DORISEA - CETREN SUMMER SCHOOL 2014: "Cityscapes and New Religiosities in Asia"

Outline

China, Southeast Asia and India are entangled not only through complex histories, but also through multi-faceted contemporary ties in the political, religious, economic and cultural sphere. India and China now boast strong and steadily growing economies and are already global political and economic players, while the Southeast Asian states are eager to follow them: ASEAN as a politically and economically ambitious alliance has become an actor to be counted for in Asia. The booming Asian economies have not only affected the economic sphere. Rapid urbanization, the emergence of an aspiring middle-class, the spread of consumer culture and a growing civil society are also features of these transformations. While modernisation was long believed to result in secularism, Asian modernities refute this thesis as euro-centric: far from becoming secular, Asian societies see a revival, a reformulation and transformation of religion in modernity, and striking religious dynamics. Religion is not an antithesis to modernity but is in complex interaction with it. Since modernity implies a number of far-reaching social, political, and economic changes, it results in not only new aspirations and practices, but also in new constraints and fears. These are articulated and addressed in religious practices and ways of expression, in new conceptualisations of religion or, in extreme cases, in acts of religiously motivated violence. Cities are spaces of longing in Asia, as they promise a modern lifestyle, economic opportunities, global connectedness, entertainment and educational upward mobility. At the same time, they stand for the loss of social and economic safety nets, for changing norms and values and the loss of close social relationships. Religious life in the city is an answer to these hopes and fears and to the changing social make-up of communities. Cities are the future in Asia: the World Development Bank estimates that within the next 20 years, 1.1 billion people will move to cities in Asia. In 2030, 55 per cent of Asia’s population will live in urban environments.

Erawan Shrine, Bangkok (Copyright Andrea Lauser)

The Summer School “Cityscapes and New Religiosities in Asia” brings the contexts of ‘religion’ and ‘urbanity’ in Asia to the centre stage. It will engage with urban spaces and religiosities through case studies especially in India, China, Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia and the Philippines. While paying attention to the specific contexts and ethnographic details of the case studies, we will also make visible their transnational and transurban connections, as urban spiritual lives and spirit worlds have been informed by the changing cultural maps of migration, adaptation, and transformation across Asia. Metropolitan centers are particular receptacles and laboratories for such global encounters, as they interweave with middle-class consumer power and diasporic identities. The summer school therefore invites participants to engage with, and develop, their own work through an exploration of three key thematic intersections, including (1) transformations of religious sites in contexts like architecture, city planning, heritage, urban place-making and re-habitation; (2) religious communities, in which different classes, castes, generations, ethnicities and genders intersect; and (3) religion and media, exploring how spirituality is visualised, sensed, communicated, staged or experienced across urban landscapes.
With this explicitly transurban focus, we also acknowledge the growing imperative for a “global-studies” perspective in postgraduate research, through which new demands are placed on students to manage the disciplinary boundaries of “regional” or “area studies”, while wondering what actual research tools they need to do so effectively and competently within the limited time frame of a thesis.

Date: 10-17 August, 2014
Venue: Tagungszentrum an der Sternwarte, Göttingen (Germany)

Organisers

The Summer School is a cooperation of the BMBF-funded research networks “Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia” (DORISEA) & “CETREN - Transregional Research Network” at Georg-August Universität Göttingen. DORISEA and CETREN are two key platforms building research, network and outreach capacities in the study of religions at Göttingen Research campus (GRC). Bringing together scholars in the humanities and social sciences for inter-disciplinary dialogue, the networks in particular foster an appreciation of regional diversity and intra- and cross-regional entanglements in Asia. With DORISEA’s expertise on Southeast Asia and CETREN’s core competence in China and India, both networks complement each other, join creative forces and pool their excellent academic networks to organise this summer school.

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