University of Hawaii Press | Edition 2007 | PDF | 254 pages | 1,43 mb
Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory - This ambitious cross-disciplinary study of Buddhist modernism in
colonial Cambodia breaks new ground in understanding the history and
development of religion and colonialism
in Southeast Asia. In How to Behave, Anne Hansen argues for the
importance of TheravÄda Buddhist ethics for imagining and articulating
what it means to be modern in early-twentieth-century Cambodia. The
1920s in Cambodia saw an exuberant burst of new printed writings by
self-described Khmer Buddhist modernists on the subject of how to
behave (as good Buddhists and moral persons) and how to purify oneself
in everyday life in the modern world. Hansen's book, one of the first
studies of colonial Buddhism based largely on Khmer language
sources, examines the modernists' questioning of Buddhist values that
they deemed most important and relevant. She explores their new
interpretations of traditional doctrines, how they were produced, and
how they represent Southeast Asian ethical and religious responses to
the modern circulation of local and translocal events, people, ideas,
and anxieties.Hansen begins her study in the mid-nineteenth century
with a Buddhist purification movement that had been set in motion by
the Khmer king Ang Duang. She follows Khmer monks to Siam as they
sought out Buddhist scriptures and examines how they carried ideas back
to Cambodia and shaped their own reformist movement in a colonial
society influenced by French discourses of modernization. Drawing on
literary and ethical forms of analysis as well as historical, Hansen
not only accounts for this historical rise of modernist values but also
introduces readers to modernist worldviews through careful translations
of sermons, ritual manuals, ethics compendia, and vernacular folktales.
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