Buddhism Deferred
Mangalika de Silva
COLORS OF THE ROBE: RELIGION, IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE by Ananda Abeysekera University of South Carolina Press, 2007, 271 pp., price not stated
October 2007, volume 31, No 10

Abeysekera has given us a cogent political anthropological study of postcolonial ideological formations in the guise of an anthropology of religion in Sri Lanka. He explores these formations in chapters on the relation of theories of religion to culture concepts, the identitarian flux of postcolonial monkhood, the conjuncture formed between Buddhism and political parties, emerging religious identities in the confrontation with Sri Lankan modernity, religion, governmentality and rhetoric, the entry of religious norms into the quasi-secular political sphere and the ratio between political terror and religious identity. What is really at stake in this monograph is how debates about the definitions and character of Buddhism end up defining the postcolonial nation state and its majoritarian Sinhalese subject.

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