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People are obsessed with religion: The definitional dissonance of evangelical encounters in Myanmar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Michael Edwards
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Abstract

This article responds to recent calls to consider how religion is defined and deployed in and about Myanmar. Discussing local Pentecostal efforts to evangelise to Buddhists in contemporary Yangon, it presents the encounter with the religious other as one ground from which definitions of religion might emerge. I show that, by taking up new opportunities to share the gospel, believers entered into a long conversation between Christianity and Buddhism dating back to the colonial period. Tracing the different definitions of religion that this conversation generates, and attuning to the dissonances between them, might offer alternate ways for approaching what gets termed the religious and the secular in the study of Myanmar.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 49 - 66
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Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2021

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank friends and interlocutors in Yangon whose generosity made possible the fieldwork on which this article draws. Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, Penny Edwards, Matthew Engelke, Anne Hansen, Deborah James, Ruth Streicher, Alicia Turner, and Wai Phyo Maung each contributed to improving the argument, as did three anonymous reviewers. Research was supported by the London School of Economics and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

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