Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion

Neena Mahadev is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and has held research fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, and the J. William Fulbright Foundation. She presently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Global Buddhism, and will serve on the soon-to-be-launched book series New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity (Bloomsbury Academic).

Her book, Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, interrogates a multi-religious public at a time when the growing presence of charismatic and evangelical and Christianity agitated hostilities of majoritarian Buddhist revivalists. In 2004, a contingent of Buddhist monks elected to Sri Lanka’s Parliament proposed a ban against what they deemed to be “unethical” conversions to Christianity. Subsequent wide-reaching Western humanitarian aid and intervention during the tsunami (2004) and war’s end (2009), served to intensify nativist contentions against those who propagate a “foreign” faith. Conflicting theological and political approaches to the nation manifest in the ways in which Buddhists revivalists call upon Sri Lankans to abide by the karmic inheritances of the self and the nation on the one hand, and in how Sri Lankan evangelists project the possibility of forging a new future “through the grace of God,” on the other. Examining these disparate orientations to religious continuity, rupture, sovereignty, and persuasion, Mahadev takes a “multicameral” approach to conversion disputes. Situated ethnographically among modernist and traditionalist Theravadin Buddhists, Pentecostal Christian “newcomers,” and long-established Christian denominations, she examines how maverick religious leaders answer the call of millenarian religious competition, attracting devotees whilst shielding their practices from the affronts of rivals, and at the same time underscoring their love of the nation. This complex Sri Lankan public does not necessarily issue wholly hostile responses to competing streams of religious projection, however. Of Karma and Grace demonstrates how inter-religious competition creates a field that is also generative of possibilities for diversification of religious forms, of leniency, and identitarian ambiguation—features of a religious public that allow plurality to flourish even in the face of ever-rearticulating conflicts.

Alexandra Kaloyanides is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Kaloyanides served as Managing Editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and currently serves as editor of the Asian Traditions section of Marginalia Review of Books, a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel.

Her book is titled Objects of Conversion, Relics of Resistance: Materials of Religious Change at the American Baptist Mission to Burma, and it illuminates little-known histories of Burma’s last kingdom and America’s first foreign mission. Throughout the nineteenth-century American Baptist mission to Burma, Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Christian evangelism while minority communities were baptized in astonishing numbers. And American Baptist Christianity also found itself changed. This book traces four key objects—the sacred book, the school house, the pagoda, and the portrait—to show Burma not as a simple country of unified Buddhists defending themselves against a monolithic Western enemy, but rather as a site of multiple clashing and remade religious worlds.