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Saving Buddhism - The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Paperback)
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Saving Buddhism - The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Paperback)
Series: Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Saving Buddhism explores the dissonance between the goals of the
colonial state and the Buddhist worldview that animated Burmese
Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many Burmese,
the salient and ordering discourse was not nation or modernity but
sasana, the life of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese Buddhists
interpreted the political and social changes between 1890 and 1920
as signs that the Buddha’s sasana was deteriorating. This fear of
decline drove waves of activity and organizing to prevent the loss
of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese set out to save Buddhism, but
achieved much more: they took advantage of the indeterminacy of the
moment to challenge the colonial frameworks that were beginning to
shape their world. Author Alicia Turner has examined thousands of
rarely used sources - newspapers and Buddhist journals, donation
lists, and colonial reports—to trace three discourses set in
motion by the colonial encounter: the evolving understanding of
sasana as an orienting framework for change, the adaptive modes of
identity made possible in the moral community, and the ongoing
definition of religion as a site of conflict and negotiation of
autonomy. Beginning from an understanding that defining and
redefining the boundaries of religion operated as a key technique
of colonial power—shaping subjects through European categories
and authorizing projects of colonial governmentality—she explores
how Burmese Buddhists became actively engaged in defining and
inflecting religion to shape their colonial situation and forward
their own local projects. Saving Buddhism intervenes not just in
scholarly conversations about religion and colonialism, but in
theoretical work in religious studies on the categories of
“religion” and “secular.” It contributes to ongoing studies
of colonialism, nation, and identity in Southeast Asian studies by
working to denaturalize nationalist histories. It also engages
conversations on millennialism and the construction of identity in
Buddhist studies by tracing the fluid nature of sasana as a
discourse. The layers of Buddhist history that emerge challenge us
to see multiple modes of identity in colonial modernity and offer
insights into the instabilities of categories we too often take for
granted.
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