Rituals: Birmingham's Buddhist Temple

Last Tuesday night I was able to go with William (from our anthropology class) to the Buddhist temple in Birmingham. It was a very interesting experience. On our way in, William let me know that I should take off my shoes at the doorway. By the time we got inside and sat down on the floor, the group of people meeting (maybe about twenty to twenty five) had already started a discussion of how different Buddhist principles and teachings apply to their everyday lives. The conversation was passed around the room to different people who asked questions or gave insight, and occasionally the “leader” (for lack of a better word), a monk from Tibet, would share his insight or experience. This discussion time lasted perhaps twenty minutes, after which everyone stood up and mingled for a while, while a few set up pillows in rows on the floor for what was next. Before everyone took their seats to read together from a small Buddhist booklet, the monk made some sort of signal to which the majority of the people in the room responded by getting on their knees and putting their head to the ground, like a position of prayer, and then standing back up and repeating the motion a few times. I asked William about it after the service, and he told me that it’s called “prostration,” and it is a way to show respect to the monk as well as prepare for the time of reading and meditation. Next, everyone took their seats and read along with the monk from the Buddhist booklet. When everyone finished the first reading, the monk, sitting at the front of the room, tapped a bell which signaled the first time of meditation. Everyone was silent for several minutes, and eventually the monk signaled that the time of meditation was over. Everyone flipped to another page and read another section together, after which there was another time of meditation for several minutes. When this finished, the service was over. People stood up, put their pillows and booklets away, hung around with one another and had tea.

I have been exposed to Buddhism in several Asian countries. I have been in many temples, watched people offer prayers with incense, seen prayer flags hung from trees, etc., but until Tuesday, I had never seen Buddhism practiced in the States. From my past experiences, Buddhist temples seemed to be very reverent and quiet places, without much interaction going on between people. So from my perspective, visiting this temple in Birmingham had more of the feel of a house-church, compared to say, visiting a cathedral. In the same way I have a community of Christians that make up my church and share in parts of my life, these people meeting at the Buddhist temple had their own small community, only practicing and talking about beliefs different to my own. I learned that Buddhism still has much of an Asian flavor to it, even being practiced in America: the smell of the incense, the paintings and decorations on the walls, prayer flags hung around the room, and in the front of the room a picture of the Dalai Lama set up on a very Asian-looking mantle. Out of the group of about twenty or so, I would say maybe six or seven appeared to be ethnically Asian. I have to say, I expected to see a higher percentage of Asians, and to be honest it shocked me just a little bit to see that the majority of the group was white. I guess the most relevant anthropological concept to this experience is the importance of suspending judgment when dealing with new and unexplored situations. Too often, we see different as bad, or at least not as good as our way of doing things. I have to be honest and say that things do get a bit fuzzy when you are looking through two lenses: the lens of what you personally believe to be true, and the lens of being the anthropologist in a situation. However, in the midst of this gray area, I am convinced that it is much better to suspend your own judgment in order to see things for what they truly are.

Global Connections: Sojourns Fair Trade Store

On Saturday I went with my brother and sister to Sojourns, the fair trade store downtown that has been mentioned in class. I loved it. It’s a small store, and it felt like a museum, displaying little windows into cultures from all around the world. The store has small drums and a few other instruments, music from different cultures, jewelry, pottery, colorful linens and hand bags, artwork, tea and coffee from around the world, and all kinds of small handmade crafts and various items. Many of the items have a sheet of paper beside them, explaining where the item comes from, who made it, and how fair trade is helping those individuals. One of my personal favorites to read was about how fair trade organizations are working alongside local small farmers in Darjeeling (a city in the foothills of the Himalayas in northeast India known for its tea). I was actually able to spend about six weeks in Darjeeling a little bit over a year ago on a missions trip, and backpacked through some of the local tea estates in various villages, so it’s cool to be able to put faces to some of those farmers. Overall, the store has a blaring theme of global connectedness. You can see it in specific pieces of artwork, in crafts, and in quotes you find throughout the store. One piece of artwork shows people holding hands lining the outside of the planet. Another picture shows a tree with an enormous amount of branches that are all connected to one huge trunk. But you also see this theme just by being in the middle of the store, looking around and realizing that everything around you was made my real people literally all over the globe, and yet here it is all together in one place, in a small shop in downtown Birmingham. It really helped me remember that even though we’re from all kinds of cultures and backgrounds, we all have our humanity in common which is a similarity that vastly outweighs our differences.

My own culture is such a mix of different places that I’ve lived, so I’m not quite sure how similar or different this experiences was to it. I guess that because I have grown up in a few different cultures, I do prefer being in places that are more culturally aware. So in that sense, it felt like “home.” One of the main things I learned from this experience is that we all have the responsibility of helping our world by the way we spend our money. It’s good to be reminded that everything we buy is being made some someone, somewhere—a real person just like you and just like me. And when we support a company by buying their product, we indirectly support everything that company is doing, whether good or bad. Ignorance is a poor excuse. Fair trade is a way of doing business that ensures economic and social justice. Sojourns’ website says, “The key goals of fair trade are to empower low-income, disadvantaged artisans, laborers and farmers around the globe, and to promote understanding between them and industrialized nations” (http://www.adventureartpeace.com/What_is_Fair_Trade_.html). As far as preconceived notions/stereotypes I had before this experience that were changed, however backwards this may seem, I realized that Americans can live lives that are very much globally aware. Growing up overseas and being surrounded by people whose lives are in tune with everything going on internationally, I’ve had a prejudice against “ignorant Americans.” But actually living here, that prejudice is slowly changing, which is exciting. One of the connections to an anthropological concept I found from this experience was realizing that all of us have “etic” perspectives of other cultures initially, and the only way to gain a true “emic” perspective would take lot of time, which is obviously why anthropologists must spend years and years absorbed in another culture to gain that culture’s perspective.