Colors of the Robe

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57003-787-0
Verlag: University of South Carolina Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 392 g

Reihe: Studies in Comparative Religion

This book offers a compelling case study of Buddhism in contemporary Sri Lanka.""Colors of the Robe"" probes the Sri Lankan world of Buddhism and politics and suggests innovative directions for the global study of religion, culture, and violence. In a volume that surpasses other studies in locating Sri Lankan Buddhism in its sectarian, ethnic, cultural, social, and political constructions, Ananda Abeysekara illuminates the shifting configurations that animate the relations connected with postcolonial religious identity and culture.Drawing on extensive field research in Sri Lanka, Abeysekara illustrates how differing discourses about Buddhism come into central view and then fade. He develops the concept of 'minute conjunctures of contingency' and places it in modest opposition to the Foucauldian (and postcolonial) conceptions of history and identity. Abeysekara suggests that the conjunctures of contingency help realize that Buddhism, identity, and difference do not remain simply available for disciplinary apprehension. This way of thinking about the unavailability of Buddhism, he contends, has profound political implications for how we might more generally think about and begin to disrupt entrenched presumptions of postcolonial cultural difference.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Abeysekara, Ananda

Über Autor(innen)

Ananda Abeysekara is an associate professor of religious studies at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the author of The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures.