Justin R. Ritzinger, PhD. Food, Family, and Philanthropy: Humanistic Buddhism in a Working-Class Taiwanese Community

Topic: 

Food, Family, and Philanthropy: Humanistic Buddhism in a Working-Class Taiwanese Community

Lecture Abstract:

Vegetarianism is one of the most central practices of contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism. It is almost inconceivable to many followers that one would practice the religion without maintaining a vegetarian diet or at least trying to. Yet Buddhism and food in Taiwan and the Chinese-speaking world are understudied. Most scholarship has focused on the abstention from meat and the ethical and karmic frameworks that support it. But foodways cannot be defined simply by what they exclude. This talk will focus on a case study of a small, working-class lay group, where food plays an especially central role, to look beyond mere abstention from meat to address larger themes in Taiwanese Buddhism as a lived religion.

Speaker Information: 

Justin R. Ritzinger 芮哲 is associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010. A scholar of modern and contemporary Buddhism in China and Taiwan, Ritzinger studies the development and articulation of Buddhist modernism, excavating the role played by seemingly non-modern ideas and practices in that movement. He is the author of Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2017) and has published on topics including Buddhist eschatology, engagements with anarchism and evolutionary theory, and the dynamics of Buddhist tourism development in contemporary China. He is currently working on an ethnographic study of a working-class lay Buddhist organization in Taiwan.