This year for the 2010-11 Lester Lectureship the Religious Studies Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder has the privilege to host Dr. Ananda Abeysekara. The lectureship has been organized by Dr. Ruth Mas, professor of Contemporary Islam in the Religious Studies Department and Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, and consists of a graduate panel of student fellows. Preceding Dr. Abeysekara’s visit this panel will be involved in weekly seminars designed to critically and creatively engage his most recent publication, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. During each weekly seminar discussion group leaders will elucidate significant concepts from this work and examine the voices of Abeysekara’s interlocutors.


The question of political and religious identity as it is constructed in monastic institutions and set in opposition to society at large is one important example of how Abeysekara has framed the issues of power, self-definition, and violence in Buddhist culture. His work runs parallel to such contemporary theorists and philosophers as Talal Asad, Alasdair McIntyre, and David Scott. And similar to these scholars his theoretical models are strongly influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, as well as other notable post-modernists. Further, Abeysekara is in discourse with such leaders in the field of Buddhist identity, political discourse, and ritual expression as S.J. Tambiah and Gananath Obeyesekere. For all these reasons, we engage his work as a highly relevant contribution to the study of past and present articulations of power and identity in post-colonial South and Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions. In the broader context of Religious Studies, Abeysekara has raised pertinent questions concerning the tools of analytical inquiry, how scholars employ theories of analysis, interpretation, and critique. With all this in mind, the aims of this lectureship are simple: To engage the discourse of a scholar who is helping to shape the future of our field, to contend with the same concepts by which he is occupied, and, to not defer our debates and conversations to any other time than now.

About the Lester Fellows

Eric Haynie

Eric is a first year graduate student in the Religious Studies department at the University of Colorado. He currently focuses on philosophical currents in the Mahayana ("Great Vehicle") Buddhist traditions and Tibetan language. With a background in Buddhist thought and Continental philosophy, Eric is particularly interested in the doctrine of no-self, its pertinence to Buddhist ontology, and the possibility of a non- or post-metaphysics. Drawing upon the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he plans to analyze the intersection of the construction of self-hood and ethics in Buddhist thought, especially as it has been translated and interpreted as it has traversed into Euro-American culture. As a member of the Mourning Secular Futures reading group, he hopes to engage the thought of Ananda Abeysekara in grappling with the study of post-secular religion and identity formations. Eric sees this seminar as an opportunity to integrate the deconstruction of secular analyses of religion and post-colonial processes of identification into his larger academic project. He looks forward to examining our modern, democratic inheritances of religious discourse and the possibility of re-thinking the question of religion.


Ravenna Michalsen
Ravenna Michalsen is a first-year MA student in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her interests include gender in Tibetan Buddhism, the incarnation / emanation lines of medieval female Buddhist masters and mystics and the genre of nam thar (akin to hagiography) writing. The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futuresis particularly interesting because Abeysekara’s work intersects, and is in conversation with, the realms of political philosophy, religious criticism and Singalese Buddhism. Abeysekara’s concept of “un-inheriting” holds especial interest for Ravenna as it may (or may not!) help to unravel thorny questions of purity, pollution or a generalized, ambiguous sense of ‘worthiness’ as reasons informing the systematic destabilization of the Buddhist nuns’ order in various Buddhist regions (Tibetan cultural regions, Ladakh, Thailand and Myanmar). However, “un-inheriting” may also prove to be very disorienting when applied to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of enthroning recognized incarnations of Buddhist masters and the less prominent practice of recognizing emanations of great masters or various bodhisattva figures. Ravenna Michalsen holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in Anthropology, both from Yale University.



Kenneth Richards
Kenneth Richards is currently in his third year as a graduate student at the University of Colorado.  Kenneth's research interest centers around the secular production of religion, or the definition and categorization of religion, in American law as a profound silencing and regulatory act towards religious ‘otherness.’  Kenneth tackles this through a deconstruction of the court’s ontology of the body, situated within a long colonial history of religious regulation, in which law, as shown to be obsessed with regulating the bodies and the bodied movements of its subjects, seeks to regulate and assimilate otherness.  Religious freedom is part of our democratic 'inheritance.' Kenneth hopes to examine and learn from Abeysekera’s work, especially in his engagement and analysis of the secular critique of religion as a substitute for religion, as religion.   As Abeysekera has sought to demonstrate, the secular critique of religion is nested in the Christian historical trajectory/genealogy of the historicization of religion upon and in relation to the otherness of the colonial subject.  In line with Abeysekara, I believe that if we are to move beyond, that is, to un-inherit, religious freedom as a colonial regulatory act of religious otherness, then we must seek to understand what it is we have inherited.  


Henry Schliff

Henry Schliff is a second year graduate student in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. My primary area of focus is Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan language. I have studied and researched ritual activities central to the Longchen Nyingtig lineage of Tibetan Buddhism as well as philosophical tenets generally relevant to the broader tradition. These studies have included source texts from Candrakirti, Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, and Asanga as well as theoretical works on ritual praxis. Currently my research interests revolve
around issues of translation, social and linguistic, and the ethical conflicts arising from processes of cultural interpretation and subjectivization. Necessarily these concerns broaden into questions regarding identity construction and types of agency in Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Much of my theoretical focus has been directed at the work of Talal Asad, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Upon first encountering Ananda Abeysekara’s work I was thrilled to see a scholar charting a path in the field of Buddhist studies similar to my own, on the theoretical level. I see this seminar as a chance to significantly engage with his work and a unique opportunity to participate in a dialogue with a fresh, powerful voice in the field of religion and the human sciences.
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