Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Fellowship "REFUSE: Disrupting Buddhist circular economies – excess and abandonment in contemporary Japan"

Anti-materialism is the most pervasive popular assumption about Buddhism that obscures Buddhism’s material presence and its environmental impacts. Problematising such moulds, this ethnographic project will demonstrate how Buddhist materiality drives Buddhist circular economies, rooted in practices of merit-making and inherited ritual labour. By tracing Buddhist objects’ biographies and illuminating the circular nature of Buddhist material exchanges, I will investigate how things given to local temples generate excess and abandonment practices in contemporary post-growth Japan. Through histories of these objects and their relations, I will uncover how demographic hyper-ageing, regional depopulation, and changing consumption patterns inform and disrupt Buddhist material exchanges: how family altars and other personal ritual items, as well as meritorious food, land and object donations get caught up in discard, disposal, and reuse cycles and what emotional, ethical, practical, and spiritual implications ensue. As such, I will illuminate how Buddhist practices for processing accumulation and abandonment of Buddhist gifts are key to understanding contemporary Buddhism, and the wider issues of consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies they inhabit. I will therefore consider Buddhist giving as forces that generate and handle excess and abandonment that challenge the viability of the circular economy ideal by producing waste. Global concern about waste continues to rise: this research interrogates the waste-making impacts of religious activity and assesses the spiritual and practical implications of managing religious excess in the world’s fastest ageing society. It complements, and is complemented by, the research at the CCBS interrogating Buddhist economic entanglements and waste that is created by Buddhist economic exchanges.