Studies of belonging and community formation often emphasize commonality of values, emotions, and feelings. This article highlights the importance of practices that create relations of distance between members as well as closeness. Drawing on fieldwork in institutionalized Tibetan Buddhist communities in northeastern Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai), I focus on everyday practices of respect and faith that materialize community by putting monks, reincarnate lamas, and laity “in their place.” This can include the most quotidian of acts, such as standing when someone enters a room. I argue that such practices of “feeling apart” and their refusal are central to individual negotiations of religious belonging and to the dynamic, ongoing process of community formation. The importance of these practices becomes particularly apparent when, as is the case in northeastern Tibet, seemingly taken-for-granted relations of belonging and the emotional style that enacts and creates these relations are felt to be precarious.

Scholarly focus on the political relationship between monasteries and the state has obscured other dynamics in the post-Mao revival and development of dGe-lugs-pa monasticism in China and led to its marginalization in wider discussions about Buddhism in the contemporary world. The present article seeks to broaden our understanding by examining economic reforms at a monastery in A-mdo. Based on fieldwork conducted 2008-2009, it argues that while recent monastic economic developments converge with state policies, monks’ narratives place agency for reforms within the monastic community and present impetus for reform as a moral issue. Consideration of the moral dimension of reforms, drawing on Sayer’s conception of moral economy, allows for a thicker understanding of contemporary monastic development which takes into account dynamics that extend beyond monastic interactions with the political and hegemonic power of the Chinese state.

The literature on Tibetan Buddhism in post-Mao China presents a bifurcated history: ethnic nationalism and (traditional) identity are foregrounded in scholarship on the revitalization of Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet; consumption and/or (global) modernism are emphasized in studies of its spread in Sinophone China. Although there are considerable historical and social differences between these different constituencies, these characterizations do not fully capture the social differences, as well as convergences, that have shaped everyday engagements with Tibetan Buddhism among Tibetans and Chinese. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in northeastern Tibet and other recent ethnographic studies, I attempt to complicate this picture, arguing that we need to pay greater attention to the affective dimension of Chinese engagements, the social embeddedness of Tibetan Buddhist institutions in the Tibetan context, and the transformations that have taken place in Tibetan areas, as elsewhere in China.

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