Nicolas Sihlé

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Université de Paris - Nanterre 2001
ns6n [at] Virginia.edu

 
My main research focus is to contribute to a properly anthropological approach (with due attention given to textual scholarship) to a highly complex set of literate and oral religious traditions: Tibetan Buddhism and its close parent Bön; and, reciprocally, basing myself on the Tibetan data, to contribute to larger debates within the anthropology of religion more generally, on themes such as ritual, religious specialization, religious organization and experience, power, magic or violence. My doctoral dissertation (2001) was based on fieldwork in Baragaon/lower Mustang and Dolpo, in northern Nepal. In that work, inspired by a critical maussian holism, I analyzed the complexly overlapping sociological and religious dimensions of a particular type of Tibetan religious specialist, the tantrist (ngakpa), a non-monastic, householder specialist of mantras and tantric rituals (practices of a typically powerful, this-worldly kind, like exorcisms), and showed the cultural logics involved in the prominence, if not centrality, of ritual violence in this context.

Eschewing the rather blunt, dualistic models such as that of the 'great' vs. 'little traditions', I also examined aspects of how the articulation between a large, complex historical and cultural entity (Tibetan Buddhism) and the diverse, local socio-cultural orders it encompasses is structured and how this articulation can be seen to operate and to be constructed in practice. An important locus of this articulation, and focus of my work, is constituted by written texts, such as the corpus of ritual manuals of a local community, which are typically exogenous (in the sense of having been composed outside of the local communities using them), but which are also the product of a local re-appropriation within a tradition that simultaneously retains fundamental oral features. Taking texts as objects of a fully anthropological inquiry poses complex and important theoretical and methodological questions.

Previous fieldwork included a survey of practitioners of (notably ritual) therapeutic practices in Bhutan and work on the politics of ritual in the Tibetan diaspora in India. More recently, I have carried out fieldwork on themes related to the above (ritual, ritual specialists) also in Tibetan areas within the People's Republic of China: in central Tibet, and, since 2003, in Repkong (Amdo / north-east Tibet), an area famous for its large, numerous tantrist communities, where I have started a second major research project. In this project, my main initial focus is on socio-religious organization, large-scale collective ritual and on the question of the nature of (in particular, supra-local) collective religious links, and the processes whereby they are constituted, renewed or transformed.

My work contributes to an anthropology of complex religious fields, characterized by the multifaceted interrelation of a plurality of religious traditions and types of specialists. It attempts to extend anthropological analyses of religion to the articulation of society with doctrinal and ritual systems belonging to highly complex literate religious traditions. It also contributes to a comparative anthropology of tantric traditions and Buddhist societies. The centrality of ritual, the striking importance of ritual violence in many Tibetan tantrist traditions, or the very low emphasis on renunciation, invite a rethinking of many common assumptions about Buddhist societies, and the uncommonly central character of 'magical' features in tantric ritual (technologies of power for both soteriological and mundane, instrumental purposes) is an enchanted invitation to revisit theories of ritual and religion.

Specialization

Anthropology of (Tantric) Buddhism; Tantric traditions; religious anthropology; ritual; religious specialists; socio-religious organization; socio-religious change; Tibet; Himalaya.

Courses

Theory and History of Anthropology; Religious Anthropology; Religious Specialists; Interpretation of Ritual; Buddhism in Asian Societies; Tibet and the Himalayas; Tibetan Religion.

Selected Publications

  • forthcoming: Rituals of Power and Violence: Tantric Buddhism in a Community of the Tibetan Himalayas.
  • 2006. Buddhism in Tibet and Nepal: Vicissitudes of Traditions of Power and Merit, in Stephen C. Berkwitz ed., Buddhism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, pp. 245-284.
  • 2002. Lhachö [Lha mchod] and Hrinän [Sri gnon]: The Structure and Diachrony of a Pair of Rituals (Baragaon, Northern Nepal),in H. Blezer ed., Religion and Secular Culture in Tibet: Tibetan Studies II. Leiden: Brill, pp. 185-206.
  • forthcoming. Tshes-bcu rituals in Baragaon: Social and religious changes in a Tibetan society of the Nepalese Himalaya.To appear in E. Sperling, ed., Proceedings of the 8th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (Bloomington, July 1998).