Nirmala Salgado's Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice is an ambitious attempt to rethink the scholarship on contemporary Buddhist nuns from a postfeminist and postcolonial perspective. Using Derrida's notion of “globalatinization” as deployed by Arvind-Pal Mandair, Salgado argues that many previous studies of Buddhist nuns have applied Western and feminist concepts rather simplistically to their analyses of female renunciants, thereby repeating a colonial appropriation of the Buddhist nuns they seek to represent. Even as Salgado admits that her own work is bound by similar discursive and disciplinary boundaries (she is, after all, trained and writing within the academy), she rejects the assumption that Buddhist nuns comprise a transnational “global sisterhood” seeking to empower women. Convincingly, Salgado argues that Buddhist nuns should be represented through their everyday practices and subaltern concerns, rather than through transnational feminist discourses or movements. Salgado is careful to avoid the tendency to lump nuns into a homogenous category. Yet she generalizes when she insists that “nuns may not consider themselves gendered” (p. 7) because one of her informants stated that she was not a woman but a renunciant, first and foremost. Her fine-grained analysis argues that an emphasis on feminism or gender is misplaced in Sri Lanka. In privileging her account of mundane renunciant experiences, she somewhat neglects the previous scholarship that described the material mechanics of meditating whilst also cooking, cleaning, and running hermitages.

Salgado's strongest chapters are those that deconstruct how scholars or activists have misread their renunciant subjects as engaged in feminist struggles rather than the micro-politics of the everyday that Salgado so compellingly sketches. Salgado's chapters on efforts to revive full ordination within Sri Lankan and Tibetan Buddhisms reveal important fissures between what activists seek—the struggle for full ordination—and the actual reality of hesitant nuns whose primary concerns may be moral practice, meditation, education, and material support. A chapter on the full ordination movement in Sri Lanka indicates that the moment had more to do with power struggles between monks and their lineages in Sri Lanka and abroad than with rights-based struggles by resistant Sri Lankan nuns. Salgado offers vivid scenes from an international conference in Hamburg, Germany, where Tibetan nuns, who had been silenced for much of the conference, finally spoke, insisting that food, alms, and religious training were more pressing needs than the higher ordination being advocated on their behalf. These chapters skillfully articulate the ways that transnational feminism can silence subaltern women in the name of empowerment.

Salgado expertly deconstructs the role of the Eight Revered Conditions or Rules, supposedly laid down by the Buddha as conditions for accepting the Buddha's stepmother as a nun and thereby founding the nuns' order. Salgado's interviews with female renunciants in Sri Lanka indicate grudging acceptance, indifference, or even ignorance of Rules they may not even be upholding. Salgado uncovers the contradictory logic by which many Sri Lankan nuns accept these Rules only because monks insist upon them as a basis for allowing nuns to ordain, even as elite nuns and scholars in Sri Lanka openly disavow the Rules based on myriad textual contradictions and inconsistencies. Yet Salgado stops short of exploring the ways that the male sangha insists upon the authenticity of Rules as a means of shoring up their exclusive claims to adjudicate their power over nuns. Instead, she argues that the authenticity of the Rules is less important than how they are deployed by nuns themselves. Yet Salgado's central thesis––that Sri Lankan renunciants are not part of a global feminist movement––requires her to overlook the ways that transnational debates have undermined or shifted monks' power relative to nuns in Sri Lanka.

Salgado asks whether householders and monks consider Sri Lankan ten precept holders (dasa sil mata) to be “true” renunciants. Here, she explores three related issues––the kinds of precepts held, robes worn, and terms used to describe female renunciants in contrast to novice monks or householder devotees (upasikas). She avoids a facile distinction between householder and monastic, even as the ambiguous category of female renunciant does hinge on the contrast between these and other categories in local discourse. Throughout, her analysis clearly shows that the category of renunciant is both created and propagated by the state and male monastics who legitimate their own power in the process of “helping” women interpellated as lacking in power or resources. She shows that state recognition and material sponsorship of nuns inadvertently led to efforts to promote full ordination (upasampada). These efforts misread nuns' willingness to truly renounce worldly goods and thereby gain the symbolic respect and freedom of the renunciant lifestyle. Interestingly, Salgado also notes that state support explicitly forbids nuns from discussing the issue of full ordination with monks but does not elaborate. The prohibition implies a palpable fear on behalf of the monks or state around the shifting power between monks and nuns that has now become a reality.

Overall, this book presents a welcome and exciting addition to the modern scholarship on Buddhist nuns in Asia.