FORMACIÓN PROFESIONAL EN EMPRESAS DUAL-EMPLEO: “

Home is often given religious and spiritual meaning. Women in a range of cultures have traditionally been regarded as the people who are responsible for maintaining and making the home (Valentine, 2001: 63-104). For Chinese families in Singapore, domestic religious rituals are taken care of by the matriarchs (Kiong and Kong, 2000: 42). For Muslim women, non-institutional domestic spaces, as their main sites of religious practice, enhances women’s social interaction and identity (Mazumdar, 1999). Compared with the monastery and other public spaces, the gender role in domestic religious space has a different significance. In Jiuzhaigou, women play a leading role in domestic religious practices which are important (yet accorded lesser significance than tasks performed by men).

Cuomo, the middle-aged local woman whom I quoted above told me that, “Normally women undertake most of the domestic religious work. The formal religious activities are done by men, and during that time women stay aside. For example, the big chanting ceremony every winter and things like this are done by men. The small things like cooking and cleaning are done by women.” This suggests that a general classification of religious practices is based on gender difference. The formal and big religious activities are assigned to men; the domestic and small religious practices are for women. This clear gender division of religious work is also in men’s minds. At home, religion becomes for them a trivial thing which is in the charge of women. Men normally are not much

involved in domestic religion. Xila, a middle-aged man from Jiuzhaigou quoted above, spoke for this gender difference.

Xila: At home, religious activities are mostly taken care of by my wife. I don’t involve myself in these things. I believe her, she can manage these [affairs] well.

Ying: Why?

Xila: Normally these things are taken care of by women. I just need to drive a car taking the monk here and send him home.”

Xila leaves his wife to do domestic religious practices. The everyday routine of burning incense in the morning is mainly conducted by his wife. He said, “-I always feel at ease when my wife is in charge of this”. In familial rituals, men always sit in front of women. Yidan, the wandering monk from Anbei, explained that this “shows respect to men. Women can sit in the front if men are not there. If men are there, both a wife and other women should respect men.” In the family, men still have a relatively higher position than women, something that is taken for granted by men and women in most households.

What needs to be emphasised here is that nowadays women contribute as much as (sometimes even more than) men to the domestic income, as tourism provides them almost equal job opportunities. Women’s rising role in the family economy has not yet however made much change to their status in terms of dealing with trivial things in and out of the religious sphere.

5.4 Conclusion

“Religious landscapes may reveal symbolically and literally a local politics, or local structure of power and authority” (Kong, 2002: 1574). In this chapter, I examined transformations of the religious landscape in Jiuzhaigou, with a focus on changes to the two most prominent institutional and non-institutional religious spaces: the monastery and the home before and after the advent of tourists. More specifically, I discussed the challenges and contestations to the traditional meaning of the monastery as sacred, public, Tibetan-exclusive and male-dominant, and the revitalisation of domestic religious space since tourism development. In Section 5.2, I examined contestations and the politics of place-making in Zharu Monastery. Firstly, I discussed how the government and local people perceive the boundary between the monastery as tourist product and as holy space. The government prefers to see the monastery as a tourist product and play down its religious significance. Local people regard it as a holy space whose sanctity should not be defiled by profiteering. Secondly, we saw how the public nature of the

monastery is being challenged by ownership-claims from non-religious institutions (laypeople, local government), by fragmentising and privatising the Stupa, by monastery’s failure to fulfil its public role. Thirdly, after the affair of the fraudulent Han tourist business, the monastery has become a place that demonstrates Tibetan identity in contradistinction to Han Chinese identity. Lastly, the monastery is also a space with serious gender divisions in which women and their bodies are seen as vectors of pollution. Through these, the monastery somewhat loses its appeal and significance.

In section 5.3, I explored the revival of domestic religious space. Jiuzhaigou people have greatly increased their capital investment in religious buildings, objects and practices thanks to tourism, which has fundamentally changed their work and living style (see Chapter 4 for a detailed description of local people’s close relationships with tourism). The high demand for domestic religious observances also leads to competition for the services of monks, and a revival of the Prosperity Sutra and a family-based bottom-up religious festival organised by laypeople. It seems domestic religion somehow supplements the loss in institutional or public religion. While on the one hand, they are able to invest more in religious practices and structures such as chantings and stupas, on the other hand, some people regret that Jiuzhaigou people are less likely to exert themselves in pursuit of religious practices. Modernisation, which brings new labour- saving technology, can be seen as one factor contributing to the increasing use of domestic religious space. Women, who are assigned to domestic religious duties of lesser significance, still have a relatively lower position than men in the family.

The first concluding point that can be drawn from this chapter is a shift toward a non- institutional expression of religion. Before I began my fieldwork, I had a pre-supposition that Jiuzhaigou is experiencing secularisation. Through careful examination of the transformation of religious spaces in the light of secularisation theories, I found that the central change is not towards secularisation but specifically towards the deinstitutionalisation of religion. To quote Peter Berger (1999: 10), “a shift in the institutional location of religion” would be more accurate in describing religious change in Jiuzhaigou than secularisation. Religious commitment and affiliation with religious institutions have become less relevant in assessing the vitality of a religion (Dobbelaere, 2002: 38-44). In Jiuzhaigou, religious change takes on a path that is not simply unidirectional. The role and meaning of the monastery have been diversified and contested, which makes it harder for its monks to perform their religious duties and transmit religious ideas to laypeople. The monastery’s significance is declining. Monasticism is under threat, given that Zharu Monastery has gradually failed functionally and lost its appeal and reputation among laypeople in Jiuzhaigou. The decline of institutional religion under these conditions has not been accompanied by the decline in

religious belief among laypeople. On the contrary, laypeople have moved their practice of religion outside of the institutional sphere.

The second conclusion is that the tourism economy is now a fundamental factor in reshaping religion in Jiuzhaigou. It dissolved the traditional authority and power of the monastery, but not Tibetans’ enthusiasm toward Bon. It generated new burgeoning religious demands and facilitated the material realisation of these demands. Based on large-scale quantitative data, Norris and Inglehart (2004: 25) claimed that the rich societies in the world are becoming less religious; in contrast poor societies with growing population still have vital religious expressions. From my study, it would be hard to conclude that the economically advanced Jiuzhaigou is less religious than the economically backward Anbei. Even though they generally see themselves as less religious than the people of Anbei because of less bodily effort of themselves in practicing religion, the physical presence, high demand of religion have been thriving. Just as Jiuzhaigou people themselves argued, the non-stop sound of chanting is a point evidencing their strong religious feelings. Sometimes religious vitality has been vibrantly maintained at micro level rather than at macro level (Wilford, 2010). My study suggests religiosity is related in a more nuanced way to a complex set of elements, rather than simply determined by monastery membership, or self-claimed piety on a scale of 1 to 5. Responding to Norris and Inglehart’s claim, I would argue that economic conditions are not the sole consideration in determining the strength of religious feeling in a specific place.

The process of modernisation will not necessarily lead to the decline of religion in social life, but rather to transformations in its social forms (Pollack and Pickel, 2007: 604). For example, the Christian church accommodates itself to attract more membership, especially in America; and it becomes a place to socialise and to meet friends. In Jiuzhaigou, Zharu Monastery has been re-designed as a crucial tourist product, and this generates struggles and conflicts between local people and the government, amongst the local laypeople themselves, between local laypeople and the monks, between Tibetans and Han Chinese. According to the new construction plan for Zharu Monastery, the monastery compound will house an activity centre for the elderly as well as being a tourist site. Tourists, laypeople and monks will have more interactions in the monastery. Its physical space, social forms and social-spiritual meanings will have further changes. It will be worth following up these changes in the future to add to our understanding of religious change at the macro level.

Secularisation as a trend is of relevance to the extent that Tibetans find themselves confronted by the secular and powerful Han China and this serves to reinforce ethno- religious identity among Tibetans (which will be further evidenced in Chapter 6 and 7).

Although the conclusions I have made are drawn from one case, Jiuzhaigou and Zharu Monastery are singled out among many other places which have common sets of issues confronted by ethnic and religious minority groups throughout the China. Many of these groups are, for example, encouraged to develop tourism by the government; local religions in many areas where minorities live are used as a tourist resource; in all of these places, there is secular pressure from Han China (Oakes and Sutton, 2010). Many Tibetan monasteries are experiencing pressures stemming from tourism and other forms of economic development, and will have to face similar challenges. While the focus is often on the macro level, this analysis of religious change in Jiuzhaigou presents a different, more detailed and vivid picture.

Chapter 6 Intergenerationality and religious change: religious