Paper short abstract:

In this contribution, I would like to reconsider the ensuing formation of a new Buddhist ultra-nationalist movement (Mabatha) led by monks, claiming a domination on the defence of religion in Burma and obliterating any more temperate position as not truly Buddhist.

Paper long abstract:

I have long been confronted to the 'two religions' explanation proposed by Melford Spiro to resolve the tension between his ethnography of what he termed Burmese Supernaturalism (1967) and Buddhism's imagining of that time. I positioned my research on spirit worship in spirit mediums circles as a kind of subaltern stance on the Burmese religious field giving access to the recurrent processes through which mainstream Buddhism was incessantly separated (or purified) from other domains of religious action composing the whole religious field to maintain Buddhism's hegemony that is Buddhism's imagining as distinctively 'good'.

In March 2013, at the height of the 969 anti-Muslim campaign led by some Sangha members, a series of violent episodes against Muslim populations burst out. This irruption of violence was truly disruptive in the context of expectations of the new transitional politics experienced in Myanmar since 2011. The field was suddenly overload with discourses of 'good' versus 'bad' religions (Buddhism versus Islam) reversing the actual situation of violence against Muslims with dreadful consequences. Rather than looking at the emergence of a new Buddhist ultra-nationalist movement (Mabatha) in terms of 'truer' or less so Buddhism, I would like to re-think it as a case in point of processes of religious delineation involved in the maintaining of Buddhism's hegemony in a situation of political transition - that is processes of imposing a discourse of Buddhism as distinctively 'good'.