Post 3: Identity

     Kirsten Jacobson 
    Kirsten.jacobson123@gmail.com

     Throughout the memes I have researched so far, meditation and prayer are images that are highlighted as key markers of the Buddhist religious group This speaks to a major belief by practicing Buddhists because it highlights the importance of finding inner peace to obtain nirvana, blocking out the outside world to be with God. These memes idealize Buddah as someone to follow in both worship and wardrobe and depict an insider view that the religion is peaceful and personal rather than group minded. The repetition of the depiction of men in orange robes sitting and praying engrains in the audiences view the prominence of peaceful and solo praying  to those in the Buddhist community.  Lastly, the memes I have been looking at use well known topics to appeal to both outside and insiders.
            I think the observations made on these memes relates very well to the topics discussed in class, specifically that of identity being fractured. From these memes there is an understanding that each individual persons journey in life through the Buddhist faith is personal and at their own pace, implying that how devoted they are to finding nirvana and being part of the outside world are individual choices to be made that help form a persons identity while practicing the Buddhist faith.

            Overall the messages being highlighted in these memes are rather positive and simple. They use humor to talk about how one must pray even if it seems boring and you could fall asleep but you must try even if you won’t ever be as “cool” as Buddha like the one meme shows. Each meme including the ones from previous posts and this post itself highlight the importance of prayer to someone who claims membership to the Buddhist faith, it is shown over and over again becoming a central part of most of the memes viewed because it is a central part of the religion. 

                                                                         Links to memes



Comments

  1. Soup Twin-1October 24, 2017 at 8:26 AM

    It will be important to contextualize your claim with other scholarly work about Buddhist ideas of prayer and how Buddhism has been presented in popular media before. Consider sources such as Why are buddhists so nice? media representations of buddhism and islam in the united states since 1945 by TA Tweed in Material Religion.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post 2: How Memes Present Features of Religion

Image
Kirsten Jacobson  kirsten.jacobson123@gmail.com The main strategy I plan on using in order to select memes for study is going to be to gather the memes themselves from Google images, using that source consistently, and only taking memes from the first couple of rows that appear from the search. My reasoning for this is that the first few rows presented on Google images, or any Google search appear to contain the most relevant content and content from more reliable sources (not made by an individual person and put on their personal account but accessible through a larger platform like Pintrist etc.,)             Through the memes I gathered for my last blog post as well as the ones presented with todays, the Buddhist rituals revolving around notions of transcendence seem to be rather clear.   Members seem to derive their meaning internally though mediation and eternal peace. The closer one is to inner peace and further away from wanting worldly possessions (tangible and non) th
Read more

Post 1: Topic Proposal

Image
Kirsten Jacobson kirsten.jacobson123@gmail.com Originally I was interested in studying memes related to the Muslim faith and community because I learned so much in the past section of the course and wanted to continue to educate myself on a different culture than my own. However, after further investigating religious memes I found that I was more curious to learn about memes centered around the Buddhist religion, as well as more about the Buddhist religion in general. I want to continue to broaden my knowledge on other religions by branching out from both my own personal and familiar Christian faith as well as the Muslim faith recently learned about in class. Buddhism is something that I have always admired and been curious about so I am excited to learn more about it especially through something I already enjoy, memes. Specifically I want to discover how memes challenge or promote certain stereotypes of practicing Buddhists in terms of how they view gender divisions (if any), if th
Read more