Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by MK Long (PhD Candidate, Cornell University), which explores the rhetorical force of relationships in biographies of Buddhist nuns in Burma.

This Gatty Lecture will take place on Zoom only. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

Understandings of Buddhist lay women and monastics in Burma and other Theravada Buddhist cultures are so far mostly informed by ethnographic projects. There is far less insight into the historical contexts and textual forms in and through which Buddhist monastic women, known in Burmese as thilashin, have worked to harness social and material capital to support their livelihoods, their pursuit of educational opportunities, and the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of their residential and educational institutions.

Long responds to these questions by analyzing a 1982 volume of (auto)biographies of the founder and three generations of successors of a Buddhist nunnery established in central Burma in 1905. The volume’s emphasis on its subjects’ gradual accumulation and upkeep of relationships over the life course, and its close attention to the grounds and effects of different forms of relatedness suggests that sociality, rather than autonomy, is vital to the rhetorical self-presentation of thilashin and their models of authority. Historically, this emphasis also indicates the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of belonging amidst the state-driven reorganization of Buddhist institutions in Burma in the 1980s. Bringing together feminist and queer theories of kinship and temporality with studies of Buddhist narrative and scriptural interpretation, Long’s analysis shows how thilashin and their biographers participate in the work of Buddhist historiography to recollect and reproduce communities. Tracing the ways generations of thilashin have reimagined models of authority during socially and politically charged moments of transformation, Long's work positions thilashin as theorists of kinship, gratitude, debt, and property as forms of relatedness that engender new political orientations within and beyond the timescape of a Buddhist nation.

About the Speaker

MK Long is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Long's research interests include Buddhism and gender, contemporary Burmese and Pali literature, biography, kinship, and the micropolitics of Buddhist institutions.