Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I describe a Tibetan Cham dance performed at a charity event hosted by a church in River City (pseudonym), a major European City with a significant Tibetan migrant population.

Paper long abstract:

From Buddhist Ritual to World Healing: Transforming Cham Dance in a Diasporic Context

In this presentation, I describe a Tibetan Cham dance performed at a charity event hosted by a church in River City (pseudonym), a major European city with a significant Tibetan migrant population. I attended the event as a member of the audience and engaged in participant-observation and informal interviewing of audience members. The event was staged by a Tibetan charity, henceforth referred to as Charity S, at a 17th century Christian church. Charity S was involved in both cultural and political activism. I first describe the origins and traditional meanings ascribed to Cham dance, before giving an account of my experience of the performance and the audience reactions to it. I go on to analyse the responses of the mostly Christian audience to the performance. I draw upon Magowan's (2001) conception of spiritual synchronicity, Pearlman's (2002) work on transformations in Tibetan Buddhist ritual and the work of Minn (2007) and others in the anthropology of humanitarianism, to argue that it is a common ground of commitment to spiritually based humanitarianism that enables a Buddhist ritual dance to appeal to a primarily Christian, European audience that has no prior knowledge of the religious significance of the dance within Buddhist practice.