I am putting links to specific papers or lectures here. Some of these are longer versions of published papers; some of them are simply accessible versions of chapters or papers that are hard to find; some are papers which have not yet been published; some are videos of presentations. Where a paper has been published in an easily accessible open-source venue I just link to that version, as I would rather the journal (or whatever) gets the visits it deserves. Please note that much of what I have written is not here, and some things that are here were never formally published.
This paper has, I think, not received the attention it deserves. One reviewer said something to the effect of 'I cannot find any evidence that you are wrong, but the conclusions are startling'. My colleague Richard Payne gave it a friendly pre-publication review. I am grateful to the Ñanasaṁvara Centre for publishing this paper as I suspect if it had been published in anything other that a spotlessly Buddhist journal, the challenge that it presents to modernist, secularizing Buddhism would have been weakened. In any case, this paper forms part of a longer project on rethinking what anthropology could be. It will be clear from the argument and conclusions that I do not subscribe to any form of humanism or liberal cosmopolitanism, but I do think anthropology as the comparative study of social relations has a key role to play in rescuing all living things from the awful mess we are presently in. Towards a Buddhist Social Anthropology, 2018.
Descriptions of Newar society inevitably describe the complexities of religious belonging. This is the first of several papers in which I sought to understand it in its own terms, as a coherent and elegant social system that did not need to be defined using Eurocentric terms such as 'syncretism'. By shifting the emphasis from individuals, lineages, or castes to shrines and their images, the pragmatic, tolerant, and flexible process of ascription became clear, and in so doing I was able to add a complementary term ('polyonomy') to Carrither's term for plural practice ('polytropy'). The version published in 2005 is here
This was published as a chapter in Glenn Bowman's fine edited volume Sharing the Sacra . It's a discussion of how Newars in Pharping undertake verbal and social work to create an inclusive, tolerant society even when Tibetan refugees living in Pharping explicitly reject the performance of a key ritual. There's a link to the published version here. Recently, I found myself working on refugee integration in Scotland. The process, in this paper, of working from very small interactions up to a spirited and explicit defence of inclusive tolerance in the face of intolerance has given me valuable theory and method with which to build policy in a contested social field.
There's more and more work around the anthropology of autism these days, and a very few pieces written by openly autistic anthropologists. I haven't yet published anything peer-reviewed in which I position myself as an autistic anthropologist and I'm not sure I ever will. However, I put together this poster for the ITAKOM conference organised by Sue Fletcher-Watson and Sophie Dow as a way of trying to make sense of theorising participant observation as an autistic anthropologist. Maybe it will become a paper or a methods chapter someday, but for now, it's a start. 'Revisiting the "Anthropologist on Mars": Questioning the assumptions that support participant observation from the perspective of an autistic anthropologist' - ITAKOM 2022.
In this study, based on research funded by the Carnegie Trust, I developed a different approach to ethnobiology that was more closely affiliated to ecological anthropology. Rather than surveying all the uses of some taxon in a community without any reference to informants, I focussed much more carefully on ethnographic and historical study of the linguistics, rituals, and medical uses of a particular taxon—in this case, bats— and what it can tell us about human/non-human relations in a place. In so doing, I started something of a sub-sub-field, and was delighted to discover that a special issue on the ethnobiology of bats was underway in 2021 (for which I served as a reviewer). The original article is here; the recent online reprint is crippled by poor handling of Unicode characters.
The published version of this book review had to be shortened, but the longer version, which makes some important historical connections, is here. In this piece I lay out my theoretical and practical objections to the category of Sacred Natural Site as it is presently used in conservation biology, while at the same time admitting its utility.
This paper was written for an edited volume towards the end of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2022. The collection was never finished, but this essay remains my best attempt at capturing what is so desperately wrong with the university system as we presently find it in the Anglophone world and why universities cannot help us with the present crisis. I also address how we might build something better that is independent of state, church, and corporate control and therefore might be a durable collaboratory within which to seek actual solutions.
In 2021, Frances Garrett, Nathalie Gummer and others summoned contributions for a Buddhist Studies Manifesto. The responses were many and militant. My contribution to the project is here.
I've written three papers about writing as a technology. This chapter has long been almost unobtainable, being published in an obscure German collection, so I hope it gets more life by being made available here. Here is a scan of the chapter; the original was published in Schaper, J (ed.) Die Textualisierung der Religion. Mohr Siebeck 2009. In this chapter I argue, using both historical/textual and ethnographic evidence, that
This paper is a precursor to a paper I delivered at MIASU in Cambridge for Hildegard Diemberger's excellent exhibition on book cultures where I argued that the anthropology of Buddhism is almost completely blind to the way in which texts actually function in Buddhist societies.
In 2020 I was asked by the London Fo Guang Shan group to contribute to a programme on Interfaith week for the UK Parliament. The topic for our session was the five harmonies (五和睦), a Neo-Confucian concept. In other events around Humanistic Buddhism, I have argued strongly that Humanistic Buddhism is an outdated, modernist notion that has to be replaced with a post-humanist Buddhism, and this was a good example of that debate. Especially in the term 和敬 (appropriate deference), we can see the implict power relations and oppression built into these five harmonies. It is characteristic of Ven Hsing Yun's Humanistic Buddhism (following from that of Taixu, about whom much has been written) to use something like the five harmonies to try to create a bridge between Chinese politics (his stance on the relations between the PRC and Taiwan is controversial) and Buddhist values.
In three successive presentations, Bee Scherer, Jonathan Mair, and I all tackled the five harmonies: Scherer looked at how Ven. Hsing Yun deployed them, Mair looked at how they shaped temporary monastic retreats and lay ascetism, and I borrowed them as a basis for ecological ethics within Buddhism. The record of the meeting is here. I was particularly struck by a comment from Mair, who argued that 'environmental problems can have spiritual solutions'.
