In her brilliant book Karma and Grace, Neena Mahadev transports us to risky, multi-religious terrains in Sri Lanka, where Buddhism commands significant privilege as the majoritarian and state-backed religion of the nation. The ethnographic subjects of Karma and Grace, however, are not Buddhists or Buddhist institutions per se. As her title suggestively spotlights, it is the “antagonistic mirroring” between Buddhist and Christian cosmologies—between religious continuity and religious rupture—that sets the scene for Mahadev’s riveting account of religious difference and inter-religious negotiation. Despite their relatively small numbers (less than 10% of the population), Sri Lanka’s Christians, a category which includes both Catholics and Pentecostals, incite fears and anxieties for their perceived proximity to Western influence and foreign resources. Given the fierce politicization of unethical conversions to Christianity in Sri Lanka’s recent past, it is Christianity—not Islam nor Hinduism—which serves as the principal foil for Buddhist apologetics and strategic revivalism. As I read it, Karma and Grace is thus foremost an explorative inquiry of “inter-religion” from inside and within the lived, everyday spaces of interaction between distinct yet overlapping traditions.
My initial characterization of Karma and Grace leads me to ask a few questions which motivate my conversation with Mahadev here. What is “inter-religion”? How is it similar and dissimilar to “religious difference”? (The subtitle of Karma and Grace, after all, is “Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka.”) What is gained and what is lost when deploying each of these terms? Where and why is it worth retaining—indeed, insisting on—the analytic distinction between the two?
Delving through the pages of Karma and Grace, any reader can see that Mahadev has been long captivated by religious communities and their respective orientations to one another. Speaking as a fellow fieldworker, I can also recognize the sheer amount of tremendous labor Mahadev has applied toward documenting so many different theological perspectives and devotional sensibilities. In one instance, she traces the murmurs of Sinhala Buddhist nationalists and their conspiratorial outlook on high-profile converts to Christianity. In another, she immerses us in a charismatic worship service on the outskirts of Colombo where Pentecostalists boast of the living spirit of Jesus against the inanimate statue of Buddha. In yet others, she takes us to the more intimate spaces of mixed marriages and mourning, revealing how Catholic, evangelical, and Buddhist women experiment between denominations and entertain soothsaying and sorcery behind the scenes. Multiple portraits of spiritual, religious, and theological life abound and flourish throughout Mahadev’s hard-won monograph.
If anthropologists in the past have made their mark for expertise on a particular “people group”, or for anthropologists of religion on a particular “tradition”, Mahadev daringly breaks the mold by refusing to remain with one community or point-of-view. The effect is an account dedicated to equal and evenly distributed coverage to as many players in the religious playing field, so to speak. Early on, she spells out some of the creative impulses that propel her commitment to something I would identify as an “ethos of pluralism.”
“With respect to method, I argue that using a multicameral ethnographic approach to query inter-religion is conducive to seeing the nondialectical aspects of religiosity, evident in the ordinary leniencies and experimentations, and in the ways that religionists may practically fall outside of bounded categories of identitarian belonging” (p. 33, emphasis mine).
With her original method of observation and analysis, Mahadev proceeds to capture those remainders of religious life that remain uncaptured by a globally hegemonic politics of identity and sectarian exclusion. Her sources of theoretical inspiration are philosopher Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and political theorist William Connolly’s Pluralism. Each source provides a resource for eschewing impulses of pigeonholing people into varied species of religious affiliation: the first by way of an ethics of “non-identity” and the second by way of a “bicameral” orientation. Mahadev joins these two thinkers in the urgent task of excavating spaces where multiple religious, political, and moral commitments flourish and exceed secular-liberal categories of reason, truth, nature, and self-identity. As the card-carrying ethnographer she is, she also underlines the realms of the ordinary and practical as resources for catching these special spaces of protean, visceral religiosity that precede realms of modern self-consciousness, including the quintessentially modern desire toward having and expressing a self.
I am greatly sympathetic with Mahadev’s ethical stance and epistemologically constructive leanings. In the spirit of productive curiosity, I am also left wondering more about what it means and looks like to make “inter-religion” the main object of study (rather than, say, a specific socio-religious group or an authoritative tradition of theological precepts and ritual sensibilities). On the face of it, there is much appeal in initiating a study of diversity from the “inter-” spaces of religious exchange, that is, those empirically rich in-between spaces of intersubjective communication. But those steeped in social phenomenology may even go so far as to affirm that all social engagements are marked by “inter-” spaces of exchange and interaction. If this is indeed the case, then how does Mahadev identify which exchanges between religious actors in her fieldwork serve as evidence of “inter-religion” and which as evidence of one religious perspective’s engagement with another? And by extension, what makes a style of interaction “inter-religious” versus “Buddhist” or “Pentecostal”? Or does the difference lie less in the communicative form and more in the theological contents, or absence therein?
In her declaration of method, Mahadev underlines the importance of attending to the “nondialectical aspects of religiosity.” The stakes are clear: her aim is to hold forth protean spaces of generosity and experimentation that exist prior to the problematically petrifying effects of identity and difference. For the task of empirically grounded analysis, however, I find this aim a bit slippery in some respects. If the principal object of inquiry is “inter-religion”, what is the difference between the “inter” model of two actors or perspectives, and the pluralist ethos of bicameralism introduced by Connolly? And if I may throw Adorno in the mix, how does the nondialectical aspects of “inter-religion” differ from the history-unfolding paradigm of two forces in an agonistic politics of struggle? (Maybe I should add, for full transparency’s sake, that I understand “negative dialectics” to lie squarely within the dialectical material school of thought). In other words, what does “inter-religion” afford us that the “bicameral” and the “dialectical” do not?
Setting aside theoretical questions of sociological interaction and historical dialectics, I also wish to pause a bit more on the terms “inter-religion” and “inter-religious,” and briefly gesture to what history and politics they carry with them. As I teach in a Divinity School dedicated to the academic study of many religious traditions, indeed the critical study of religion-in-general, I regularly encounter talk of “interfaith,” “Abrahamic,” “mixed,” and “cross-sectarian” engagement. Having spent years thinking about Coptic Christians, I also know well those spaces where minority communities give little credence to the Egyptian state’s efforts to build a “house for interfaith dialogue and peaceful coexistence.” Many Copts in Egypt have pointed out to me, time and time again, that dialogue is futile because the very conditions for fair and free exchange of religious thought will never be. Some Muslims in Egypt have additionally pointed out that the very framework of “interfaith” is a foreign import, ultimately of Christian origin. As I write this, I can hear echoes of both of these suspicions from anthropologists of Islam and postcolonial critics of secularism.
To be sure, Mahadev is already familiar with the challenges and terrains of debate that I have outlined here. And so I repeat, what does “inter-religion” offer for her study of multi-religious life in millennial Sri Lanka? Does “inter-religion” help us see where and how religious differences are made, in ways that the critical study of secularism, the dialectics of non-identity, and the hermeneutics of political theology do not? I am eager to hear Mahadev’s thoughts on any or all my questions. That I risk inundating her with too many questions in such a short space only reveals, I hope, my enormous interest in Karma and Grace, as well as my deep confidence in my conversations on a range of important, timely topics with Neena in the future.
