Saturday, October 31th 10:30 – 12:00

Session Room: Studio Theatre

1) Tal Liron, University of Chicago

Buddhism is the religious heritage of many nations, and its beliefs, practices, rituals, social organizations, and loyalties are enmeshed in nation-building efforts and conflicts over sovereignty and self-determination. The cases of Sri Lanka, Tibet, Myanmar, and Thailand are well known due to their recent history of violence and high geopolitical stakes. In this presentation, I will show that in post-socialist Mongolia, too, Buddhism is called upon to constitute a sense of belonging and national distinction. I will also argue, based on my dissertation research, which included two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Mongolia, that tensions between Buddhism's nativist and cosmopolitan tendencies can help us understand nationalism's ideological dexterity more generally.

In 1990 Mongolia abandoned its Soviet-aligned state socialism, which enforced secularism with brutal efficiency. Since then, there have been private efforts and public projects to rebuild Buddhist monasteries and monuments, to train monks and educate the public, and to foster alliances with international Buddhist organizations. This work often rubs against that of Christian missionaries and Muslim minorities, as well as other native systems of belief related to shamanism. My research shows that, though Buddhism in Mongolia is often called “Tibetan,” there are in fact diverse, sometimes competing forms. In particular, some Mongolian Buddhists are embroiled in the dispute over Dorje Shugden against the Dalai Lama with potentially disruptive geopolitical consequences. At stake is the status of native Buddhist traditions, as well as the character of “Mongolness” in the context of democratic, capitalist, and cosmopolitan values, as well as a continuing socialist-internationalist discourse. The Mongolian case speaks to the power of religious heritage in debates and disputes over national identity.

2) Louise Harrington, University of Alberta
Spaces of religio-ethno-nationalism in comparative perspective

This paper is concerned with creative portrayals of religio-ethno-nationalism in post-partition geographies. It is concerned with the after effects of decolonization and geopolitical partition across three locations; India, Palestine and Ireland, and their rendering in artistic forms, including literature and cinema. The Troubles in the early 1970s in Northern Ireland, the communal violence in the 1940s across India and East and West Pakistan, and the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict are all the subjects of a wealth of scholarly research in their specific contexts. Sectarian, ethnic and religious violence naturally differ in each of these places, but the formation of visible and symbolic (often nationalistic and state-sponsored) borders is a common feature in each case of partition. In this paper, I first interrogate the value of a comparative study on these locales since comparison is often criticized in scholarship for its relationship to decontextualisation, to simplification, or the privileging of one culture over another. I show instead how a broad and inclusive approach to global partitions can expose important commonalities with regard to the kinds of spaces post-partition conflicts create. As many diverse filmmakers, writers, and artists work with and in the liminal spaces created by a geopolitical partition, they refuse to ignore the incomplete and ambiguous fragments within ethno-religious divides, and in so doing, valuably render the warped cartography which scars today’s global landscape.

3) Yael Shenker, Sapir Academic College
Religious and national identities expressed in works by artists from the national-religious sector in Israel.

One of Israel’s most prominent developments in the last decades is the growing impact of the religious Zionist community on the contours of Israeli cultural discourse and political life.

The current Israeli discourse on religion and nationalism assumes an intimate interchangeability between religious Zionists and the settlement project in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This seeming identity goes hand in hand with the religious settlers’ claim that they are not only the authentic spokesmen of Jewish ideas, but also of ideals held by secular Zionists. I suggest probing the constructed identification between the theological and political discourses through a critical reading of literary and cinematic works by directors, poets and prose writers associated with religious and settlers’ communities.

The work I study responded to Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip, and from four isolated settlements in Samaria in 2003. First, I explore several representations of the territory and space that were evacuated during the disengagement. These works reveal an ambivalent depiction of the evacuated territory as "sacred," as having a "religious value". Simultaneously, and painstakingly, they document the daily life of individuals in the evacuated settlements as a routine, "secular” activity.

Second, I examine the position these works take vis-a-vis the occupation—the obliteration of Palestinians from documentaries, their demonetization and definition in religious, national or security terms.   I explore these depictions in the context of a discourse that converts national, ethnic and racist categories into religious ones. The result is an automatic connection that I challenge between religious notions of time, space and identity, and political and racist conceptions according to which bi-national existence is a threat to the nation's unity.