In his own work, Michel Foucault approached the question of the relationship of the body and the subject from a range of different methodological and philosophical perspectives. Madness is tied to physical exclusion and confinement, the subject is shaped by rituals of exposure, from the confessional to technologies of surveillance. This online session challenges and builds upon Foucauldian methods and insights through interventions particular to religious studies, including methodological perspectives from madness, embodiment, and ritual studies. How does ritualization intersect with embodiment? How is “madness” embodied, and how are the “mad” subject to rituals of exclusion, inclusion, confession, and more? How do embodiment methodologies speak to ritual studies, and vice versa? And how may we continue to critically challenge Foucault through conceptual and historical resources outside of his own typically European focus?
Foucault’s work History of Madness lays the groundwork to consider what it means to be marginalized. When Foucault considers the marginalized, he is considering those who have been discarded by their social structures. Foucault considers this group in terms of the Great Confinement in France, when many individuals were collected from around the country and placed in insane asylums whether they were truly mad or not. Foucault argues that it is so important to really understand who was being deemed as insane because it allows us to consider the power imbalances in this specific moment. During this historical moment the categorization of the mad here is the criminal, the poor, the unemployed, and then the insane. Using this categorization, we can apply this logic to our modern-day scapegoats. Who are the individuals who are a “problem” in the modern-day context and singled out to be removed from these societal structures.
This paper argues for the utility of a Foucauldian lens for Buddhist studies, while also drawing attention to how Buddhist histories complicate and expand Foucault's methods. While Foucault is often rightly criticized for focusing on western contexts, this paper suggests that some of the operations of power that he analyzed found parallels in central Asian contexts. If mechanisms of confession and surveillance apply, so too do creative practices of "self-fashioning. Examining resonance and rift across cultural contexts enables us to trace how Foucault's analysis of the history of sexuality allows us to think not only about Buddhist's ancient monastic codes and their incitements to discourse, but also how these codes were applied in Tibetan-specific configurations of emerging modernity.
Studies of The Body espousing a Foucauldian approach tend to engage the body as an abstract theoretical construct –as in social science; and/or a material artifact –as in history. However, incorporating Foucault’s work into ritual studies –a subfield within religious studies— brings forward that Foucault engaged the body –as Merleau Ponty before him— as the lived material substrate wherein culture and history play out. Indeed, centering of experience of bodily performances constituted the major continuity between Foucault’s earlier and later scholarship. This paper will present my interdisciplinary framework of ritual ecological analysis as a means of reframing how we view Foucault’s approach to the body as the reflexive expression of historically contingent cultural praxes. Further, I will argue that embodiment methodologies are similarly consistent with Foucault’s approach to the body and bodily experience.