The Legacy of F. K. Lehman (F. K. L. U Chit Hlaing) for the Study of Religion and the Secular in Burma

Abstract

The Legacy of F. K. Lehman (F. K. L. U Chit Hlaing) for the Study of Religion and the Secular in Burma Juliane Schober (bio) Professor Lehman has written prolifically on Theravada Buddhist civilizations, especially in Burma, and their intersections with tribal societies located on the peripheries of lowland kingdoms in Southeast Asia. He examines in his essays the cultural intersections of religious and political power among lowland and upland peoples from diverse perspectives, enriching and nuancing our knowledge of the processes through which the many variants of Hindu and Buddhist statecraft in Southeast Asia were localized. His work on religion, cosmology, and social rank is transdisciplinary in scope and combines theoretical insight, linguistic facility, and rigorous ethnography with historical detail. It also reveals an intellectual genealogy going back to his own teacher, Robert von Heine-Geldern, who was a founding figure in Southeast Asian ethnology and whose classic essay on “Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia” defined the early parameters of a cultural history of the region and its civilizations. By choosing to focus my comments on Professor Lehman’s contributions to the anthropology of religion in Southeast Asia, I anticipated that my choices would necessarily leave aside his contributions to the study of ethnicity, history, kinship, linguistics, and cognitive theory. In [End Page 43] mapping out Professor Lehman’s arguments about Buddhist cosmology, kingship, the institution of the monkhood (sangha), doctrine, practice and belief, ritual, millennialism, and spirit veneration, it became evident that he does not restrict himself to one or two methodologies, but draws instead on all bodies of knowledge at his disposal to make his point: etymologies, texts, theorems, ethnographies, and histories. In the discussion that follows, I trace Professor Lehman’s arguments on the study of Theravada Buddhism in Burma and conclude by considering the implications of his work for a postcolonial study of religion and the secular in contemporary Myanmar. On Buddhist Civilizations Professor Lehman’s profound influence on the literature about religion in Southeast Asia is evident from countless notes that acknowledge his careful contributions to the anthropology of this region. His comments are generously credited in Stanley Tambiah’s World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (1976), Melford Spiro’s Buddhism and Society (1970), Charles Keyes’ Golden Peninsula (1977), Clifford Geertz’ Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980), Michael Mendelson’s Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership (1975), and, most recently, in James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). Professor Lehman’s own work provides nuanced insights into the political and religious complexities of the Buddhist hegemonic polities of lowlanders and their tribal vassals whose social organizations are closely tied to the structure of kinship. Professor Lehman began to investigate these issues in his own classic study, The Structure of Chin Society (1963) and developed subsequently his thinking about them further in an extended series of essays referenced below. Indeed, Professor Lehman’s contributions were conceptualized in conversation with the work of other [End Page 44] scholars and many of his essays were conceived as a direct response to specific points made by one or the other of them. For instance, in his widely cited review of Melford Spiro’s Buddhism and Society, entitled “Doctrine, Practice and Belief” (1972), he critiques Redfield’s, and by extension Spiro’s, theory that great religious traditions form a thin veneer over pre-existing local traditions. His approach not only signaled a departure from Redfield’s theoretical framework, but also obviated lingering misconceptions in anthropology about the presumed lack of Buddhist literacy among villagers as an explanation for the differences between doctrine and practices. Lehman used the occasion of this review to make a larger point about the important role of interpretation in Buddhist practice, doctrine and belief. Arguing against the primacy of one aspect of religion over others (for instance, text or doctrine over practice), he insisted that the practice and understanding of Buddhist doctrines or texts is inflected by situational interpretations within a larger worldview. Long before critics of orientalism dismantled received ideas about...