Description
Once common across Nepal and northern India, Sarus Cranes (Grus Antigone) are an endangered species today. 690 Sarus cranes remain in Nepal, over 90% of whom choose to reside in the Lumbini area of southern subtropical Nepal, the birthplace of Buddha Gautama. Why is Lumbini so attractive to the cranes?
To answer this question, I assemble together disparate elements, features, actors, and conditions in the lives of these largest flying birds of the world, through what Bruno Latour calls Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). In the course of fieldwork in Lumbini and textual study of Hindu and Buddhist texts, I try to give agency to the cranes by imagining and ascertaining what might be attractive about this place to the cranes. What is it about Lumbini that is to the cranes’ liking? Is it the abundance of rivers and lakes? Or the local climate, which is hot and moist, fronting onto the Gangetic plain? Perhaps it is the wet rice paddies and other agricultural products of the local people, which provide the cranes with food and a watery habitat and protection from predators for their nests? Or is it the Buddho-Hindu religious culture of the local human inhabitants?
Too often, secular environmentalism neglects to examine ancient and living religious cultures, whose teachings may be more effective in environmental protection than scientific arguments, because these cultures tap into deep-seated emotions and religious ethics. Similarly, Anthropology has remained steadfastly anthropocentric, in contrast to the rich multispecies narratives of the religious cultures they study, where humans interact and communicate with animals, plants, and divinities, and deploy them in ethics that extend to more than-humans.
About the Speaker
Mayfair Yang 楊美惠 is a professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in the Anthropology of Religion, Modernity, and the State; Environmental Humanities; China Studies; and Gender and Media Studies. She was elected President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2023-2025), a division of the American Anthropological Association. She was Director of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia (2007-2009). She has also served as Director of the East Asia Center at UCSB (2005-2006, 2009-2013). She was also Director of the UCSB Confucius Institute, organizing conferences, events, and visiting lecturers to UCSB.
She is the author of two monographs: 1) Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (2020), which won an Honorable Mention for the Clifford Geertz Book Prize, and 2) Gifts, Favors, & Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (1994), which won an American Ethnological Society Prize. The latter is published in Chinese. She also edited the following four books: Anthropology of Ascendant China (2024); Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religion, Ontology, and Social Practices (2021); Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity & State Formation (2008); and Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China (1999). She produced, wrote, and directed two video documentaries: Through Chinese Women’s Eyes (distributed by Women Make Movies) and Public and Private Realms in Rural Wenzhou, China. She is currently writing a monograph: “Religious Environmentalism in the Age of the Anthropocene: Potentialities and Actualities in China, Taiwan, and Nepal.”
This talk is part of the ongoing Posthumanism and Buddhism Series.
Hybrid. Please register to attend either in-person (in SS 2106) or virtually on Zoom. If you choose to attend virtually, the join meeting link will be sent to you several hours before the event begins.
