I had an interesting conversation yesterday that led me to briefly ponder the nature of theory and practice of culture (and particularly religion) on the plateau. This post does not intend to engage with any body of theory or literature, but just is a remark on a trend I feel like I have noticed in these parts:
Yesterday, I had a very interesting discussion with a young man about local deities. In the course of our discussion, I unwittingly used an inappropriate verb asking about people having dad pa 'faith' in local deities rather than yid ches 'belief.' This led to the distinction generally made between these two verbs, and the way in which they classify inherently different sets of human actions in worship. Faith is a term reserved for higher-level Buddhist deities, while belief is a term for local deities of the earth. This seemed to generally seemed to agree with Tucci's distinction between gods of the mundane world (belief) and supra-mundane deities (faith). What struck me however, was my friends statement that local deities (those in which you should have belief but not faith) should not be the object of prostration and other such extreme forms of veneration. What's more, my friend said that people don't venerate those deities by prostration. And yet, I have personally seen people prostrate to such deities. My friend then explained that they just don't know the difference. This made me think about the difference between theory and practice. There is the notion that there is an objectively correct theory that exists, and is the standard to which any line of argument needs comparing. This objectively correct theory is also frequently the earliest source. For a person with even a modicum of education, it seems less important to observe that a certain practice is widespread. The fact that a certain theory suggests that the practice shouldn't be is enough for many young intellectuals to remove "practice" entirely. from their explanations of concepts. I believe that there's more to be made of this, but I'm still pondering it.
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About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |