Michael Lempert's study of discipline and debate practices in a southern Indian Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the late 1990s and early 2000s is a highly original analysis. In it, he brings the methodological insights of linguistic anthropology to the often rarefied world of Tibetan Buddhist studies, which as he says, has long tended to emulate the tradition's own highly valorized “textualism” and neglect the semiotics and pragmatics of “face-to-face interaction” in Buddhist communities (xvii). By contrast, Lempert conducted several years of fieldwork in Tibetan monastic communities established in India after the Chinese Communist takeover of Tibet (late 1950s). Working (and living as the student of a lama) largely in the Geluk-sect Sera monastery in India's far south, Lempert collected hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings of monastic assemblies, debate practices, and interviews. Though he is careful to say that he does not take transcriptions as unmediated records of events (xviii), that data grounds his analyses in the book's five main chapters. Throughout, he argues convincingly that this inductive focus on the specificities and dynamics of semiotic forms-in-use allows him to delve further than both earlier Durkheimian functionalist approaches to ritual and the more recent critical focus on “practice” in Tibetan Buddhist studies.
In this, Lempert joins other recent ambassadors of linguistic anthropology in religion and ritual studies (e.g. Engelke Reference Engleke2007; Keane Reference Keane2007; Makley Reference Makley2007; Stasch Reference Stasch2009), arguing that linguistic anthropology provides better analytic tools for getting at the risks and “work” of making types of persons or “subjects,” thereby providing ways to link particular rituals and practices with broader scale issues and stakes (39). “Scale” here is not to be assumed as a set of a priori “bounded domains” (xvii), linked or conflated metaphorically by resemblances imposed by the analyst. Instead, Lempert directs our attention to scaling processes as the contingent outcome of performances of “mimetic sympathy” (8, 38). In this view, Tibetan monks are not just purveyors of doctrine or debaters of “ethnologics” (49). Taken instead as interactants in particular ritualized events, we see that monks in fact deploy a range of iconic and indexical signs to emulate and make manifest types of subjects and contexts, all to convince and cultivate interlocutors both within interactions (debate opponents, monk students, deities, Lempert himself) and outside them (competing monastic colleges, the Dalai Lama, “the West”).
The great promise of this work is that it brings the linguistic anthropological critique of the “referentialist bias” (11) undergirding Enlightenment-era notions of the rights-bearing liberal humanist subject into dialogue with increasingly fraught debates about the nature of “violence” in Tibetan Buddhism since the rise of a kind of Buddhist modernism advocated by the Dalai Lama in exile. Joining other anthropologists analyzing religions and modernisms (Asad Reference Asad2003; Robbins Reference Robbins2004; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Keane Reference Keane2007), as well as recent scholars addressing the question of violence in Tibetan Buddhism (Sperling Reference Sperling, Thierry and Heinz2001; Makley Reference Makley2007; Dalton Reference Dalton2011), Lempert's contribution is to demonstrate what he calls the “pragmatics of modernity” (11, 153) among monks in Sera Monastery. That is, Sera monks seek to emulate the liberal subjects and associated speech genres and pedagogical principles touted by the Dalai Lama and western patrons (always in dialogue with Maoist critiques of a “feudal,” “backward” Tibet) even as they participate in the “histrionic anger” (5, 110, 124) and corporeal punishment in monastic debate and discipline practices reestablished in exile.
Lempert structures his study by interweaving “close readings” of transcripts and speeches with an historical account of the establishment of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and sectarian politics in India. Throughout, he makes clear that forms of ritualized violence in daily debates over the doctrinal manuals (Tib. yig cha) of rival monastic colleges, as well as in ongoing discipline of monk students, were core “rites of institution” (36) at Sera. Such rites were meant to shore up not only the ideal perfection and coherence of doctrine and thus the Buddha's word, but also the dialectic coherence of the monastery as a whole against internal and external opponents. And these practices, as Lempert shows, were not premised on the ideally sincere and transparent liberal subject, but on a “split subject” whose wrathful affect does not stoop to vulgar anger but conceals an internal compassion and benevolence (110). Yet the danger was always that, under the evaluative gaze of the Dalai Lama, but especially of western patrons, wrathful compassion would be read as illiberal violence unworthy of support, a tension that lead even the relatively conservative Sera monastery to begin (piecemeal) reforms in the early 2000s. Importantly, Lempert's attention to the semiotic specificities of relevant speech genres (rtsod pa ‘debate’ and tshogs gtam ‘public reprimand’) in particular events allows him to avoid framing these cultural politics as an East-meets-West clash of civilizations. He concludes instead that the modern liberal subject itself, just like the old figure of a ritual effigy, can seem coherent and unitary but emerges only contingently and in “fractions” as it is performed across dialogic events and scales (166–67).
Lempert's focus on the stakes of modern liberalism for Tibetan monks in exile tightly organizes this analysis. In this era of increasing space limits imposed on ethnographic monographs, the study thus reads as an extremely pithy, even elliptical, and problem-oriented study (the text is only 168 pages). That approach produced some brilliant analyses, especially the erudite yet accessible unpacking of Geluk monastic debate practices not as ultrarational argumentation but as a kind of staged “dissensus” between a “challenger” and a “defendant” of doctrine (19). Unlike most scholarly accounts in English (Perdue Reference Perdue1992; Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus2003), Lempert directs our attention to the visual spectacle or, drawing on Erving Goffman, the “demeanor indexicality” of monks' debate performances (48), all the while demonstrating the pragmatics of textuality that situate and authorize debate practice in a range of ritualized interactions with texts (26, 35, 52).
As Lempert turned to the broader scale stakes and implications of these interactions, however, I began to wonder about the limitations of such an exclusive focus on the figures of the modern liberal subject and, by proxy, the Dalai Lama and “the West” as the main “superaddressees” (87, 90) of Sera monks. That is, Lempert made excellent use of Bakhtin to demonstrate the dialogic presence of multiple “social voices” in monks' performances, but the most relevant dialogue for him in those interactions invokes national and global scales, not the rich ethnohistories and socioeconomic relations that (re)constitute Sera Monastery in India's far south. Ultimately, monks' debate and discipline practices at Sera boil down to “one big interaction” with the West, “a vast, interdiscursive project of recalibration and sympathy” (139). In this, Lempert does indeed demonstrate how interlocutors can “jump scale” (152), but his own analysis jumps almost completely over a crucial intermediate scale that would more richly illustrate the work and stakes of making subjects at Sera, fleshing out his interlocutors as multifaceted biographical persons rather than as types (conservative lama, mischievous student) or as participant role incumbents (challenger vs. defendant).
Without that, and despite himself, Lempert's microanalyses of ritual interactions (perhaps written first) come across as oddly detached from either his ethnographic anecdotes or his broader discussions. Most jarringly, perhaps because it was written last, almost all discussion of shifting demographics and lay-monastic patronage relations is left for the concluding chapter. Yet for me at least, that context—for example, the predominance of “new arrivals” from Tibetan regions of China in Indian monasteries (and consequent regional conflicts and interdialect translation issues), the ambivalence of the longer term exiled Tibetan community toward monkhood, competition among Indian monasteries for recruits, and the influence of western Christian aid agencies at Sera—radically reframes the stakes of the practices Lempert had previously analysed. In that light, and if “mimetic sympathy” to secure aid was a principal framework, why weren't the cultural politics of patronage at Sera, including necessarily Lempert's own participation, more foregrounded here? Why not analyze the specific impacts of his own or foreign tourists' and aid officials' spectatorship and uptake of monastic debates or discipline? If Sera Mey College now has a large contingent of Khampa Tibetans (160), wouldn't the use of “standard” Lhasa dialect in debates itself be an index of regional dynamics playing out interpersonally? If senior lamas are lamenting the loss of respect and discipline among young boys, and nuns in India are for the first time participating in debate, aren't shifting gender relations a core aspect of these dynamics (especially since embodied “violence,” after all, is the issue)?
To my mind, these intermediate scale relations should be part and parcel of the microanalyses that are the bread and butter, and the most significant contributions of a linguistic anthropology. But such explorations can sometimes make for awkward relations with interlocutors who would disclaim their importance. By “jumping scales,” Lempert's brilliant analyses avoid such potential conflict with his monk interlocutors, but they end up feeling oddly and unnecessarily impoverished.
