Neena Mahadev is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and has held research fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, and the J. William Fulbright Foundation. She presently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Global Buddhism, and will serve on the soon-to-be-launched book series New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity (Bloomsbury Academic).
Her book, Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, interrogates a multi-religious public at a time when the growing presence of charismatic and evangelical and Christianity agitated hostilities of majoritarian Buddhist revivalists. In 2004, a contingent of Buddhist monks elected to Sri Lanka’s Parliament proposed a ban against what they deemed to be “unethical” conversions to Christianity. Subsequent wide-reaching Western humanitarian aid and intervention during the tsunami (2004) and war’s end (2009), served to intensify nativist contentions against those who propagate a “foreign” faith. Conflicting theological and political approaches to the nation manifest in the ways in which Buddhists revivalists call upon Sri Lankans to abide by the karmic inheritances of the self and the nation on the one hand, and in how Sri Lankan evangelists project the possibility of forging a new future “through the grace of God,” on the other. Examining these disparate orientations to religious continuity, rupture, sovereignty, and persuasion, Mahadev takes a “multicameral” approach to conversion disputes. Situated ethnographically among modernist and traditionalist Theravadin Buddhists, Pentecostal Christian “newcomers,” and long-established Christian denominations, she examines how maverick religious leaders answer the call of millenarian religious competition, attracting devotees whilst shielding their practices from the affronts of rivals, and at the same time underscoring their love of the nation. This complex Sri Lankan public does not necessarily issue wholly hostile responses to competing streams of religious projection, however. Of Karma and Grace demonstrates how inter-religious competition creates a field that is also generative of possibilities for diversification of religious forms, of leniency, and identitarian ambiguation—features of a religious public that allow plurality to flourish even in the face of ever-rearticulating conflicts.
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