Scott MacLochlainn is a sociocultural anthropologist, with a geographic focus on the Philippines and the United States. His research examines the contemporary and historical intersections of religion and law, and the semiotic translation of religious identities across linguistic, economic, and regulatory domains. In particular, his work focuses on the history and expansion of corporations and their religious and ethical identities. Since July 2018 he is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MPI-MMG, where be began a new project on the hyper-mediatization and increasingly fraught legal and social spaces of death in the Philippines.
Matthew Carey is assistant professor in anhropology at Copenhagen University, and his main thrust of research revolves around Tachelhit-Berber speaking communities in Southern Morocco. His PhD at the University of Cambridge focused on questions of political organisation, institutionality and anarchism, and his postdoctoral research explored subjectivity, intimacy and emotions in the Moroccan High Atlas. His recent work has focused on mistrust and lying (Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory, University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Peter Pels (1958) is Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology of Africa at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of the University of Leiden since 2003. He graduated in social anthropology at the University of Amsterdam on a study of Catholicism in East Africa (1993), and worked there at the Research Centre Religion and Society between 1995 and 2003. He published on religion and politics under colonialism, the history of anthropology, the anthropology of magic, social science ethics, visual and material culture, archaeology and science fiction. He was the editor-in-chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, from 2003 until 2007. Between 2006 and 2015 he was an advisor to the Çatalhöyük Research Project led by Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder. He is currently interested in questions of race, culture and decolonization as they pertain to museums and heritage.
International workshop co-sponsored by Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity,Göttingen, Germany & Center for Thanatology, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology andReligious Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Samuel Williams is a Research Fellow in the Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change, and he is based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. His research examines interesections between economy and material culture in Turkey, and he has a particular interest in the ethnographic study of markets and marketplaces. He has conducted fieldwork over the last decade on contemporary commerce in two historic Istanbul marketplaces ––the Grand Bazaar and Istiklal Street–– and his current multi-sited field research explores the traffic in gold between Europe and the Middle East. Trained in social anthropology at the University of Sydney and Princeton University, he has held prior appointments as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac and as Andrew W Mellon Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Susan Bayly (M.A., Ph.D. University of Cambridge) is Professor of Historical Anthropology and Director of Graduate Education in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology. She is a past editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and former Associate Editor of Cambridge Anthropology. She has held visiting appointments in the USA, India, France and Singapore. She is adviser to a number of museums and other institutions in Vietnam, including the Vietnam Centre for Research & Promotion of Cultural Heritage. Her publications include Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age. Vietnam, India and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Her current research is on aspects of marketisation experience in contemporary Vietnam, though she retains a longstanding interest in the Indian subcontinent. She recently completed a study of conceptions of achievement and success in contemporary Vietnam funded by the UK ESRC, and is currently combining the perspectives of visual anthropology and the anthropology of morality and ethics in a project on how official and personal images are deployed and perceived in variety of present-day Hanoi contexts.
Conference organized by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, and the Department of Religious Diversity, MPI-MMG
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Wang Hui, Distinguished Professor of literature and history at Tsinghua University, Changjiang Scholar, Director of Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences. He achieved his Ph.D in 1988 at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. From 1996 to 2007, he served as the co-editor of Dushu magazine and organized a series of significant intellectual debates in China. In 2002, he moved to Tsinghua University. His fields are Chinese intellectual history, modern Chinese literature and social theory etc. His publications include The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (four volumes), The Depolitized Politics, “Tibetan Question” between East and West, From Asian Perspective: Narrations of Chinese History, The Short Twentieth Century: Chinese Revolution and the Logic of Politics tc. Many of his works have been translated into different languages including China’s New Order, The End of the Revolution, The Politics of Imagining Asia and China from Empire to Nation-State: China’s Twentieth Century etc. He is the winner of “2013 Luca Pacioli Prize” and “2018 Anneliese Maier Research Award”.
Antonius C.G.M. Robben is Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. He received a Ph.D. (1986) from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a research fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, Ann Arbor, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and the David Rockefeller Center, Harvard University. His monographs include Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005), which won the Textor Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2006 for Excellence in Anthropology, and Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018). His most recent edited volumes are Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (2015; co-edited with Francisco Ferrándiz), Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2017, 2nd ed.), and A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (2018).
Berna Turam, Director of International Affairs Program and Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, is the author of Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford University Press, 2007), and Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2015), and the editor of Secular State and Religious Society: Two Forces at Play in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She also published articles in journals including British Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Nations and Nationalism, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Contemporary Islam and Journal of Democracy. She co-edited a special issue, entitled “Secular Muslims?” in Comparative Studies of South America, Africa and the Middle East. Her article, entitled “Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Space, Power and Freedom in an Istanbul neighborhood,” won the best article award from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2014. As a political sociologist, Turam has an abiding interest in conducting research on state-society interaction, particularly on the interaction between ordinary Muslim people and secular states. Her last book on Istanbul and Berlin--the city with the largest and densest Turkish neighborhood outside Turkey-- reveals and analyzes the ways in which contested urban space generates democratic practices that facilitate inclusion and accommodation. By gendering political and spatial processes of inclusion and exclusion, she does intersectional analysis of religion, space and gender. Currently, she is the lead Co-PI of a comparative project on cities of refuge that explores how cities shape perception and experience of fear and safety of Muslim non-citizens. The locus of Turam’s ethnographies has extended from homeland Turkey to host lands of the Muslim, Turkish and Syrian Diaspora –specifically Almaty-Kazakhstan, Berlin-Germany Athens-Greece and North America. During her sabbatical in 2016, she was awarded two fellowships, Dahrendorf fellowship at London School of Economics and Erasmus Fellowship at Cosmopolis Department of Geography at Vrije University in Brussels.
Kenneth Dean is the Raffles Professor of Humanities, Head of the Chinese Studies Department and Research Leader of “Religion and Globalization” at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
China has undergone rapid urbanization since the policy of opening up to reforms. By the end of 2015, 56% of the total population lived in urban areas. If urbanization continues to progress as the Chinese government plans, by 2025, 70% of Chinese citizen will live in cities. Urbanization has tremendous impact not only on the environment but also on people and their cultural fabric in everyday life. State-led urbanization on such a scale also further blurs the boundaries between cities and villages as they are more closely embedded in each other, with more and more people living in both cities and villages.
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Liza Wing Man Kam is Research Fellow (Architecture and Urban Studies) at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Chinese Societies at the Department of East Asian Studies at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. She was trained as architect and later researcher in Hong Kong, Singapore, Liverpool, London, Paris and Germany. Her work on Hong Kong and Taiwan depicts the transformation of political, societal and cultural symbolisms represented by the colonial urban heritage in their unique post-colonial settings by illustrating the inter-relation between architecture, historiography, identity formation and hence civic awareness. She currently investigates colonial Shinto Shrines in the Japanese occupied Taiwan as both religious space and political symbolisms for enunciating the different powers in post-war Taiwan. Her work puts into dialogue the local memory and the grand narrated history while interpreting the meaning of colonial urban heritage and colonial legacy.
R. Michael Feener is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Islamic Centre Lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He was formerly Research Leader of the Religion and Globalisation Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He has also taught at Reed College and the University of California, Riverside, and held visiting professor positions and research fellowships at Harvard, Kyoto University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Copenhagen, The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (Honolulu), and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamic studies and Southeast Asian history, as well as on post-disaster reconstruction, religion and development. His current research focuses on the archaeology and history of the Maldives.
The symposium is convened on occasion of the public defence of the dissertation of Samuel Lengen, Binary Dreams: An Ethnography of the Digital Economy in China.
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