ИСТИНА

The paper will examine the connected processes of copying, recasting, and fabrication of lithic inscriptions in the eighteenth-century Burma (roughly, from the 1730s to the 1790s) via the lenses of manuscript and epigraphic footprint of the period as well as of ripple effects of the eighteenth-century initiatives during the next century. The presentation seeks to complicate our understanding of the dynamics and context of the Konbaung court's keener interest in collecting and codifying information on the donations of land and labor made to Buddhist institutions in the past. So far, these efforts have been analyzed in relation to Konbaung fiscal policies and religious reform. At the same time, the data available on the actors involved in production and circulation of recopied and recast inscriptions as well as on the impact of epigraphic manuscripts on Konbaung historiographical and erudite literature opens up avenues for a discussion of bureaucratic functions and procedures of pre-colonial Burmese polity, its capacity to carry out data-gathering and inventorial projects, digest new information flows and capitalize on them. The agency of local administrative and monastic elites and their ability to trigger the court's initiatives or manipulate the court's agendas constitute another promising line of inquiry. Summing these explorations up, the presentation will reassess the relationship between the practices of royal governance, management of Buddhist estates, and the polity's ongoing venture of identity-making, highlighting political and conceptual, rather than economic underpinnings of the Konbaung effort to build and rematerialize a new locally-sourced and royally-dominated archive of stone slabs.