Introduction: Mimetic Governmentality, Colonialism, and the State

Late Western colonialism often relied on the practice of imitating indigenous forms of rule in order to maintain power; conversely, indigenous polities could imitate Western sociopolitical forms to their own benefit. Drawing on historical ethnographic studies of colonialism in Asia and Africa, States of Imitation examines how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic governmentality, as well the ways indigenous states adopted these imitative practices to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Fieldwork between folders: fragments, traces, and the ruins of colonial

This essay conceptualises the colonial archive as a product of processes of ruination. Taking its inspiration from recent studies of archival spaces, the three case studies on Portuguese, French, and Guinea-Bissauan colonial archives explore the ruptures, discontinuities, and silences inherent in such archives. With reference to Walter Benjamin’s writing of history and its recent applications in anthropology and history, the authors investigate the conditions, possibilities, and limitations of fieldwork in archives. Fragmentation, ruptures, and decay are not only understood as negative, but as productive processes. This perspective helps to shed light on the relevance of the historical materials that have survived as colonial debris and can provide traces that allow for developing unusual perspectives on the colonial past. By proposing methodologies to deal with these fragments, and by pointing to parallels in ethnographic fieldwork, the essay emphasises the processual character of data collection in the archive and the materials and documents themselves. Archives are, in this sense, less the static places of where facts lie waiting to be rescued, but places of the recurrent regrouping and transformation of facts through on-going ruination and fragment accumulation

Worshipping Relics and Animating Statues. Transformations of Buddhist statecraft in contemporary Laos

In Laos—one of the few remaining ‘officially' socialist countries—Buddhism was abolished as a state religion after the revolution in 1975. However, since the 1990s the communist government has been increasingly using its patronage of Buddhism to gain legitimacy. With reference to the divine sources of power in Theravāda Buddhism, this article explores the extent to which modern Lao state socialism is still imbued with pre-revolutionary patterns of Buddhist kingship and statecraft. The analysis will focus especially on ritual patronage of a Buddhist relic shrine and on the recent inauguration of statues of deceased kings in the Lao capital, Vientiane. With reference to the ritual animation of ‘opening the eyes' of the statues, and with regard to theories exploring the agency of objects, I argue that the Lao palladium has to be understood as being made up of ‘living' entities. Finally, the article explores to what extent the control, worship, and creation of statues and relics today are still essential for the legitimacy of rule in the Lao People's Democratic Republi

Introduction. Legacies, Trajectories and Comparison in the Anthropology of Buddhism

International audienceThe anthropology of Buddhism may give the impression of already having a well-established lineage. However, understood as a collective endeavor bringing together specialists from different parts of the Buddhist world in a comparative spirit, it remains very much an emerging project. We outline in this introduction some of the striking features of the beginnings of this subfield, such as how it has undergone a process of emancipation from textualist interpretations of Buddhism, and survey some of its main thematic and analytic orientations, pointing in particular to its most substantial ‘long conversation’, on the structure and dynamics of Buddhist religious fields. Throughout, we focus primarily on the period following an assessment of the subfield made by David Gellner in 1990. Finally, we stress the importance and highlight the promise of a comparative anthropology of Buddhism that builds on a critical, reflexive examination of its central concepts

Introduction: Mimetic Governmentality, Colonialism, and the State

Engaging critically with literature on mimesis, colonialism, and the state in anthropology and history, this introduction argues for an approach to mimesis and imitation as constitutive of the state and its forms of rule and governmentality in the context of late European colonialism. It explores how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic policies of governance, while examining how indigenous polities adopted imitative practices in order to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state. In introducing this special issue, three main themes will be addressed: mimesis as a strategic policy of colonial government, as an object of colonial regulation, and, finally, as a creative indigenous appropriation of external forms of state power.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution: The Life and Career of Maha Khamtan Thepbuali (1919–2019) in the Context of Buddhist Socialist Movements

Ladwig Patrice, Rathie Martin. Lao Buddhism and Faith in the Revolution: The Life and Career of Maha Khamtan Thepbuali (1919–2019) in the Context of Buddhist Socialist Movements. In: Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient. Tome 106, 2020. pp. 403-431