Erik W. Davis

American scholar of Buddhism and professor of religious studies at Macalester College whose research focuses on Cambodia.

Creator details
Also known as	Erik Davis
Roles	Scholar; Author; Educator
Based in	United States
Website	https://www.macalester.edu/religious-studies/facultystaff/erikdavis/
Subjects	Religion & Spiritual Life

Erik W. Davis is a professor of religious studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, whose work centers on Buddhism in Cambodia. He studies and teaches Buddhism, ritual and the theory of religion. His research covers rebirth and past-life memory, death and funeral practice, Buddhist boundaries, and the ties between religion, material life and political authority.

Education

Davis earned his bachelor's degree in religious studies at Macalester College in 1996, with an honors thesis titled "Monasticism and Women: Gender and Identity in Buddhism." He earned a master's degree in religious studies at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2000, with a thesis on memory, historical method and early Buddhism. He completed his doctorate in the history of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2009. His dissertation, "Treasures of the Buddha: Imagining Death and Life in Contemporary Cambodian Religion," was advised by Steven Collins.

Career

Davis lived in Cambodia from 2003 to 2006 during his first period of fieldwork. In 2004 and 2005 he advised the master's research program at the Buddhist Institute of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, where he volunteered as an adviser and instructor for the first group of Cambodian master's students. From 2005 to 2007 he directed the institute's Folklore Project. He managed ten trained researchers, who traveled to rural areas to record folktales from traditional storytellers, and the project published four volumes of the tales. In 2005 he also interviewed Nuon Chea in rural Cambodia. That interview is the basis of his article project "Nuon Chea's New Buddhism."

Davis joined Macalester College as a visiting instructor in 2007. He became an assistant professor in 2009 and an associate professor in 2015, and he is now a full professor. As of 2025, he chaired the Religious Studies department. His current research covers the development of early Buddhist sectarianism, meditative practices and philosophical thought, as well as ritual creativity in contemporary protest movements in Cambodia. His teaching projects include the course material How to Get to Nirvana and the workshop Our Primary Expertise.

Davis has Khmer-language skills and holds that knowing the language is important for anthropological research. He has served on committees and groups focused on Buddhism and Southeast Asia within the Association of Asian Studies and the American Academy of Religions. He is also an active member of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. He writes the blog Imagining the Real World on Cambodia, Buddhism and religion.

Works

Books

Deathpower: Buddhism's Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (Columbia University Press, 2016) is an ethnographic account of Cambodian Buddhist funeral ritual. It grew out of his dissertation, with major changes and new material from later visits to Cambodia, and it received the Association of Asian Studies First Book Subvention Grant. The book argues that monks transform harmful forces into resources of morality, power and fertility through ritual practice. Davis uses the term "deathpower" for the social power gained by people who deal with and act upon the dead. Buddhist monks are the group with the most cultural authority to do so. Among his cases is a malevolent spirit, a preay, that is captured, bound and placed under a Buddha image to protect a temple.

Davis coedited Sīmās: Foundations of Buddhist Religion with Jason A. Carbine, a volume published by the University of Hawaiʻi Press in 2022. A sīmā is a temple boundary that marks the place where the monastic community carries out its core legal acts, including ordination. The volume centers on sīmā traditions in Theravāda cultures, among them Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Each Other's Destiny: Rebirth and Relationship in Cambodian Buddhism is scheduled for publication by the University of Hawaiʻi Press in September 2026. It centers on six people Davis interviewed or researched between 2003 and 2006: children, adults and elders who have kept memories of past lives. Davis argues that karmic relationships, not individuals, are reborn. The cases include a ritual attempt to force a child who recalled being her deceased uncle to forget that past life, the claim by former Prime Minister Hun Sen to be a past Khmer king, and a popular lay teacher who professed to be Maitreya, the Buddha of the future.

Davis has also written and edited books on Buddhist funeral rituals, temple boundaries and folktales. With Cambodian collaborators he edited four volumes of new Khmer folktales, on judgment (2005) and on gender, tricksters and place (2006).

Articles and translation

• A microhistory of the life, death and desire of a Cambodian woman (2008)
• An essay on the Cambodian use of the word "mother" for authority figures outside the family, including men (2008)
• An article on money and spirit flows in Cambodia (2011)
• A chapter on the rag robe in Cambodian funeral ritual (2012)
• An article on two Sino-Khmer spirit mediums possessed by Khmer spirits (2012)
• An essay on a Buddhist ascetic who remembers past lives (2012)
• An article on kinship, past-life memory and autonomous children in Cambodian Buddhism (2015)
• A translation from Khmer into English of Hok Sokol's article "Monumental architecture and habitable homes" (2006)

See also

• Each Other's Destiny: Rebirth and Relationship in Cambodian Buddhism
• All creators

References