Baptizing Burma

Meticulously researched and theoretically distilled, Baptizing Burma offers fresh understandings of material culture among nineteenth-century Theravada Buddhists and converted Protestant American Baptist Christians in Myanmar. Kaloyanides’s insightful and clearly articulated analysis of religious change focuses on how sacred texts, schools, pagodas, and visual representations were revalorized in dynamic ways that proved transformational for adherents of both traditions. Essential reading for students of Southeast Asian religious cultures and history. -- John Clifford Holt, author of <i>Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka</i> Rich with multiperspectival sources and stories, Baptizing Burma offers a fascinating vantage point onto the material culture of nineteenth-century American Baptist missionaries to Burma. Alexandra Kaloyanides invites her reader to consider the lingering resonances of these missionaries and their images, sites of memory, and writings among U.S. and Burmese Baptists today. -- Pamela Klassen, author of <i>The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land</i> Baptizing Burma reveals the nuanced and agentive interactions between American Baptist missionaries and Burmese Buddhists. Drawing on rich archives in counterintuitive ways, Baptizing Burma stands out for its exploration of religious landscapes and transformations unlimited by the imagined boundaries of Buddhism or Christianity. It is bound to reshape how we understand religion in colonial Burma. -- Alicia Turner, author of <i>Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma</i> Neither a triumphalist insider account of the heroes of the mission nor a Saidian takedown of imperialist Orientalists, Baptizing Burma examines a series of objects as a window onto the translation from Baptist to Buddhist and vice versa. In the process Kaloyanides provides new ways of thinking about the interaction between Christian missionaries and Buddhists that resonate with recent work on the material aspects of Protestant missions in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of Asia. Because of her close attention to Buddhist doctrine and history, she also offers insights into Buddhist materiality. Not only did Protestants adopt different approaches to the material when they stepped away from their pulpits back home to enter the missionary field, Buddhists too worked within different frameworks of the material depending on their status within local society. -- John Kieschnick, author of <i>Buddhist Historiography in China</i>