Anne Mocko

Capstone Conference Talk

Saturday (8/5) 1:50-2:10PM

Eco-Karma: Notes on What Western Environmentalists might Learn from India’s Jains

Environmental responsibility in the West is often conceived in terms of needing to develop better environmental consciousness, by learning about the science of oceans or atmospheres. But what if, instead of providing people with more information about climate change or extinction and hoping that they change their habits, we began by interrogating and redesigning the daily habits we lived by? To explore this possibility of ethical embodied action, I will present excerpts from my manuscript Eco-Karma, to contrast Western lifestyles with the daily devotional and karma practices of India’s Jains, to point to ways that Jains might inspire non-Jains to live better.

Capstone Conference Research Laboratory

SATURDAY (8/5) 9:30-10:40AM

Integral Ecology: Enhancing Human and Non-Human Life

The task of this Research Laboratory is to provide perspectives from philosophy, history, theology and anthropology about the possibilities for engaging in each other’s lives and in the natural world. Rather than exploring ecology and just the sum of its parts, we explore fundamental aspects of and “integral ecology.” That is, we examine the ways environments and social relationships organize, inspire, and vitalize each other. The laboratory will also look across different societies to explore the ways these integral interactions are mediated by material infrastructures and cultural belief systems. In doing so, we seek to reflect on the webs of mutuality, interdependence, and exchange that can and do enhance the integral coexistence of human and non-human life.

Research Laboratories allow audience members to interact with a panel of ELP Scholars and Interlocutors in addressing a problem of public relevance. We invite active participation from audience members in the creation of new knowledge.

Academic Biography

Anne Mocko is Assistant Professor of Asian religions at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, where she has taught since 2012. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and her 2012 dissertation on the role of ritual in the dismantling of Nepal’s Hindu monarchy was awarded distinction.

Her research has primarily focused within the field of ritual studies, and she has been most interested in examining the capacity of ritual practice to inscribe narratives or ideologies into the lived realities of practitioners and observers. Her doctoral research was conducted in Nepal, and was focused on the effects and effectiveness of political ritual. She examined the ways that the royal rituals that had for centuries performed the king as the center of the government and nation were co-opted and transformed between 2006–2008 in order to remove the king and implement a party-based electoral government in the monarchy’s place.

She is the author of several articles and book chapters, including most recently “Nepal and Bhutan in 2014: New Governments, Old Problems” (co-authored with Dorji Penjore, appearing in the January 2015 issue of the Asian Survey journal). Her first book, Demoting Vishnu: Ritual, Politics, and the Unraveling of Nepal’s Hindu Monarchy, will be released by Oxford University Press later this year.

Project Executive Summary

This project is designed as a comparative, ethnographic investigation into the concept and practice of merit in Theravada Buddhism and Jainism. I argue that both traditions posit a powerful counter-world in which humans can free themselves from their desires and pettiness—a world in which humans can be calm, undemanding, peaceable, and satisfied—and that each tradition puts forward concrete practices, particularly oriented around the generation of merit, through which ordinary people can move toward that counter-world.

Merit is a spiritual “asset.” It accumulates as a result of acts of compassion, non-violence, or renunciation, and aids in rebirth and eventual salvation. The generation of merit is central to Buddhist and Jain lay practice, and it organizes the lives of Buddhists and Jains around the core ascetic/monastic ideals of the religions. I hypothesize that, through these practices, even as Buddhists and Jains reduce or renounce lives of worldly pleasure, they can nevertheless experience their lives as being abundant in merit.

In order to probe the specific dynamics of merit-making activities, I will conduct field research in Asia, traveling to and residing in Theravada Buddhist and Jain communities, in order to observe merit-making practices and interview practitioners. I plan to travel during the three summers of the grant period to Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka, and hope that my research will contribute to a fuller appreciation to the ways that two of the world’s foremost monastic religions affirm meaningful non-monastic lives, and teach that any life can enhanced through restraint and compassion.