Economies of expert religion in Sri Lanka
In recent years, international campaigns to promote religious freedom have come under sustained scholarly scrutiny. At the core of much of this scrutiny are concerns about a pernicious misfit between legal categories and local realities. Recent scholarship suggests that international advocacy campai...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2018]
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| In: |
Journal of religious and political practice
Year: 2018, Volume: 4, Issue: 1, Pages: 27-45 |
| Further subjects: | B
Buddhism
B Law B Sri Lanka B Religion B Religious Freedom |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
| Summary: | In recent years, international campaigns to promote religious freedom have come under sustained scholarly scrutiny. At the core of much of this scrutiny are concerns about a pernicious misfit between legal categories and local realities. Recent scholarship suggests that international advocacy campaigns often rely on narrow and partisan understandings of religion and religious freedom and, in turn, marginalize or ignore local practices of worship, asceticism, textual engagement and moral self-fashioning. However, in Asia, as in most parts of the world, international religious freedom advocacy campaigns do not enter a blank space of lived religion. Rather, they participate in a broader 'economy' of organisations and advocacy campaigns designed to promote, protect or liberate particular forms of religion. The politics of religious freedom in Asia is not, then, simply an encounter between translocal categories and local religiosities. It also involves competing domestic campaigns to redeem and reform particular types of religiosity. To make this point, this article considers one important religious freedom campaign from Sri Lanka in 2004 and examines how that campaign participated in and responded to an existing economy of what Elizabeth Shakman Hurd calls 'expert religion.' |
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| ISSN: | 2056-6107 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of religious and political practice
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2017.1396090 |