Anti-materialism is the most pervasive popular assumption about Buddhism that obscures Buddhism’s material presence and its environmental impacts. In this talk, I wish to introduce my new project that problematises such thinking to discuss how Buddhist materiality drives Buddhist circular economies, rooted in practices of merit-making and inherited ritual labour. By tracing the circular nature of Buddhist material exchanges, especially those involving food, I will investigate how things given to local temples generate excess and abandonment practices in contemporary post-growth Japan.
Through histories of these ‘gifts’ and their relations, I seek to uncover how demographic hyper-ageing, regional depopulation, and changing consumption patterns inform and disrupt Buddhist material exchanges: how family altars and other personal ritual items, as well as meritorious food, land and object donations get caught up in discard, disposal, and reuse cycles and what emotional, ethical, practical, and spiritual implications ensue.
I will reflect on how Buddhist practices for processing accumulation and abandonment of Buddhist gifts are key to understanding contemporary Buddhism, and the wider issues of consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies they inhabit. I will therefore consider Buddhist giving as forces that generate and handle excess and abandonment that challenge the viability of the circular economy ideal by producing waste.
Global concern about waste continues to rise: this research interrogates the waste-making impacts of religious activity and assesses the spiritual and practical implications of managing religious excess in the world’s fastest ageing society.
Speaker's Bio
Paulina Kolata is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies at Lund University, Sweden, and an incomings Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her work explores ethnographically the socio-economic and demographic complexities of religion in contemporary Japan, focusing on Buddhism, depopulation, and people’s everyday lived experiences and their relation to particular pasts and imagined futures. Her monograph, currently under review, investigates the post-growth survival of Buddhist temple communities in regional Japan.