Ian Morrison – ‘Like a mighty wind’: Locating the apolitical Buddhist subject within orientalist narratives of citizenship
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Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship
The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?
Panel 18: Religion and the Political
Dr Ian Morrison (Wilfrid Laurier University) – ‘Like a mighty wind’: Locating the apolitical Buddhist subject within orientalist narratives of citizenship
In recent years, numerous projects have explored the manner through which various subjectivities and practices have been forgotten, marginalized and/or depoliticized as a result of the dominance of orientalist conceptions of citizenship and the political. Scholars such as Talal Asad (2003, 2005, 2006), Wendy Brown (2006), Engin Isin (2005; 2008), Sabah Mahmood (2005, 2006, 2008), Bryan Turner (2003) and others have conducted important studies that demonstrate the historical construction of the dominant discourse of citizenship through its differentiation from its Oriental other. The focus of much of this literature has been on the ways that the dominance of orientalist conceptions of citizenship serve to make subjects and practices associated with Islam or Islamic societies appear as non-political and their presence in the political realm as a threat to the political. These studies reveal the manner in which practices and subjects associated with Islam fail to be recognized as properly political. Instead, they are viewed as either ‘merely’ religious or are disqualified from the political due to their dangerous failure to differentiate the political and the religious. Whether deemed ‘merely’ religious or dangerously religious, subjects and practices associated with Islam appear as non-political.
My proposed paper will assert the importance of focusing on the different mechanisms through which particular subjects and practices are made to appear as the other of citizenship and the properly political within dominant discourses of citizenship. As such, it will focus on the mechanisms through which subjects and practices associated with Buddhism are depoliticized. While orientalist narratives of citizenship and the political construct subjects and practices associated with Islam as non-political, those associated with Buddhism appear as apolitical. They appear as a turn away from the political or a rejection of the political.
My paper wishes to explore the manner in which this discourse came to be formed, the way in which it has been deployed, and the possibilities for political subjectivity that it may keep hidden. First, I explore the manner in which subjects and practices associated with Buddhism came to appear as apolitical within dominant anthropological, philological and sociological discourses of the nineteenth century. Second, I point to the manner in which these discourses have been deployed, both by those demanding rights and those seeking to deny these claims in recent events in Burma, Thailand and Tibet.
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