CONCLUSION

Modern anthropologists have long debated the relative strengths and weaknesses of structure and agency. Structural approaches illuminate the similarities between cultures and the persistence of long-lasting cultural phenomena. Agent-based approaches, in contrast, lend themselves to more particularistic and contingent explanations of historical change. In practice, few anthropologists strictly follow either a structural or agent-based approach. Rather, most ricochet between the two—often justifying their theoretical inconsistency through vague incantations of the dialectic.

I no longer believe that my theoretical inconsistency has anything to do with the dialectic. Rather than justify my theoretical inconsistency through calls to dialectical reasoning, I now justify my theoretical dalliances by noting the inconsistency, incoherence, and contradiction of human culture. Theoretical coherency is only a virtue in a world that is coherent. As will become clear in the following pages, Indian Buddhism was anything but coherent. From the start, Indian Buddhism was shot through with contradictions and disjunctures—chief among them the competing desires for asceticism and communalism. The history of Indian Buddhism, then, is the study of how Buddhists sought to resolve, exploit, and ignore this and other persistent contradictions. Over time, some disjunctures were resolved, though often at the expense of creating new disjunctures. Other disjunctures persisted, with subsequent generations addressing persistent disjunctures in novel ways.

A full understanding of the long-term development of Indian Buddhism requires theories that can address the diverse, contradictory, and incoherent elements of Buddhism. While I value the latest anthropological insights on practice, materiality, and semiotics, I persist in seeing value in the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Turner, and others. Rather than rejecting older theories for the novelty of newer theories, I find it more informative—and interesting—to use them all.