Ananda Abeysekara
Biographic Data
| ID | 3621951 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ananda Abeysekara |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ananda |
| FAMILY NAME | Abeysekara |
| SIGNATURE | ABEYSEKARA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Virginia Tech |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
On Rewriting Buddhism
Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern language of 'agency', 'autonomy', 'innovation', and 'creativity'. This legacy cannot easily be separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and South Asian rel…
Portrait
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
Protestant Buddhism and “Influence
Critiques of the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” claim to tell a different story about the relation between religion and modernity (“Protestantism”) in South Asia. They seek to reconstruct the temporal relation between the past and the present, contesting postcolonial conceptions of history, time, and religious practice. This story of temporality is staked on the question of “influence,” which has a genealogy that includes not just colonial, mis…
Religious Studies' Mishandling of Origin and Change
The “Problem” of Religion, Christianity, and the Capacity of Community
Ananda Abeysekara's essay takes up Gil Anidjar's objection to the way Nancy ignores the problematic legacy of “religion” inseparable from Christianity. Abeysekara focuses on the politics of exclusion that Anidjar identifies in the Christian notions of “fraternity” and “community” supposedly connected to the problem of religion. Thus, for Anidjar, the definition of religion arises as a problematic that is compounded by the legacy of “fraternizatio…
IResponse to Aamir R. Mufti
At the Limits of the Secular
Postcolonialism’s understanding of religion, broadly conceived, depends on a certain secular relation between critique and history. It is assumed that historicization constitutes a critical secular practice within which true-to-the-Greek and other conventional senses of the word ‘critique’ ultimately cause life to become separated from itself. The chapter suggests that the critical historicization of religion, and of life more generally, which fo…
Sri Lanka, Postcolonial ‘Locations of Buddhism’, Secular Peace
The postcolonial (anthropological) thinking about the relation/opposition between religion and politics, peace and violence rests on the sovereign law of 'decision'. This postcolonial thinking is a necessary thinking about the question of what constitutes secular life/politics. The postcolonial thinking about politics is then as much decisive as it is critical in that it must always decide to separate (secular) life from violence. In a detailed r…
Buddhism, Power, Modernity. Gathering leaves and lifting words
The Past Future of Postcolonial “Category” Religion, Theory, and Translation
In this symposium, three scholars Michael Nijhawan, Ruth Mas, and Sian Hawthorne engage the work Religion and the Specter of the West by Arvind-Pal Mandair. They take up concepts of translation, postcoloniality, memory, representation, writing, and the “category” religion itself in ways that help us think about the future of secular theory and theorizing of religion in the humanities
The Un-translatability 1 of Religion, The Un-translatability of Life
Every scholarly attempt to define-and, by extension, theorize, interpret, and conceptualize-religion is based on the sovereign "force of decision." Such theory-decision translates religion into a symbol or category, accounting for it, separating and releasing it from what Talal Asad calls the "not so easily varied" disciplinary practices that constitute life. In this separation of "religion," life becomes a spectator (theoros) to itself. Asad's a…
The im-possibility of secular critique
The legacy of secular critique, with its Greek, Christian, Kantian, modernist traces, constitutes an aporetic law (or contradiction). That law is this: a critical legacy, if it is critical, can affirm and sustain itself only by trying to separate it from itself (from the very crisis that it is). The legacy or history of ‘religion’ is always a history of such critique. Such a legacy always anticipates critiquing itself, its memory (of whatever kin…
The Politics of Postsecular Religion
Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious—political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian, Muslim, or Tamil—can be critiqued, neutralized, improved, and changed, even while remaining inseparable from the genocide of the past. This facile belief, he argues, is pre…
Thinking the 'question' of religion
(If an abstract can ever be ‘abstract’?) Buddhism (and, more generally, religion) has never been thought as a question ‐ that is, as a question inseparable from the question of the political. The academic study of Buddhism continues to be dominated by an empiricist, humanist, and even humanitarian project, shackled by modes of knowledge production, within the garrisons of colonialist area studies. No textualizing, anthropologizing, historicizing …
Desecularizing Secularism
Animated by a profound sense of complacency about history, rights and law, secularism has reached a dead end of political despair today. Thinking about this dead end will demand giving up certain cherished historicist claims to law and justice. The task of desecularizing secularism is one of dehistoricizing history. To relieve secularism of its appeal to the innocence of history, we need a conceptualization of time that folds the Nietzschean idea…
Identity for and against Itself
Confronted as we are with new sorts of postcolonial political orderings, the study of postcolonial religion demands a new practice of criticism. Meeting this demand, among other things, involves a different kind of rethinking of still taken-for-granted assumptions about the liberal distinction between religion and secularism and related concepts like nation, tolerance, and unity. Secularists of varying disciplinary persuasions remain unable to of…
Identity for and against Itself
Journal Article Identity for and against Itself: Religion, Criticism, and Pluralization Get access Ananda Abeysekara Ananda Abeysekara Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, VA 24061 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 72, Issue 4, December 2004, Pages 973–1001, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfh086 Published: 01 December 2004
The Saffron Army, Violence, Terror(ism)
This paper proposes alternative approaches to conceptualizing the relation between religion and violence, Buddhism and terror(ism). An important body of scholarship seeks to theorize religion and violence as transparent objects of disciplinary knowledge in terms of their supposed difference or interrelation, while chronically failing to appreciate them as discursive categories. The relation between religion and violence, the paper contends, is no…
The Work of Kings
The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. H. L. Seneviratne. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiii. 358 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index
Formations of Ritual
The Work of Kings
The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. H. L. Seneviratne. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiii. 358 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index
The Un-translatability 1 of Religion, The Un-translatability of Life
Every scholarly attempt to define-and, by extension, theorize, interpret, and conceptualize-religion is based on the sovereign "force of decision." Such theory-decision translates religion into a symbol or category, accounting for it, separating and releasing it from what Talal Asad calls the "not so easily varied" disciplinary practices that constitute life. In this separation of "religion," life becomes a spectator (theoros) to itself. Asad's a…
Portrait
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
The Saffron Army, Violence, Terror(ism)
This paper proposes alternative approaches to conceptualizing the relation between religion and violence, Buddhism and terror(ism). An important body of scholarship seeks to theorize religion and violence as transparent objects of disciplinary knowledge in terms of their supposed difference or interrelation, while chronically failing to appreciate them as discursive categories. The relation between religion and violence, the paper contends, is no…
Protestant Buddhism and “Influence
Critiques of the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” claim to tell a different story about the relation between religion and modernity (“Protestantism”) in South Asia. They seek to reconstruct the temporal relation between the past and the present, contesting postcolonial conceptions of history, time, and religious practice. This story of temporality is staked on the question of “influence,” which has a genealogy that includes not just colonial, mis…
The im-possibility of secular critique
The legacy of secular critique, with its Greek, Christian, Kantian, modernist traces, constitutes an aporetic law (or contradiction). That law is this: a critical legacy, if it is critical, can affirm and sustain itself only by trying to separate it from itself (from the very crisis that it is). The legacy or history of ‘religion’ is always a history of such critique. Such a legacy always anticipates critiquing itself, its memory (of whatever kin…
Religious Studies' Mishandling of Origin and Change
Buddhism, Power, Modernity. Gathering leaves and lifting words
The Past Future of Postcolonial “Category” Religion, Theory, and Translation
In this symposium, three scholars Michael Nijhawan, Ruth Mas, and Sian Hawthorne engage the work Religion and the Specter of the West by Arvind-Pal Mandair. They take up concepts of translation, postcoloniality, memory, representation, writing, and the “category” religion itself in ways that help us think about the future of secular theory and theorizing of religion in the humanities
Thinking the 'question' of religion
(If an abstract can ever be ‘abstract’?) Buddhism (and, more generally, religion) has never been thought as a question ‐ that is, as a question inseparable from the question of the political. The academic study of Buddhism continues to be dominated by an empiricist, humanist, and even humanitarian project, shackled by modes of knowledge production, within the garrisons of colonialist area studies. No textualizing, anthropologizing, historicizing …
Desecularizing Secularism
Animated by a profound sense of complacency about history, rights and law, secularism has reached a dead end of political despair today. Thinking about this dead end will demand giving up certain cherished historicist claims to law and justice. The task of desecularizing secularism is one of dehistoricizing history. To relieve secularism of its appeal to the innocence of history, we need a conceptualization of time that folds the Nietzschean idea…
Formations of Ritual
The Saffron Army, Violence, Terror(ism)
This paper proposes alternative approaches to conceptualizing the relation between religion and violence, Buddhism and terror(ism). An important body of scholarship seeks to theorize religion and violence as transparent objects of disciplinary knowledge in terms of their supposed difference or interrelation, while chronically failing to appreciate them as discursive categories. The relation between religion and violence, the paper contends, is no…
The Work of Kings
The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. H. L. Seneviratne. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiii. 358 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index
Identity for and against Itself
Confronted as we are with new sorts of postcolonial political orderings, the study of postcolonial religion demands a new practice of criticism. Meeting this demand, among other things, involves a different kind of rethinking of still taken-for-granted assumptions about the liberal distinction between religion and secularism and related concepts like nation, tolerance, and unity. Secularists of varying disciplinary persuasions remain unable to of…
Identity for and against Itself
Journal Article Identity for and against Itself: Religion, Criticism, and Pluralization Get access Ananda Abeysekara Ananda Abeysekara Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, VA 24061 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 72, Issue 4, December 2004, Pages 973–1001, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfh086 Published: 01 December 2004
Desecularizing Secularism
Animated by a profound sense of complacency about history, rights and law, secularism has reached a dead end of political despair today. Thinking about this dead end will demand giving up certain cherished historicist claims to law and justice. The task of desecularizing secularism is one of dehistoricizing history. To relieve secularism of its appeal to the innocence of history, we need a conceptualization of time that folds the Nietzschean idea…
The Politics of Postsecular Religion
Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious—political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian, Muslim, or Tamil—can be critiqued, neutralized, improved, and changed, even while remaining inseparable from the genocide of the past. This facile belief, he argues, is pre…
Thinking the 'question' of religion
(If an abstract can ever be ‘abstract’?) Buddhism (and, more generally, religion) has never been thought as a question ‐ that is, as a question inseparable from the question of the political. The academic study of Buddhism continues to be dominated by an empiricist, humanist, and even humanitarian project, shackled by modes of knowledge production, within the garrisons of colonialist area studies. No textualizing, anthropologizing, historicizing …
The im-possibility of secular critique
The legacy of secular critique, with its Greek, Christian, Kantian, modernist traces, constitutes an aporetic law (or contradiction). That law is this: a critical legacy, if it is critical, can affirm and sustain itself only by trying to separate it from itself (from the very crisis that it is). The legacy or history of ‘religion’ is always a history of such critique. Such a legacy always anticipates critiquing itself, its memory (of whatever kin…
Buddhism, Power, Modernity. Gathering leaves and lifting words
The Past Future of Postcolonial “Category” Religion, Theory, and Translation
In this symposium, three scholars Michael Nijhawan, Ruth Mas, and Sian Hawthorne engage the work Religion and the Specter of the West by Arvind-Pal Mandair. They take up concepts of translation, postcoloniality, memory, representation, writing, and the “category” religion itself in ways that help us think about the future of secular theory and theorizing of religion in the humanities
The Un-translatability 1 of Religion, The Un-translatability of Life
Every scholarly attempt to define-and, by extension, theorize, interpret, and conceptualize-religion is based on the sovereign "force of decision." Such theory-decision translates religion into a symbol or category, accounting for it, separating and releasing it from what Talal Asad calls the "not so easily varied" disciplinary practices that constitute life. In this separation of "religion," life becomes a spectator (theoros) to itself. Asad's a…
Sri Lanka, Postcolonial ‘Locations of Buddhism’, Secular Peace
The postcolonial (anthropological) thinking about the relation/opposition between religion and politics, peace and violence rests on the sovereign law of 'decision'. This postcolonial thinking is a necessary thinking about the question of what constitutes secular life/politics. The postcolonial thinking about politics is then as much decisive as it is critical in that it must always decide to separate (secular) life from violence. In a detailed r…
At the Limits of the Secular
Postcolonialism’s understanding of religion, broadly conceived, depends on a certain secular relation between critique and history. It is assumed that historicization constitutes a critical secular practice within which true-to-the-Greek and other conventional senses of the word ‘critique’ ultimately cause life to become separated from itself. The chapter suggests that the critical historicization of religion, and of life more generally, which fo…
The “Problem” of Religion, Christianity, and the Capacity of Community
Ananda Abeysekara's essay takes up Gil Anidjar's objection to the way Nancy ignores the problematic legacy of “religion” inseparable from Christianity. Abeysekara focuses on the politics of exclusion that Anidjar identifies in the Christian notions of “fraternity” and “community” supposedly connected to the problem of religion. Thus, for Anidjar, the definition of religion arises as a problematic that is compounded by the legacy of “fraternizatio…
IResponse to Aamir R. Mufti
Religious Studies' Mishandling of Origin and Change
Protestant Buddhism and “Influence
Critiques of the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” claim to tell a different story about the relation between religion and modernity (“Protestantism”) in South Asia. They seek to reconstruct the temporal relation between the past and the present, contesting postcolonial conceptions of history, time, and religious practice. This story of temporality is staked on the question of “influence,” which has a genealogy that includes not just colonial, mis…
Portrait
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
On Rewriting Buddhism
Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern language of 'agency', 'autonomy', 'innovation', and 'creativity'. This legacy cannot easily be separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and South Asian rel…
Philosophy (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political science (14 works) · Religious studies (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Buddhism (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Theology (9 works)