Undergraduate Courses

840:370 BUDDHISM, SOCIETY, AND POLITICS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA (3)

This course offers an exploration of the histories of Buddhist social and political culture in Southeast Asia from premodernity to the present. We read primary literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and art historical and archaeological evidence, as well as current interdisciplinary scholarship in Buddhist and Southeast Asian Studies, to consider how Buddhism has played, and continues to play, a vital role in the construction of norms and habits of the sociopolitical domain. Examples of particular thematic foci include diverse regional Buddhist practices and understandings of law, gender, class, political authority, the family, monastic institutions, colonialism, and economic life.