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oai:keep.lib.asu.edu:node-1930152024-12-23T18:01:48Zoai_pmh:alloai_pmh:repo_items

193015 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.193015 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2024 309 pages Doctoral Dissertation Academic theses Text eng Harcey, Blayne Kevin Schober, Juliane Feldhaus, Anne Emmrich, Christoph Arizona State University Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2024 Field of study: Religious Studies This study offers a genealogical investigation of the modern manufacture of the Buddha’ birthplace at Lumbini, in Nepal’s rural Terai region. Throughout the twentieth century, Asian and non-Asian actors employed the cross-cultural prestige of Lumbini in their overlapping agendas. These efforts emerged in response to the Buddhism’s disembedding from traditional socio-political institutions under colonial governance across South and Southeast Asia and were further spurred by the rapid globalization characteristic of the mid-twentieth century. Lumbini was conscripted into colonial regimes of power, and also emerged as symbolic capital in the formation of national narratives within post-colonial India and Nepal. I argue that Lumbini presents a unique and interesting case of a protracted process of “heritagization” that is both multivalent and multivocal. As Buddhists have sought to ensure the survival of the Buddha’s dispensation (śāsana) in modernity, they have mobilized Lumbini as a powerful symbol of peace, brotherhood, and global connectivity in conjunction with the prevailing logics of their non-Buddhist contemporaries. Focusing on Lumbini's modern (re)discovery and its successive development highlights conjunctures between “Buddhist modernism” and the secularizing processes of heritage conservation and display. This study finds that trans-Asian flows of investment in reconstituting the Buddha’s birthplace throughout the twentieth century are antecedents to emergent forms of geopolitical and “geo-cultural” (Winter 2019) imaginations in the contemporary, as evidenced by Lumbini’s inclusion in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Religion South Asian studies History Buddhism Development Lumbini Nepal Transnational United Nations Locating Lumbini: Transnational Buddhism and the Construction of Heritage in Nepal