Engendering the Buddhist State

Abstract

This slim but intellectually expansive volume outlines a new understanding of the gendered relationship between the singular and the universal in Southeast Asian history, interrogating the ways early Cambodian history has been written and understood as an encounter between the global, cosmopolitan, theoretical, and phallic on the one hand, and local, vernacular, idiomatic, and yonic on the other. Drawing on diverse theoretical, historical, and historiographical sources, Thompson deconstructs these binary categories to present a more complex image of the engagement between the aesthetics and politics of sexual difference in the ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia. In doing so, she reappraises conceptual models that have informed studies of pre-modern Southeast Asia, notably Sheldon Pollack’s ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ – that vast politically universal and ethnically diverse ecumene that included much of South and Southeast Asia in which ‘Sanskrit became the premiere instrument of political expression ’1 – and George Cœdès’ ‘Indianized states’, the...