For fifteen years I have been interested in engaging in research on Contemporary Buddhism in India. I began my research career during my PhD studies, where I reseached on the intersections of youth and Buddhism in India, with a focus on young Ladakhi educational migrants in Delhi. I sought to understand how they related to Buddhism while away from their families and Buddhist environments in Ladakh, India. I then continued with research looking at contemporary Buddhism in Ladakh through two post-doctoral projects looking at the intersections of Buddhism and business more broadly, and Buddhism and tourism more specifically. Based on this research I have published 16 academic articles, co-edited two academic volumes, and co-edited three special issues of academic journals (see publication list). If interested, you can read more about my research projects below:
1) Marketization of ‘exotic east’ and the spiritual value of Buddhism in Ladakh, India: The Himalayan region has for the past many decades become established as a spiritual tourism destination for global tourists. While the high-altitude Himalayan mountain region offers a plethora of adventure tourism activities such as trekking, river rafting and snow leopard spotting, it is Buddhism which has been particularly promoted as the Unique Selling Point (USP). This project examines how Buddhism is being marketed among tour operators in order to promote spiritual tourism to the region. Marketing strategies which position the Himalayas as an exotic East which can be accessed through capital investment in package tours offers an interesting juxtaposition in which the allure of Buddhism as a salve for the dystopia of global capitalism can be bought through global capitalism. In most cases, tourists who choose to embark on these spiritual tours are not Buddhists themselves, but drawn by the exotic representation of Buddhism- including images of monasteries, monks and nuns, devote villagers, and material implements such as statues, thangka paintings and singing bowls. Through ethnographic research and media analysis, the ways in which Buddhist goods and services are marketed in the Indian Himalayan region of Ladakh are investigated, paying particular attention to how local and outside actors, including tour operators and tourists who purchase these tours engage with these Buddhist-mediated goods and services. (Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation).
2) Buddhism as a Unique Selling Point (USP) – Spiritual tourism and cultural survival in Ladakh
This project investigates the relationship between Buddhism and a market economy through studying local attempts to brand Buddhism as a means to attract foreign and domestic tourists to the Indian Himalayan region of Ladakh. Considered to be the last remaining bastion of Tibetan Buddhism since the Chinese incursion in Tibet in the 1950s, Ladakh has become a site of intense cultural politics regarding the survival of Tibetan Buddhism in the region. As a Buddhist minority in a Muslim majority state and a Hindu majority nation, along with the increasing impacts of global capitalism, a revitalization of Buddhism has gained emphasis in the region. These revitalization efforts at times take the shape of marketing techniques such as branding and commodification, not only for the sake of curious tourists, but also as a means to attract the attention of its younger cohort away from the allures of global goods. Through two periods of multi-sited ethnographic research among tour operators, foreign and domestic tourists, policy makers, clerical and lay Ladakhis, this project examines how Buddhism mediates both material and spiritual benefits and seeks to gain insight into the ways in which Buddhism is branded as Ladakhi as well as an attractive global good as a response to and player among global market economies. (Funded by the Danish Research Council, FKK- start date September 2017)
3) Young Buddhism: Analyzing transformations of Buddhism through ‘youth’. While transformations of Buddhism have often been conceptualized as ‘New,’ ‘Modern’ and ‘Global,’ I suggest a shift in focus towards analyzing the particular role that ‘youth’ play in transformations of Buddhist practices and understandings in Asia. Taking as my starting point ethnographic research among Ladakhi Buddhist youth in India, I make the case for a youth-focused analytical approach for understanding the nexus of religion and modernity. I argue that through taking ‘youth’ as an optic- both the manner in which young people engage with Buddhism, but also how the social category of ‘youth’ is invoked – a wider social landscape in which Buddhism is becoming transformed is illuminated. Young Buddhists, while mostly aligned with modern and global trends especially regarding new media and technologies, are also frequently at the height of concern about the future of Buddhism in Asia. The ways in which Buddhism is situated within these young contexts, I argue, helps to reveal the tugs and pulls of preservation and transformation which especially young Buddhists must forge and negotiate. I argue that ‘Young Buddhism’ as an analytical approach to studying conjectures of Buddhism and Modernity helps to emphasize not only the role that youth have played, but also the interplay of continuity and innovation in these movements.
Elizabeth Williams Ørberg 