He turned our attention to pioneering studies by Adhemard Leclere and others that emphasized how religious meaning is produced in local linguistic and cultural contexts, as opposed to solely through a translocal Pali corpus. He pointed out that almost all European researchers of the period were engaged with local interlocutors, unacknowledged South and Southeast Asian scholars whose views gave shape to Western perceptions of Buddhism. By examining the divergent approaches of colonial-era European scholars of Buddhism in what is now Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia, Hallisey demonstrated how those that swam against the Orientalist current were pushed to the edges of academic discourse. Charles Hallisey's influential 1995 essay, "Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism," built on the concerns outlined by Collins and others to offer a bold reappraisal of the field and its nineteenth-century roots.
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