Description
Book SynopsisExamines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. This book illustrates how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.
Trade Review"Religious Bodies Politic is an ethnographically detailed and theoretically ambitious work that boldly brings together three topics of anthropological inquiry that are usually kept apart: postsocialism, Buddhism, and transnationalism. Anya Bernstein succeeds in untangling the surprising ways in which Buddhism lies at the heart of the ongoing restructuring of Buryat social worlds, cultural forms, and political imaginaries in the wake of the collapse of state socialism and the rise of global market capitalism." (Morton Axel Pedersen, University of Copenhagen)"
