Tending to Garden

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====== Things to read ======
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.


===Towards A Buddhist Social Anthropology===
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 [[https://rkpayne.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/secular-buddhism-a-diminishingly-human-buddha/|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. [[https://tending.to/filingcabinet/Tuladhar-Douglas_BuddhSocAnth_2018.pdf|Towards a Buddhist Social Anthropology, 2018]].

===Autism and Anthropology===
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. [[https://tending.to/filingcabinet/ITAKOM_poster_Tuladhar-Douglas.png|'Revisiting the "Anthropologist on Mars": Questioning the assumptions that support participant observation from the perspective of an autistic anthropologist' - ITAKOM 2022]].

===Asian Sacred Natural Sites===
The [[https://journals.equinoxpub.com/JSRNC/article/view/36106|published version]] of this book review had to be shortened, but the longer version, which makes some important historical connections, is [[https://tending.to/filingcabinet/Book_Review-Asian_Sacred_Natural_Sites_(long_version_unpublished).pdf|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.

===On the Future of the University===
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 [[https://tending.to/filingcabinet/Future_of_the_University.pdf |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.

===On Why It Is Good to Have Many Names===
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 [[https://tending.to/filingcabinet/Tuladhar-Douglas2005.pdf|here]]

===The Work of Mending===
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 [[https://tending.to/filingcabinet/The_Work_of_Mending.pdf|here]].