In How to Behave, Anne Hansen traces a shift in what Khmer Buddhist writers saw as the ethical and religious ideas most relevant to their time and place. In the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant form of Khmer religious imagination was of a morally constructed universe whose physical and temporal structures reflected ‘cycles of decline and regeneration that mirrored the contiguous decline and regeneration of adherence to the Dhamma among sentient beings’ (p. 20). By the 1930s, this had shifted to ‘a correct understanding of scripture … demonstrated through moral conduct in religious ritual and orderly life’ (pp. 1–2). This turn towards a rational, textual, everyday vision of Buddhist ethics was, Hansen argues, the result of the political and social upheavals of colonialism, growing links between Khmer Buddhists and the global Buddhist world, and the rise of print technologies and literacy in Cambodia. Hansen's study of the modernist movement in Khmer Buddhism thus explores how historical forces shaped and changed Khmer Buddhist ideas about the world and how best to exist in it.

This is an excellent book. Hansen's remarkable fluency in Theravada Buddhist thought and ideas is evident, and it gives her study a depth that is absent in many other historical approaches to religion in Southeast Asia. Hansen balances close readings of Buddhist texts with a careful consideration of their historical and intellectual trajectories, their social and technological modes of transmission and their ritual functions, all of which she rightly views as inseparable from the texts themselves. In this respect, Hansen employs a wide range of sources to complement Buddhist modernist texts. Particularly interesting are funeral biographies of Khmer monks, a genre that emerged in the 1920s, which give readers a clearer sense of the social side of this world of ideas. Hansen is also adept at critically reading French authors from the era, sidestepping the pitfalls of these texts to extract the rich ethnographic material that they contain.

A nuanced understanding of broader historical forces frames Hansen's arguments about texts and their meaning. The French colonial state had a strong influence on the Khmer Buddhist modernist movement both by regulating the movement of monks and the circulation of texts and also by supporting schools and institutes deemed compatible with colonial agendas. Hansen illuminates the French connection without falling prey to a common but misplaced argument about the colonial ‘invention’ of Southeast Asian religious modernity. She does so by considering the many transnational influences on Khmer Buddhism in this era, notably reforms in religious education and in the organisation and administration of the Sangha in Siam during the reigns of Mongkut and Chulalungkorn and the influences of these reforms on Khmer monks, both through the growing circulation of texts and through travel and study in Siam.

Hansen's study is a convincing picture of the ‘intercultural mimesis between a translocal circulation of ideas drawn from the Buddhist modernization project taking place in Siam, French imperial ideologies and polices in Indochina, and Khmer religious intellectual absorption with the problem of how to live as a modern Buddhist in authentic Theravāda terms’ (p. 111). Accordingly, this work's contributions to the study of colonial-era Southeast Asia are numerous. By demonstrating how Buddhism acted as a vehicle for understanding and responding to social change in colonial-era Cambodia, Hansen offers a powerful corrective to studies that approach the question of identity in modern Southeast Asia in primarily secular terms. This study is also an excellent model to approach the broader question of the production and circulation of ideas in colonial-era Southeast Asia, too often reduced to tensions between an ex nihilo Orientalism and indigenous responses. Hansen instead reveals how complex and reciprocal exchanges between local, colonial and transnational forces shaped intellectual life in this time and place.

If the book has weaknesses, they stem from its strengths. Hansen ends her study in the 1930s, when Buddhist modernist ideas ‘would cease to function as a modernism in the sense of an opposing critique, ethos or movement but increasingly as the dominant religious discourse’ (p. 181). Buddhism's place in Khmer nationalism is explicitly not Hansen's research interest, but the book does end a bit abruptly, and some general reflections on the relationship between Khmer Buddhism and post-colonial Cambodia would have been welcome. Finally, the subtlety of Hansen's picture of the intersections between Khmer Buddhism and the global trends and forces collectively referred to as ‘modernity’ makes her regular reference to theorists of this phenomenon who focus on the European context (notably David Harvey) a little puzzling. The theoretical parameters that this helps her to establish are diffuse, and they do not contribute much to the nuanced theoretical position that she ultimately constructs through her own case study. If anything, Hansen's work is proof that studies of global modernity need not assume as a starting point theoretical literature grounded in European case studies.