Religious Bodies Politic

“This extraordinary ethnography follows a ritual traffic of bodies among Buddhists in the Russian republic of Buryatia and in their pilgrimages to India, to reveal some surprising consequences. Anya Bernstein discovers Buryat Buddhists engaged in an effort to recenter world Buddhism through reincarnation practices that produce spatial mobility in defiance of international borders. By refashioning secular space and creating new religious lineages rooted outside Tibet, they challenge both Chinese and Tibetan control over Buddhism’s reproduction. A brilliant and highly original work.”

“Anya Bernstein’s work on the role of Buddhism before and after the rise of socialism is a truly pioneering work of scholarship. Her most interesting findings are those that revolve around the place of bodies in Buryat Buddhism, especially necropolitics. A close study of one particular lama’s body in reviving Buryat Buddhism introduces the resonance of other recovered bodies as crucial to the rebirth of Buddhism in Buryatia. Far from merely filling a gap in our knowledge of a social and religious world that most scholars hardly knew even existed, this book successfully illuminates what might at first seem a peripheral topic and region as crucial to our understanding of developments in religion and globalization today. Fascinating reading!”

“This imaginative contribution is one of the few books that could be read equally well in a class on modern Buddhism and in Russian or postsocialist studies.”