Spirituality, Health and Wellbeing: ‘Contemplative Radicals’

Speaker

Dr Ori Mautner is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, University of Cambridge. His research examines the practice of insight meditation (vipassanā)— contemplative and ascetic techniques that originate in Theravāda Buddhism—by two groups of Israeli Jews operating in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Abstract

Anthropologists have critiqued the growing focus on ethics—often emphasizing self-care and self-formation—as potentially depoliticizing. Engaged Dharma Israel (EDI), a radical-left Israeli activist group, raises similar concerns. EDI combines Buddhist-inspired meditative self-care with anti-occupation activism in solidarity with Palestinians, involving fraught and often risky encounters with Israeli settlers and the military. Responding to calls to integrate the anthropologies of ethics and politics, I propose tracing how people themselves navigate this relationship, whether or not they name it as such.

EDI upholds ethical self-care practices—awareness, reflection, cultivating friendliness—while resisting Israel’s policies toward West Bank Palestinians. Positioned between Dharma practitioners focused on self-care and radical-left activists focused on political opposition, members view self-fashioning and resistance as complementary, mutually reinforcing forms of care. They see each as insufficiently attuned to the wellbeing of either self or others without the other. I illustrate this through Nimrod, an everyday exemplar of EDI’s approach, and briefly note other—orthodox-Jewish and nationalist—Israeli practitioners of Buddhist-derived meditation to suggest comparisons of how people variously conceptualize and enact relations or separations between self-care and political action.

The conclusion considers ethnographic critiques of EDI’s ‘politics’, viewed by some as overly humanitarian and insufficiently democratic to address ongoing, unprecedented crises.

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Please note that this event is free to attend.

This event is hosted by the Spirituality, Health and Wellbeing research theme of the Institute for Medical Humanities, led by Loretta Lou, Sitna Quiroz, Adam Powell, Fran Cettl, and Arya Thampuran.