Cornell University

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Remembering the Present: An anthropological comparison of mindfulness practices in South-Southeast Asia and the United States

Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 4:30pm

A.D. White House Guerlac Room

For many people in the United States mindfulness represents a general state of present-focused, non-judgmental awareness, but in today’s Theravāda-majority Buddhist countries of South and Southeast Asia it has come to mean this and much more. In this talk Julia Cassaniti discusses the results of an ethnographic project carried out among 600 Buddhist monks, psychiatrists, university students and villagers on mindfulness in Thailand, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, using its Pali gloss of sati. Focusing on person-centered narratives of meditation and mental health, Cassaniti suggests some of the ways that mindfulness looks similar and different across the region and in the United States, and highlights key associations that mindfulness makes to ideas and ideals about the human mind.  Memory, ethics, power and the spirits of a transient self are all important components of mindfulness in contemporary practice in South-Southeast Asia, and as such offer new psychological and cultural implications for the concept’s global reach.

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Event Type

Seminar

Departments

The Society for the Humanities, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Human Development [DO NOT USE deprecated 1/23/23], Southeast Asia Program, South Asia Program

Tags

Human Ecology Human Development

Speaker

Julia Cassaniti

Speaker Affiliation

Washington State University

Reception

Reception to follow

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