"Religion, Place and Modernity in East and Southeast Asia"

Nikolas Broy (University of Goettingen)

This paper will examine how the western concept of “religion” has been transferred, discussed, and accommodated in Japan, China, and Korea since their modernization and westernization began in the mid 19th century. This concept, itself a 19th century western creation with deep Protestant implications, the things it entails, and its relationship to a modern and allegedly “secular” state came to be a matter of debate which still has not ended yet. Even though “religion” came to be represented with the same Chinese characters in all three countries, it is not only their pronunciation as shūkyō, zongjiao and chonggyo that differs quite a lot. This paper will examine the history of “religion” in three steps: First, it will trace the discourses that shaped the concept of “religion” and helped to popularize it within their respective societies. Second, it will show the alterations of the religious fields that have been triggered by it. Finally, it will discuss the nature of these concepts in relation to the course of the western conception of “religion” and the “secular”.

[The paper can be downloaded here...]

Michael Dickhardt (University of Goettingen)

The recent ethnography on religion in Vietnam shows many examples of religious practices being a genuine part of modernity and of multiple ways to articulate and shape modernity in and through religious practices. To understand the relationship between modernity and religion in Vietnam means to understand this multiplicity. An important aspect of this multiplicity is the ensemble of the religious forms of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Religion of the Mother Goddesses and the beliefs and rituals related to tutelary gods, local spirits, heroes and ancestors. These religious forms can be understood in various respects as distinct and as having own dynamics and own ways of being related to and affected by modernity. However, they are brought into meaningful relations and interactions by the practices of actors. But this does not result in a common doctrinal core or in a single religious totality. Rather, the actors bring about a distinctive religious sphere characterized by its multiplicity. In order to empirically and conceptually approach this specific form of religious multiplicity and its multiple relations to modernity, I suggest to focus on religious places such as pagodas (chùa), temples (đền and phủ) or communal houses (đình) in urban contexts of Hanoi. As these places bring together different religious forms and various religious and non-religious practices, they become fields of conjunction, disjunction and contestation of religious forms in which the actors articulate modernity, religious beliefs, localized practices as well as translocal relationality and unleash dynamics of religion characterized by tensions between continuity and change, inclusion and exclusion and modulation and conversion. This paper argues that the empirical study of urban religious places as places of a religious multiplicity offers a major contribution to the understanding of modernity in Vietnam.

[The paper can be downloaded here...]

Volker Gottowik (University of Heidelberg)

Every year at the beginning of the rainy season, the active volcano Mount Rinjani attracts some hundred Hindu-Balinese pilgrims, who live in the western part of Lombok or arrive from the neighboring island of Bali. In the course of an altogether six-day journey, these pilgrims trek to the crater lake Segara Anak, where they pray for sufficient rain, while a small delegation climbs the peak of Mount Rinjani (3700m) to sacrifice to the Hindu gods and fetch holy water. In this context, a local deity, Dewi Anjani, receives special veneration from precious offerings dropped into the middle of the lake. The spatial proximity to the gods, indicated through the densification of essential elements like fire, water and smoke, requires a particular behavioral code at the pilgrimage site, which goes beyond dress and food. Despite the explicit removal of the pilgrims from the conveniences of modern life, this behavioral code does not cover the use of modern technologies at the lake. Loudspeakers, computers, mobile phones etc. find their way to the pilgrimage site and cut across the expectations of the western researcher who has prepared himself for silent meditations in the midst of nature. However, according to the Hindu-Balinese pilgrims, this technical equipment does not violate the dignity of the place, but is rather well integrated into the ritual process. Against this background, the focus of this paper is on local concepts of space and spirituality which allow the pilgrims to appropriate achievements of modernity without challenging their overall ambitions, i.e. to be close to the Gods and to receive holy water.

Patrice Ladwig (Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology)

Ethnic minorities in Laos have endured various forms of internal and external colonialism that positioned them spatially and culturally at the margins of lowland society. Although the communist revolution in 1975 radically altered their former social status as ‘slaves’ (kha) and introduced an ambivalent politics of recognition, Laos has since the 1990s undergone an increasing process of Buddhification and Laotization. Certain elements of Buddhism – and with that ethnic Lao culture - are now again promoted as national culture. These aspects of Buddhism not only pervade political ritual, but increasingly also everyday morality and expected standards of behavior and etiquette. After the decline of the new socialist man, state agents now use Buddhism to cover up the debris of the socialist project.

This presentation follows processes of Buddhification in the South of Laos, specifically Attapeu province. Taking as an example the slow, but constant spread of Buddhism in the recent decade among Mon-Khmer groups such as the Oy and the Cheng, I specifically examine how this process spatializes Buddhism, its teachings (dhamma) and rituals by drawing minorities increasingly into the religious and social life-worlds of the ethnic lowland Lao. This spatialization works on a multitude of levels linking the promotion of national culture, ideas of modernity and civilization, resettlement to the lowlands and general development politics. Through the participation in religious and secular state rituals, ordination as a novice or monk, the learning of Lao religious language and bodily practices, minorities are supposed to acquire the ‘national culture’ in the temple, which thereby becomes a mediator of modernity. Although this Buddhification is far from complete and the Oy and the Cheng also make creative use of the options created by this process, the pressure of the state authorities and their resettlement into the vicinity of ethnic Lao has lead to unprecedented religious change.

[The paper can be dowloaded here...]

Jovan Maud (University of Goettingen)

In southern Thailand one of the most prominent sacred presences in the landscape is that of Luang Pho Thuat, a renowned Buddhist monk who is supposed to have lived and wandered in the region during the seventeenth century CE. Although an ostensibly ancient figure, knowledge of Luang Pho Thuat has emerged since the 1950s through the actions of a variety of authoritative intermediaries who have "rediscovered" his presence in the landscape. Through a range of techniques ranging from "traditional" visions and mediumship to the "modern" historiography, the sacred landscape associated with this ancient monk has not been static but has emerged over time through the production of different forms of authoritative knowledge. Furthermore, these ongoing excavations of the pre-modern past have been intertwined with political and economic processes in the modern South, including the symbolic consolidation of the Thai nation-state and the development of pilgrimage and religious tourism.

The stories and sites associated with Luang Pho Thuat's travels are not confined to the Thai nation-state, however, but also inscribe pathways that connect southern Thailand with northern Malaysia. But compared to southern Thailand, the Malaysian sites have remained relatively undeveloped, largely invisible to all but the most knowledgeable. Recently, however, there have been attempts to develop the northern Malaysian sites. Within the framework of the Indonesia Malaysia Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT), efforts are underway to develop the ancestral wanderings of the saint as one of several cross-border "cultural routes" designed to promote tourism and economic development in the borderland region. To this end new instances of scholarship, mediumship, and entrepreneurship have been recruited to excavate the presence of the saint and confer new sanctity, and legibility, to the landscape.

This paper considers these latest elaborations of the sacred geography associated with Luang Pho Thuat, and in particular the convergence of transnational governance embodied in the Growth Triangle, with new efforts to imagine the borderland as a shared cultural space in which a Buddhist past is evoked and re-presented. In this way the paper shows place-making and production of the sacred to be ongoing, dynamic practices inseparable from contemporary political and economic realities, even as they are constructed, and experienced, as the rediscovery of premodern presences inherent in the landscape itself.

[The paper can be downloaded here...]

Michael Prager (University of Muenster)

Modernist Islam as advocated by a variety of reformist groups is striving for a return to an "authentic" form of Islam, an Islam that has been purified from its culture-specific and local "contaminations". In Indonesia, the growing impact of modernist Islam, both in urban and rural contexts, has given rise to a religious dynamics by which the cosmological systems of local societies have been affected to a large extent. The indigenous cosmological systems of Indonesian societies were often centred around ideas and ritual actions acknowledging the importance of local ancestors and other spiritual beings who were thought to form part of an extensive network of socio-cosmological relationships. Different categories of spirits were considered to mark various types of social, political, and territorial/spatial boundaries.

By drawing on ethnographic data collected in Bima and Eastern Java and by taking additional comparative data from other Indonesian regions into account, I shall focus on the way in which modernist Islam - as an ideology and religious praxis - tends to delocalize religion by declaring local traditions of religious knowledge as irrelevant, thereby relocating the sacred to another, more abstract, domain, and by attaching the individual to a translocal intangible community of believers (umma). By discussing these and other important religious changes, I shall scrutinize the major ontological transformations brought about by modernist Islam, particularly with regard to the conceptualization of social and ritual space.

Clemens Six (University of Groningen)

If one agrees with Talal Asad that “any discipline that seeks to understand ‘religion’ must also try to understand its other”, i.e. the secular, a discussion on dynamics of religion in modern Southeast Asia ought to include a debate on how the religious and the secular mutually constituted and thereby transformed each other in the context of modernisation.

My paper discusses different processes of re-locating the religious within early post-colonial nation-building from a comparative perspective: India, Indonesia and Singapore have realised rather different ideas of a “secular” state after colonialism and have thus developed different strategies to locate the religious within their specific regimes of modernized religious pluralism. This re-location of religion concerned on the one hand spatial strategies of identifying, authorizing and re-locating places of worship through the post-colonial state but also strategies of social re-location, whereby the “religiously neutral” state re-defined the location of religion in society to limit and at the same time make use of its entitlement. The formation of the “secular” state and the re-location of religion shall thereby be understood as a power-driven process of mutual constitution and emancipation.

[The paper can be downloaded here...]

Alexander Soucy (St. Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada)

Twentieth century events, with the Buddhist Revival (in response to colonialism), the war (and subsequent dispersal of the Vietnamese overseas), and Communist challenges, have brought about a renewed interest in Zen Buddhism in the twenty-first century. The southern Vietnamese monk, Thích Thanh Từ, has drawn on potent historical signifiers of Trần Nhân Tông and the only Vietnamese Zen lineage (Trúc Lâm) to create a new kind of Zen while simultaneously claiming identity with a nationalistic symbol from the past. In 1997 a local pagoda was taken over by Thích Thanh Từ's organisation and Zen missionaries from southern Vietnam have turned it into a major Zen center on the outskirts of Hanoi. This paper will explore how they have created and transformed the northern Buddhist space into something entirely new, reflecting more Modernist/Western/Global visions of Buddhism than local Vietnamese Buddhist understandings.

[The paper can be downloaded here...]