Religious Encounters in and beyond Myanmar

This roundtable takes the theme of encounter—between and within religious traditions, between religion and other spheres of social life, and between humans and the divine—as a frame to reimagine the place of religion in the study of Myanmar, and the place of Myanmar in the study of religion. Attending to moments of religious contact, exchange, circulation, comparison, and (mis)translation, our panelists consider and rethink some of the conceptual binaries that shape how religious life in Myanmar is approached: majorities/minorities, inside/outside, nation/foreign, selves/others, centers/peripheries, homogeneity/heterogeneity, conflict/coexistence. In the wake of the Rohingya genocide, the 2021 military coup, and the emerging revolution, we consider what attention to such encounters, past and present, might tell us about “Burmese religion” as a lived world and as an object of academic study—and about the relation between the two.