This book series deals with religion and its interface with the state and society in Southeast Asia. It examines the multidimensional facets of politics, public policies and social change in relation to contemporary forms of religions, religious communities, thinking, praxis and ethos. All articles in this Book Series were a direct result of a policy-relevant research collaboration conducted by investigators from the participating countries from 2013–2016. The issues under examination in this Series include: state management of diversity, multicultural policies, religious (...) social activism and state-society relations. All of the analyses in this Book Series are fixed within the context of a rapidly changing society in Southeast Asia. (shrink)

In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on my brief personal experiences of conducting field research on ways in which way a small group of Tibetan Buddhist monks enact a monastic total institution in Ladakh, India. More specifically, I analyze my experiences in view of the relationship between dual and nondual mind, as discussed by Henry Vyner (2002) in Anthropology of Consciousness, and use this analysis to develop preliminary insights into the ways in which a Tibetan Buddhist monastery is constituted.

In the Southeast Asian context, the questions of civilizational identity and civilizational premises of modernity cannot be posed in the same way as with regard to China or India. From a long-term perspective, the most salient features of the region have to do with intercivilizational encounters and their local ramifications. As the debate on `Indianization' has shown, Southeast Asian traditions took shape in active interaction with dominant external models, and it is a flexible combination of imported and local patterns that (...) is most characteristic of the region, rather than any persisting indigenous infrastructure. Cultural patterns of state formation are the most distinctive outcome of this process; they can be traced back to the Indianizing phase, but they also play an important role in the early modern history of the region, and they are relevant to the debate on `re-traditionalization' in contemporary Southeast Asia. (shrink)