Deathpower : : Buddhism's Ritual Imagination in Cambodia / / Erik Davis.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Contemporary Collection eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Davis, Erik,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 p.) :; 20 b&w photographs

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs.Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the social hierarchies of Khmer culture. The monks' realization of death underwrites key components of the Cambodian social imagination: the distinction between wild death and celibate life, the forest and the field, and moral and immoral forms of power. By connecting the performative aspects of Buddhist death rituals to Cambodian history and everyday life, Davis undermines the theory that Buddhism and rural belief systems necessarily oppose each other. Instead, he shows Cambodian Buddhism to be a robust tradition with ethical and popular components extending throughout Khmer society.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration -- Introduction -- 1. Getting Sited in Cambodia -- 2. The Funeral -- 3. Rice, Water, Hierarchy -- 4. Building Deathpower and Rituals of Sovereignty -- 5. Binding Mighty Death -- 6. Gifts and Hungry Ghosts -- 7. Eating Leftovers, Rumor, and Witchcraft -- 8. Buddhism Makes Brahmanism -- Notes -- Khmer Glossary -- Works Cited -- Index