SHAOLIN TEMPLE IN THE MIDST OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: TRANSFORMATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN A CHINESE MONASTIC COMMUNITY
Keywords:
Shaolin Temple, Covid-19, everyday life, crisis management, ChinaAbstract
This article explores the continuity and transformation that characterized everyday life within the Shaolin Temple amidst the Covid-19 pandemic in China. It reveals the emergent mechanisms that enabled the monastic community to maintain its core religious life during the initial five-month quarantine. The study is based on the data collected during my two-and-a-half-year long anthropological fieldwork in the Temple, which included the period of the outbreak of epidemic and the subsequent isolation. Being caught in the midst of the full quarantine in a Buddhist monastery in China is a unique research experience, which has not been reported in literature. The analysis of the Shaolin Temple case shows that when the socio-cultural transformations jeopardize the reproduction of the core daily life of a relatively closed community, new internal initiatives and mechanisms are produced to safeguard, sustain, and promote the community’s basic means of survival and identity reproduction. The study also shows that the community’s trust in the monastic leadership’s capacity to maintain health safety enables its members to direct their practical consciousness and agency toward sustaining the religious and ontological underpinnings of daily monastic life that are foundational to their communal existence.
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