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ABSTRACT
What impacts does the transition from a land-based to predominantly cash-based economy have on the fundraising strategies of religious institutions? What new opportunities does it present and what moral debates and dilemmas does it prompt? What is at stake? This article explores these questions through examples from two very different contexts: the Irish Catholic Church in the nineteenth century and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in late twentieth century to early twenty-first century Amdo (northeast Tibet). In both cases, political and religious oppression, poverty, and crisis presaged periods of both religious resurgence and significant economic shift that had profound effects on religious funding models, as well as the debates they generated. By bringing these cases into dialogue, this article identifies common themes and patterns beyond the specificities of religious tradition and cultural milieu that usually frame analyses of religion and economy. Building on these insights, we suggest a framework for conceptualising religious fundraising that explains why it is often a site of contestation where ideas about religion and economy are (re)produced and played out, without assuming that religion and economy are separate ontological categories.
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Notes
1 In the Tibetan case, this was a characteristic of the first flush of revival in the 1980s. See note 12.
2 For a more extensive discussion of the religion and economy field, including references to scholarship that challenges such essentialist ideas, see our introduction to this issue.
3 On the continued prevalence of the problematic separation of religion and economy as ontological categories, see also Osella and Rudnyckyj Citation2017.
4 We follow Spechler et al. (Citation2017, pp. 5–7) in defining China as a state-capitalist country. We use the term ‘Tibet’ to refer to all Tibetan areas in the PRC, including Amdo and Kham, not just the Tibet Autonomous Region or Central Tibet.
5 Geluk monasticism has been predominantly a male preserve, much more so than other Tibetan Buddhist traditions. For statistics, see Schneider Citation2013, p. 51.
6 ‘Speaking bitterness’ (Ch. suku) was a key mass mobilisation technique employed by the Chinese Communist Party in its rise to power in China and during the mass campaigns of the Maoist period. People were coached in the – often highly theatrical – public voicing of grievances against the ‘tyrants’ (e.g. landlords) who had oppressed them. The aim was to engender class consciousness and sympathy among the ‘masses,’ and outrage and hostility toward ‘class enemies.’ For an overview, see Javed Citation2019. On speaking bitterness in Amdo, see Makley Citation2007, pp. 87–100, Weiner Citation2020, pp. 173–177; for first-hand accounts see Arjia Rinpoche Citation2010, pp. 33–34, Naktsang Nulo Citation2014, pp. 202–205.
7 On the 2008 unrest and subsequent Tibetan self-immolations, see the special issues of China Perspectives 2009 (3), Cultural Anthropology 2012 (April), and Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines 2012 (December).
8 On village redevelopment see also Duojie Zhaxi Citation2019. On urbanisation see the double special issue ‘Education, Urbanization, and the Politics of Space on the Tibetan Plateau’ in Asian Ethnicity 50(4) and 51(1); see also Roche, Leibold, and Hillman Citation2020.
9 Paul Nietupski's (Citation2011) study of Labrang Monastery provides the most detailed historical account in English of a pre-modern monastic economy in northeast Tibet (see in particular pp. 82–92). On pre-modern Tibetan monastic rules and regulations relating to trade and business, see Jansen Citation2018, pp. 101–114.
10 As in premodern Tibet, each monastery has three distinct economic layers: the income and expenditures of the monastery as a ritual community; the wealth and properties of reincarnate lamas; and the livelihood and wealth of individual monks. In this article, we deal primarily with the first. On their interconnection see Caple Citation2019, p. 41.
11 For specifics, see Caple Citation2019, p. 53.
12 Although numbers never reached pre-1958 levels, the speed and scale of monastic repopulation in the 1980s was dramatic. There were no working monasteries at the end of the 1970s and most monks had died or married during the Maoist period. Available data suggests that by the end of the 1990s over 5% of males were monks in one of Caple's main field sites. At most monasteries numbers peaked in the 1990s and subsequently levelled off or dropped. For statistics see Caple Citation2019, pp. 24–25, 123–125.
13 On subsequent discursive shifts resulting from heritagization processes see Saxer Citation2014.
14 Based on the historical mid-market rates available at: https://www.xe.com/currencytables/.
15 For more detail on the factors summarised here, see Caple Citation2022.
16 Another example is ‘luck's penny’ where a seller returns a coin to the buyer, thereby ‘shar[ing] a small symbolic amount of profit with the customer, keeping it in circulation, blunting the unlucky negative reciprocity inherent in capitalism’ (Cashman Citation2016, p. 213).
17 For more detail on the issues summarised in this and the next paragraph, see Caple Citation2019, pp. 38-67.
18 While lotteries have not been similarly used as a Buddhist fundraising mechanism in Tibetan monasteries, they have been in Eastern Buddhist institutions. On lotteries in pre-modern Japanese Buddhist temples see Matthew Mitchell's contribution to this issue; on their introduction in Chinese Buddhist monasteries no later than the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Yang Citation1950.
19 Based on the National Archives ‘Currency converter: 1270-2017’[online]. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/.
20 See also Andrew Short's article in this issue on attitudes toward investor capitalism in nineteenth-century America. While some Protestant leaders were occasionally highly critical, in the view of Protestant supporters of investor capitalism, ‘[i]nvestors and brokers who used their wealth for charity and benevolence, and were active in their churches, were not ‘stockjobbers’ or gamblers but respectable upright Protestants.’
21 In contrast, some (although by no means all) of Caple's interlocutors considered it appropriate, even preferable to establish price lists for butter lamps in temples as this would prevent any hint that temple caretakers were inflating prices (Caple Citation2021). Since butter is a commodity now generally bought on the market, there is a clearer relationship between cost and price, which might explain why fixing prices for butter lamps (a ‘product’) was seen differently from setting fees for services.
22 The use of pew rents in the Irish Catholic Church and their impacts will be addressed in detail in the monograph that Roddy is currently writing.
23 Though not necessarily the most obvious ones; in the case of monastic shops, for example, explicitly commercial transactions could take on the form of quasi-religious giving (Caple Citation2021).
24 We have borrowed loosely here from Osella and Rudnyckyj's (Citation2017, p. 13) comments on the historical contingency of articulations between religion and market, which were inspired by Ruth Marshall's (Citation2009) analysis of the dramatic rise of Pentecostalism in Nigeria.
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Notes on contributors
Jane Caple
Jane Caple is the author of Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet (UHP, 2019) and is currently writing a monograph based on her EU Commission-funded project ‘Wealth, Virtue and Social Justice in Contemporary Tibet.’ Her main research interests are in religion, economy, morality and emotion, and the anthropology of Buddhism.
Sarah Roddy
Sarah Roddy is the author of Population, Providence and Empire: The Churches and Emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland (Manchester UP, 2014) and co-author, with Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe, of The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870–1912 (Bloomsbury, 2018). She is currently writing a monograph based on her ESRC-funded project Visible Divinity: Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850-1921.