Local Traditions and World Religions: The Appropriation of "Religion" in Southeast Asia and Beyond
Final Report Abstract
There is a strong sense among Southeast Asians that modernity, however defined, does make a difference in regard to religion. “Religion” is a term that suggests the global relevance of particular ideas and practices. Turning local practices like those on Bali (Picard, Hornbacher) into “religion” is thus a way to situate locality within modernity. This makes the notion of “religion” a highly political one. Both on the personal and on the community level, a variety of responses to the challenge of “religionification” can thus be observed. In some cases, as in Laos, “religionizing” means to come closer to the state, while in others, “religion” is seen sometimes as a too political category, and individual alternatives are sought out. In any case, the notion of “religion” and the form of differentiation it suggests – both between “religions” and between religion and “non-religion” – have lead to the emergence of an Other of religion. This Other, by which “religion” is defined, is not simply modern secularism or some embryonic form of it, although it shows certain relations with it: The differentiation of certain social fields, like religion and state, and their subsequent reconnection produces question about how these relationships can be accomplished. This opens up an experimental space, in which the variations, which Hornbacher, Rodemeier, or Guillou have documented, can be situated. Also, there are certain fields of interaction which are now marked as not or only partially religious, as for example Platenkamp and Raillon demonstrated. While our research thus connects directly to some of the most pertinent themes in the study of Southeast Asia and religion, the broad perspective which we chose and the immediate dialogue which we engaged in – and are still continuing – provided more general insights into the processes by which the global and the local, the religious and the tentatively non-religious are negotiated in this region.
Publications
- 2011 "Tradition and Monotheism in Eastern Indonesia." In: Schröter, Susanne (Ed.) Christianity in Indonesia. Perspectives of Power (Reihe: Southeast Asian Modernities, Bd. 12): 177-201. Berlin: Lit-Verlag
Susanne Rodemeier
- 2012 ‘Everyone is a potential leader’ - attractiveness of a charismatic Church in Solo, Java (Indonesia). Ekonomia /Economics (Polandia) 3 (20): 45-58
Susanne Rodemeier
- 2013 'Sovereignty in the North Moluccas: Historical transformations', History and Anthropology, 24,2: 206-232
Josephus D.M. Platenkamp
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.697062) - ‘On the confrontation between perennial models in 19th Century Halmahera (Indonesia)’. In: A. Hartmann und O. Murawska (Hg.), Representing the Future. Zur kulturellen Logik der Zukunft, S.73-110. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015. - 9783837630152
Josephus D.M. Platenkamp
- Animism in Southeast Asia. London: Routledge, 2016 (Routledge contemporary southeast Asia series, 77) 326 S.
Guido Sprenger/Kaj Århem (eds.)
- Piglets are buffaloes: Buddhification and the reduction of sacrifice on the Boloven Plateau. Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics, and Culture in a Post-Socialist State (2017): 281-300
Guido Sprenger
