Circulating in difference: performances of publicity on and beyond a Yangon train

Abstract

Amid Myanmar's fraught democratic transition, some local Pentecostals took up new opportunities to publicly evangelize to Buddhists, efforts that were met mostly with indifference. This article explores the role of indifference in mediating encounters across difference. Drawing together scholarship on recognition and sincerity, it argues that these evangelists were occupied not just with the challenges of hailing an audience in a tentatively more open public sphere, albeit one shot through with heightened tension around religious belonging; they were also concerned with what I call the performance of publicity: the ways in which publicity is itself publicized, celebrated, circulated, and receivedespecially online.

Religious suasion: introduction to the special issue

“…Further still, suasion, as a generalized practice, often mediates ethical categories and life in the material world. For example, Handman (2018: 152) has argued that for many Christians evangelism plays the essential – even ‘criterial’, as she puts it – function of relating their day‐to‐day existence to God (see also Edwards 2022). This is arguably the case for other religious communities as well, as suasion itself – not just actors’ suasive strategies or methodologies – can be considered in the function it plays in binding together religious identities.…”

“…We want to shift our attention from theorizing religious change qua religious change to investigating the ways that religious actors themselves theorize and go about realizing the sorts of transformations they want to make in the world, including, but exceeding, attempts to convert others. Of course, there have been many attempts to make conversion more than just a transformation of the inner self (a few may include : Edwards 2022;Hefner 1993;Pelkmans 2009;Robbins 2004;Rogozen-Soltar 2019;Swift 2012;van der Veer 1995;Vilaça 2009), but past efforts, for the most part, cannot totally escape a reliance on personal conversion as the primary motivating impulse. Instead, by focusing on the actors' own strategies for bringing about change in other beings and worlds -on other people's suasive strategies -we can see a range of motivations, means, modalities of interaction, and teleologies of religious influence.…”