Shwedagon Pagoda 3. Yangon, 2019.
Racial Categories, Religious Exclusions
In colonial Burma, the British policy of adjudicating law according to a subject’s religion created major confusion for the colony’s mixed-race subjects. Fifty years of legal work went into arguing whether these religiously plural subjects should be considered Buddhist at all, and what religious laws they were subject to.
Focusing on the litigation involving mixed Buddhists, this project develops the idea of ‘religious racialization’ to describe how colonial jurisprudence cleaves racial categories from socio-religious practice. Through the idea of religious racialization, I argue in this dissertation that narrow judicial interpretations of the terms ‘Buddhist’ and ‘religion’ in British jurisprudence established divergent customary law and property rights regimes for native and foreign Buddhists, marking the latter as racial other.
This research documents how, for those who crossed the boundaries that a foreign regime imagined, the question of where the legal boundaries between foreign and indigenous lie were not necessarily clear, even as which side of that divide they fell on carried significant weight. Racial Categories, Religious Distinctions draws on colonial era litigation involving mixed Buddhist families to propose new ways of speaking about race, religion, and ethnicity in Burma.
You can read articles I’ve published on this research below.
Courting Colonialism: Considering Litigation as an Act of Citizenship in Colonial Burma. Citizenship Studies, 28 (4-5), 2024.