Kim Gutschow is a Lecturer in Anthropology and Religion at Williams College and Professor of Anthropology and Public Health at the University of Goettingen.
Being a Buddhist Nun is a persuasive and moving combination
of vivid writing and sophisticated scholarship. The lived
experience is wonderfully captured in both verbal and visual thick
descriptions of foods, tasks, conversations, all the evocative
phenomena of the everyday, while the book raises questions that are
significant far beyond the Himalayas, ranging from the usual
questions of gender--Why Cannot Nuns Be Monks?--for which Kim
Gutschow offers new answers, to the not-so-usual questions of
celibacy, in which she sees newly relevant values.--Wendy Doniger,
Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions, University of
Chicago
Being a Buddhist Nun is a valuable account of the life of
nuns in the Himalayan valley of Zanskar, a region of Ladakh in
north-west India. The work is driven by a deep sense of injustice
and a compelling focus on a remote society still medieval in
character...[Gutschow] present[s] an unrivalled account of monastic
economy and social anthropology in Ladakh. Her text is full of
'thick' description, delightful anecdotes, biographies of
courageous and not so courageous nuns, as well as accounts of the
personal joys and sufferings of individuals. Although she focuses
on the often lamentable ways in which nuns suffer discrimination,
she is not unduly disrespectful of the monastic system to which
they belong; rather she subjects it to a prolonged and penetrating
examination and interpretation.-- (01/13/2006)
Solidly based on over a decade of fieldwork, Gutschow successfully
dispels a number of stereotypical misconceptions about Buddhist
monasticism in general and Buddhist nuns more specifically. She
places monasticism in its necessary political and economic spheres,
while not ignoring the pragmatic aspects of lived Buddhism.
Being a Buddhist Nun transports women and nuns from their
marginal peripheral position in Buddhist history to its ideological
center.--Frank J. Korom, Boston University
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