Theo Stapleton
PhD Candidate, Cambridge University
Social Anthropology Department

Tanhua Temple is the first Chinese Buddhist mission in East Africa, and part of an emerging Buddhist missionary movement on the continent. This talk draws on over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer driver and translator at Tanhua Temple in Dar es Salaam. My own interest in Tanhua Temple was stimulated by the unique combination of languages, religions, nationalities and other positionalities that coexist there. Over the course of fieldwork it became clear that the kinds of differences being negotiated in daily life at the temple could not be captured by simple China-Africa binaries. Instead, in my dissertation I explore five different sets of engagements that took place within the temple including chapters on; (1) the transnational Buddhist ‘system’ (tixi) at its core, (2) the emergence of a local congregation, (3) the tensions, conflicts and compromises produced by differences between the temple’s ‘merit model’ and local workers’ values, (4) the perspective of young Chinese backpackers who volunteered at the temple during their travels, and finally (5) the Chinese business community, Tanzanian translators and various state institutions that came into contact with this Buddhist mission. In this talk I will speak about the first four of these engagements, and attempt to draw some initial comparisons between the ways in which these various differences were negotiated. In doing so I engage with debates in the anthropology of Buddhism, the nature of cosmopolitan ethical projects, theorisations of value hierarchies and conflict along with ongoing debates about Chinese civil society.