Lecture Series

David Gellner
on
Rebuilding Buddhism: Transnational Theravada Revivalism in Nepal

David Gellner is Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research (1982-4) was on the traditional Vajrayana Buddhism of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley. He has since carried out fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley, broadening his interests to include politics and ethnicity and religious change, in particular the history and effects of the newly introduced Theravada Buddhist Movement. He is the author of The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism: Weberian Themes (2001), and Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest (1992), co-editor of Contested Hierarchies: A Collaborative Ethnography of Caste among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley (1995); and Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Nepal (1997), and editor of Resistance and the State: Nepalese Experiences (2003).