Pamela Klassen

Religion and memory on the land

News

Suppressing the Mad Elephant

Matt King, a scholar of Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism, asked me one day if I could help him to figure out the identity of a mysterious man from “Eng-a-leng” who appears in an account of an 1889 meeting between a Tibetan Lama and a Christian missionary as transcribed by a Mongolian monk in the early twentieth century. The results of our detective work can be found here, in History and Anthropology.
King, Matt, and Pamela Klassen. “Suppressing the Mad Elephant: Missionaries, Lamas, and the Mediation of Sacred Historiographies in the Tibetan Borderlands.” History and Anthropology 26, no. 5 (2015): 529–52.

Fantasies of Sovereignty: Civic Secularism in Canada

To ask whether the postcolonial is postsecular demands asking: for whom, where, and when? It is necessarily a local and a comparative question, in which the ‘post’ prefix suggests less that colonialism or secularism are ‘over,’ but that their enduring effects must be named, questioned, and denaturalized.

Klassen, Pamela. “Fantasies of Sovereignty: Civic Secularism in Canada.” Critical Research on Religion 3, no. 1 (2015): 41–56.

Blood: The Element of Christianity

 

Christianity — based not only on the crucifixion but also on the incarnation — is a complex social imaginary whose power depends on the combined control and celebration of the maternal body. Reading blood — conceptual or otherwise — through death without also reading it through birth has profound political consequences that reassert and even revitalize the violent innocence of Christianity that Anidjar seeks to critique.

For Blood: The Element of Christianity. A Forum on Gil Anidjar’s Blood: A Critique of Christianity, edited by Nina Caputo, I wrote a response entitled ‘Fertile Blood’; find it here.