Dr Alan Strathern: List of publications

In the 1680s, King Narai, ruler of the cosmopolitan kingdom of Ayutthaya, was the subject of competing French and Persian attempts to convert him to monotheism. These attempts were not only embarrassing failures; they also helped to precipitate a coup in 1688, in which Phetracha forcefully intervened to place himself on the throne and eject French influence from the realm. But to what extent did the execution of the coup depend on popular involvement? And what ideals and emotions seem to have animated this participation? After pondering the role of ethnicity and xenophobic sentiment, this article considers the construction of powerful discourses of Buddhist intellectual opposition to Christianity, the role of the sangha in the orchestration of the coup itself, and then considers in more detail the extent to which ‘the people’ demonstrated some kind of autonomous political agency. Lastly, it considers whether the events of the coup and its immediate aftermath were shaped by anti-Christian emotion. As a movement with conservative and restorative aims, 1688 was not a ‘revolution’ in the modern sense, but it may have ushered in an enlarged sense of popular investment in the legitimation of royal contenders associated with the defence of Buddhism.

The conversion of certain warlords in Kyushu, Japan, (1560–1580 CE) represents one of the most important breakthroughs for Christianity in the early modern world, and it was accompanied by striking acts of destruction of the local sacred sites and objects. Yet shrine and temple destruction had already become a relatively commonplace feature of warfare in this period of internecine struggle, exemplified by the activities of Oda Nobunaga. How was the iconoclasm of Christian converts interpreted in this context? This article is particularly concerned with the implications of iconoclasm for a raging struggle of “empirical religiosity” – in which Christians and their opponents argued about the immanent power of the gods and their capacity to take revenge on iconoclasts. It also suggests that prevailing Buddhist and Confucian discourses presented important limits to how damaging such empirical arguments were to local religion. These issues are also explored in relation to the case of the Christianizing Ōtomo house, and their relations with the important Usa Hachiman shrine.

Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical literature from all regions and periods of world history, Alan Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about transformations in the fundamental nature of religion ...

This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement ...

The story of Vijaya, has long been central to the Sinhalese idea of themselves as a distinct ethnic group of Aryan origin with ancient roots in the island of Lanka. The ‘national’ chronicle of the Sinhalese, the Mahāvaṃsa (circa fifth century ce) presents Vijaya, an exiled prince from India descended from a lion, as the founder hero of Sinhala civilisation. In a companion article to this, I argued that the narrative of Vijaya and other founder-heroes in the Mahāvaṃsa revolves around the theme of transgression, and that this puzzling fact can only be explained by a consideration of the symbolic logic of the ‘stranger-king’ in origin stories and kingship rituals worldwide. In the present article, I look at other ways of explaining the narrative of Sīhabāhu, Vijaya, and Paṇḍukābhaya. First I break down the narrative into four different origin stories and consider their distribution in a range of texts from South Asia in order to reflect on possible textual inspirations for them (and even consider parallels with the Greek tale of Odysseus and Circe). Second, I consider the possibility that the narrative concerning relations with Pāṇḍu royalty reflects immediate political imperatives of the fifth century ce. Do such interpretations negate the assumption that an organic communal process of mythogenesis has been at work? In the final section this methodological dilemma is approached through comparisons with the way in which scholars have looked at the origin myths of ancient Greek and particularly Roman society. Lastly, these reflections add further weight to the global comparative model of the stranger king, for the stories of Romulus and Vijaya share an emphasis on alien and transgressive beginnings. In 2009 the Sri Lankan government finally destroyed the conventional forces of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) as the civil war that had afflicted the island since 1983 was brought to a violent denouement in the north-east of the Vanni region. From some of the subsequent celebrations by the Sinhalese majority, it seemed that the President Mahinda Rajapaksa was hailed not only for having rid Sri Lanka of a violent menace, but for having, in one sense, re-created the island. The country could now attain the kind of genuine independence and wholeness that had been lacking for much of the period following decolonisation in 1948. After the victory, Rajapaksa was hailed as a ‘great king’ and his admirers were not slow to draw historical analogies with kings and founder-heroes of the past. Such heroes typically have to wade through blood to obtain political mastery; the Lankan chronicles imply that such is the price that must be paid for the re-establishment of society or civilisation itself.

Two rulers, one in Africa, one in Asia, are about to undergo the ceremony of baptism following first contact with the Portuguese maritime expansion—but they insist that the rite be conducted in secret. The African ruler is a regional governor (the Mani Soyo) of the Congo King Nzinga Nkuwu who has just converted in 1491. The high king's diplomatic exchanges with the sea captain Diogo Cão had not elicited any real sensation of vulnerability to Portuguese imperial designs, yet he had been happy to convert nonetheless. Now the Mani Soyo is about to follow suit, but he will not have any of his subordinates witnessing the ritual because he does not want them benefiting from the enhanced status and power that the ritual could bestow. In the highlands of Sri Lanka some fifty years later, the King of Kandy is equally intent on keeping his baptismal rites hidden from public view. But his reasons are strikingly different. He does this “lest his people should kill him.” When news of the baptism did leak out rioting followed, and the king had to spread the story that it had all been a ploy to deceive the Portuguese.

In the past twenty years or so the history of Sri Lanka has become a site of vibrant controversy, largely because the current ethnic conflict has loaded any kind of reflection on the historical boundaries of political, ethnic or religious identity with an immediate emotional charge. The intellectual reverberations of post-colonialism and the vigorous contributions of anthropologists have added rich strata of theoretical thinking. However, despite one or two calls to the contrary, the periods of Portuguese (1505-1658) and Dutch influence (1658-1796) in the island have tended to moulder on the periphery of these debates. The purpose of this article is to bring some of this thinking to bear on the evidence from the sixteenth century in order to stimulate fresh perspectives on both the events of that time and the models themselves. With the arrival of the Portuguese and their increasing involvement in the affairs of the island during the long reign of Bhuvanekabahu VII (1521-51), the darkness of the Kotte period is suddenly illuminated by wonderfully detailed flashes of events. The flurry of letters written by contemporary Portuguese settlers, officials and missionaries, and the attentions of Portuguese chroniclers such as João de Barros, Diogo do Couto, Gaspar Correia and Fernão de Queirós bring quite new forms of evidence into the historian's purview.