Thursday, November 14, 2024 – 5pm, Foster 103:
Xue Han, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
Contemporary Tibetan teenagers are obligated to receive a uniform anti-religious Marxist ideological education in formal schools; meanwhile, Tibetan Buddhism is also passed on to them in their families as their traditional religious belief system. How do they react to this ideological tension? My research discovered that Tibetan teenagers do not typically feel it is necessary to reconcile the apparent ideological conflict or have to choose one of the two belief systems. Instead, they incubate diverse socially functional strategies while holding two opposed ideologies, which informs us of the practical wisdom for co-existence in our increasingly multi-polar and multi-ideological global world.