly about environmental sustainability, but the question of how to sustain a religious landscape is acute here.

And me, where does this leave me? Sociologically speaking I'm a seeker, if a lackadaisical one. I'm hoping to find something on this trip I didn't know was available, the kind of thing one couldn't have known one was seeking until the finding. Part of my slapdash approach to seeking is an openness to serendipity - I didn't agree to come on this trip because of the challenges, however real, of mass tourism; my reason is closer to Edmund Hillary's oft-quoted reason for ascending Everest, "because it's there": the opportunity presented itself. Perhaps that in itself is worth appreciating.

Along with the above-quoted books I've been reading the account of pioneering western Tibetan Buddhist Robert Thurman's first trip to Kailash, heady stuff which seems to me, an outsider, often grandiose. He's is going to Mount Kailash literally to save the world, bringing his bodhisattva wishes for all people to a place which channels them farther and more effectively than any other. World peace and true Enlightenment for all beings! But I've marked the pages where he exhorts his group:

We came here on pilgrimage, to perform the Dharma, and we should confidently feel a sense of destiny. ... 

Awareness of freedom is part of Tibet’s special legacy. So is the rare preciousness of human life. Enjoy this contemplation of your potential. Count your blessings carefully. Be honestly proud of yourself. Karmically, you all made great efforts and did great things to get to be such beautiful human beings, to be here at this time…

Robert Thurman and Tad Wise, Circling the Sacred Mountain:

A Spiritual Adventure through the Himalayas (NY: Bantam, 1999), 46, 49

Our Kangchenjunga

Took one of our ERSEH partners, my host when I was in Darjeeling last year, on the Staten Island Ferry this afternoon. (It's his first trip to the US.) There's no better way to get a sense of New York in place and time. And, as I'd guessed, for a hill-dweller the open water is a great rarity.

Himalayan connections

Our ERSEH conference was planned to overlap with a conference of the Yale Himalaya Initiative called "Himalayan Connections: Disciplines, Geographies, Trajectories," so all of us piled into a bus after our gig ended yesterday and headed up to New Haven. (Us was perhaps twenty participants in our conference, from India, Nepal, China, Germany, France, Britain, US.) This made it a true India China Institute trip, with all the disarming conviviality of traveling together to picturesque spots, eating together in restaurants at long tables... At the Indian restaurant where we dined last night I ended up with all the Nepalis (including my friends from Darjeeling, who are ethnic Nepalis), who've decided to adopt me. A Nepali name is in the works! I newar expected...
And at the Yale event I met an ex-student whom I haven't seen in perhaps sixteen years (although we're Facebook friends... go figure!), a freshly tenured professor of anthropology at a liberal arts college upstate. His contribution to the discussion (the most thought-provoking, at least for me) was to focus on movements of people - a characteristic of Himalayan life for a long time - and to ask how far, in consequence, the Himalaya can be said to reach. (The nascent field of Himalayan studies seems to build on existing communities of scholars of Nepal and of Tibet, but tends to focus on the steep and dramatic "south slope," the Indian side; from the "north slope," the Tibetan Plateau, it's much harder to say where the Himalaya begins.) He is interested not only in Himalayan diasporas but also in the movements of people into the Himalayan areas, notably the growing number of Chinese religious tourists to Tibet. When one of them hangs a tankga bought on his travels in his apartment Beijing, isn't that Himalaya, too?

Update: the Nepali name is Mark Bahadur Shrestha. 

ERSEH can you see!

The Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya (ERSEH) project's final conference is off to a good start - though half the audience (myself included) goes all wistful each time someone puts up a slide of mountains or colorful Himalayan customs.

I was the first speaker in the second panel, coming after reports from our five case studies in India, Nepal, and Tibetan regions of China. Since I'd been introduced as someone who had never been to the Himalaya before this project began, I was happy to admit that I've been as stretched by what I've seen and learned as our local researchers have been by the rather nebulous charge to explore "everyday religion." My presentation was on "resource use decisions," and seems to have gone over well enough. There's something obvious about "lived religion," as about pragmatism, which can be either liberating, reassuring or a bit dull: my deliberately unglamorous (and non-"religious") mantra won't have changed that! But I think it was appreciated that I was trying to be helpful... and maybe I succeeded!

The next speaker offered a flashy Latour-de-force with clever powerpoint slides suggesting a parallel between the faux religion of Shangrila and New Yorkers' fixation on ugly and inefficient window box air conditioners. I dare say my three word message, delivered without slides, is more likely to be remembered.

ERSEH can you see!

Updated poster for our big conference. You can watch it online and even submit questions digitally if you can't make it to New York!

ERSEH

Coming soon, the ERSEH conference, where researchers - some whom we know, some newly joining the project - will be presenting fascinating

new work; I'll be sharing my "resource use decisions" model as part of the first, more schematic session, "Concepts and Debates."

RUDimentary

Have I told you about "resource use decisions" (RUDs)? This deliberately unlovely, bureaucratic-sounding formulation is my contribution to the ERSEH (Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalayas) project. It came to me the last morning of our workshop in Shangrila, and now it's time to write it up. We're putting on a big conference in March, and want to circulate the papers well in advance. If my ideas prove helpful, they might shape some of the other papers.

RUD emerged from discussions about what on earth "everyday religion" was, and in what ways studying it might be useful in promoting environmental sustainability. "Everyday religion" was a term chosen by our little organizing committee at the one organizing meeting I had to miss - I'd been pushing for "lived religion." I continue to think of the two as cognates although, in fact, they're the fruits of different intellectual projects and disciplines. Engaging concerns of sociologists, historians and anthropologists as well as scholars of religion, they provide different problems and prospects. More grist for the theorist's mill! But also, one hopes, occasion for helpful clarifications.

According to sociologist Nancy T. Ammerman, studies of "everyday religion"

privilege the experience of nonexperts, the people who do not make a living being religious or thinking and writing about religious ideas. That does not mean that "official" ideas are never important, only that they are most interesting to us when they get used by someone other than a professional. Similarly, everyday implies the activity that happens outside organized religious events and institutions, but that does not mean that we discount the influence those institutions wield or that we neglect what happens within organized religion "every day." We are interested in all the ways in which nonexperts experience religion. 

Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford 2007), 5 

That sounds pretty good to me as a start. It speaks to the populist anti-authoritarianism I preached when giving my talks in India in January, though it doesn't go as far as I'd like. There is expertise outside of specialists and status-conferring institutions, I'd want to insist, and there are traditional religious events outside these institutions, too. I worry about the passive implications of the language of "experience," even in a study emphasizing the ability of individuals and collectives to improvise and sustain alternatives to the work of institutions (13).

The "everyday" also brings all sorts of conceptual challenges with it. A distinguished anthropologist gave a talk about the everyday at New School recently which suggested that many of her colleagues (readers of Heidegger!) distrust the everyday as thoughtless, unconscious and, most damning, incapable of transcending itself; I encountered a similar perspective at the Center for the Study of the Developing World in Delhi. There's also a suspicion of the everyday deep in classic religious studies perhaps most visible in Weber's theory of "charisma," defined as out-of-the-everyday ausseralltäglich, and threatened by the everydayification Veralltägliching usually rendered "routinization" in English translation. To one of my religious studies colleagues, RUD sounds like the worst kind of routinization. These aren't debates I wanted to get involved, but it's actually proved good in helping me tease out the stakes of our proposals.

My preference, as you know, is for "lived religion," the view that what historian Robert Orsi calls "religious creativity" happens at every level and all the time: there is ... no religion that people have not taken up in their hands. The study of "lived religion" is in its way more ambitious than the exploration of "everyday religion." It directs attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practice and theology, things and ideas – all as media of making and unmaking worlds. If the latter acknowledges (while challenging the dominance of) expert and institutional religion, the former implies that besides "lived" there is nothing but dead religion - even specialists in their institutions have lives and have creatively to make and maintain worlds. World-making is, I think, not only a great way of describing what people do, but a way to avoid anxieties about "syncretism" based on problematic ideas of purity.

Robert A. Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live In?"

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42/2 (Jun. 2003): 169-174, 172

"Lived religion" is still in the same ballpark as "everyday religion," attending as it does to unofficial and domestic(ated) practices. But it might be better called "everywhere" or "everyone religion." Though it shares the preferential option for the non-specialist, it's really a theory of religion as a whole (and of religious studies as an ideological distortion of that whole). As you've seen me thinking and teaching about it, the lived religion approach inverts the view of the nature and history of religion which comes from specialists and was long replicated by academics. Religion isn't primarily the experience of something outside human life, but emerges from the challenges (and blessings) of life. Not everyone does it well - there are people with special gifts, many developed through special training, and it's natural to enlist their services - but everyone does it. And while we're at it, religion isn't just about otherworldly things. (Not Heidegger but the American pragmatists are the philosophical sources here.)

"Lived religion" has blind spots of its own, I'm sure, but I think it has great promise. For instance, on the vexed question of what is to count as religious. Ammerman again offers a good start:

Sometimes the participant is clear about what is happening, while the observer misses the religious dimension. At other times, the observer sees something of religious significance, while the participant is not so sure. … [W]henever people talk about and orient their lives in ways that go beyond everyday modern rationality, when they enchant their lives by drawing on spiritual language and concepts and experiences, they are engaging in religious action. Not everything is religious (or even spiritual) but when either observer or participant uses that category, social scientists should be interested in knowing why and how and to what effect. (224-25) 

Just how the participants' and observers' perspectives are to be brought together is the biggest question. My instinct here is to focus on the why and how and to what effect but Ammerman goes on to suggest that some kind of definition of religion is needed after all, and trots out the language of "sacred" and "transcendence" already hinted at above in "enchant" and "spiritual," along with "sacred others" like gods. I'm not sure we can do without something but this all sounds very monotheistic to me, indeed Protestant. As with the language of "experience" there seems a presumption that religion comes from outside and takes you outside ordinary life. I remember that at our first ERSEH discussion in Kathmandu one scholar embraced the category of "everyday religion" because, unlike most western "religion" theory which was about otherworldly things, this sounded like the dharma of South Asian traditions. 

I hope we can punt on the definition of religion by focusing on things people actually do and the decisions they make about them - our focus is given by concrete questions of environmental sustainability, not theoretical questions like "what is religion?" or "are all people religious?" or meaninglessly broad queries like "what is the Buddhist view of environment?" And so we come to "Resource Use Decisions," which only seems like a bureaucratic charisma-killer. Rather than supplement apparently non-religious categories used in studies of environmental sustainability with specifically religious ones, it stretches them in such a way as to let religious world-making flow in.

Here's the proposal from Shangrila:

The ERSEH project focuses on the way everyday religion shapes and is shaped by environments broadly understood, with an eye to informing policy on issues of environmental and cultural sustainability. It hopes to enrich studies of religion, environmental sustainability and the rapidly changing and politically and culturally vital Himalayan region by attending to the resource use decisions of ordinary people in their religious lives. These key terms are used not in their conventional economic ways but in a manner expanded and enriched by dialogue with the concerns of religious and environmental studies. 

• Resource is understood in ways attentive to "sacred" as well as "natural" and "human" resources as constructed by different peoples. Resources are components of a complex social-ecological system in which individuals, groups and institutions not only use resources, but modify them, create them, and destroy them. Frameworks like RED facilitate the modeling of connections between components of each local "system" and can help clarify what is known and not known. Examples might include water supplies, time, the sacred energies of mountains, or the powers of religious objects and specialists. 

• Use refers to the engagement of resources involved in all human practices. It draws attention to the variety of ends of human activity, far exceeding the emaciated ideal of homo oeconomicus, and to the various and new ways in which resources are crafted, exploited and improved by design. Examples might include sustenance, purification, propitiation of dangerous powers or festal squander. 

• Decisions draws attention to the decisions people, individually and even more so as members of collectivities, make about resource use in ever changing social, economic and cultural landscapes; our attention is directed not only to what is decided but to how decisions are come to, as people seek advice and examples, cite, balance or contest authorities, seek validation from various sources, and give reasons of various kinds to various stakeholders. Many decisions are not experienced as such; it is interesting to observe when and how habitual decision-making practices are upset, recalibrated, and return to habitual status. Examples might include daily sacrifices, contributions to religious institutions (like sending sons to a monastery) or the amending of a ritual in the face of a changed resource environment. 

This model does not claim to be exhaustive but, together with the flowchart of interactions of environment, religion and state/development, offers a template for facilitating the analysis and integration of case studies. The deliberately mundane categories of resource, use and decision are intended to focus attention on different elements of social, ecological and symbolic systems; we may emend or replace them as a result of our studies. We may conclude that the terms, even as stretched, are still too utilitarian, or that they fundamentally distort indigenous understandings and experiences of agency. Even these, however, would be useful insights to offer environmental policy-makers. 

RUD was offered as a synthesis of many discussions and, in the absence of other proposed syntheses, has by default become our shared platform. I think it has a lot going for it, especially in the ERSEH context. Does it solve the problems of "religion," "world religions" and "everyday religion," and of the integration of participants' and observers' categories? It may not even successfully skirt them. But it does make clear to our research collaborators, innocent of the academic study of religion if not of western ideas of "religion," what we're about.

Sure, the RUD terms don't sing the way "sacred" and "transcendent" and the like do. They're not supposed to! (I actually like that the acronym can be pronounced rude.) But we've also stripped the ecologists' language of its secular halo. Who knows what we might discover!

Back from China

I'm still sifting through photos from my trip to China (1400; target after sifting; 600-700), but here are a few. It seems like a very long trip, though I was only in China for 13 days, and Hong Kong for another 5. I think it's not just because of the forced blogging and Facebook fast! Perhaps because it was many different kinds of trips and destinations?

There was the trip to the Tibetan Plateau with the "Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya" project, complement to earlier trips to Nepal and northern India - these above are alpine flowers I pressed after a hike in the environs of the ethnic Tibetan town of Shangrila, altitude 3200m. (Before 2001 it was called རྒྱལ་ཐང་རྫོང་ or 中甸.) And here is our Indian-Nepali-Chinese Tibetan-American-Australian research group, amplified by women from the village of Daba, and the view of Daba seen the following morning from the yurt where I slept. We did good work, and also turned a monster prayer wheel (3 rotations = 2.4 billion om mani padme hum), visited a tangka painting school, the recently rebuilt Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Songzanlin, and the wildly powerful churning waters of the Yangtse at Tiger Leaping Gorge. The whole area has become a major tourist destination for domestic Chinese tourists escaping the heat and uniformity of Han Chinese cities. The tours usually start in the picturesque 17th century town of Lijiang,

a success story of the Naxi people who rose from a devastating earth- quake in 1996 to become China's first UNESCO World Heritage site and premier tourist destination. I spent 2 nights there before our meeting. Not everyone likes Lijiang, though; an American scholar we met lamented its "Disenyfication" and the "zombification" of its culture.
He felt the same happening to Shangrila - behold the Chinese stone bridges and metal-trussed Tibetan temples being built around its main square. It is an interesting question what's going on here. China is proud of being a multi-ethnic land, and Yunnan is home to more minority peoples than any other province... And its ethnic Tibetans aren't like those rowdy combustible types in Tibet. They're even allowed to post pictures of the Dalai Lama - as among the assembled holy figures in the minibus which drove us around; next to him is the Chinese-appointed reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. As a reward for good behavior lots of money flows in, many temples razed during the Cultural Revolution(by Tibetan Maoists, glad to be freed of monastic feudalism!) are being rebuilt. But, our source told us, Songzanlin is but "a shell," with few monks and no Tantric initiations. In these parts, he said provocatively, "religion is dead." Everyday religion may survive but its vitality depends on the institutions whose backs have been broken by communism.

I'll doubtless have reflections on that topic to share eventually - the Himalayan region does certainly offer a wealth of research topics! - but the order of the day is "Mark's first trip to China," so I'll keep moving outward from the trip at its center. I made my way slowly to Shangrila, stopping first in Lijiang, and the 3 nights before that in Kunming, which I explored quite comprehensively on foot. A small city of 7 million, Kunming lies at 2000m and is known as the city of eternal Spring for its clement weather. Historically and again today it's a hub of peoples from the Tibetan Plateau to Southeast Asia. It was my first China experience, quickly overcoming any scruples I'd brought with me.

Lily pads and morning tai chi dancers in Green Lake Park, a billboard with a homeless person, a Tang dynasty pagoda, the new city center. And below: a street overlooked by the city planners, a street sutra, immortals at Zhenqing Daoist temples, incense at Yuantong temple and Tibetan dances in the ethnic dance spectacular "Dynamic Yunnan."There's definitely a bias to my touring! There's plenty I didn't see (or photograph: I peeked into the giant Carrefour and the international luxury brand malls), and of course, walking from the city center, I didn't get to the unthinkably vast standardized housing projects I saw from the plane where most Kunmingers evidently live. The closest I came were
some towers under construction from the taxi window on my way to Quiongzhu temple in the hills to the city's west, where I snuck some photos of the near life-sized 500 Luohan (arhats) which somehow managed to survive the Cultural Revolution - perhaps because the caricaturing sculptor was disciplined by his abbot for impertinence!

And that wraps up the Yunnan part of my trip; I'll save Hong Kong- Shenzhen-Guangzhou for tomorrow. But I trust you get a sense of some of the historical, geographical, cultural questions raised... What's up with the gleaming new temples among the gleaming new towers and shops of the new China? Zombie or immortal? A new age of the arhat?

Highway to heaven?

Because of a threatened strike today, my Gangtok hosts suggested I head down to the plains where the airport is already on Sunday, directly after our excursion. It was an adventure. I sat in the front of a shared jeep, only slowly becoming aware that besides the three of us in the front seat, there were another dozen people behind us, four each in seats and four more (plus a baby) in the hold behind the last row. For all I know we were even more - I saw similar jeeps with up to six people sitting on top and another three or four hanging off the back. One van I saw must have been transporting twenty people, half inside, half outside!

However many we were, agile driving and near continuous use of the horn helped us make good time, arriving in Siliguri from Rangpo in just two and a half hours, in the dark. We followed the grand windy Teesta River, sometimes in broad valleys (two with big dams in the works, I think) and as often high above narrow S-shaped gorges. It's a stunningly beautiful region, and watching night fall around it (don't suppose anyone lives here to puncture the scene with lights except us cars) was like a dream, all of us in the jeep silent (praying or snoozing?) ... at least until something triggered the driver's clear plastic Ganesh dashboard charm to start blinking in alternate blue-white and red-green.

There had been people walking along the road the whole way - shadows emerging briefly into color as we drove beeping by - but come Siliguri the road was full of conveyances of every size and speed, and most of them without lights. That we didn't run over several pedestrians and many cyclists and knock a few cycle rickshaws and an auto-rickshaws off the road before ourselves slamming into the back of a larger jeep seems a miracle. Some calves trotting through the traffic towards us nearly had our hide, too. But arrive safely we did, and an auto-rickshaw (they're called tuktuks in other places) festooned with Jesus stickers took me the rest of the way to my hotel in the airport town of Bagdogra.

So my Himalayan foothill adventure has ended. (Four days in Delhi remain.) I'm not entirely sure what it all adds up to, beyond the connections I made to research partners of our project ERSEH (Everyday religion and sustainable environments in the Himalaya). I did lots of interesting things, but this is a bad time to visit if you're hoping to meet people. In Gangtok in particular, where the university is in recess and many people have headed to the plains for various reasons, there was an off-season deadness to it - even as, of course, the "everyday religion" is concerned with hummed along, in and out of view. (Thank goodness a New School colleague hooked me up with the wonderful world of Rachna Books, Gangtok's nascent public sphere.)

What I take from my time in Darj, Gangtok and Rorathang is that these mountain cultures are complex composites which found ways of accepting and even perhaps embracing the plurality of languages, cultures, and religions, both at the lived and at the governance level. They are under great strain now, though, because of demographic changes including galloping urbanization (Gangtok's population tripled between the census of 2001 and 2011) and the arrival of new purity-focused religious and political groups.

For instance, I'm told old-style Nepali Christians received the tika on their forehead from their priests, and didn't observe Christmas when in mourning, but the newer missionaries insist on strict separation from other practices. I understand Hindu fundamentalists are making similar claims. Lepchas, the indigenous(ish) people of this area, most of whom have in recent centuries assimilated more or less with Buddhist and Christian traditions, are now asserting a distinct religious identity. Meanwhile there are all sorts of new religions (in Darjeeling prominently the followers of the recently deceased Sai Baba), most of which preach the mantra of love and the unity of all religions, which can mean all sorts of things in practice...!

And then there's Kangchenjunga, tea, millet beer, vestigial Brits and trans-territorial Tibetans, tourists and dam-builders, and whatever it is that inspired a Beatles-themed lodge in Darjeeling and let the Sikkimese death metal band I heard at the rooftop bar Little Italy in Gangtok do a pitch-perfect cover of "Highway to Hell" on Saturday night. I suppose it's a sign of success when you start to understand that you really don't understand a place, but that there's plenty to understand!

SHEER

So about the workshop. It was the first big meeting of an ongoing research project called "Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya," proposed by the New School's India China Institute (ICI) and funded by the Luce Foundation. Over the next three years, it will rally scholars from India, China, Himalayan nations and the US in shared research and meetings, sponsor smaller-scale research projects, and hire a post-doc to develop and teach courses at the intersection of religion, environmental studies and the Himalaya at New School. Sounds great, yes? Well, yes and no.

Where to begin, explaining this? My sense of the emergence of the project is that AG, the director of the India China Institute and a Nepali, had been trying for some time to interest foundations in a project on Himalayas and the environment. Why Himalayas for an institute devoted to fostering dialogue between scholars in India and China? That's the easy part: the threatened glaciers of the "third pole" are the source of the major rivers of China and India, on which 2.1 billion people depend. Wouldn't you want something like ICI on board for such a project? But foundations weren't giving, perhaps because New School has none of the science departments you'd need to do new environmental research; nor do we have actual Asian studies departments. But then one day AG bumped into a program officer of the Luce Foundation, who told him of a new program supporting research on religion, environment and policy, and it was a new day. AG called New School's religious studies program - that would be me. When I protested that I had neither competence nor even demonstrable interest in environment or Himalaya, he said it was no problem. And, somewhat unnervingly, he was right: the Luce Foundation evidently bought his gambit that, because we lack the resources to do the project on our own, we have no preconceived notions or agendas on these questions. That was certainly true of me, to an embarrassing extent.

And so it was that scholars and policy makers - five each from China and India, seven from Nepal, nine from the US, and one from Bhutan - met to raise broad research questions about ERSEH: "Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya." (Couldn't someone find a better acronym? SEERH? HERSE?)

I should explain that I bear some responsibility for the vague notion of "everyday religion." I had told AG that I was interested in a movement in the study of Western religions which calls itself "lived religion," and that reference to that work might conceivably help a study of the often syncretistic religious practices of South Asia contribute to broader efforts to decolonize the study of religion.

I'm not sure why AG picked "everyday" over "lived." In any case, the concept of "everyday religion" freed conference participants otherwise disinclined by principle or training to engage with religion to explore... a bit. Most were social scientists, secular in method if not conviction. Many had in fact been trained at Marxist universities. But you wouldn't have guessed. Never defined, "everyday religion" turned out to be the part of religion anyone could love, and, more importantly, everyone should revere and promote. For it contained precious ecological knowledge, which could be translated straightforwardly into the language of science for policy-makers, but should be allowed to stay in the language of myth and ritual for "ordinary people" as it's perfectly on target - and besides, religion motivates better than science.

There were so many leaps of logic here that it took me a while to realize what was going on - and then another two days to figure out what was really going on. What was going on, I think, was that people were thinking fondly of their grandmothers or nursemaids, and of the local and indigenous practices, threatened by modernization, globalization and climate change, which are part of the very landscape of a vaguely remembered premodern past. In any case, people who should have known better blithely equated "ER" with "SE." It was a Himalayan holiday resort version of "nice religion." It went without saying that the rest of religion was a menace, as also, curiously, that "ER" could somehow easily be disentangled from its dangerous non-everyday namesake. As a religious studies person I was miffed that religion was getting too much and too little credit. There's little reason to think religion correlates with any regularity at all with ecological consciousness - that's a modern myth. And could it be that its value lies not in its pretended protoscientific awareness but in something, well, religious? I tried to bring this up once or twice, but found no takers.

As for what was really going on, besides a display of the blind spots of social science's hegemonic secularism, it took a discussion on the dynamics of local knowledge to open my eyes. Where can the kind of knowledge of environment and ecosystem we're supposedly after be found? What forms does it take? Well, not written down and perhaps rarely discussed in the abstract. It's lived knowledge, and learned through living - harvesting, building, maintaining wells, treating human and animal ailments, etc. Much of this is connected to livelihoods, and much is what's sometimes known as women's knowledge.

Before I quite knew it, "everyday religion" was exposed: not the benign folkloric sustainer of environments our discussions presupposed, but the familiar ideological sustainer of oppression and inequality. In celebrating the practices of the often disprivileged members of endangered communities as bulwarks against ecological disaster we were rationalizing the social structures that locked generations into drudgery, and, indeed, arguing that they must not be changed - for the sake of all our future! It took me longer than it should have to awaken from the pleasant stupor of secular tributes, however shallow and patronizing, to "everyday religion," but my eyes are wide open now. A kinder gentler secular class system knows that religion - at least one localized enough to pose no political or intellectual threat - is valuable for those whose care work sustains our world, and may be even more valuable for the rest of us: it's the best way of keeping them at that work. "Sustainable Himalayan Environments and Everyday Religion" - a SHEER drop.

I'm overreacting, a little. The feelings of moral vertigo came as much from witnessing Nepali poverty out the window as we bounced from cushy hotel to pretty religious site to peaceful resort conference center with view of Himalayan peaks and farmers, and from the discovery that Nepali society has until the 1960s been legally bound to the caste system. Maybe it's not an overreaction but a discovery. My next contribution for the project will be a review of the literature of "lived religion" in its Western context, flagging questions for its extension to - or complication by - Himalayan and environmental considerations.

(The fabulous beasties are from temples in Patan and Changu Narayan.)