Jonathan Mair

My research in the anthropology of religion focuses on Buddhism in East Asia. Though Buddhist traditions have ancient roots in Asia, there have been enormous innovations in ideas, practices and organization in the last century, and especially in the last few decades - transformations that are no less radical than the other changes in Asian societies over the same period.

My main research project is an attempt to understand the contemporary revival of Tibetan Buddhism among Mongols and Han Chinese in northern China. Religion in China was suppressed from the 50s to the end of the 70s, and was treated with suspicion throughout the 80s, but there has been a resurgence of interest in religious life since the late 1990s thanks to a more positive official view of religion in general. But reviving religion in a situation where traditional sources of authority have been swept away, and in which the relationship between religious institutions and the state is still very close, is not a simple matter. My work asks how ordinary followers of the Mongolian-Tibetan Buddhism in northern China see their religion and their place in it.

I am also working with colleagues on a comparative project on contemporary Buddhist ethics in Asia. This project focuses on the new Buddhist practices and movements that are increasingly making their influence felt across the traditional boundaries of different Buddhist traditions. These include Vipassana meditation, which originated in Thailand, but which is now very widely practised, and mass movements such as the Taiwanese Buddha's Light Mountain, which boasts more than a million members around the world. The aim of the research is to analyse these movements as ethical projects, and to understand the effect that adopting them has on practitioners behaviour and their relationships to their communities to civil and political society. One planned outcome of the project will be a series of seminars with moral philosophers whose aim will be to ask whether contemporary Buddhist ethics can be described and understood using terms designed for western ethical traditions based on very different premises.

I lecture on cognitive anthropology and anthropology of belief in the Department of Social Anthropology, and I supervise students of the Faculty of Divinity in contemporary religion and social anthropology of religion.