By kevinwfogg, Mar 11 2013 9:12AM
This weekend Oxford hosted its second Southeast Asia Symposium, with a broad range of panels on the region. One of the very impressive things about this conference was that it included both the humanities end of the spectrum (where I spent most of my time listening to papers on religion and history) to current events and activism (including a great roundtable on the future of Burma) and the hard sciences (not just forestry but also infectious diseases and other medical topics).
Further information about the conference is here.
I also thought it might be interesting for me to post the summary I just submitted of the panel that I chaired on Saturday morning:
Panel 20, ‘Islam and Identity in Maritime Southeast Asia’, gave a variety of time periods, methodologies, and geographic foci as it addressed its subject. First, Dr. Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja used her expertise in architecture to look at the longue durée of Islamic influence on Java. With examples of specific architectural motifs such as the tumpal (a decorated triangle), kala-makara (demon head over an archway), and lotus buds, Dr. Lee suggested that the openness and accommodative nature of Javanese society allowed local Muslims to integrate pre-Islamic Hindu-Buddhist influences of centuries past with the more scriptural Islamic influences that have been prominent since the nineteenth century. During the question-and-answer period, these ideas were pushed into other geographic zones and other cases on Java to demonstrate the particulars of the cultural fusion process. In the second paper, Dr. Nurfadzilah Yahaya, a post-doctoral fellow at Washington University in Saint Louis, USA, presented a micro-historical study of a trial over animal slaughter in Malaya. In the 1929 case, a Muslim butcher was accused of animal cruelty for his method of slaughter, causing much concern between the colonial British and local Muslim communities about the position of Islamic slaughter, the limits of colonial policies, and the position of Malaya in a broader commercial network. Dr. Yahaya’s paper elicited discussion of the nature of public and private in legal practice, colonial policy towards Islam, and the on-going issues of trade in cattle and meat in the region. Finally, Najib Burhani, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of California – Santa Barbara, USA, sent a paper entitled ‘Hating the Ahmadiyya: The Place of Heretics in Contemporary Indonesian Muslim Society.’ Because he was unable to attend the conference in person, this paper was read by Kristyna Andrlova of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. The paper deploys Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer to detail the liminal position of Ahmadis in Indonesian society—simultaneously inside and outside the Islamic community—and then presented an analysis of the timing for attacks on the Ahmadiyya, coming, as it did, after the break-down of the Suharto regime. The panel was chaired by Dr. Kevin W. Fogg of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, and attended by a cross-section of students, scholars, diplomatic personnel, and practitioners.
http://kevinwfogg.net/#/blog/4570569437
This weekend Oxford hosted its second Southeast Asia Symposium, with a broad range of panels on the region. One of the very impressive things about this conference was that it included both the humanities end of the spectrum (where I spent most of my time listening to papers on religion and history) to current events and activism (including a great roundtable on the future of Burma) and the hard sciences (not just forestry but also infectious diseases and other medical topics).
Further information about the conference is here.
I also thought it might be interesting for me to post the summary I just submitted of the panel that I chaired on Saturday morning:
Panel 20, ‘Islam and Identity in Maritime Southeast Asia’, gave a variety of time periods, methodologies, and geographic foci as it addressed its subject. First, Dr. Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja used her expertise in architecture to look at the longue durée of Islamic influence on Java. With examples of specific architectural motifs such as the tumpal (a decorated triangle), kala-makara (demon head over an archway), and lotus buds, Dr. Lee suggested that the openness and accommodative nature of Javanese society allowed local Muslims to integrate pre-Islamic Hindu-Buddhist influences of centuries past with the more scriptural Islamic influences that have been prominent since the nineteenth century. During the question-and-answer period, these ideas were pushed into other geographic zones and other cases on Java to demonstrate the particulars of the cultural fusion process. In the second paper, Dr. Nurfadzilah Yahaya, a post-doctoral fellow at Washington University in Saint Louis, USA, presented a micro-historical study of a trial over animal slaughter in Malaya. In the 1929 case, a Muslim butcher was accused of animal cruelty for his method of slaughter, causing much concern between the colonial British and local Muslim communities about the position of Islamic slaughter, the limits of colonial policies, and the position of Malaya in a broader commercial network. Dr. Yahaya’s paper elicited discussion of the nature of public and private in legal practice, colonial policy towards Islam, and the on-going issues of trade in cattle and meat in the region. Finally, Najib Burhani, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of California – Santa Barbara, USA, sent a paper entitled ‘Hating the Ahmadiyya: The Place of Heretics in Contemporary Indonesian Muslim Society.’ Because he was unable to attend the conference in person, this paper was read by Kristyna Andrlova of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. The paper deploys Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer to detail the liminal position of Ahmadis in Indonesian society—simultaneously inside and outside the Islamic community—and then presented an analysis of the timing for attacks on the Ahmadiyya, coming, as it did, after the break-down of the Suharto regime. The panel was chaired by Dr. Kevin W. Fogg of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, and attended by a cross-section of students, scholars, diplomatic personnel, and practitioners.
http://kevinwfogg.net/#/blog/4570569437
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