Located at the intersection between migration and religion, this conference will examine how migrants experience their spiritual lives and interpret religious practices and responsibilities. We seek to understand how different Asian communities pursue their religiosity when unfastened from local settings, and examine how religious congregations find new avenues of spirituality in a migratory context. Although scholarship on migration has extensively studied the importance of faith in the lives of transnational workers, refugees and diasporas, these studies have mainly investigated institutional elements of religious participation, structures, and networks that faith-based organizations provide. As a departure, we propose to shift attention to ritual, missionary and pastoral aspects of religion, and highlight the spiritual dimensions of migratory trajectories. Religiosity often transforms the experience of migration, refashioning narratives of displacement into journeys of spiritual awakening and missionary calling. We aim to explore what migrations and displacements do to devotional experiences, practices and duties, and how the affective dimensions of migration are addressed by old and new religious commitments. We propose to show how the spiritual and religious adopt new meanings in resettled contexts, challenging or reinforcing emotional and intellectual dispositions towards the Other. A multi‐disciplinary event that will address important questions in anthropology, religion and migration studies, this conference will interrogate the diverse ways in which internal and international migrations shape religion in resettled contexts.
World religions often possess the infrastructure that migrant communities require for religious worship and devotional practices, yet religious spaces and practices remain frequently contested, revealing important conflicts and divisions between communities that profess to share the same core beliefs. In light of these distinctions, categories such as Muslim, Hindu or Catholic, fail to provide useful insights when encompassing migrants with profoundly different linguistic, cultural, national and class backgrounds. The performance of rituals and ceremonies that trace their origins to distant homelands become a fundamental part of the spiritual wellbeing of migrant communities that refuse to substitute their traditions with generic, cross‐cultural devotional celebrations. Nonetheless, religious observance in a foreign land is not merely an effort to uphold traditional values; it is an important way of generating new meanings and re‐signifying the experience of migration. We invite participants to examine the multiple ways in which migrant communities pursue new and old spiritual commitments and how these activities factor in the quality of the migratory experience.
Studies on religion and migration indicate two main political and cultural approaches that define the diaspora and cut across denominational boundaries. The first is characterized by anxieties of impending loss and dissolution of tradition and religious identity, occasionally manifested in a heightened sense of religious duty and morality amongst Asian migrant communities. The second portray migration as a unique opportunity to improve the global reach of religious denominations and to upset the balance of power of creeds formerly bounded to regional traditions, for example with the increased exposure that religions have in the global religious marketplace.
Moreover, Asian religious denominations zealously take responsibility towards fellow migrants and towards those with whom migrants work with. Although Christianity provides important examples of “reverse missionary work,” Buddhist, Hindus and Muslims communities also reach out beyond the members of their communities in the diaspora. Religious societies and organizations encourage dialogue and offer religious education to diverse populations, where the work of non‐natives is a key aspect of migrants' agency capable of deeply transforming the spectrum of activities usually associated with migrant labor. While focusing on the experiences of lived religion in the diaspora, we are also interested in original, decentralized and small‐scale initiatives designed to promote particular religious faiths.
Taking these contrasts as our point of departure, this conference will investigate a) affective lives of migrant and displaced communities beyond conventional studies of religious diaspora b) changing notions of faith‐based community and religious affiliation in re‐settled contexts c) migrants’ decisions, actions and strategies that structure and transform religious practices and belongings.
The conference will address the following four lines of inquiry:
1. Which aspects of religious life can be shared across communities and which remain exclusively connected to local cultures and traditions?
Although adherents to world religions embrace the same faiths and doctrines, taking part in the same pastoral and social institutions – language, regional cults and national traditions are highly specific and can generate conflict when sharing places of worship and venues for social activities. In this thematic section we focus on how different migrant communities navigate the tensions between belonging to global religious institutions and celebrating unique regional traditions.
2. How are regional religious traditions and rituals reproduced and enacted through migration, displacement and re‐settlement?
Migrant communities often go to great lengths to preserve specific regional practices and replicate holy celebrations and devotions in their migratory destinations. In this section we examine how migrant communities organize to prepare appropriate meals, reproduce pilgrimages, transport ritual images and other devotional objects to their new locations and how they negotiate with local authorities to pursue these traditions.
3. What kind of migration strategies are implemented by those invested in religious proselytizing?
Increasing numbers of religious communities no longer see migration as a threat to the moral integrity of those who are away from their homeland and identify the receiving communities as a fertile ground for inter and intra‐religious exchanges. These range from initiating interfaith dialogues and showcasing religious rituals to those unfamiliar with foreign traditions; to using faithful migrants to reach out to members of the community who are distanced from their religion or using labor migration as an opportunity for missionary work.
4. How do religious communities finance their work and how do they find venues for their celebrations? Diasporic religious communities channel financial flows for devotional activities and for the movement of religious workers. We here focus on the material dimensions of transnational religious practice, support of local institutions vs. large global churches, and the infrastructures made available to diasporic communities to observe religious commitments.
Convenors
Dr Bernardo BROWN
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore E | aribeb@nus.edu.sg
18 AUGUST 2015 (TUESDAY)
09:00 – 09:15 REGISTRATION09:15 – 09:30 WELCOME & INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
HUANG Jianli | Asia Research Institute, and Department of History, National University of Singapore Bernardo BROWN | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
09:30 – 10:45 LEAD ADDRESS 1
Chairperson Bernardo BROWN | National University of Singapore
09:30 Kenneth DEAN
National University of Singapore
Ritual Sensation and Ritual Change: The Heng Hwa Spirit Medium Networks between Putian and Southeast Asia
10:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 10:45 – 11:15 MORNING TEA 11:15 – 13:15 PANEL 1
Chairperson Ronojoy SEN | National University of Singapore
11:15 Silvia VIGNATO
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Feeling Hindu: The Devotional Sivaist Aesthetic Matrix and the Failed Conversion to Hinduism in North Sumatra
11:45 Vineeta SINHA
National University of Singapore
Sojourneying Hindu Deities: Unbounded Efficacy
12:15 Amanda LUCIA
University of California-Riverside, USA
Saving Yogis: Missionizing Discourses and the Transnational Dissemination of Modern Postural Yoga
12:45 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 13:15 – 14:15 LUNCH
14:15 – 15:45 PANEL 2
Chairperson KWA Kiem-Kiok | East Asia School of Theology, Singapore
14:15 Bernardo BROWN
National University of Singapore
A Multicultural Church: Notes on Sri Lankan Transnational Workers and the Migrant Chaplaincy in Italy
14:45 Arkotong LONGKUMER University of Edinburgh, UK
“10/40 Window”: Naga Missionaries as Spiritual Migrants and the Asian Experience
15:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 15:45 – 16:15 AFTERNOON TEA 16:15 – 17:45 PANEL 3
Chairperson Anju Mary PAUL | National University of Singapore
16:15 Alexander HORSTMANN
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
The Culture and Landscape of the Humanitarian Economy among the Karen (Kayin) in the Borderland of Southeast Myanmar and Northwest Thailand
16:45 HUANG Weishan
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Capital-linked Migrants and Buddhist Evangelism:
A Case Study of a Transnational Lay Movement in Shanghai 17:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
17:45 END OF DAY 1
19 AUGUST 2015 (WEDNESDAY)
09:15 – 09:30 REGISTRATION09:30 – 10:45 LEAD ADDRESS 2
Chairperson Malini SUR | National University of Singapore
09:30 Janet HOSKINS
University of Southern California, USA
Sacralizing the Diaspora: Many Ways to Leave your Country 10:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
10:45 – 11:15 MORNING TEA 11:15 – 12:45 PANEL 4
Chairperson Francis LIM | Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
11:15 Ester GALLO
Gediz University, Turkey
Similar but not Quite the Same: Migration, Masculinity and “Asian Catholicism” in the Holy Centre of Rome
11:45 Bindi SHAH
University of Southampton, UK, and National University of Singapore
Converging Religious Practices, Negotiating Hegemonic Gender Identities: Second-generation Jain Women and Men in Britain and USA
12:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 12:45 – 13:45 LUNCH
13:45 – 15:15 PANEL 5
Chairperson Teresita CRUZ-DEL ROSARIO | National University of Singapore
13:45 Bubbles Beverly Neo ASOR National University of Singapore
“Empowering” Filipino Catholic Migrant Communities in South Korea
14:15 Jagath Bandara PATHIRAGE
University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Charles Darwin University, Australia
Liberalizing the Boundaries: Reconfiguration of Religious Beliefs and Practices among Sri Lankan Immigrants in Australia
14:45 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 15:15 – 15:45 AFTERNOON TEA 15:45 – 17:15 PANEL 6
Chairperson Nurfadzilah YAHAYA | National University of Singapore
15:45 Attiya AHMAD
The George Washington University, USA
Everyday Conversions through the Household:
Da’wa, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait
16:15 Diana WONG
Independent Scholar, Malaysia
What’s in a Name: From Hui to Chinese Muslim in the Diaspora
16:45 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 17:15 END OF CONFERENCE
Ritual Sensation and Ritual Change:
The Heng Hwa Spirit Medium Networks between Putian and Southeast Asia
Kenneth Dean
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore
chshead@nus.edu.sg
This paper explores effects of migration on the preservation and change of ritual traditions, focusing on the Henghwa (Xinghua prefecture: Putian and Xianyou counties, Fujian) spirit medium networks that spread from the Fujian coast to Singapore, Sumatra, Java, Serembang, and Kuching from the 1930s to the 1990s. The most complete set of altars of the variant ritual traditions found in Putian is in the Temple of the Eastern Peak in Medan – far more systematically preserved and presented than in Putian. Ritual traditions were preserved in Southeast Asia throughout the period of the ban on ritual activity in Putian during the Cultural Revolution. However, Southeast Asia was also a site for ritual changes in this tradition, including the elaboration of new roles for women, who developed a parallel set of initiation rites to those of the collectively trained male mediums and altar associates. These innovations are gradually making their way back to Putian in the latest instance of a long term historical circulation of ritual practices and institutions. Meanwhile, individuals now move and live within the network of Henghwa trade associations, and can receive spirit medium training in Putian or in Singapore. The role of spirit writing in these processes will be examined, and the power of these ritual traditions to provide collective identity within the diaspora will be explored. The intensive ritual sensations of the training sessions (held within locked temples for several days in a row) will be theorized in relation to ideas of syncretic fields of force.
Kenneth DEAN is Professor and Head of the Department of Chinese Studies and a Senior Researcher at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. He is Lee Chair and James McGill Professor Emeritus of McGill University. Prof Dean is the author of several books on Daoism and Chinese popular religion, including Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plains: Vol. 1: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods,
Vol. 2: A Survey of Village Temples and Ritual Activities, Leiden: Brill, 2010 (with Zheng Zhenman); Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: The Quanzhou Region, 3 vols., Fuzhou: 2004 (with Zheng
Zhenman); Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China, Princeton: 1998; Epigraphical
Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: The Xinghua Region; Fuzhou 1995 (with Zheng Zhenman); Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China, Princeton 1993; and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Brian Massumi), Autonomedia, New York. 1992. He directed Bored in Heaven: a film about ritual sensation (Dean 2010), an 80 minute documentary film on ritual celebrations
around Chinese New Years in Putian, Fujian, China. His current research concerns transnational trust and temple networks linking Singapore Chinese temples to Southeast China and Southeast Asia. As part of this project, he is conducting a survey of 800 Chinese temples in Singapore. He plans to publish a collection of stone inscriptions from these temples with NUS Press next year, entitled Chinese Epigraphy of Singapore:
Feeling Hindu: The Devotional Sivaist Aesthetic Matrix and
the Failed Conversion to Hinduism in North Sumatra
Silvia Vignato
Department of Human Science for Education “Riccardo Massa”, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
silvia.vignato@unimib.it
This paper concerns the relationship between second to third generation Tamil Hindu migrants to Medan and some Indonesian people’s conversion to Hinduism in North Sumatra, which I studied between 1991 and 1998. The question at its core concerns the tension between local cults and world religions or, to put it in an old style Indonesian phrasing, between adat and agama. I shall examine early embodied experiences.
Taking the example of the sacrificial device in order to underline how the emotional and sensorial early experience of Hindu sacrifice enabled the young Indonesian Tamil, third generation migrants, to feel Indian and Hindu, whereas the absence of it barred the Karo from the possibility to separate what is Hindu from what is Indian, much though they cared for conversion. And yet, sharing an environmental sensorial frame (rural or semirural environment, access to rivers even in cities, rice eating) still opened a way to a common religious organization. This never happened because religion must have a political root and in this case, it didn’t.
I shall describe how the sudden invasion of Indian images through then quite rough media (videotapes) has pushed the Tamil to increase their Indianness. The first circulation of video recorded material from India and Malaysia has empowered younger generations as individual and genealogical memories, rural and complex, lost relevance to an increasingly globalized reservoir, accessible by anybody with the necessary technological skills. Religion-wise, Hindu Tamil Indonesians have become diasporic Indians. At the same time, the resisting
Karo have found in Christianity an easier dialogue with their tradition.
Silvia VIGNATO is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Department of Human Science for Education “Riccardo Massa”, Università di Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB). She teaches undergraduate and graduate students and supervises MA and PhD thesis focused on Southeast Asia. Her actual research interest is on subjectivity as related to gender, evolving structures of families (with a focus on matrilocality) and unattached children in Indonesia (Aceh) and Malaysia. She examines marginal environments and considers issues of work and unemployment. Beside a monograph about Indonesian Tamil migrants, other Sumatra ethnic minorities and their levels of subjective integration into the State, she has published articles about Malaysian factory workers and manpower agents for migrants and about post-conflict and post-disaster young Acehenese people (children, teenagers, young parents). Since 2012 she is Work Package Leader in Seatide (Southeast Asia: Trajectories of Inclusion, Dynamics of Exclusion), 7th Frame Project of the European Commission.
Sojourneying Hindu Deities: Unbounded Efficacy
Vineeta Sinha
Department of Sociology, and South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore
socvs@nus.edu.sg
Much of the literature on migration and religion is anthropocentric, focusing on the movement of humans across national boundaries and querying how such flows also enable the export of religious practices, institutions, sentiments, ideologies and solidarities. The idea of moving deities is not alien for Hindus. A great deal of festival Hinduism sees “utsav” (processional) versions/manifestations of Hindu divinities temporarily venturing beyond their secular abodes. These outings serve to “please” the deity as well as benefit spectators who imbibe the deity’s divine power. However, this paper examines the phenomenon of globally sojourneying Hindu deities–not as a by-product of human mobilities, or an accompanying move–but as an independent phenomenon, consciously and deliberately planned to achieve particular outcomes. This demonstrates a particular religious logic and ambition at work; its success rests on tremendous financial investment and secular labour as well as effective negotiation of bureaucratic and administrative terrains, unlike the movement of humans.
The paper is grounded ethnographically in my examination of the first ever Singapore visit of the “Utsavamurthis” (processional deities) of Thiruchendur Sri Murugan, Sri Valli and Sri Dheivaanai from the Chendur Murugan Seva Trust, Thiruchendur. The divine visit, from 29 May to 7 June 2015, is hosted by Singapore’s Arulmigu Velmurugan Gnanamueeswarar Temple. This is one of the 6 most prominent Murugan temples in South India and the visit of these deities to Singapore’s shores has been presented as a visit to our nation, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year. “We welcome all devotees to be part of this memorable event to mark SG50 and receive blessings of the Lord and pray for Singapore's continued progress and prosperity and your family's well-being”, suggesting that the event is momentous for Singapore as well as the Hindu community therein. Moving away from the idea of religious processions, I examine a different variant of
the phenomenon of “gods on the move”. Relying on ethnographic details of the visit of Thiruchendur Murugan
to Singapore, I argue that this voyage across national boundaries registers several critical moves: it attempts to spread divine power and mark divine territory, enhance unity and solidarity amongst devotees, lead to the formation of new communities and demonstrate not only cosmic but transnational efficacy of deities beyond particular national borders. I suggest that even as trans-global Hindu communities are necessarily embedded within discrete boundaries of nation-states, their sense of religious connectivity with sentiments, solidarities and ideologies is by no means contained in these frames and assumes global even cosmic proportions.
Vineeta SINHA is Head and Professor at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Head of Department at the South Asian Studies Programme, NUS. Her research and teaching interests include the following areas: Hindu religiosity in the diaspora; religion-state encounters; religion, commodification and consumption; history and practice of sociology; critique of concepts and categories in the social sciences; rethinking the teaching of classical sociological theory. Her publications straddle diverse platforms, including monographs, articles in peer-reviewed journals, contributions in special issues of journals, book chapters in edited volumes, book reviews and encyclopedia entries. She has published three monographs thus far: A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore (Singapore University Press & Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2005); Religion and Commodification:
Merchandising Diasporic Hinduism (Routledge, 2010); Religion-State Encounters in Hindu Domains: From the Straits Settlements to Singapore (Springer, 2011). Currently, she is co-editor of the Asian Journal of Social Science (Brill), the Monograph Series, Social Sciences in Asia (Brill) and the Routledge International Library of
Sociology. Her publishing portfolio includes the following appointments: Editorial Board member of the Sociopedia.isa, Asia-Pacific Journal of Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism, E-Journal of the Indian Sociological Society and SAGE Studies in International Sociology.
Saving Yogis: Missionizing Discourses and the Transnational Dissemination
of Modern Postural Yoga
Amanda Lucia
Department of Religious Studies, University of California-Riverside, USA amanda.lucia@ucr.edu
In multiple global arenas, advocates for the practice of modern postural yoga must represent itsrituals, ideologies, and practices as other than religion in order to justify its presence in secular spaces. From the elimination of the Surya Namaskar and the chanting of “Oṃ” in India’s recent International Yoga Day to the legal cases involving the K-12 public schools in Encinitas, California (USA), the very sustainability of modern postural yoga depends upon its construction as a universal practice, divorced from any singular and exclusive religion. Setting aside thedebates about the secularity or religiosity of modern postural yoga, this paper analyzes closely the rubrics within which modern postural yoga has been represented and disseminated in transnational global networks. Through an analysis of the discursive rhetoric and themethodological tactics that postural yoga pioneers employed (and their protégées continue to employ), the author aims to show how yoga was actively transformed into a purportedly universal practice. Its reconstruction as a “transposable practice” enabled these modern yogis to transplant it into multiple environments, which contributed to its contemporary global reach. Still, its relation to religion and its Indic roots continues to be a focus of political debate in multiplecontexts. But while modern postural yoga may have successfully distanced itself from Indicreligious traditions, its method of dissemination has adopted religious tactics of evangelicalproselytization. The universalization of modern postural yoga should not be viewed as a moveaway from religion, but rather as a navigational tactic of global proportion that resemblestraditional religious modes of dissemination and expansion.
Amanda LUCIA’s research engages transnational encounters between Hinduism and American religions. In studying contemporary global guru movements and American appropriations of Hinduism, her research and teaching focuses on new religious movements, gender, immigration, ethnicity, globalization, postcolonial theory, and ethnographic methodology. Her first book is an ethnographic account of Mata Amritanandamayi’s guru movement in the United States, entitled Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (2014). Lucia’s current book project, American Yogis: Play, Representation, and Authenticity, investigates the creation of sacred space and subjectivity through cultural appropriation in contemporary transformational and yoga festivals in the United States. This focus on festival, space, and display complements her ethnographic research conducted at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India 2013 and at religious festivals in immigrant communities in Southern California as the Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Immigration and Religion at UCR. Her articles and reviews have been published widely in top journals in the field.
A Multicultural Church:
Notes on Sri Lankan Transnational Workers and the Migrant Chaplaincy in Italy
Bernardo Brown
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore aribeb@nus.edu.sg
After several decades of dwindling numbers of churchgoers and the apparently irreversible trend towards downsizing of institutional infrastructure and personnel, European Catholicism has received an unexpected reinvigoration with the arrival of tens of thousands of practicing Catholics from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Aware of the changing ethnic, linguistic and racial landscape of local parishes, the Vatican developed and implemented a number of policies to welcome the new diversity brought to the Church by transnational labor migrants. Some of these initiatives to deal with cultural diversity have mirrored governmental policies of multiculturalism, leading local churches to stumble into similar obstacles and resistances as those faced by European states.
An ethnographic examination of the Sri Lankan Chaplaincy in Rome, this paper aims to address the tensions that multicultural strategies have raised within local parishes and between native and foreign Catholic communities. Ethnic chaplaincies in different Italian cities celebrate mass in a variety of languages and encourage migrants to replicate national traditions, festivities and devotions. By taking a multicultural approach that privileges notions of authenticity, inter-cultural dialogues are discouraged, promoting the emergence of “immigrant churches” that have a peripheral role in Italian society.
I analyze how Ecclesiastical canon law has incorporated a multicultural discourse that highlights cultural difference and privileges the reproduction of indigenous social dynamics as key to the sustained growth of Catholic communities outside the northern hemisphere. However, some voices suggest that the faith and devotion of Catholic immigrants should not be protected or insulated from European influences but channelled towards inspiring a religious reawakening in the secular North. In this paper, I discuss how these two approaches are manifested within the Sinhalese migrant community living in Italy, and how its ramifications are played out in Sri Lankan hometowns.
Bernardo BROWN is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, affiliated with the Religion and Globalization and the Asian Migrations clusters. His work on Sri Lankan Catholic return migration has recently appeared in Contemporary South Asia (2014), Ethnography (2015) and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2015). His current research projects focus on Catholic seminaries and priestly vocations in South and Southeast Asia. He received an MA from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Cornell University. Before joining ARI, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden.
“10/40 Window”:
Naga Missionaries as Spiritual Migrants and the Asian Experience
Arkotong Longkumer
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, UK a.longkumer@ed.ac.uk
The aim of this paper is to discuss the ways in which Christianity continues to challenge identities in Asia. It will take as a starting point the Indian state of Nagaland in the eastern Himalayas, one of the few Christian states in India. Partly due to the strong “new divinity” theology introduced in the 19th century by American Baptist missionaries, which emphasized the view that Christ’s return would not be a cataclysmic event, but would be achieved through benevolent activities, social reform, and missionary outreach. Coupled with the subsequent rise of Christianity as a political and cultural identity, alongside the military unrest in the region, the Nagas have developed a strong messianic Christianity infused with an aim to missionize Asia–referring to what is widely known as the “10/40 window”–with more than 1 billion potential converts. This preliminary enquiry will examine the role of Naga Baptist missionaries as “spiritual migrants” to specific parts of Asia - China, Burma, Thailand, and Laos. It will focus on three questions: 1) what motivates these missionaries; 2) in what ways do missionaries negotiate and navigate the worlds beyond their immediate context; 3) and finally, how do these processes relate to the broader ideas of mission, based on the nexus between territorial and cosmic, covenant and fulfilment, and national and transnational.
Arkotong LONGKUMER is an anthropologist, specializing in South/Southeast Asian religion and culture. His research and teaching interests lie in the intersection between local religions, Hinduism and Christianities. He is also interested in nationalism, transnationalism, the performance of identity, and the politics of place in India. His research is very much at the interface between the different disciplines of anthropology, cultural and religious studies, and history. He is Lecturer at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh.
The Culture and Landscape of the Humanitarian Economy among the Karen (Kayin)
in the Borderland of Southeast Myanmar and Northwest Thailand
Alexander Horstmann
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, and Center for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
fnt592@hum.ku.dk
Recent work has highlighted the central position of religion for victims of forced migration, who often use religion as a spiritual and material resource (or compass, in the words of Thomas Tweed) in their new home and in their transnational connections that relating them to home. Building a place of worship is among the first practices that migrants and refugees do for re-constructing a home in exile and for recalling religious ritual - closely attached to the kinetics of place and place making. My work has focused on the navigation of the civil Karen population in Southeastern Burma who have been squeezed between the Burmese military and the Karen militia which all put pressure on the Karen villagers. Religious leaders, shamans, pastors and monks all exercise great authorities among Karen communities and clerical leaders, Buddhist and Christian, are active in providing a safe sanctuary for displaced villagers.
I consider the notion of home from various, inter-connecting levels. First of all, home is seen as a comfortable nest, and villagers often have a nostalgic relationship for their lost homes. But home has also a wider notion of a Karen nation that remains unrealized. Religion is crucial to the place-making in the new home, in transnational connections to the original home or the new home in the refugee camp. In imagining and aspiring a home on the national level, religion also feeds Karen ethno-nationalism. So, the paper also looks at how religious leaders are involved into political connotations of a Karen homeland.
The paper thus explores how religion feeds and gives content to different notions of home on different levels, local, national and global, and how the Diaspora in the refugee camps, in humanitarian organizations and in the resettled Karen communities in the West contribute to a religious long-distance nationalism. The paper builds on some ethnographic vignettes to illustrate the theoretical framework that merges and brings into communication mobility, the notion of home and the religious experience and transformation of personhood in Asia. While much literature on transnational migration centers on mobility, my contribution to this workshop rather highlights the way that local reinterpretations of Christianity and Buddhism in the diaspora and in exile become the focus of nationalist aspirations and the creation of familiarity and cohesion in unfamiliar and hostile lands. Religious ritual thus becomes a showcase for transforming spaces of despair and alienation into spaces of hope.
Alexander HORSTMANN is Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies and affiliated with AMIS (Center for Advanced Migration Studies) at the University of Copenhagen. He is the co-editor of Building Noah’s Ark for Migrants, Refugees and Religious Communities, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015, and numerous articles on religion, migration and identity in Southeastern Burma.
Capital-linked Migrants and Buddhist Evangelism:
A Case Study of a Transnational Lay Movement in Shanghai
Huang Weishan
Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong weishanhuang@arts.cuhk.edu.hk
A process of capitalist modernity in Shanghai has taken place since the late 1980s. While most scholarship argues that modern Chinese cities are secular national and capitalist projects, my research will present a counter view to this argument by offering a case study of the development of public and private religious sites in Shanghai carried out by capital-linked migrants since the 1990s. In this essay, I will explore the ways in which a transnational religious movement inhabits, adapts, and negotiates with secular forms of post-communist state regulation and urban restructuring. Firstly, I have found that capital-linked migrants have been pioneers of transnational production in both private sectors and religious education in Shanghai, with these foreign passport-holders migrating with aspirations of both entrepreneurship and (Buddhist) evangelism. Secondly, my research indicates that there is an accelerated process of indigenization of transnational Buddhist movements, such as Tzu Chi, in China.
HUANG Weishan is Sociologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies (CRS) at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work mainly focuses on transnational religious movements, the formation of immigrant community, and religious symbolizations of space in New York and Shanghai City. One of her joint research projects was to inquire as to how culture and economics intertwined in urban re-structuring before and after the 1990 recession in New York City. She is the co-editor of the book, Ecology of
Faith in the New York City (Indiana University Press, 2013). Her current research at CRS is funded by the Chiang
Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange from 2013 to 2015 and aims to research the globalization/expansion of Taiwanese religion(s). In particular, she is interested in examining the process of the de-territorialization and the localization of reformed Buddhism and Protestant Ethic carried out by Taiwanese entrepreneurs at the intersection of transnational migration and the global division of labor in China in the last 20 years.
Sacralizing the Diaspora: Many Ways to Leave your Country
Janet Hoskins
Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California, USA jhoskins@usc.edu
People who leave their own country to travel to another one may narrate the reasons for their departure in a number of ways: Many argue that they were compelled to leave by political repression, poverty or ethnic exclusion, others that they were moved to do so to further some higher religious purpose, and others present their motives as purely instrumental - “seeking a better life”. I have earlier described these narrative strategies as stories of exile, exodus and emigration. But the stories themselves can change over time, since the reasons for leaving are almost always complicated and multi-faceted. Each “migration story” is in fact a work in process, in which emphasis is often shifted, adjusted to current circumstances, and edited retrospectively to fit present circumstances.
Based on research with Vietnamese diasporic communities in the United States, Canada and France, I examine how two different “indigenous religions”–the syncretistic, modernist followers of Caodaism, and the more ritualistic, traditionalist followers of Đạo Mẫu (“the way of the Mother Goddess”)–have provided narrative frames for understanding the experience of leaving one’s country, and how these narrative frames also provide ways of “returning” (at least conceptually) to the homeland. I argue that new rituals emerge to “sacralize the diaspora”, craft new interpretations of religious symbolism and provide an innovative response to displacement.
Janet HOSKINS is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California. Her research interests are defined around several overlapping themes, each of which draws on a separate set of interdisciplinary connections: (1) indigenous representations of the past and of time, (2) the relation between gender, exchange and narrative, and (3) colonial and postcolonial theory, with specific reference to Caodaism, a new universal religion born in French Indochina in 1926. Her first book The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on
Calendars, History and Exchange (winner of the 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies) was both an
ethnographic study of the politics of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of fieldwork with the Kodi people of Sumba, it examined indigenous calendars, historical narratives and new symbols of nationalist unity to show how a complex ancestral heritage has been changed in the contemporary context. Her second book, Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996), continued this interest in history and anthropology by examining the reasons why headhunting rituals are still performed in the postcolonial era, several generations after pacification. These new instances suggest that headhunting is a powerful symbolic trope that resonates throughout the region, pitting a heritage of violent raids against new anxieties about domination by external political forces. Her third book Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of
People's Lives (1998) explores the relationship between persons and their possessions, and in particular the
ways in which both men and women may choose to tell their own life histories by using a domestic object as a pivot for narrative articulation. It draws on the fields of gender studies, cultural studies, literary analysis and exchange theory, and opposes forms of biographic identification to the different forms of materialism in Western consumerism. Her latest book, The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes
Transpacific Caodaism (2015), looks at the changing historical contexts of a new millenarian religion that
articulated an Asian synthesis of world religions in the context of anti-colonial resistance, the American war in Vietnam, and the post 1975 diaspora. She has also edited, with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific
Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (2014), which develops a new perspective on relations between Asia,
Similar but not Quite the Same:
Migration, Masculinity and “Asian Catholicism” in the Holy Centre of Rome
Ester Gallo
Department of Sociology, Gediz University, Turkey ester.gallo@gediz.edu.tr
Social sciences’ renewed interest on religions that followed the emergence of public religions and the growth of migrant flows has been accompanied by the recognition that Catholicism is one of the most understudied religions, particularly in “Western” countries. Different reasons can be put forward for this, ranging from socio-anthropological privileged gaze on religions in colonial destinations to disciplinary orientation towards less-institutionalized Christian confessions. As a result, relatively little is known about how the longstanding globalisation of Catholicism has transformed this religion in the present.
In this context, the study of the link between Asian migration and Catholicism holds relevance not only because of the significant share of Catholic Asian migrants in contexts like mainland Europe, and for migrants’ quest for public visibility. Its importance also lies in the fact that in post-Conciliar restructuring of the Catholic Church Asian countries have been simultaneously identified as a source of inspiration for a purified “Western religiosity” and as target destinations for new evangelical expansions.
This paper draws from a recently started ethnographic research in Rome with Indian and Filipino men and with Catholic institutions and explores the nexus between religion, masculinity and transnational mobility. It preliminarily suggests how membership into Italian Catholic congregations allows Asian migrant men to appeal to a more “universalist” morality and to more “legitimate” gendered subjectivities, while also to withdraw from demeaning representations as “ethnic Catholics” which is promoted in the Italian public sphere. The paper also analyses how Asian men who are religiously trained in Italy become potential agents of re-evangelizations to be sent “back” to India or the Philippines by Italian Catholic institutions. In the process, transnational mobility does not only mould deep transformations in everyday gendered religiosity, but also indicates ongoing and potential changes in the institutional features of this world religion.
Ester GALLO is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Department of Sociology, Gediz University (Turkey). Her research interests cut across migration, religion, kinship, memory and middle classes, with specific reference to South India and Mediterranean Europe. On these topics, she has published in international journals and recently edited a book titled Migration and Religion in Europe: Comparative
Perspectives on South Asian Experiences (Ashgate 2014). She is currently writing with Francesca Scrinzi a book
on migration, masculinity and domestic labour (Palgrave - Migration, Diaspora and Citizenship Series) and finalizing a monograph on colonialism, middle-class memories and kinship in South India. She plans to develop a future comparative research project on Catholicism, politics and kinship in Europe and Asia.
Converging Religious Practices, Negotiating Hegemonic Gender Identities:
Second-generation Jain Women and Men in Britain and USA
Bindi Shah
Department of Sociology, University of Southampton, UK, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
aribvs@nus.edu.sg
This paper aims to understand shifts in religious practices among second-generation Jain women and men in late modern societies. To investigate this aim, I do not adopt a World Religions framework, but view religion as a social and cultural construct; religious beliefs and practices are the products of social interactions, structures and processes, and vary according to social context, time and place. Drawing on qualitative data collected between 2008-2010 as part of a larger project on second-generation Jains in Britain and USA, I argue that there is a shift in lay Jain practices in the diaspora, leading to a gender convergence. This shift is facilitated by two sets of socio-cultural transformations occurring in the latter half of the 20th century. The first set of socio-cultural transformations can be found within the Jain tradition itself; particularly the rise of neo-orthodox Jainism, which is more prominent outside of India among the Jain diaspora. The second set of socio-cultural transformations are found in late modern societies, and involve the liberalisation in sexual attitudes and advent of feminism that has brought about shifts in women’s roles and opportunities in the West, as well as processes of “detraditionalisation” and individualisation in the wider society.
These findings contrast with previous research in India with Jain laity, which has found that women were much more involved in overt and personal religious activities than men. These patterns among Jain laity in India were also found among the parents’ generation in Britain in early research by Banks (1991), and as indicated by respondents participating in my own research. Moreover, Jain nuns greatly outnumber monks, and research in India suggests that asceticism provides an avenue to circumvent rigid gender hierarchies as well as to articulate identities, desires and female honour. While Jain nuns are subordinate to monks in terms of temporal power, nuns have much greater authority over Jain laity due to their greater numbers.
I argue that socio-cultural transformations in the Jain tradition and in late modern societies complement each other and facilitate a convergence in religious practices among young Jain men and women in Britain and USA. These socio-cultural transformations enable young Jains to integrate religiosity into their everyday lives, and in so doing, they are negotiating hegemonic femininities and masculinities in late modern societies.
Bindi SHAH was born in Kenya and has lived substantial portions of her life in Kenya, the UK and the United States. She has a multi-disciplinary academic background, having trained in Geography at the London School of Economics, MA in Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, and PhD in Sociology at University of California-Davis, USA. Her first book Laotian Daughters: Working Toward Community, Belonging and
Environmental Justice, which has received two prizes, focuses on experiences of adaptation and acculturation
among second-generation Laotian young women, and their engagement with community politics and Asian American activism. She has begun work on a new book on the role and significance of Jainism and Jain organisations in the lives of second-generation Jains in the UK and USA, titled “Religion, Identity & Belonging
in the Diaspora: Young Jains in Britain and USA”. She has also written journal articles on the ways in which
ethnicity, religion and gender construct identity, belonging and citizenship among the children of Asian immigrants in the UK and USA, as well as on diasporic faith spaces.
“Empowering” Filipino Catholic Migrant Communities in South Korea
Bubbles Beverly Neo Asor
Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore socabbn@nus.edu.sg
South Korea has emerged as one of the most “coveted” destinations for migrants because of high salary, relatively good working condition and strong influence of Korean “wave” in Asia. The increase in migrant population also marks the growth and visibility of migrant communities and migration-related organizations. This paper focuses on Filipino migrants which comprise one of the most organized and visible migrant communities in South Korea. Based on a 13-month fieldwork in four South Korean cities, I examine how Filipino Catholic migrants appropriate and use their religiosity and spiritual lives not only to make sense of their migration experiences but also to “empower” themselves at the individual and community levels. I discuss how Filipino migrants’ interpretation of individual empowerment based on revitalized religiosity and newfound spiritual calling is transmuted into community empowerment when they see the need to “share their blessings” to the larger community. Catholic migrant communities serve as strategic sites for individual migrants to move out of passive positionality into a more active state with more options and power to control their lives and shape their environment. But at the same time these communities may also reproduce disempowerment by curbing and restraining migrants’ capacity for individual empowerment. By looking at this contradiction, this paper questions romanticized depictions of empowerment in enabling migrant trajectories.
Bubbles Beverly Neo ASOR is a PhD Candidate with the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She is currently finishing her PhD dissertation on the role of the Catholic Church as a migrant-serving mediating structure in South Korea. Her research interests include religion and migration, state-civil society relations, migrant organizations and transnational communities. She previously taught at the University of the Philippines.
Liberalizing the Boundaries:
Reconfiguration of Religious Beliefs and Practices among
Sri Lankan Immigrants in Australia
Jagath Bandara Pathirage
Department of Sociology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University, Australia
jagathbandara.pathirage@cdu.edu.au
Reconsideration of religion within migrants’ lives intersects with the notion of mobility, with its shifting meaning of time and space as well as changes of behavior in mundane life. In a peaceful social environment, radical interpretation of religious beliefs or practices is reluctantly tolerated or subject to repercussions. Nonetheless, long-term migration and transnational practices bring alternatives or changes in religious belief and practices. These interpretations are possible in the context of the migrants’ dislocation from usual practices. In such a context, different aspects of religious interpretations are tolerated. Boundaries of ritual practices and the meaning of inclusion and exclusion are negotiated. Boundaries of participation are relaxed. The divisionsbetween sacred and profane are blurred or reinterpreted. Through participation, migrants enter into temporality of religious enactment. Based on ethnographic methodology this paper will explain the changes in religious behavior among Sri Lankan immigrants in Darwin in Australia. The paper will examine the ways in which religious beliefs and practices are redefined and reconfigured through data gathered during participant observation, as well as in-depth interviews which were held mainly among Buddhists during a religious event held at a Buddhist temple in Darwin as well asin family spaces.
Jagath Bandara PATHIRAGE teaches anthropology at the Department of Sociology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He completed his BA Honors in Sociology at the University of Colombo and obtained an MSc in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently reading for his Doctoral studies in Anthropology at Charles Darwin University in Australia. His PhD explores how Sri Lankan immigrants in Australia perceive the meaning of “Home” and “Belonging” in the context of transnational practices. He was a visiting scholar to Centre for Refugee Studies at York University in Canada from May to July 2015 and was Senior Research Fellow to Marga Institute in Sri Lanka from 2008 to 2011. He has been researching in the field of migration since 2007.
Everyday Conversions through the Household:
Da’wa, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait
Attiya Ahmad
Department of Anthropology, The George Washington University, USA ahmada@email.gwu.edu
Over the past twenty years, tens of thousand of migrant domestic workers in the Greater Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region have taken shehadeh, the Islamic testament of faith. A widespread phenomenon, these religious conversions have generated a great deal of debate centering on one question: why? Some argue domestic workers convert in order to wrest better remuneration and treatment from their employers. Others point to the efforts of Kuwait’s myriad Islamic reform and da’wa movements as leading to their conversions. Based on over two years of ethnographic research, this paper suggests a shift in analytic focus, one emphasizing domestic workers’ “housetalk” or everyday gendered relations and activities within households as generative of their Islamic conversions. Domestic workers’ experience religious conversion not as a radical break from their previous relationships and religious practices, but as a gradual reworking of them. Their experiences mark the confluence of two realms often assumed to be distinct: the everyday cultivation and ethical formation of religious subjectivities related to these migrant women’s engagement with Islam, and the disciplining and reshaping of their comportment and personalities related to their undertaking of affective labour. Their experiences point to the subtle imbrication of political-economic and religious processes without eliding or fetishizing the importance of each to the other. Undergirded by gendered relations and discourses, both these processes are reshaping domestic workers’ subjectivities, modes of belonging, and social networks.
Attiya AHMAD is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at The George Washington University. Broadly conceived, her research focuses on the gendered interrelation between Islamic piety/movements and material/political-economic processes in the Greater Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean regions. Her first research project, an ethnographic study of the Islamic conversions of South Asian migrant domestic workers in Kuwait, brings together scholarship on gender and transnational feminisms, Islamic and religious studies, political economy and an array of critical theories that reexamine labour and the “material”, including work on immaterial and affective labour, theories of affect and emotion, new materialism and materialist feminists. She is also in the preliminary stages of developing a project focusing on global halal tourism networks spanning the Middle East, Europe and South-East Asia. She obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and has held fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center and the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University.
What’s in a Name: From Hui to Chinese Muslim in the Diaspora
Diana Wong
Independent Scholar, Malaysia dwongingboh@gmail.com
"Hui" is the officially designated term for the largest Chinese Muslim ethnic minority in China, numbering 9.8 million in 2000, and distributed all over China, but concentrated in the Northwest. Part of an elaborate state taxonomy for the different "nationalities" or minzu in China, the term Hui designates a minzu derived from the vernacular "hui hui" and is widely accepted as a term of self-designation in China. Since the 1990s, a sizeable number of Hui students have come to study in Malaysia. Some have remained in the country, their numbers recently augmented by new arrivals under the Malaysia my Second Home scheme. This paper examines the changes in the religious life of the new migrants, both at the individual and collective level. It argues that in the diaspora, a significant shift in identity is to be discerned from that of Hui to Overseas Chinese Muslim.
Diana WONG is an independent scholar based in Kuala Lumpur with research interests in migration and religion. Earlier academic affiliations include ISEAS (Singapore), Univerisiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (Bangi) and Universiti Sains Malaysia (Penang). Recent publications include Time, Generation and Context in Narratives of
Migrant and Religious Journeys and Travelling Faiths and Migrant Religions: The Case of Circulating Models of Da’wa among the Tablighi Jamaat and Foguangshan in Malaysia.
ABOUT THE CHAIRPERSONS AND ORGANISERS
Anju Mary PAUL is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Division of Social Sciences, Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore. She is an international migration scholar with an interest in emergent patterns of high- and low-skilled migration to, from, and within Asia. Her research subjects encompass migrant domestic workers, migrant nurses, and Asian scientists and their spouses. She has published in top sociology and migration journals including American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Brenda S.A. YEOH is Professor (Provost’s Chair), Department of Geography, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is also the Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, and coordinates the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and she has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants. She has published widely in these fields. Her latest book titles include The Cultural Politics of Talent
Migration in East Asia (Routledge, 2012, with Shirlena Huang); and Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts
(ISEAS press, 2012, with Lai Ah Eng and Francis Collins); Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia (Duke University Press, 2013, with Xiang Biao and Mika Toyota); as well as a paperback reprint of her book
Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (originally published
in 1996 by Oxford University Press; reprinted by NUS Press in 2003 and 2013).
Francis LIM received his PhD in Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies. He was then awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, under the Religion and Globalization research cluster. He joined the NTU Sociology division in 2006, and teaches courses on globalization, tourism, Singapore society, classical social theory, and a graduate course on religion in contemporary China. He is the author of Imagining the Good Life: Negotiating Culture and Development in
Nepal Himalaya (Brill, 2008), editor of Mediating Piety: Technology and Religion in Contemporary Asia (Brill,
2009), and co-editor of Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict (Routledge, 2009). He has also published in a number of international refereed journals.
HUANG Jianli is an Associate Professor with the History Department of the National University of Singapore. Within the university, he is concurrently the Deputy Director of Asia Research Institute and a Research Associate at the East Asian Institute. His first field of study is on the history of student political activism and local governance in Republican China from the 1910s to 1940s. His second research area is on the Chinese diaspora, especially the relationship between China and the Chinese community in Singapore. He has a monograph on The Politics of Depoliticization in Republican China (1996, Chinese edition 2010) and co-authored The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Past (2008). He also has published papers in a range of internationally refereed journals.
KWA Kiem-Kiok is Lecturer in Inter-Cultural Studies at East Asia School of Theology, Singapore. She earned her PhD at Asbury Theological Seminary where her dissertation was a study of the Casino Debate 2005 and how that debate models a form of Christian public discourse in Singapore. Her areas of interest and research is in
Malini SUR is Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore and a member of the Asian Migration Cluster. Her research interests connect three broad areas—borders, mobility, and citizenship—with a focus on South Asia. She has lectured at the University of Amsterdam; held fellowships at the University of Toronto and the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden); and worked for Social Science Research Council (New York). Malini has published in anthropology and interdisciplinary journals including HAU, Mobilities, Indian Journal of Gender Studies and Economic and Political Weekly. She has co-edited a collection of ethnographic essays on migration entitled Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities (Amsterdam University Press, 2012 /Open access: http://en.aup.nl/books/9789048515875-transnational-flows-and-permissive-polities.html). Photographs from her fieldwork have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Heidelberg, Kathmandu and Munich. At ARI, she is working on a book manuscript on the India-Bangladesh border, and making an ethnographic film on migration.
Nurfadzilah YAHAYA is a legal historian, and Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. She is also the Regional Editor for SHARIAsource for Southeast Asia, a go-to site on Islamic law for researchers, journalists, and policymakers. From 2012 till 2015, she held the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in November 2012. She is currently preparing her book manuscript on mobile Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean. The book, tentatively titled Fluid Jurisdictions, explores how members of the Arab diaspora utilized Islamic law in British and Dutch colonial courts of Southeast Asia. Her forthcoming article in The Muslim World explores Arab contribution to the laws of the Straits Settlements. Her next project looks at French, Dutch and British regulation of “halal” (lawful) animal slaughter in the Islamic world. Her article on British colonial attempts to regulate the Muslim method of animal slaughter earned her the Young Scholar Prize from Indonesia and the Malay World Journal. Her article on legal pluralism in the Straits of Malacca is forthcoming in Law and History Review.
Ronojoy SEN has worked for over a decade in leading Indian newspapers. He was last with The Times of India, New Delhi, where he was a Senior Assistant Editor on the editorial page. Dr Sen holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in History from Presidency College, Calcutta. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C. and the East-West Center Washington, and Fellow of the International Olympic Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland. He is the author of Nation at Play: A
History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press, in press) and Articles of Faith: Religion, Secularism, and the Indian Supreme Court (Oxford University Press, 2010; paperback 2012). He is the co-editor of Media at Work in China and India (in press), Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity and Daily Life and More than Maoism: Politics, Policies and Insurgencies in South Asia. He has contributed to edited volumes and has published in
several leading journals. He also writes regularly for newspapers.
Teresita CRUZ-DEL ROSARIO has a background in Sociology, Social Anthropology and Public Policy from Boston College, Harvard University and New York University. Her research interests are on social movements, development and underdevelopment, history and migration. Her book Scripted Clashes: Dramaturgical
Approach to Philippine Uprisings (DM Verlag 2009) utilizes a Goffmanian framework to explain the
quasi-religious character of people power in the Philippines. Her second book The State and the Advocate:
Development Policy in Asia (UK Routledge 2014) is a series of country case studies that illustrate the roles of
the developmental state and policy coalitions in the pursuit of development outcomes. She is currently working on a third book on comparative regional studies between Southeast Asia and the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan), of which historical research between these two regions is a necessary and indispensable component.
