How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930. By Anne Ruth Hansen. . University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. 254 pages. $54.00.
摘要
Amid a nexus of religious modernist movements in Southeast Asia at the turn of the last century, Anne Hansen examines the contours of emergent Buddhist modernism in Cambodia. How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930 focuses on the modernist Khmer movement that promoted ethical purification and fostered renewed interest in the Vinaya, or Buddhist monastic code, in the midst of rapid social change under French colonial rule. While attuned to the ways that colonial policies and print technologies enabled the spread of modernist ideas, Hansen is careful to trace the origins of the “modern Dhamma” movement that crystallized in the 1920s to pan-regional Theravādin discourses and practices, particularly the mid-nineteenth-century reforms initiated by Mongkut in Siam (present-day Thailand). As such, her study underscores the regional dimensions of Buddhist modernism in Southeast Asia while focusing on the historical contingencies of the Cambodian context and specific expressions of Khmer modernism.
In line with recent developments in the study of colonialism, Hansen succeeds in complicating the picture of emergent Buddhist modernism beyond a stimulus–response model, whereby local intellectual developments are deemed to be principally derivative of colonial policies, western scientific discourses, and orientalist …
