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.

Ananda Abeysekara

Ananda Abeysekara is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He is also a member of the editorial board of the journalCulture and Religion (Routledge). His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Theravada Buddhist tradition, Sri Lanka, postcolonial studies, South Asian Religion and the Political, (counter) philosophical traditions of thinking (Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel), and political philosophy. His approach to the study of religion engages broad questions of memory, translation, inheritance, legacy, loss, catastrophe, testimony, un-witnessing, un-translatability, secularism, race, animal life, law, political sovereignty, responsibility, and justice. Currently, Abeysekara is concerned with what he calls "thinking the 'question' of religion." This task demands more than the conventional modes of analysis, interpretation, critique--and more than even theoria in the Greek and other senses of the word--that guide the epistemological and empiricist protocols of humanities/area studies. Such modes of theoria always run the risk of translating and annulling life that does not lend to the secular (technologist, capitalogist, humanist, metaphysical, metaphorical) logos of translation, extension, and division. Thinking the question of religion seeks to consider the fundamental untranslatability of life, vis-à-vis the political limits of secular existence and the liberal theories of the humanities. 
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