[Buddha-l] Book announcement

[Sally McAra]

Hi there,
I would like to announce the publication of my 
book in April this year (apologies for cross-posting).

Regards
Sally McAra

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Land of Beautiful Vision: Creating a Buddhist 
Sacred Place in New Zealand
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_Land of Beautiful Vision_ is the first 
book-length ethnography to address the role of 
material culture in contemporary adaptations of 
Buddhism and the first to focus on convert 
Buddhists in New Zealand. Sally McAra takes as her 
subject a fascinating instance of an ongoing 
creative process whereby a global religion is made 
locally meaningful through the construction of a 
Buddhist sacred place. She uses an in-depth case 
study of a small religious structure, a stupa, in 
rural New Zealand to explore larger issues related 
to the contemporary surge in interest in Buddhism 
and religious globalization.

Her research extends beyond the level of public 
discourse on Buddhism to investigate narratives of 
members of the Friends of the Western Buddhist 
Order (FWBO) about their relationship with the 
land, analyzing these and the FWBO's 
transformative project through a thematic focus on 
key symbolic landmarks at their site, 
Sudarshanaloka. In considering cross-cultural 
interactions resulting in syncretism or 
indigenization of alien religions, many 
anthropological studies concentrate on the unequal 
power relations between colonizing and colonized 
peoples. McAra extrapolates from this literature 
to look at a situation where the underlying power 
relations are quite different. She focuses on 
individuals in an organization whose members seek 
to appropriate knowledge from an "Eastern" 
tradition to remake their own society -- one 
shaped by its unresolved colonizing past.

In its exploration of the role of three key 
symbolic markers of relationship between the 
community, its motivating ideals, and the land it 
occupies, _Land of Beautiful Vision_ brings 
together the diverse themes of land, colonization, 
environment, and the relationship between Buddhism 
and indigenous spiritual entities. It contributes 
to material culture studies, landscape studies, 
religious studies, and anthropology of religion. 
In exploring the domestication of Buddhism in a 
new cultural setting, it will be of interest to 
anyone wanting to understand the rise of Buddhism 
in new sociocultural settings. It will also be of 
interest to scholars and students of 
cross-cultural religious translation and settler 
societies.

Book web pages:
http://hdl.handle.net/2292/330 (link to abstract 
and introduction)
http://tinyurl.com/y48lhl (University of Hawaii Press)
-- 
Sally McAra
PhD candidate
Department of Anthropology
The University of Auckland
NEW ZEALAND