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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of religious and political practice
Main Author: Schonthal, Benjamin 1976- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge, Taylor & Francis [2018]
In: Journal of religious and political practice
Further subjects:B Buddhism
B Law
B Sri Lanka
B Religion
B Religious Freedom
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
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.'
ISSN:2056-6107
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of religious and political practice
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2017.1396090