Stephen Christopher

• Presentation
• Research outputs

Postdoc project

FLOW: The Value of Refugees and the Impact of Global Buddhist Networks 

Funded by Horizon 2020
Project period: 2022 - 2025
Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies

Stephen has two lines of research. In Tibetan Studies, thanks to a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, he studies how Buddhism generates value in a global spiritual economy in South-, East- and Southeast Asia. It analyzes how the generation of material and symbolic capital in diasporic Tibetan Buddhism collapses traditional disciplinary distinctions between religion and economy. By tracking both the material forms of patronage and ‘soft power’ in spiritual, social, and discursive forms, this project addresses economic questions with anthropological sensibilities.

The other line of research analyzes Himalayan tribal ethnicity and Indian affirmative action, called reservation. He is especially interested in how tribal idenity in the contemporary period is bound up with ecological practices and discourses.