DORISEA Conference

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Kaleidoscopes of Religion: Southeast Asia and Beyond

In global comparison, Southeast Asia stands out as a region marked by a particularly diverse religious landscape: various “ethnic religions” interact with so-called “world religions”, all which find representation in the region. From the popularity of Thai ghost movies in Malaysian cinemas to the growth of the so-called halal industry, it is clear that sweeping modernization in the region has not been accompanied by processes of secularization as predicted by classic modernization theory. Yet the diversity of cosmological ideas and practices present in the region raises the question as to how these phenomena have been interpreted, classified and regulated in the wake of colonialism, nation-state building and globalization: from the purification of “animist” elements to the categorization of ancestor worship as “tradition”, research into Southeast Asian conceptualizations of “religion” reveal that these have both absorbed and contested concepts of “religion” emerging from the context of European modernity.

Over the past three years, the research network “Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia” has carried out empirical, historical and comparative research into different manifestations of “religion” and its various “others” - including “secularism”, “animism” and “tradition”. Sociologists, anthropologists, linguists and historians have explored how “religion” is materially and discursively constructed in various Southeast Asian contexts, including in Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand.

With the conference "Kaleidoscopes of Religion: Southeast Asia and Beyond", the research network wishes to engage with scholars who have worked on “religion” beyond the Southeast Asian region by focusing on three thematic fields: religion and politics, religion and media, and religion and space. Ultimately, the aim is to discuss whether there is a particular quality to the “religious” – and, maybe more importantly, to the study of the “religious” – in the region, and if so, what that would be and how insights from Southeast Asia can contribute to stimulate broader theoretical debates on religion.

Dates: 23 – 24 January 2015

Location: Festsaal an der Luisenstr. 56, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

To get to the venue, please note:

1. Coming from north, the Luisenstraße is blocked due to a contruction site. You need to walk a detour westwards via Hannoversche Str./Virchowweg/Hufelandweg/Rahel-Hisch-Weg, or eastwards. We have described the directions for the eastwards detour in our map.

Download our direction map.

2. The S-Bahn trains on the North-South route (lines S1, S2 and S25) do not operate during the time of the conference. There is a bus replacement service. S-Bahn station "Nordbahnhof" is not served.

Organizers: Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the BMBF-funded Network of Competence “Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia” (DORISEA)