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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Buddhism
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Saving Buddhism - The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,323
Discovery Miles 23 230
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Saving Buddhism - The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Hardcover)
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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