When The Baptists Came To Burma With Alex Kaloyanides

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Alex Kaloyanides to discuss the religious material culture of 19th-century Burma, what we miss when we study religions solely through their texts, and how her research has shaped how she thinks about religious conflict today.

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This morning, I came across this podcast episode from Tricycle: When The Baptists Came To Burma With Alex Kaloyanides. She is researching the entanglement of Christian and Buddhist cultures through the “objects of conversion, relics of resistance.”

The interviewer, James Shaheen, Editor-in-Chief of Tricycle, remarks, “You write that the material dimensions of culture can often be overlooked, as our educations are pretty much text-oriented anyway. What are we missing when we think about Buddhism only through written texts? You discovered yourself that the story was incomplete. What do we miss when we overlook what we are referring to as material culture?”

Alex replies, “The first thing we miss is the way that so many parts of society who are not literate engage with Buddhist culture. Texts, for so long, have been the possessions of a very small elite minority.”

Then, she goes on to talk about being embodied people, of dharma talks and the whole experience of those spaces, and focusing on the sensory experiences of those traditions.

I find that my experience of stumbling upon ideas that confirm what I was already exploring to be a signal of what Universe and Earth are communicating with me. It is a kind of experience of ubuntu. These events do not feel coincidental. They feel more like a participatory experience of material and embodied dialogue in spacetime. How did I select this particular podcast episode while exploring the theme of embodiment?