Summary of SEAA READS, session three, 10/2022

Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality by David Palmer and Elijah Siegler 2017 U. Chicago Press.

Ten curious minds assembled across the ether in the gallery boxes of Zoom to meet each other and talk about the ideas presented in the intersection of local Daoist monks and China’s domestic tourists, along with foreign seekers and scholar practitioners, not to forget the ethnographers weaving together the many sides to the stories of holy sites, revered scriptures, and location of important rituals. The complete book title is Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality. The Zoom host who led the session was Jie Yang, who began with several questions springing from this multi-sited study of historical depth, personal profiles, and numerous occasions of participant-observation. In approximate chronological order the conversation across many time zones included the following.

--Color slideset of Daoist cultivators in China and at four temple sites newly opened in USA, including the instrumental leadership role held by female Daoist from China.

--The central axis in the book between “cosmological attunement” (adjust self to external energies) and “ontological individualism” (idio as unit of analysis; personal growth): is the cosmos an unchanging field or instead in ‘dynamic equilibrium’ that looks unchanging, but in fact does remain fluid in boundaries and features.

--Authenticity sensitivity boosted among diasporic communities; heightened self-awareness of ethnic or religious practices once settled outside the country of origin; fossilized or crystalized by the removal of original context.

--Contrasts between foreign Dream Trippers (on tour in China) and local Daoist monks, priests, and lay people who experience ‘communitas’ (Victor Turner reference to 3-phases of ritual) versus ‘commensurability’ (different motives, different experiences of same catalyzing event).

--False impression given to English-language readers when seeing “individualistic” used to describe one Daoist leader quitting the monastery for a new mode as urban hermit. Since Daoist hermits are well known from earliest records, to label this modern-day hermit as acting as individualist (not conforming to prominent peer-referenced Chinese patterns of social relationship) gives the wrong impression. Charting his own course does fit within the Chinese pattern. He continues to seek attunement to cosmos, rather than (Western pattern) “ontological individualism.” ADDENDUM from Louise S: some potential problems of positioning when the researcher is studying two opposing groups. In the book Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization by Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen, published by Cornell UP, the research team divided up the field work between the Chinese workers and the African hosts who received the technological help from the Chinese. The research team took the radical participatory approach called the ontological turn. Result? The two sub-teams started to fight and yell at each other, as those who studied the Chinese and those who studied the Africans saw things very differently.

--Tao (dao) as referenced in diagrams, 5-elements and Yin-yang, shows that verbal description is inadequate for something powerful and bigger than human words. Thus the various writings and teachings are meant to be figurative, not literal; at best pointing to the thing, not containing it.

--Putting the ethnographer in the picture (reflectivity) is mainly confined to the epilogue, segregated from the main body of the book’s several chapters. The discussion touched on the merits and shortcomings of “disappearing” the participant-observer from those other pages.

 

In conclusion, the group marveled at the scale of the subject, since “global” at first seems antithetical to the small, deep engagement typical of ethnographic exploration and documentation. And yet, even something as big and intangible as an Anthropology of Spirituality does involve specific persons, places, and patterns of activity. A few of the Zoom meeting people currently are engaged in Daoism study and fieldwork, so the subject is in good hands as virtual spaces and ancient places blur their borders.