There is a revealing episode in the Buddha’s life story, one that, like many others is about the revelation that the vision of the Buddha entails, but which is also about the dubious virtuosity of replication, the revelatory power of return and techniques for expanding territorial dominion – and, that these are all of a piece.
This talk will contemplate restitution in Southeast Asia today in the shadow of this story and with an anxious eye on our times.
- What affects does absence evoke, and how?
- What expectations arise in the progress of return, on whose part and why?
- What transformations take place in the comings and goings? How, when and where?
- Why and how do these processes constitute identifications at shifting scales, from the individual to the communal to the national to the regional to the international to the global to the cosmic, at once closing down histories and borders and carrying the potential for visionary unification?
- Do they reproduce Hindu-Buddhist hegemonies made as much in the ‘Sanskrit-Pali cosmopolis’ as in colonial knowledge production?
- Are we witnessing the reconsolidation of the commercial wing of an ever-expanding global conglomerate surveying borders between subject and object?
- Or are we catching glimpses of another time and space, where ‘animism’ might win the day?
