The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

Professor David H. Day

Monroe Community College, Rochester, NY
Encountering Old Faiths in New Places: Mapping Religious Diversity in the Rochester, New York Area

 

Executive Summary:

Monroe Community College is a large two-year institution located within the greater Rochester, New York metropolitan area. As a publicly-funded college within the State University of New York system, MCC commands an excellent reputation and plays a key role in providing a broad-based liberal and technical education equipping students for transfer to four-year institutions as well as for employment in the culturally-diverse local workforce. Our campus reflects this local diversity and we are witnessing a growth in interest in courses on religion and spirituality across a range of disciplines.

Students enrolled in Anthropology 202: Human Religious Experience at MCC have long conducted ethnographic research on area religious institutions. Our new affiliation with the Harvard Pluralism Project will allow students, with the guidance of their anthropology instructor, to focus their ethnographic inquiries on a variety of religious and spiritual communities and faiths that are "new" to our area, especially those non-Judaeo-Christian groups in diaspora emerging in the United States since 1965. Until quite recently, research on these groups has been largely neglected by researchers and scholars. Some of the students will focus specifically on the origins and growth of local ethnic Buddhist temples and Professor David Day will conduct a detailed interview with a Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition. Results of these joint projects, including student-authored profiles of mosques, temples, etc., together with photographs, will be posted on the internet for greater accessibility.

Project Components:

Part One will consist of student ethnographic research on selected religious / spiritual communities, with special focus on Southeast Asian or "ethnic" Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Afro-Caribbean spirituality (Rastafarianism, Santeria), Egyptian Copts, Wiccans (Neo-Pagans), Sufism, Sikhism, gay/lesbian, Macedonian, Korean, Chinese, Latin-American Catholic, botanicas, and others. Our goal is to begin to map the new religious demography of the Rochester area.

Using a range of qualitative ethnographic fieldwork techniques, approximately forty students will conduct participant-observation in a venue of their choice from a list provided by Professor Day. Using a common template, they will obtain data on the history, ethnic composition and roles played by each institution. Where possible, interviews will be conducted with congregants, priests, monks or ministers and stories and life-histories will be elicited. Photographs will be taken where feasible.

Part Two will explore, in the manner of a case-study, the origins and growth of an urban Laotian Buddhist temple in the Theravada tradition within the city of Rochester, N.Y., one of at least two in the area. Five other Buddhist organizations include Tibetan, Zen, Cambodian and Zen temples. Traditional ethnographic and ethnohistorical fieldwork techniques will be used.

Part Three will feature a biographic profile or life-history of a single Laotian monk, tracing his ordination, arrival in Rochester, position within the wider Buddhist sangha, and the multiple roles he plays in the spiritual life of a temple. This, and the work carried out in Part Two, will provide a cultural window into the myriad ways by which a new religious community has been recreated on American soil.

Part Four (with the assistance of the College's webmaster), places relevant student projects, the temple case-study, the life-history and a variety of photographs on our College's web page, with links to the Pluralism Project at Harvard University.

Links:

Monroe Community College, of the State University of New York