Such distinctions are useful, just as lines on a map are useful indications of where a country may begin and where it may end. Here I mean the way the past becomes segmented or packaged-in academic works, national historiographies, and a host of other media-into discrete time-capsules, through such labels as precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial or “before” and “after” Mao. 5–6ĦA third question running through this chapter relates to temporal boundaries, and to the interplay between the past and the present. A common thread between these ostensibly different studies is the extent to which such emergent identifications intersect with the “national space” and how they figure in the construction and validation of the idea of a “nation” in ways which materialize whatĥBenedict Anderson so brilliantly and influentially dubbed an “imagined community.” In other words, I am interested in how the adoption of a particular style of costume as “national dress,” or a dish as a national dish, to use two obvious examples, translate nationalist imaginings into the world as lived, worn, read, seen, and otherwise experienced by those who the modern nation claims as its subjects.Īnderson’s Imagined Communities see Ong pp. To date my main interests in this area have been with the construction of ethnic identities (as with the Chinese in Cambodia, or Anglo-Burmese in Burma) with gendered identities (as with the bifurcation of gender norms in dress and etiquette which developed in Cambodia under colonial rule) with religious and national identities as with the crystallization of a notion of a specifically Cambodian national culture and the idealization of a particular type of Buddhism as Cambodia’s “national religion,” processes which I examine in my forthcoming book Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945. I contest the notion of cartographic boundaries, and examine the disparity and disjuncture between the clean boundary lines represented on modern maps, which convey the impression of countries as both static and sealed, and the actual, material and human dynamics of life at, on, and across boundaries.ĤA second focus is on the conceptual boundaries of a nation and its culture, and how, and by whom, such boundaries are articulated and contested. In this chapter, I examine boundaries from three main angles. Instead, this chapter simply aims to frame some underlying questions and underscore some research directions that are pertinent to our collective project to decenter Chinese studies.ģLike many other contributors to this project, I am interested in interrogating and subverting the notions of distinct and immutable “boundaries” around particular collectivities or countries. By examining the linkages between Buddhist diplomacy and China’s economic and strategic integration into Southeast Asia, I aim to emphasize how culture can be mobilized as a political commodity, and how cultural transactions can become intertwined, however precariously, tenuously, or unintentionally, with broader considerations of regional and national security.ĢBecause this is a new project, I am in no position here to present conclusions. My focus is on state-regulated traffic in, and rhetoric about, Buddhist relics, Buddhist delegations, and official visits to Buddhist sites. 1My current project, Transnational Identities, National Ideologies and Buddhist Diplomacy in Sino-Myanmar Relations explores the ways in which two state actors-Myanmar (Burma) and China-have used Buddhism as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy in the last decade.
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