Blayne Harcey

Popular religion, material culture, pilgrimage, sacred space and place, and ritual in South and South East Asian traditions specifically focusing on sites associated with the biography of the Buddha in India and Nepal, as well as the extended network of sites across the region.

My M.A. thesis focused on Adam's Peak in the central highlands of Sri Lanka as a multivalent place which mediates Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic narratives of the sacred footprint in situ there. 

My dissertation project, "Locating Lumbini: Transnational Buddhism and the Construction of World Heritage in Nepal" engages the Buddha’s birthplace at Lumbini, in the Terai region of Nepal, as a case study for exploring the complicated material outcomes of Buddhist encounter(s) with modernity. This research attempts to wrestle with the ways in which this popular site has become situated in what Feener and Fountain (2018) have termed the “religious-development nexus.” Manufactured as an imagined epicenter for pan-Buddhist ecumenicism beginning in the late 1960’s Lumbini has taken center stage in the formation of a transnational network of Buddhist actors and institutions. My project explores how the process of rediscovery, excavation, and development of the Buddha's birthplace has been shaped by, and is shaping, global Buddhism and its transnational movement of ideas, commodities, and people. Central to my investigation is a focus on the shifting material effects engendered by the logics of development operative within organizations like UNESCO, that have underwritten these projects of development in “third world” Asia. These uniquely modern visions for development have brought about deep transformations in the ways in which people inhabit these places and make sense of their significance.

My dissertation project focuses on the historical contingencies and contemporary resonances surrounding the ongoing development of the Buddha's birthplace at Lumbini in the Terai of Nepal. This project engages ongoing discourses in the field of Buddhist Studies concerning the Buddhist biographical genre, the production and maintenance of monastic and lay Buddhist spaces, and the transnational cultural flows of Buddhism. Focusing on Lumbini's modern (re)discovery and development attempts to highlight conjunctures between Buddhist placemaking practices and emergent "secular" forms of marking spaces as significant. Extending scholarship on the multivalence of Buddhist pilgrimage sites as "places in motion" and the Buddhist biographical episteme this research engages the "trans-locative" dimensions of Buddhism to highlight the ways in which attention to place-making has created the conditions of possibility for new articulations of minority Buddhist identity in Nepal. Research at Lumbini has the potential to engage broad questions regarding the relationship between Buddhism and secularity, the performance of pilgrimage, and cross-cultural exchange. The "religion-development nexus" at Lumbini provokes even more interdisciplinary conversations regarding the role of religion in the global marketplace, the commodification of "cultural" or "world" heritage as capital, and the hegemonic force of neoliberalism in transforming the practices of Buddhists across the globe. Lumbini also offers a compelling case study for exploring the regionalization of Buddhism and for rethinking some of the presumptions in the field regarding sectarian division, the preferential treatment of texts, and the overt linkage of Buddhist religious expression with majority national and cultural identity.