Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity, and Difference FROM THE PUBLISHER
Poised to spark debate among scholars of religious studies and other
disciplines, Colors of the Robe sheds new light on the Sri Lankan
Buddhist universe of ethics and politics and, more important, suggests
innovative directions for the global study of religion, identity,
culture, politics, and violence. In a volume that surpasses other
studies in tracking, identifying, and locating Sri Lankan Buddhism in
its sectarian, ethnic, cultural, social, and political constructions,
Ananda Abeysekara lays down a challenge to postcolonial and postmodern
theory. He argues that although criticisms have undermined the
orientalist constructions of culture, they cannot help us understand,
let alone theorize, the emergence of contemporary authoritative
discourses that define distinctions involving religion and violence,
identity and difference. Supplanting that aim, Abeysekara illuminates
the shifting configurations that characterize the relations connected
with postcolonial religious identity and culture.
Drawing on extensive field research in Sri Lanka, Abeysekara
illustrates how differing meanings of such religious and national
concepts come into central view and then fade, denying them fixity.
Proposing an alternative, he develops the concept of "minute
conjunctures of contingency" and places it in modest opposition to the
work of Michel Foucault and other leading postmodern thinkers.
Abeysekara attends to these minute conjunctures of
contingency to understand such categories as religion and difference,
Buddhism and politics, civilization and terror. He thereby resists
today's antiessentialist arguments without falling back on yesterday's
foundationalist claims. Viewing religion through this lens, Abeysekara
contends, has profound political implications for how we might more
generally think about and begin to disrupt entrenched presumptions of
postcolonial cultural difference.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
The subject matter of Colors of the Robe is fascinating and the
analysis is an important addition to scholarship on modern Sri Lankan
Buddhism, but Ananda Abeysekara�s greatest contribution is theoretical,
both for the study of cultural life in general and the study of religion
in particular. The angle of vision in the book brings us to the
�coal-face� of knowledge with ramifications that will take some time
for the rest of us to explore and develop. — Charles Hallisey
David Scott, Columbia University
Ananda Abeysekara�s Colors of the Robe is a subtle and critical
inquiry into the agonistic space of discourse about Buddhism and politics
in Sri Lanka. A fascinating work of multi-registered sophistication, it
challenges the ready-to-hand assumptions that guide much of the
contemporary study of religion, culture, and violence in the
postcolonial world. Colors of the Robe unsettles and provokes, and will
help to alter the terms of the historical study of postcolonial
difference.
— David Scott
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