Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Narration
1 Decolonizing Female Renunciation
2 Institutional Discourse and Everyday Practice
3 Buddhism, Power, and Practice
Part II Identity
4 Invisible Nuns
5 Subjects of Renunciation
6 Becoming Bhikkhunis, Becoming Theravada
Part III Empowerment
7 Renunciation and ''Empowerment''
8 Global Empowerment and the Renunciant Everyday
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Nirmala S. Salgado (MA, SOAS, University of London; PhD, Northwestern University) has published widely on Buddhist nuns. She teaches religion to undergraduates at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
"A good corrective to much scholarship on the practices and lives
of Buddhist nuns and therefore deserves serious attention by all
scholars of Buddhism." --CHOICE
"This brilliant and unsettling work enjoins us to think the
'everyday life' of Buddhist female renunciants in Sri Lanka without
translating it into the 'globalatinized' language of our gendered
politics. After reading this work, we can no longer arbitrate
'third world' questions of gender, renunciation, religious
existence, law, and secularism in the same way." --Ananda
Abeysekara, author of The Politics of Postsecular Religion:
Mourning Secular Futures
"In my view this is the most interesting and important recent study
of Buddhist nuns. Salgado frames the multiple voices of nuns within
their own lived existence and shows that from a cross-Buddhist
viewpoint the many nuns living in our contemporary world do not
have to carry the burden of uniformity." --Gananath Obeyesekere,
Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Princeton University
"The strength of Salgado's admirably rigorous and comprehensive
book lies in how she questions the conceptual vocabulary of
post-Christian secular modernity that organizes liberal feminist
translations and interpretations of the practices of Buddhist nuns.
This is an important and accessible work that presents a timely and
very necessary engagement with postcolonial theory for the study of
religion." --Ruth Mas, Assistant Professor of Critical Theory
and
Contemporary Islam, University of Colorado, Boulder
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