Events of the Department of Religious Diversity (in descending order)

"Refugees and Religion"

Workshops, conferences 2018
Conveners: Birgit Meyer & Peter van der Veer [more]

"Tribes, guerillas, de-facto states: militarism in the China-Burma borderlands, and militarism in anthropology"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
  • Date: Dec 12, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Hans Steinmüller (London School of Economics)
  • Hans Steinmüller is a specialist in the anthropol­ogy of China. He has conducted long-term field­work in the Enshi region of Hubei Province in central China, focusing on family, work, ritual, and the local state. The main object of his research are the ethics of everyday life in rural China, but he has also written on topics such as gambling, rural development, and Chinese geomancy (fengshui). Recently he has started a new research project about militarism among the Wa people at the China-Burma border.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Supplying Haji’s: Afghanistan’s Central Asian emigres in China and beyond"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
  • Date: Dec 5, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Magnus Marsden (University of Sussex)
  • Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. His work is centrally concerned with the study of Asia‘s Muslim societies. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, as well as with diasporic communities from this region in the Gulf, Eastern Europe, and China. He is the author of Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Northern Pakistan (Cambridge, 2005), and Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (Oxford, 2015).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Discussion on the Lutheran Reformation: historical context and contemporary impacts"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18

"Marriage, love, and religion among young Muslim women in Mumbai"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
  • Date: Nov 28, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Sana Ghazi (MPI-MMG)
  • Sana Ghazi is a PhD student in the Religious Diversity depart­ment. She studied for a BA degree in Sociology at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai and an MA in International Relations from the University of Warwick, UK.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Ethnic democracy: an ethnographic account of terror of India’s counter-terror agencies"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
  • Date: Nov 13, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Irfan Ahmad (Melbourne)
  • Irfan Ahmad is a Senior Research Fellow working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Terrorism in Question: Toward An Anthropological Approach. Until January 2017, he was Associate Professor of Political Anthropology at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. Author of Islamism and Democracy in India (Princeton University Press, 2009), short-listed for the 2011 ICAS Book Prize for the best study in the field of Social Sciences, his second book Religion As Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace is forthcoming in 2017 from the University of North Carolina Press. Religion As Critique enunciates the ethnic foundation of the Enlightenment to ethnographically draft an alternative genealogy of critique in Islamicate traditions of south Asia. Ahmad is founding Co-Editor of Journal of Religious and Political Practice (Taylor & Francis). With Natalie Doyle, he co-edited (Il)liberal Europe: Islamophobia, Modernity and Radicalization (Routledge, 2017) and is currently co-editing (with Pralay Kanungo, Leiden University/JNU) a volume on the 2014 Indian elections.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room
We welcome you to the Symposium on Irfan Ahmad’s bookReligion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017 and Oxford University Press, Delhi) [more]

"Serendipity and Sociality: Conversations with Michael Herzfeld"

Workshops, conferences 2017

"Body movement and sport activities in contemporary Chinese Buddhism"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
  • Date: Nov 7, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Tzu-Lung Chiu (MPI-MMG)
  • Tzu-Lung Chiu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. In 2016 she received a Ph.D.at Ghent University, Belgium. In her dissertation, Contemporary Buddhist Nunneries in Taiwan and Mainland China: A Study of Vinaya Practices, she explored Chinese Mahāyāna nuns’ perceptions of how they interpret and practice vinaya rules in the contemporary contexts of Taiwan and Mainland China.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Religious environmentalism in the anthropocene: potentialities and actualities in Coastal China"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
  • Date: Nov 2, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Mayfair Yang (University of California, Santa Barbara)
  • Mayfair Yang received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley. She has been a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at UC Santa Barbara, and in Religious Studies Department and East Asian Studies Department at the same university. She was Director of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia, and has held visiting scholar or fellowship positions at University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Harvard University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Beijing and Fudan Universities in China, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is the author of Gifts, Favors, & Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China, and editor of Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernities & State Formation and Places of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Her forthcoming book is: Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy & Indigenous Civil Society in Wenzhou, China (Duke University Press). She is also working on a second, more theoretical book on Wenzhou religiosity.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Chinese Community in North Vietnam before and after 1978"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
  • Date: Oct 26, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Han Xiaorong (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
  • Xiaorong Han teaches Chinese history at the Department of Chinese Culture of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Hawaii, and his research has focused on the interactions between intellectuals and peasants and between state and ethnic minorities in China, as well as China’s relations with her neighbors, particularly Vietnam. His publications include Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900-1949 (SUNY, 2005), Red God: Wei Baqun and His Peasant Revolution in Southern China, 1894-1932 (SUNY, 2014), Zhongguo minzu guanxi sanlun (Ethnic Relations in China (World Scientific, 2015), and numerous articles.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Bulang today"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2017/18
British anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2008, 2014, 2017) writings have generated considerable interest among social-cultural anthropologists working in the different national traditions that have shaped our discipline, and which our discipline has helped shape. This mini-workshop responds to Ingold’s article: “That’s Enough about Ethnography.” [more]

"Approximately 52 seconds: the time of prior commitment"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: Jul 12, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: William Mazzarella (University of Chicago)
  • William Mazzarella is the Neukom Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2001. His work deals with the political anthropology of mass publicity. He is, in addition to a broad range of articles on media, aesthetics, affect, and crowds, the author of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (2013), and The Mana of Mass Publicity (2017). He is also the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (2016) and the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (2009).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
  • Room: Library Hall
Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Diversity and the Max Planck Research Group “Empires of Memory“ [more]
In this workshop, we explore the question of how Vietnam is made into a historical entity by scholars and popular movements, especially in the modern period. The nature of this historical entity has not ceased to interest scholars, political activists, military strategist as well as spiritual activists, inside Vietnam and beyond the country. Obviously, this is not an abstract scholarly issue only but also deeply entangled with political action, armed violence, and the justification for unification and division. [more]

"From the household to the individual? Towards religious subjectification in contemporary China"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: Jun 20, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Adam Chau (University of Cambridge)
  • Adam Yuet Chau (PhD in Anthropology, 2001, Stanford University) is University Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Modern China in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow at St. John’s College. He is the author of Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press 2006) and editor of Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (Routledge 2011). He is currently working on projects investigating the rise of the ‘religion sphere‘ (zongjiaojie) in modern China; the idiom of hosting and forms of powerful writing (“text acts”) in Chinese political and religious culture.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Poly-ontology: rethinking religious plurialism through a Chinese lens"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: Jun 19, 2017
  • Time: 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: David Palmer (University of Hong Kong)
  • David A. Palmer is an Associate Professor and head of the department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 2008. A native of Toronto, he graduated from McGill University in Anthropology and East Asian Studies. After completing his PhD in the Anthropology of Religion at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, he was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and, from 2004 to 2008, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the French School of Asian Studies (Ecole Française d‘Extrême-Orient), located at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include the award-winning Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007); The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, co-authored with Vincent Goossaert 2011; awarded the Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies); and Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press, co-authored with Elijah Siegler, 2017).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Collective actions in Post-Mao China: between chaos and discipline"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: Jun 14, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dingxin Zhao (University of Chicago)
  • Dingxin Zhao is Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Qianren Jihuai Professor of Zhejiang University. He is also the director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences of Zhejiang University. His research covers the areas of historical sociology, social movements, nationalism, social change, and economic development. His interests also extend to sociological theory and methodology. Zhao has publications in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, Mobilization, Problems of Post-Communism and China Quarterly. He has published two awards-winning books in English: Power of Tiananmen (2001) and The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History (2015). He has also four books in Chinese: Social and Political Movements (2006), Eastern Zhou Warfare and the Rise of the Confucian-Legalist State (2006), The Limit of Democracy (2012), and State and War: A Comparative Analysis of the Chinese and European Historical Development (2015).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Twists of fate: growth trajectories of Catholicism and Protestantism in Modern China compared"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: Jun 13, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Yanfei Sun (Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China)
  • Yanfei Sun received her PhD in sociology from University of Chicago in 2010. She is currently associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University. Her research interests include sociology of religion and political sociology. In addition to religious changes in modern China, she also researches on religious movement, global expansion of Christianity, religious toleration, religious nationalism, and ethno-religious violence.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Publics vs customers: mass assembly as political speech in Mumbai"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: May 23, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Lisa Björkman (University of Louisville)
  • Lisa Björkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville. Her work studies how global processes of urbanism and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial exclusions and inclusions in Mumbai, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contestation and representation. Lisa’s book „Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai“ (Duke University Press, 2015), is a political ethnography about the encounter in Mumbai between market-oriented urban development reforms and the material politics of the city’s water infrastructures. Pipe Politics was awarded the American Institute of Indian Studies’ 2014 Book Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Lisa received a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research in New York in 2012.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Habsburg official as ethnographer: a case study of Trebinje"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: May 16, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Cathie Carmichael (University of East Anglia)
  • Cathie Carmichael is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where she is Head of the School of History. She studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Ljubljana before completing a Ph.D at Bradford University. She has supervised over a dozen PhDs on the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean and established a number of courses at BA and MA level. Her books include Slovenia and the Slovenes (co-authored with James Gow) (2000), Language and Nationalism in Europe (co-edited with Stephen Barbour) (2000), Genocide before the Holocaust (2009) and most recently Bosnia e Erzegovina. Alba e tramonto del secolo breve (2016). She is an editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room
Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Diversity and the Max Planck Research Group “Empires of Memory“ [more]
Conveners: Shaheed Tayob, Birgit Meyer and Peter van der Veer • Co-sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity and the Department of Religious Studies, Utrecht University. [more]

"Religious space in Singapore"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: May 9, 2017
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Kenneth Dean (National University of Singapore)
  • Kenneth Dean is the Raffles Professor in the Humanities at the National University of Singapore. Previously, he was the James McGill Professor and Drs. Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair of Chinese Cultural Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies of McGill University. Professor Dean received his B.A. in Chinese Studies from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Stanford University.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Listening acts: sounding the Sufi sublime in secular France"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Date: Mar 30, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Deborah Kapchan (New York University)
  • Deborah Kapchan is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press 1996), Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (Wesleyan University Press 2007), as well as numerous articles on sound, narrative and poetics. She is translating and editing a volume entitled Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry, and is also the editor of two recent volumes: Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit (2014 University of Pennsylvania Press) and Theorizing Sound Writing (2017 Wesleyan UP). She is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Listening to Islam: The Festive Sacred and the Islamic Sublime. A Guggenheim fellow, she has also received grants from the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council as well as New York University.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room
Organisers: Kenneth DEAN (NUS), Peter van der VEER (MPI-MMG) [more]

"Morality, discipline, and religious addiction treatment in Thailand"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"Remembered and forgotten Gods: the transnational worship of ancestral deities among Malaysian Hindus"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"Beings without bodies: contemporary Catholic exorcism and the discourse of evil"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17
  • Date: Feb 6, 2017
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Thomas J. Csordas (University of California San Diego)
  • Thomas J. Csordas is the Dr. James Y. Chan Presidential Chair in Global Health, Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology, Director of the Global Health Program, and Associate Director of the Global Health Institute at the University of California, San Diego, as well as a past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and a member of the American Society for the Study of Religion. His research interests include anthropological theory, comparative religion, medical and psychological anthropology, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture. He has conducted ethnographic research among Charismatic Catholics, Navajo Indians, adolescent psychiatric patients in New Mexico, and Catholic exorcists in the United States and Italy. Among his publications are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994); Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (1994); Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (1997); Body/Meaning/Healing (2002); and Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
  • Room: Library Hall
Presenters: Peter van der Veer (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) ▪ Doyoung Song (Hanyang University) ▪ Hyun Mee Kim (Yonsei University) ▪ Jin-Heon Jung (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) ▪ Nicholas Harkness (Harvard University) Discussants: Selected Faculty Members from Institute of Korean Studies, Freie Universität Berlin [more]
Go to Editor View