Teravada budizam i rod u Indoneziji: (de)kolonijalizovan susret?
Theravada Buddhism and Gender in Indonesia: A (De)Colonized Encounter?

Summary/Abstract: This chapter represents a revised version of a paper composed and submitted as part of the course requirements in the duration of the author’s attendance of a PhD programme in Indonesia. Hence, the structure of the text reveals the thinking process, as well as the i eldwork method, in which the author devises her approach to exploring two Theravada Buddhist communities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, from a (postcolonial) feminist perspective of her non-Western subjectivity. h e latter is displayed through a genealogy of the historical conditions, hitherto academic training and wider political circumstances that informed her as an “outsider” to the Western liberal democracy, while the former is subjected to an ethnographic research designed to investigate the position of women in relation to theology, practice, and experience of Theravada Buddhist religion in contemporary Indonesia. The analysis of the collected ethnographic data renders an account of the ways in which the ethnic background, religion-related policies in Indonesia, dominant Theravada theology and institutions, as well as gender politics all combine in structuring the lines along which women in Theravada Buddhism are allowed to perform certain roles in their lived religious lives, while remaining excluded from others. The analysis of sources, however, displays how transnational feminist practices support the attempts of certain female Buddhist communities in Indonesia to win and secure the roles, such as that of bikkhuni, which are denied not only by the (traditional) socio-cultural gender-regulating norms, but also by the institutionalised Buddhist theology in Indonesia. In addition, age seems to play a significant role in reshaping the traditional exclusionary lines that prevent women from becoming religious leaders or institutionalised religious workers, for the informants who took part in this project, consisting of undergraduate or postgraduate students, express their belief in a more gender-balanced Theravada Buddhist theology, practice and overall politics for their future.

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