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Shortlisted, 2024 EuroSEAS Book Prize in the Humanities, European Association for Southeast Asian Studies
In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in Rangoon to preach the gospel. Celebrated in the Protestant press, which ran dramatic accounts of exotic adventures, the attempt to convert the Burmese met with mixed results. Although Burmese Buddhists resisted Christian evangelism, people from minority communities were baptized in large numbers throughout the nineteenth century. American Baptist Christianity was itself transformed in the Buddhist kingdom. Missionaries who were initially horrified by what they saw as the idolatry of Buddha statues found themselves creating tree shrines and their converts hanging colorful Jesus paintings in their churches.
Baptizing Burma explores the history of how the American Baptist mission to Burma failed to convert the country yet succeeded in transforming its religious landscape. Alexandra Kaloyanides examines how the Burmese majority positioned Buddhism to counter Christianity, how marginalized groups took on Baptist identities, and how Protestantism was reimagined as a Southeast Asian religion. She considers a series of holy objects to reveal the mechanics of religious practice in a period of entangled empires—British, Burmese, and American. By telling stories of four key things—the sacred book, the school house, the pagoda, and the portrait—this book illuminates the histories of Burma’s last kingdom and the unexpected consequences of America’s first overseas mission.
As Myanmar continues to grapple with a protracted civil war, the book’s analysis contributes significantly to understanding the enduring impact of foreign missionaries on the country’s socio-religious landscape.
Baptizing Burma will spur conversations among diverse scholars about multiple perspectives towards religious objects.
Baptizing Burma is a very well-organized and clearly-written book which avoids insider jargon. As a result, it will be legible for both area specialists and non-specialists.
Kaloyanides does an excellent job of neither naturalising religion nor overlooking the self-interest that can sometimes colour the Christian movements of the past.
A well-researched book.
A useful piece of scholarship that will be of interest to researchers studying American missions history, as well as those working on Buddhism and on 19th-century Burmese religious movements.
In its methods and argument, Baptizing Burma successfully shows the transnational religious geography and material connections between US Baptists and Southeast Asians in both the past and present.
This is a much messier and more complicated picture than we used to tell in the religious history of Asia, but thanks to Kaloyanides…it is a more accurate one.
[Baptizing Burma] will be of great interest to scholars of art history, material culture, comparative religions, and global imperialism, and to specialists on Southeast Asia, Burma, and colonial India. Written in an engaging and accessible prose style, vividly supporting the arguments with animating case studies, the book powerfully uses material culture to reclaim the histories of nonliterate peoples….this is a skillfully researched and argued book that deepens our understanding of colonial Burma and Southeast Asia, as well as broader conversations on interreligious and transnational histories of the region.
Meticulously researched and theoretically distilled, Baptizing Burma offers fresh understandings of material culture among nineteenth-century Theravada Buddhists and converted Protestant American Baptist Christians in Myanmar. Kaloyanides’s insightful and clearly articulated analysis of religious change focuses on how sacred texts, schools, pagodas, and visual representations were revalorized in dynamic ways that proved transformational for adherents of both traditions. Essential reading for students of Southeast Asian religious cultures and history.
— John Clifford Holt, author of Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka
Rich with multiperspectival sources and stories, Baptizing Burma offers a fascinating vantage point onto the material culture of nineteenth-century American Baptist missionaries to Burma. Alexandra Kaloyanides invites her reader to consider the lingering resonances of these missionaries and their images, sites of memory, and writings among U.S. and Burmese Baptists today.
— Pamela Klassen, author of The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land
Baptizing Burma reveals the nuanced and agentive interactions between American Baptist missionaries and Burmese Buddhists. Drawing on rich archives in counterintuitive ways, Baptizing Burma stands out for its exploration of religious landscapes and transformations unlimited by the imagined boundaries of Buddhism or Christianity. It is bound to reshape how we understand religion in colonial Burma.
— Alicia Turner, author of Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma
Neither a triumphalist insider account of the heroes of the mission nor a Saidian takedown of imperialist Orientalists, Baptizing Burma examines a series of objects as a window onto the translation from Baptist to Buddhist and vice versa. In the process Kaloyanides provides new ways of thinking about the interaction between Christian missionaries and Buddhists that resonate with recent work on the material aspects of Protestant missions in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of Asia. Because of her close attention to Buddhist doctrine and history, she also offers insights into Buddhist materiality. Not only did Protestants adopt different approaches to the material when they stepped away from their pulpits back home to enter the missionary field, Buddhists too worked within different frameworks of the material depending on their status within local society.
— John Kieschnick, author of Buddhist Historiography in China
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: The Book: Religious Texts of Nineteenth-Century Burma
2: The School: Models of Religious Imagination in Burmese Education
3: The Pagoda: Icons and Iconoclasm
4: The Portrait: American Jesus in Burma
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index