Dharma and Difference in Dar es Salaam: The first Chinese Buddhist mission in Tanzania
Speakers:
Theo Stapleton (University of Cambridge)
Matei Candea (University of Cambridge)
About this event:
Tanhua Temple, founded in 2018, is the first Chinese Buddhist mission in Tanzania, and part of a broader expansion of Chinese Buddhist institutions across the continent. For my doctoral research I conducted one year of participant observation there as a Chinese-English-Swahili interpreter and driver (2022-23). Tanhua Temple was a ‘superdiverse’ social space, with residents and visitors including people of different religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam), languages (Chinese, Swahili, English), ethnicities (Tanzanian & Chinese), socio-economic statuses and other positionalities. My thesis asks how people dealt with these various differences, and does so by taking a thick comparative approach inspired by Matei Cadea’s work on comparison in anthropology and recent work in the Global China literature. Each chapter of the thesis deals with a particular set of engagements that unfolded in social life at Tanhua Temple, and then asks what each can contribute to conceptual debates in anthropology and beyond. Empirically the thesis describes the Buddhist organisation behind Tanhua Temple, the rise and fall of a local congregation, the temple’s exchange relations with its residents, its place in the Chinese diaspora, along with its engagements with Tanzanian and Chinese young people who passed through its grounds. In this talk I will introduce the comparative approach taken in this project and sketch the broad features of the arguments made in each chapter. As the final seminar in this series, I will also briefly ask how these engagements compare to the other religious sites on the Sino-African frontier, building on the past 11 papers given in this series. This will be a chance to test out a framework for a special issue on this subject.
About the speaker and respondent:
Theo Stapleton is a 2025-26 Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate at the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology, where he has been a PhD student since 2021. He has recently submitted his PhD thesis and will defend on the 30th of September 2025.
Matei Candea is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University interested in understanding ethics, epistemics, materiality, and politics, with an emphasis on the analysis of conceptual and social forms and formalisms. His monograph Comparison in Anthropology: the impossible method (2018) was influential in the development of Theo’s doctoral research.