Buddhist Salvation Armies as Vanguards of the Sāsana: Sorcerer Societies in Twentieth-Century Burma

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 1083-1104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Patton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Buddha

Since the early twentieth century, groups of Burmese Buddhist sorcerers and their followers have taken on the duty of guarding the Buddha's sāsana from colonial, ideological, and Islamic threats. Sāsana (broadly, the teachings of the Buddha and the institutions and practices that support them) and how it should be sustained in the face of its inevitable demise have been central concerns of these societies, expressed in both their textual and oral representations. To illustrate this tension between endurance and change, this article explores ideas of the life cycle of the sāsana and how ideas about its responsibility to wider communities of Burmese Buddhists became expressed through the intersection of sāsana and sorcery. Examining the ways these associations understood themselves to be protecting and propagating the sāsana through various means demonstrates how sāsana vitality gave their beliefs and actions a distinct collective and collectively ethical tone.

Danxia Burns a Buddha

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Art Collecting ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Modern Artists

Chapter 3 focuses on a medieval painting in the Zen art canon—Yintuoluo’s painting of Danxia Tianran (738/39-824), a Chinese monk said to have burned a wood statue of the Buddha—and situates it within its modern surround, particularly in relation to Zen iconoclasm, a prominent trope in postwar Zen cultural production including Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and other countercultural works. The chapter suggests how premodern representations of the Danxia tale circulated in the modern world through art collecting, photographic reproduction, translations of hagiography into modern Japanese and English for lay and non-practicing readers, and “reverse orientalist” critique of Western views of Buddhism. It notes too the tale’s representation by modern artists in Japan, including Yamamoto Shunkyo and Okamoto Ippei. Whatever the representation of Danxia burning the Buddha meant in preceding centuries, in the early twentieth century, it responded to new prospects, ambitions, and conflicts, as much geo-political as personal.

A Bureaucracy of Rejection: Petitioning and the impoverished paternalism of the British-Indian Raj

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-202
Author(s):  
JULIA STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Steady Flow ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Resistance ◽  
Imperial Governance

AbstractBombay, the hub of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, hosted a ceaseless flow of humanity: sailors and lawyers, street performers and royal refugees. When fate set obstacles in their way, the residents of this teeming metropolis petitioned colonial officials, looking on them as patriarchal providers of last resort. These petitions, which this article terms ‘personal pleas’, adeptly braided different, often contradictory, idioms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial governance, from stylized imitations of traditional authority to bureaucratic proceduralism. Their functional contribution to Raj governance, however, remains a puzzle since the vast majority of petitions were rejected. For the British, the steady flow of rejections threatened to unmask the disjuncture between the expectations and realities of Raj paternalism. As a result, colonial officials viewed personal pleas with a mixture of ridicule and concern. Yet, while unsettling for officials, personal pleas rarely spurred the collective politics associated with anti-colonial resistance. Thus, where other articles in this special issue focus on petitioning's functional contributions to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and the formation of new publics, this article traces the genre's more emotive dimensions. Even as they failed to consolidate colonial discipline or resistance, personal pleas provided a vehicle for the airing of the lived contradictions and tensions of empire. They allowed rulers and subjects alike to fantasize about the possibility of a more benevolent order, and to vent their frustration when those fantasies crumbled in the face of imperial indifference.

scholarly journals 'Saints without God'

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Whistler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
French Intellectuals

This article addresses Camus’s response to Christianity and the problem of suffering in the context of the early twentieth century. Owing to his association with the existentialist movement, it is often assumed that Camus, like many other French intellectuals of the period, rejected Christianity altogether. For this reason, his sympathy with Christian thought is overlooked, and it seems altogether bizarre that some theologians even claimed Camus to be a convert. Among these wildly conflicting claims, Camus’s philosophical response to Christianity has become somewhat muddied; in this article I attempt to rectify this. I argue that Camus’s entire philosophy is underpinned by his response to Christianity, and that he wanted to re-establish the position of morality in the face of the problem of suffering. I thus demonstrate how his writings manifest this struggle to achieve this goal, in what I refer to as Camus’s ‘poetics of secular faith’. Camus once claimed, ‘I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist’. This article aims to elucidate just what is meant by a statement like this, as well as to catalogue and analyse Camus’s innovative attempts at reconciling spirituality and suffering through philosophical literature.

scholarly journals Dying against Democracy: Suicide Protest and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Keren He
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Modes Of Action ◽  
Social Negotiation ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Popular Movements ◽  
Chinese Political Culture

The joint rise of popular movements and mass media in early twentieth-century China gave birth to a democratic imagination, which culminated in the anti-American boycott of 1905. The transnational campaign nonetheless disintegrated as a result of partisan division—an ingrained predicament of democratic agonism that is best illustrated by the story of Feng Xiawei, a grassroots activist whose suicide in Shanghai constituted a key moment in the boycott. Juxtaposing a variety of accounts about Feng's death in journalism, political fiction, reformed opera, and advertisements, this article examines how, together, these texts construct democratic agonism and suicide protest as revealing two opposing political sensibilities as well as modes of action. Instead of expressing only nationalist passion, Feng's suicide reveals a deep anxiety of his time to locate a spiritual source of authority in the face of its glaring absence in social negotiation. This fraught dynamic between the democratic and the transcendent continues to characterize modern Chinese political culture to the present.

New worlds for old: the League of Nations in the age of electricity

2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
JO-ANNE PEMBERTON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Electric Energy ◽  
Scientific Organization ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Control

This article examines representations of the League of Nations as a creature of early twentieth century modernity. In particular it focuses on the propagation of the doctrine of rationalization in that forum from mid-1920s until early 1930s. Rationalization came to signify not only the scientific organization and control of social development, but also world interpenetration in technical, industrial, cultural and political spheres. Conjuring images of a globe crisscrossed by streams of electric energy, League functionaries and devotees spoke of a bright new dawn. Industrial flow would meld the ‘minds of men’. Discussions of globalization today have a similar repertoire of arguments and many of the same linguistic items as of rationalization. In the inter-war period rationalization was held out as the destiny of the world's people, promising both harmonious integration and cultural profusion. Its rapid evaporation from intellectual and public discourse in the face of the crises of the 1930s serves as a warning to those who would weave fantastic tales of globalized tomorrows.

Rabelais's Laurel for Glory: A Further Study of the “Pantagruelion”*

1989 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-77
Author(s):  
François Rigolot
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
The Face

Numerous interpretations have been given to the final episode of Rabelais's Third Book of Pantagruel—the last four chapters devoted to the famous plant called “Pantagruelion” (Tiers Livre, chaps. 49-52). For the great editors of the early twentieth-century critical edition of Rabelais's Works, the Pantagruelion was a “technical enigma” meant to be deciphered by scientists as the symbol of the Renaissance belief in human progress. For some of the supporters of Rabelais's Erasmian Evangelism, on the contrary, the enigmatic formulation of the episode was the key to Rabelais's thought: the magic plant had to be decoded as a veiled message of steadfast faith in the face of persecution. For obvious political reasons Rabelais had resorted to the ingenious device of enigmatic speech; yet his message had been understood by his contemporary Christian humanists.

Aftermath of Renaissance: Restudy of A Maori Tribe

1962 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9
Author(s):  
Felix Keesing
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Return Visit ◽  
Social Experiments ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Dry Out ◽  
Made In

This article reports on a return visit, made in 1958, to a Polynesian Maori tribe which the author had studied in 1928: the Ngatiporou of the isolated East Coast district in New Zealand. This tribe occupies bays and small valleys along a rugged coastline, backed by open grassy hills; high forested mountains further inland dry out the prevailing winds, minimizing precipitation. Among the fifty or so Maori tribes it was small and of no particular prestige. Yet, in the early twentieth century, when Maori survival in the face of encroaching whites seemed dubious, and their numbers had dropped below 50,000, its tribesmen pioneered a series of economic, political, and social experiments which led to modernization of land titles, effective farming, and revitalization of tribal and community life. By 1928, the Ngatiporou had become the focal group in what was being called a Maori renaissance, and even the most shattered and regressive tribes were beginning to follow their lead.

Fraternalism, Paternalism, the Family, and the Market: Insurance a Century Ago

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Whaples ◽  
David Buffum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
Market Insurance ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Reformers

They helped every one his neighbor; and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage.—Isaiah 41:6By the end of the nineteenth century most of the economically advanced European nations had adopted some form of public social insurance. In the world’s richest nation, however, widows and the aged, sick, and injured received little support from the state. Without the help of the state, how did American workers and their families survive in the face of sickness, accidents, old age, or the death of the primary earner? The traditional answer is that they survived rather badly, if at all. Social reformers of the early twentieth century and most modern historians argue that voluntarism was a failure, that it was not suited to the needs of an increasingly industrialized, urbanized populace.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Daniel Elam
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Theories Of Reading

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.

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