Description
This study offers a genealogical investigation of the modern manufacture of the Buddha’ birthplace at Lumbini, in Nepal’s rural Terai region. Throughout the twentieth century, Asian and non-Asian actors employed the cross-cultural prestige of Lumbini in their overlapping agendas. These efforts emerged in response to the Buddhism’s disembedding from traditional socio-political institutions under colonial governance across South and Southeast Asia and were further spurred by the rapid globalization characteristic of the mid-twentieth century. Lumbini was conscripted into colonial regimes of power, and also emerged as symbolic capital in the formation of national narratives within post-colonial India and Nepal. I argue that Lumbini presents a unique and interesting case of a protracted process of “heritagization” that is both multivalent and multivocal. As Buddhists have sought to ensure the survival of the Buddha’s dispensation (śāsana) in modernity, they have mobilized Lumbini as a powerful symbol of peace, brotherhood, and global connectivity in conjunction with the prevailing logics of their non-Buddhist contemporaries. Focusing on Lumbini's modern (re)discovery and its successive development highlights conjunctures between “Buddhist modernism” and the secularizing processes of heritage conservation and display. This study finds that trans-Asian flows of investment in reconstituting the Buddha’s birthplace throughout the twentieth century are antecedents to emergent forms of geopolitical and “geo-cultural” (Winter 2019) imaginations in the contemporary, as evidenced by Lumbini’s inclusion in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Details
Title
- Locating Lumbini: Transnational Buddhism and the Construction of Heritage in Nepal
Contributors
- Harcey, Blayne Kevin (Author)
- Schober, Juliane (Thesis advisor)
- Feldhaus, Anne (Committee member)
- Emmrich, Christoph (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2024
Subjects
Resource Type
Collections this item is in
Note
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Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2024
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Field of study: Religious Studies