Journal of Global Buddhism 2021, Vol.22 (1): 219–227 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4727542 www.globalbuddhism.org ISSN: 1527-6457 (online) © The author(s) Symposium: New Roads in Theravada Studies “Intercultural Mimesis,” Empire, and Spirits Alexandra Kaloyanides University of North Carolina at Charlotte This article surveys the impact of the concept of “intercultural mimesis” from Charles Hallisey’s “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism,” with specific attention to the way this chapter guides scholars toward more localized examinations of how representations of Buddhism are produced. The article provides examples of intercultural mimesis from nineteenth-century Burma that suggest that future work on Theravada Buddhism should develop “intercultural mimesis” in two ways: 1) revitalized attention to how structures of empire shape and are shaped by local interactions and 2) new experimentation with writing histories of Asian cultures that include nonhuman beings such as spirits, gods, and ghosts. The author argues that these directions will advance Hallisey’s call to investigate Buddhism’s multiple mediators and to resist giving too much power over to imperial endeavors. Keywords: Theravada Buddhism; intercultural mimesis; Burma; spirits; empire T he most celebrated contribution of “Roads Taken and Not Taken” has been its call for scholars to avoid absolute divisions between “the West” and “the Orient” by considering the varied interests of both European and Asian communities. Charles Hallisey qualified Edward Said’s work on Orientalism to advise scholars to consider relations between “the Orient” and “the West” as representing “a kind of ‘intercultural mimesis,’” which he specified to mean “occasions where it seems that aspects of a culture of a subjectified people influenced the investigator to represent that culture in a certain manner” (1995: 33). In other words, Hallisey pressed us to see the significant role that Asian Buddhists themselves played in portrayals of Buddhism coming out of colonial contexts. This was a welcome correction to earlier scholarship that had focused on the way that “Westerners” had invented Asian religions (Inden 1986, Almond 1988; Halbfass 1981 [2017]).1 Hallisey’s essay highlighted the agency of South and Southeast Asian texts and peoples in forming representations of Theravada Buddhism. The field has continued to recognize the dominance of For more on the academic debates over the invention of Hinduism, see Brian Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented (2005). 1 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 KALOYANIDES | 220 colonial forces, but, with Hallisey’s help, has learned to write accounts of those forces in which they are not entirely determinative. This article offers a brief survey of the influence of Hallisey’s notion of intercultural mimesis. It then provides examples of intercultural mimesis from my own scholarship on nineteenth-century Burma. I suggest that future scholarship on Theravada Buddhism develop “intercultural mimesis” in two ways: 1) revitalized attention to how structures of empire shape and are shaped by local interactions and 2) new experimentation with writing histories of Asian cultures that include nonhuman beings such as spirits, gods, and ghosts. I argue that these directions will advance Hallisey’s call to investigate Buddhism’s multiple mediators and to resist giving too much power over to imperialist endeavors. Intercultural Mimesis and Buddhist and Theravada Studies Hallisey’s notion of “intercultural mimesis” urged scholars to pursue more nuanced understandings of the emergence of representations of Buddhism in the nineteenth century and beyond. It contributed to larger reconsiderations of Orientalism, such as Richard King’s widely read Orientalism and Religion (1999), as well as studies of Buddhism in non-Theravada, non-colonial contexts, such as Judith Snodgrass’s Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West (2003), which showed how Japanese Buddhists in the Meiji period turned to the West to advance a domestic agenda, a strategy Snodgrass terms “Occidentalism.” The field that Hallisey’s essay influenced most, of course, was Theravada studies. As Erik Braun demonstrated in his 2009 survey, “Local and Translocal in the Study of Theravada Buddhism and Modernity,” Hallisey’s notion of intercultural mimesis has been “a particularly useful analytical concept for understanding the way that Western presentations of Buddhism and local, subaltern assumptions interacted, thus showing local agency” (939). Braun highlighted work from the aughts by Theravada specialists such as Anne Blackburn, Thomas Borchert, Anne Hansen, and Justin McDaniel to show a shared commitment to focusing on local conditions. Through close and careful analyses of developments in Sri Lanka, southwest China, Cambodia, Thailand, and other locales, this body of scholarship has shown Buddhist communities enacting transformative practices of innovation, conservation, and contestation (Blackburn 2001, Blackburn 2003, Borchert 2006, Hansen 2007, McDaniel 2008). In the decade since Braun’s survey, scholars have continued to emphasize the local productions of Buddhist texts, practices, and values (as Trent Walker’s essay for this collection demonstrates in expert detail). In Braun’s field of Burmese Buddhism, monographs by scholars such as Juliane Schober (2011), Jason Carbine (2011), Braun (2013), Alicia Turner (2014), Christian Lammerts (2018), Alexandra Green (2018), and Thomas Patton (2018) applied careful consideration to Buddhist developments in Myanmar.2 Together, these works show how particular monks, royalty, colonial administrators, 2 We also find a concurrent turn to local productions of meaning in academic work on Burmese history, such as Chie Ikeya’s historical study of the representation of women in colonial Burma, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (2011), and Michael Charney's study of the interactions between the Buddhist literati and royalty in Konbaung Burma, Powerful Learning (2006). JOURNAL OF GLOBAL BUDDHISM | Vol.22, No.1 (2021) “INTERCULTURAL MIMESIS,” EMPIRE, AND SPIRITS | 221 laywomen, laymen, artists, and even wizards have shaped Buddhist expressions in the Southeast Asian country. Following this trend, emergent work on Burmese Buddhism continues to give finegrained attention to developments among local communities and individuals. For example, Janaka Ashin’s Ph.D. dissertation for King’s College London (2016) offers an illuminating study of the nationalist monk Shin Ukkaṭṭha (1897–1978) that explores this monk’s particular reinterpretation of the doctrine of rebirth and subsequent prosecution to demonstrate how during the colonial period the Burmese sangha began using state bodies to regulate beliefs, not just to regulate monastic practices as they had in the past.3 I have been thinking about these texts and Hallisey’s “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism” as I finish up a book project on religion in nineteenth-century Burma. This project explores the American Baptist mission to Burma that began in 1813 and was active throughout the Anglo-Burmese War period, which ended in 1885–1886 with Britain’s total colonization and incorporation of Burma into the British Raj. Despite a historiographic tendency— especially in American religious history—to see American missionaries as hostile to Asian religions,4 I would often find American Christian missionaries writing and circulating relatively positive accounts of Buddhism that were clearly based on their interactions with monks and other Burmese people as well as on their studies of Pali and Burmese manuscripts. One telling claim I found repeated in Baptist accounts was that Burma’s Buddhism was the world’s most pure form. For example, in an 1853 volume on missionary life, the American Baptist author and missionary Emily Chubbuck Judson includes the story of her friendship with an unnamed Burmese Buddhist monk. Relaying his history of Buddhism, Chubbuck Judson explains to her American audience that: this comparatively pure and elevated faith had been supplanted in its original dominions by the disgusting doctrines and horrible practices of the Brahminists, while in China it held a divided sovereignty, in Thibet had become so changed in character as to be scarcely recognizable, and even in its old Cinghalese home had deteriorated almost to a level with surrounding idolatries, in Burmah it had only swerved a little from its original simplicity (Chubbuck Judson, 1853: 138–139). ⁠ 3 All of the monographs, as well as the dissertation, mentioned in this paragraph are in English. This is an example of the increasing English-language dominance and related inequities in Theravada studies that Trent Walker and I write about in the introduction to this collection. 4 For example, one of the first book-length studies of American engagement with Buddhism, Thomas Tweed’s American Encounters with Buddhism, 1844–1912 (2000) states that “almost all of the missionaries’ interpretations [of Buddhism] were hostile,” with a qualifying footnote acknowledging that that “no comprehensive study of Protestant missionary interpretations of Buddhism has yet appeared” (1992: 30, 177). There is some more recent scholarship on American religious history that is more sympathetic to missionary engagement with non-Christian cultures, such as David Hollinger’s Protestants Abroad (2017), which argues that US missionaries should be understood as having a cosmopolitan worldview that advanced religious liberalization. Hollinger’s book, though, focuses on the period of 1920–1970 and does not explore examples of missionary cosmopolitanism from the early period of US foreign missions, the period in which the American Baptists were establishing missionary posts in Burma. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL BUDDHISM | Vol.22, No.1 (2021) KALOYANIDES | 222 A description of Burma housing the most pristine form of Buddhism was a common claim in vaṃsa literature (linage narratives chronicling important figures and histories) and other forms of rhetoric produced by Burma’s last empire, the Konbaung Dynasty (1752–1885). As their royal predecessors had done, Konbaung kings established their power by promoting themselves as the true protectors of the sāsana (the Buddha’s teachings and their prosperity in the world). They continued the practice of commissioning vaṃsa, but they elaborated on this tradition by producing the first texts that claimed to be histories of Buddhism for the Burmese domain envisioned as a united whole. In these Konbaung Buddhist chronicles (B. thathanawin P. sāsanavaṃsa), this united Burmese domain consistently acted as the righteous guardian of the sāsana.5 By considering these textual practices and politics of the Konbaung era, we can see their influence on Chubbuck Judson’s praise of Burma’s Buddhism. We also see in her harsh and targeted criticisms of Indian Brahmins, and Buddhist practices in China, Tibet, and Sri Lanka, a combination of Burmese chauvinism and emerging North American and European practices of listing and classifying world religions.6 Chubbuck Judson was familiar with contemporary colonial representations of South Asian religions circulating in the Protestant press—texts and images that were also formed, to some degree, through the influence of South Asian people and traditions, however distorted they became in the end. Hallisey has shown me how to see this confluence of Anglo imperialism and Burmese rhetoric as a form of intercultural mimesis. While completing that book project, I have been continuing to think with this notion of intercultural mimesis and asking how it can help illuminate something more than the particular way people and cultural practices in Burma contributed to specific representations of Burmese Buddhism conveyed by Americans. The power dynamics between the Baptist mission and the Konbaung dynasty were multifaceted, especially once the period of British colonialism began. Even the most openminded American missionary reports that celebrated Buddhism as the best religion in the world next to Christianity and that criticized the British still positioned Burma as religiously deficient. This work of comparative religions helped promote Protestant empires as righteous conquerors because they spread the true word of God.7 My work aims to carefully acknowledge missionary complicity in imperial projects. It also reveals the mechanisms by which the mission’s work of filling out a picture of world religions promoted a particular Anglo-American Protestantism, no matter how much they depicted that work as a benevolent embrace of pluralism.8 To help me think through the power dynamics of the American Baptist mission to Burma—and the various actors in these dynamics, 5 For more on these Konbaung Buddhist chronicles, see Pranke 2004. As The Invention of World Religions taught us, the nineteenth-century European project of creating lists of world religions was in the service of promoting Protestant European powers (Masuzawa 2005). 7 Another dimension of the American missionaries’ cooperation with British colonialism was the work the British relied on the Americans to do to promote vaccination against smallpox. As Atsuko Naono (2009) shows, the American Baptist mission’s rapport with minority communities, experience with local languages and printing operations, and monastic connections, allowed them to be far more successful than the British in inoculation efforts. 8 For more on this issue of a pervasive Protestantism in antebellum America and how the American Baptist mission to Burma figures into it, see my article, “America’s God and the World: Questioning the Protestant Consensus” (Kaloyanides 2015). 6 JOURNAL OF GLOBAL BUDDHISM | Vol.22, No.1 (2021) “INTERCULTURAL MIMESIS,” EMPIRE, AND SPIRITS | 223 including Christian converts, American evangelists, Burmese Buddhists, British colonists, local spirits, the Christian god, and Gotama Buddha—I find guidance in recent religious studies scholarship on material and immaterial power. Taking Roads toward Empire and Supernatural Beings It seems to me that the most logical place to take intercultural mimesis—indeed a place scholars are already keen to take it—is to one in which there is greater concern with the complex ways that representations of Theravada Buddhism are formed.9 Ideas about Buddhism were not generated by dualistic pairs, by colonizer/colonized, Christian/Buddhist, Western/Asian, indigenous/imperial. Instead, this effort was mediated by various political, economic, religious, and cultural conditions. As David Chidester demonstrates in Empire of Religion, his counter-history of the study of religion, knowledge about religion has been produced “within the power relations of imperial ambitions, colonial situations, and indigenous innovations” (2014: xi). Chidester’s material history works to “overcome lingering dualisms—imperial versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—by attending to the complex, multiple, and multiplying mediations in which knowledge was produced in and through the material conditions of empire” (2014: xii). For my own work, attention to these kinds of knowledge and category productions means moving beyond a story of the British colonist and the local Burmese Buddhist to think about how the Konbaung Dynasty enacted its own forms of imperialism through religious expression and control, how the religious lives of other ethnic groups in the country (especially those with histories of Baptist conversion) impacted emerging definitions of Buddhism, and how particular efforts to control material resources and economic systems shaped Buddhist expressions.10 Furthermore, I ask what we can learn about US operations as an informal empire in the context of the American Baptist mission to Burma.11 To refine our more general understandings of “Western” colonialism and Burmese history, we must investigate specific forms and practices of imperialism. In addition to reinvigorating our commitment to postcolonial approaches, the field should also consider joining scholars across religious studies who are asking what is missed when we see 9 A recent book that exhibits this particular interest in exploring the complex ways ideas of Buddhism are produced in colonial contexts is The Irish Buddhist, a study of the Irish hobo and sailor turned Burmese monk, U Dhammaloka (Turner, Cox, and Bocking 2020). This study of a Western monk during Britain’s period of high imperialism sheds new light on understudied poor whites and their multifaceted engagements with Asian communities and colonial powers. Steven Kemper’s Rescued from the Nation (2015)—which reveals Anagarika Dharmapala to be more of a spiritual seeker than a political reformer—raises similarly productive questions about the Buddhist agents of change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 10 One particularly important material resource in this period was teak. For more on the Burmese religious history of this tropical hardwood, see my article “Buddhist Teak and British Rifles; Religious Economics in Burma’s Last Kingdom” (Kaloyanides 2019). 11 My article “Peering into Prisons, Gazing upon Graves: Early US Missionary Media from Burma” (Kaloyanides 2021) investigates this issue of US imperialism by investigating how images produced by the American Baptist mission to Burma created an imagined world of redemptive missionary sacrifice that primed generations of Baptist communities to see foreign missionaries and their domestic supporters as righteous. For more on informal and formal empires and the ongoing impact of imperial history on world politics, see Samir Puri’s The Shadows of Empire (2021). JOURNAL OF GLOBAL BUDDHISM | Vol.22, No.1 (2021) KALOYANIDES | 224 everything as social constructs and power struggles. A growing group of scholars is responding with exploratory histories that include nonhuman actors. This effort is wagering that by expanding notions of agency beyond the human, we will see things that scholarship fixated on human power struggles has missed. Since Robert Orsi’s 2016 call for the study of religion “to approach history and culture with the gods fully present to humans,” scholars of Asian religions have been considering meaningful ways to respond to this turn toward divine presence. Can we tell better stories of Theravada Buddhist communities and creations if there are real spirits, gods, and ghosts in those stories?12 What are the risks of pivoting away from academic approaches that focus on the structures humans use to oppress other humans?13 I have been experimenting with something akin to Orsi’s approach after finding an abundance of accounts of the local spirits known as nats in research I have been doing on interactions between the Kachin and American Baptist missionaries in the late nineteenth century. In these accounts, nats are actively involved in expressions of conversion and resistance to Christianity. Like Hallisey’s subjectified people influencing investigators, it seems that nats also participate in a kind of intercultural mimesis. For example, in 1880, an ordained Karen Christian missionary from Bassein named Mankeh approached a revered nat and his human medium in the village of Oo-zee-gong to persuade them to become agents for the Christian god. When Mankeh introduced this nat and his medium to the American missionary Jacob Freiday who visited during the dry season, he was moved to write about the experience in his journal, praising the medium’s “good heart” and his hope “that he is a chosen vessel to bear God’s name before the Ka-Khyens” (Freiday 304). In his classic work, Political Systems of Highland Burma, the British anthropologist Edmund Leach argued that Kachin offerings to nats were really just a way of influencing human social structures.14 Orsi’s approach challenges us to resist turning to human politics in the face of other beings. If the Kachin, Americans, and others in Burma described the nats as really acting in the world, how might I also try and open my writing up to this possibility? Perhaps if the history of Kachin Christianity could more creatively account for interactions with nats and the being often introduced as the lord of the nats, Jesus Christ, we can move beyond the binaries that describe widespread Kachin Christian conversion as either a 12 Two recent monographs on Theravada communities that move in this exciting direction of bringing non-human beings in as active participants in Buddhist worlds are Thomas Patton’s The Buddha’s Wizards (2018)—which explores what it feels like to be in a relationship with wizard-saints in Myanmar—and Erik Davis’s Deathpower (2016)—which studies how Buddhists in Cambodia engage the dead. An additional noteworthy book on Southeast Asian religions (though not on Theravada) that tells stories of nonhumans acting in human worlds is Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008). Kwon approaches ghosts of war as “living evidence of historical injustice” and reveals how social theories that do not include ghosts reveal their preoccupation with human function and structure (2008: 2, 23). 13 These questions come from a panel I helped organize at the 2019 meeting of the American Academy of Religion. I am grateful to my fellow panelists, Susanne Kerekes, Murad Mumtaz, and Aleksandra Restifo, as well as our respondent, Robert Orsi, for their contributions and our discussion. 14 Leach’s approach to seeing the nats as nothing more than a reflection of human relationships has raised questions by scholars such as Robin Horton (Horton 1968) and Mandy Sadan (Sadan 2013). Horton, in arguing that anthropologists start by taking belief statements seriously, pointed out that if “nats are nothing more than counters in the language of political argument, why do Kachins waste so much time talking about them? Why do they not couch their political arguments more directly?” (Horton 1968, 626). JOURNAL OF GLOBAL BUDDHISM | Vol.22, No.1 (2021) “INTERCULTURAL MIMESIS,” EMPIRE, AND SPIRITS | 225 result of Kachin being duped by missionaries or using Christianity to savvily gain economic and social power. Burma specialist Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière has long called for more academic attention to nats. Her illuminating 2009 survey of the study of Burmese Buddhism lamented the lack of scholarship on these popular Burmese beings. In this essay, Brac de la Perrière follows Hallisey’s interpretation of intercultural mimesis to argue that scholarship on Burmese Buddhism coincided with dominant Burmese constructions of their religious identity. She shows that academic omissions of spirit cults have been influenced by efforts by Burmese communities in power to present themselves as in line with the canonical Theravada tradition and therefore not entangled in nat worship. Here Brac de la Perrière’s attention to the complex ways that knowledge of Buddhism has been produced given local and international political conditions continues to advance the kind of analysis Hallisey has advocated for. We must follow in Brac de la Perrière’s footsteps to watch for other ways that dominant political and religious institutions in Burma mold and constrict our scholarship. We can also look beyond these human power dynamics to consider how other forms of intercultural and interbeing mimesis can shape the stories we tell about Buddhism. It seems to me very much in the spirit of “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism” to say that we need to and can do all of the above. We need to be careful to recognize the agency of a range of figures and traditions in South and Southeast Asian people (including those who inhabit borderlands and waterways, as Jack Chia also urges in his essay for this collection). We must be ever cautious about the subtle and gross ways imperialism continues to shape the work we do. We can also think creatively together about what and who animates Buddhist worlds. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Adeana McNicholl and Trent Walker for their valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank William Noseworthy and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Corresponding author Alexandra Kaloyanides Department of Religious Studies University of North Carolina at Charlotte akaloyan@uncc.edu References Almond, Phillip C. 1988. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashin, Janaka. 2016. Die-Human, Born Human. The Life and Posthumous Trial of Shin Ukkaṭṭha, a Pioneering Burmese Monk during a Tumultuous Period in a Nation’s History. PhD Dissertation. London: King’s College London. 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