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

Room: Conference Room Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen

CANCELLED - "The unbearable lightness of trust: trade, masculinity and the life-world of Indian export agents in Yiwu, China"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2020
  • Date: Mar 30, 2020
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Filippo Osella (University of Sussex)
  • FILIPPO OSELLA is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Sussex (UK). Since3 1989 he has conducted research in Kerala (India), Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and in a number countries in the Gulf. His recent books include Islam, Politics and Anthropology (with B. Soares, 2010), Islamic Reforms in South Asia (with C. Osella, 2012), Religion and the Morality of the Market (with D. Rudnyckyj, 2017). Last year he has co-edited (with S. Ramaswamy) a special issue of Modern Asian Studies on “Charity and Philanthropy in South Asia” (2018). His current research focuses on trading networks between China, India and West Asia, and he has recently begun research on a two years, ESRC-funded project on artisanal fishers’ attitudes towards risk in Kerala (India).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Religion and the Nation-Form"

"Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2020"

"Ritual and Pluralism: Religious Variations on Socialist Death Rituals in Urban China”

  • Date: Dec 9, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Huwy-min Lucia Liu (George Mason University)
  • Huwy-min Lucia Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Depart-ment of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University in the United States since 2019. Before joining Mason, she was an Assistant Professor in the Division of Humanities at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Dr. Liu received her PhD from the Anthropology Department at Boston University in 2015. Dr. Liu is a cultural anthropolo-gist whose research interests cover topics in politics, religions, socialism and change, subjectivity and governance, life and death study, rituals, and emotion. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled, Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"When Men Get No Share: Matrilineal Muslims and Sharia of Succession”

"Father Samba. Politics of Nerves and Catholic Redemptive Psychiatry in colonial Senegambia”

  • Date: Oct 7, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Annalisa Butticci (MPI-MMG)
  • Annalisa Butticci is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Her research interests include anthropology and sociology of religion, Christianity and colonialism, Roman Catholicism, West Africa and African diasporas, mobility and migration, visual studies, narrative methods and life stories. She has conducted extensive research in Italy, Nigeria, Ghana, and the US. Her latest book African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2016) was awarded honorable mention by the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize committee in recognition of its contribution to the anthropological study of religion and it was nominated for the 2020 Louisville Grawemeyer Award, a recognition that honors highly significant contributions to religious and spiritual understanding. She is the co-director of the film/documentary “Enlarging the Kingdom. African Pentecostalism in Italy”, editor of the photographic catalogue “Na God. Aesthetics of African Charismatic Power”, curator of several photographic and multimedia exhibitions and author of video and sound essays and of articles published in scientific journals and edited volumes.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"How is it between us? relational ethics and transcendence”

Religious Diversity Colloquium
  • Date: Sep 17, 2019
  • Time: 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jarrett Zigon (University of Virginia)
  • Jarrett Zigon is the Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, as well as the Founding Director of the Center for Data Ethics and Justice, and the Director of the Bioethics Program at UVA. He is the author of several books, including A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (University of California Press), Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding (Fordham University Press), HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia (University of California Press), and Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (Berg Press).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Comparative Queer Southeast Asian Studies"

  • Date: Jun 18, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Ward Keeler (University of Texas)
  • Ward Keeler is an American anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in Java in Indonesia during the New Order area. He worked in predominately Surakarta cultural areas, and studied wayang as a means of understanding specific manifestation of Javanese ways of thinking. His book Javanese, a cultural approach was a Javanese language text for English speakers that provided learners with language expressions for learning, rather than elaborate on the complexities of hierarchy within the language and culture. (Source: Wikipedia)
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Missionary, hostage, ransom, spy"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: Jun 3, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Angie Heo (University of Chicago)
  • Angie Heo is Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago. Her first book is The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (2018). Her current research examines various sites of Evangelical capitalism in the Korean peninsula.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Perspectives on Philippine psychic surgery"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: May 20, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Deirdre de la Cruz (University of Michigan)
  • Deirdre de la Cruz is Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures, at the University of Michigan. A cultural anthropologist by training, she is the author of the book Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and several articles on religion in the Philippines. Her current projects include a scholarly book on the history of faith healing in the Philippines, an edited volume on religious diversity in the Philippines, and two plays, one on the legacies of Filipinos who fought in WWII, and another that tells the history of Christianity through the eyes of its apostates.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Duty to Feed: Religion, Racial Democracy, and Welfare in Malaysia"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: May 6, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Rupa Viswanath (University of Göttingen)
  • Rupa Viswanath is Professor of Indian Religions at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen, and a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge. Prior to arriving in Göttingen in 2011, she taught in the South Asia Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and writing address the practices of secular regimes, histories of slavery in colonial South Asia, the political economy of caste, and comparative studies of racialized governance. Her current research projects are (1) an historical examination of how the concept of a democratic “people” emerged in the vernacular in postcolonial south India, specifically through the governance of intergroup violence and the administration of welfare, and (2) an ethnographic account of how religious and racial identification and state governance serve to underpin a specific ethics of political representation among ex-indentured Indians in Malaysia.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

" ‘Sakawa’: A moral critique of corruption in Ghana"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: Apr 1, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Girish Daswani (University of Toronto)
  • Girish Daswani is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research interests include Ghana, religion, Christianity, morality and ethics, transnationalism, corruption and activism. His most recent scholarly work has been exploring different activist and religious responses to corruption in Ghana. In addition to several articles in anthropology journals, he has published a monograph entitled Looking Back, Moving Forward: Transformation and Ethical Practice in the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost (2015, University of Toronto Press) and co-edited A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies with Prof. Ato Quayson (2013, Wiley-Blackwell). You can read his public-facing scholarship on the blog Everyday Orientalism and watch his Tedx UTSC talks on Youtube (2014 and 2018).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Syrian Revolutionary Culture at Home and in Germany"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: Mar 19, 2019
  • Time: 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Miriam Cooke (Duke University)
  • miriam cooke is Braxton Craven Professor of Arab Cultures emerita at Duke University. She has been a visiting professor in Tunisia, Romania, Indonesia, Qatar and Istanbul. She serves on several national and international advisory boards, including academic journals and institutions. Her writings have focused on the intersection of gender and war in modern Arabic literature, Arab women writers’ constructions of Islamic feminism, contemporary Syrian and Khaliji cultures, and global Muslim net-works. In addition to co-editing five volumes, she is the author of several monographs that include The Anatomy of an Egyptian Intellectual: Yahya Haqqi (1984); War’s Other Voices (1987), Women and the War Story (1997); Women Claim Islam (2001); Dissident Syria (2007), Nazira Zeineddine: A Pioneer of Islamic Feminism (2010), Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014) and Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (2017). She has also published a novel, Hayati, My Life (2000). Several books and articles have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch and German.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Mosque as a vehicle of Muslim political participation in Denmark"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: Mar 18, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Brian Arly Jacobsen (University of Copenhagen)
  • Brian Arly Jacobsen is mainly doing research in the area of religion and politics and religious minority groups in Denmark, especially Muslim minorities in Denmark/Western Europe, the political debate on Muslim minority groups and Muslim institutions. Recently he have studied the relationship between local authorities and local religious groups (religion and local politics). Currently he is PI on the research project ‘Danish Mosques – Significance, Use and Influence’ (https://mosques.ku.dk/), a three year research project funded by Independent Research Fund in Denmark from 2017 to 2020. Subproject in this project has the title: “Constructing Conflict: The Politics of Mosque Building.” Previously he has been part of the following projects: The role of religion in the public sphere. A comparative study of the five Nordic countries (NOREL), Alternative Spaces – The Religion of Danes Abroad, Demography of Religion – The Challenges of Estimating Muslims, Civil Religion in Denmark and other projects.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Interrogating Communalism: Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in South India"

Workshops, conferences 2019
We welcome you to the Symposium on Salah Punathil’s book"Interrogating Communalism: Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in South India" (Routledge, London, New Delhi 2019) [more]

"Between a rock and a hard place: Sacred geography and spiritual warfare in today’s Vietnam"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: Mar 4, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Tam Ngo (MPI-MMG / Radboud University Nijmegen)
  • Tam T. Ngo (ngo@mmg.mpg.de) is a member of the Department of Comparative Religious Studies (Radboud University, Nijmegen) and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany. She is the author of the monograph The New Way: Protestantism and The Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) and “Dynamics of Memory and Religious Nationalism in a Sino-Vietnamese Border Town” (Modern Asian Study, Forthcoming), and co-editor of Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015)
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

" ‘If God is with us, who can be against us?’: Christianity, cosmopolitics, and living with difference in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: Feb 18, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Liana Chua (Brunel University London)
  • Liana Chua holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge and is now Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has long-term ethnographic interests in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, where she has worked with indigenous Bidayuh communities since 2003, looking at conversion to Christianity, ethnic and religious politics, development and resettlement. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo (2012) and co-editor of several edited volumes, including Who are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology (2018). She is currently leading a large multi-sited research project that explores the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the age of ‘the Anthropocene’.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"At the foot of the grave: Challenging collective memories of violence in post-Franco Spain"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2019
  • Date: Feb 4, 2019
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Nicole Iturriaga (MPI-MMG)
  • Nicole Iturriaga is a sociologist with research interests in social movements, collective memory, human rights, culture, necropolitics, and the politics of reproduction. Her research examines how human rights activists are using forensic science to reframe histories of violence among other mechanisms (transnational advocacy networks, pedagogy, performativity) that further their goals of restoring identity, memory, and justice within a globalized context. Since July 2018 she is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MPI-MMG, where she will continue her research on the impact of scientific exhumations on post-conflict states, specifically Spain and Argentina.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The God of American bureaucracy: religion and the rise of the corporation in the Philippines"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2018/19
  • Date: Nov 26, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Scott MacLochlainn (MPI-MMG)
  • 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.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"(Mis)trust, (un)certainty and intention: can one trust an inscrutable God?"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2018/19
  • Date: Nov 19, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Matthew Carey (Copenhagen University)
  • 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).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Data management in anthropology: the next phase in ethics governance?"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2018/19
  • Date: Nov 12, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Peter Pels (Leiden University)
  • 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.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Politics in the piyasa: marching, marketing, and the emergence of gay identities in Istanbul"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2018/19
  • Date: Oct 22, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Sam Williams (Max Planck – Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change ▪ Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
  • 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.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Beyond ‘propaganda’: images and the moral citizen in late-socialist Vietnam"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2018/19
  • Date: Oct 8, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Susan Bayly (Cambridge University)
  • 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.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The voices of good and evil: what is enlightenment?"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2018/19
  • Date: Sep 25, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: WANG Hui (Tsinghua University=
  • 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”.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The matter of death: destruction and loss in Rotterdam during World War Two"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2018/19
  • Date: Sep 24, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Ton Robben (Utrecht University)
  • 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).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Muslim Diaspora and Sanctuary cities: safe places and politics of fear"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2018
  • Date: Jun 11, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Berna Turam (Northeastern University)
  • 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.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The transmission of Chinese civilizational techniques to Southeast Asia: networking, Daoist rites, spirit possession, and hybrid ritual forms"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2018

"Underneath the grand yellow imperial roofs of Martyrs’ Shrines: Taiwan’s colonial past and onwards and the political symbolisms at play"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2018
  • Date: Jun 5, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Liza Wing Man Kam (MPI-MMG)
  • 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.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Engineering transformations in the ‘religion-development nexus’: Islamic law, reform, and reconstruction in Aceh"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2018
  • Date: Jun 4, 2018
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Michael Feener (Oxford)
  • 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.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Coping with uncertainty through partnership: an ethnographic study on Vietnamese migrant women in Berlin"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2018

"Buddhism and colonial governmentality in Laos and Indochina: from French orientalism to anti-communism (1893-1953)"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2018

"Refugees and religion"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2018

"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

"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]
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]

"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

"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

"Songs to the Jinas and of the Gurus: historical comparisons between Jain and Sikh devotional music"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"Transactional Sociality: Market Moralities and Embedded Capital in Modern South Asia"

Workshops, conferences 2016
Funded by MPI-MMG and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen University. Conveners: Ajay Gandhi, Sebastian Schwecke [more]

MPI PhD Workshop – “Creative Value” with Samuel Lengen, Xiao He, and Shaheed Tayob

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"An inescapable comparison: casteism and racism in the diaspora"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17
  • Date: Nov 22, 2016
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Meena Dhanda (University of Wolverhampton)
  • Meena Dhanda is a Reader in Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton where she has taught for the last 24 years. She migrated from the Indian Punjab to the U.K. as a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University in 1987 and was later awarded a Rhodes JRF. Her first publication on the question of caste and untouchability was an article in 1993 “L’eveil des intouchables en Inde” in Le respect : De l’estime à la deference: une question de limite ed. by Catherine Audard, les Editions Autrement - Serie Morales, France. Translated by Isabelle di Natale, which she wishes had been published in English as she does not read French! She engaged with the problematic question of the identity of a dalit in her DPhil which was later published as The Negotiation of Personal Identity (Saarbruken: VDM Verlag, 2008). She is interested in questions of intersecting discriminations and in her collection Reservations for Women (ed.) (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2008) she touched upon gender and caste. From 2007, Meena has engaged in transdisciplinary studies connected with caste, publishing several papers. ‘Punjabi Dalit Youth: Social Dynamics of Transitions in Identity’, (Contemporary South Asia, 2009); ‘Runaway Marriages: A Silent Revolution?’, (Economic and Political Weekly, 2012); ‘Caste and International Migration, India to the UK’ (The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, 2013); ‘Certain Allegiances, Uncertain Identities: The Fraught Struggles of Dalits in Britain’ (Tracing the New Indian Diaspora, 2014); ‘Do only South Asians reclaim honour’? (‘Honour’ and Women’s Rights, 2014); ‘Anti-Castism and Misplaced Nativism’ (Radical Philosophy, 2015) and ‘Ensuring Protection against Caste Discrimination in Britain: Should the Equality Act Be Extended? (International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 2016).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"Tribe, caste and class in contemporary India"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"Are you afraid of cockroaches?’: Compassion and the horrors of abjection in Taiwanese Buddhism"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"Engaging tolerance: privacy and publicity in the inter-religious engagement of Mumbai’s Ismaili Muslims"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"Rifah-e-Aam Club, Lucknow: politics and poetics in India’s changing public sphere"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

"From excarnation to ashes: changes in Zoroastrian ritual infrastructure in Mumbai"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17

" ‘Spiritual Warfare’ on Multi-religious Terrain: Political Cosmologies in Postwar Sri Lanka"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2016

"Death and the Afterlife"

Workshops, conferences 2016
What does one do with the dead? Burial, entombment, mummification, or cremation hint at creative ritual possibilities that tell us how we care for the dead. In several contexts, the dead form an unquestionable social good that encompasses a number of tropes, such as designating ancestors for a family, configuring the nation-state on memorials and mortal remains, meditating on death as part of ethical self-formation, and so on. Added to this, is the whole range of beliefs in souls, spirits, ghosts, zombies, saints, and shamans that anthropologists routinely encounter, which testifies to the idea of a vibrant afterlife and puts into serious doubt any conceptualization of death as finitude or cessation. Conversely, the dead and especially mortal remains also entail vital registers of forgetting, of ostracism and of obliteration. [more]

"Yearning, Modern Destinies and Christian Morality at the Margins of the Chinese State"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2016

"Sacred Geography and Alchemical Ideology: A Sectarian Standpoint"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2016

"Economies of Sao Paolo: Image, Space, Circulation"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2016
  • Date: May 24, 2016
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Maria José de Abreu (Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin)
  • De Abreu studied Anthropology of Media at SOAS, University of London, and received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam in 2009. Her work engages with a range of anthropological, philosophical and literary debates about religion, time, space, personhood, the human senses and their technological extensions. She is currently working on two projects. The first is on the flourishing of Byzantine imaginary in urban Sao Paolo through the practices of a media-savvy religious movement and the seconds is on experiences of impasse among Portuguese youth in the context of the Southern European financial crisis. She has published in various journals and edited volumes. She is currently affiliated to the ICI-Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. In 2017 she will be both a fellow at Humboldt University and an assistant professor at the department of Anthropology at Columbia University in the city of New York.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Embracing the World in Isolation--the Rise of Protestant Christianity in Southeast China during the Cultural Revolution"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2016

"The walking undead: spirit victims and heroes in Post-Pinochet Chile"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016

"The mechanical missionary: infrastructures of conversion and the Far East broadcasting company"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016

"An ethnographic theory of hospitality: reflections from Tibetan borderlands"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016
  • Date: Dec 15, 2015
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Giovanni da Col (University of London)
  • Giovanni da Col is Director of the newly founded Centre for Ethnographic Theory at SOAS, University of London, and member of the ERC-KHAM project at CNRS-Centre d’Etudes Himalayennes. He has done fieldwork on conceptions of vitality, witchcraft and modes of deception in China’s official Shangri-la, and is currently conducting research on self-immolations among Tibetans in PRC and Naxi-Tibetan rituals of life and prosperity. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Executive Publisher of HAU Books, the author of several peer-reviewed articles, and editor of a few collections, including three volumes on hospitality and fortune (2012 JRAI, Social Analysis-Berghahn). Some overdue collections and monographs are forthcoming in 2016: The Invisible State: Spirits and Environmental Worlds on China’s Frontiers (The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology-Routledge), Cosmoeconomics: Theorising vitality, prosperity and alternative economies today (Anthropological Theory); and Anthropology and Life Itself (with Bhrigupati Singh, Clara Han and Bob Desjarlais, 2016). He is currently working on an invited article on Hospitality for the Annual Review of Anthropology and the entries ‘Life’, ‘Luck, Fortune and Chance’ and ‘Event’ for Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (in preparation) His monograph on negative kinship, poisoning and hospitality in Tibetan borderlands is under consideration at the University of Chicago Press.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Demystifying the secular: European Muslim intellectuals re-posing the Muslim question"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016
  • Date: Dec 8, 2015
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Nadia Fadil (KU Leuven)
  • Nadia Fadil works as an Assistant Professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Multiculturalism Research Centre at the KU Leuven. Her research interests revolve around the questions of secularism and religion, subjectivity, embodiment and affect and Islam as a discursive tradition. These questions are explored through an ethnographic engagement with the public debates around, and the lived experiences of, secular and pious Muslims in Brussels and Francophone Europe. Parts of her work have been published in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, and some of her most recent publications include “Recalling the Islam of the Parents. Politics of authentication of liberal and secular Muslims” (2015, published in Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power) and “Rediscovering the Everyday Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Fault-line” (2015, co-authored with Mayanthi Fernando and published in HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"From bondage to citizenship: African Americans and Dalits since enfranchisement"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016

"Prayers as life affirming practices: Dalit Christianity in Kerala, India"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016

"Fear rather than remorse: emotional performance of citizenship and Turkish- and Arab-German engagements with the Holocaust"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016
  • Date: Nov 17, 2015
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Esra Ozyurek (London School of Economics)
  • Dr. Esra Özyürek is an Associate Professor and Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute, London School of Economics. She received her BA in Sociology and Political Science at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining the LSE she taught at the Anthropology Department of University of California, San Diego. Her most recent book Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion and Conversion in the New Europe has been published by the Princeton University Press (2014).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Searching for ông Trượng"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2015/2016

"What is a Situation?: The Drug War"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: Jul 2, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jarrett Zigon (University of Amsterdam)
  • Jarrett Zigon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include morality, subjectivity, political ontology, and possibilities for becoming otherwise. These interests are taken up from the perspective of an anthropology strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian phenomenology and critical theory. His most recent book is HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia (2011, University of California Press). His articles can be found in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, Ethnos, and Ethos among other journals. His forthcoming book is titled Possibilities: Critical Hermeneutic Essays on Politics, Moralities, and Ontologies. He can be reached by email at j.zigon@uva.nl; his website is http://jarrettzigon.com.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Spiritual Topographies of Ruination and Reconstruction in Vinh City, Vietnam"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: Jun 30, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Christina Schwenkel (UC Riverside)
  • Christina Schwenkel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Vietnam on the transnational co-production of postwar memory and postwar reconstruction of urban infrastructure. She is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana University Press 2009) and a co-edited special issue of positions: asia critique (with Ann Marie Leshkowich) on “Neoliberalism in Vietnam” (2012). Her most recent publications examine the global Cold War as a civilizing project through socialist circulations of knowledge, labor, and technology between Vietnam and East Germany, including Vietnamese contract workers and architecture students in the GDR (Critical Asian Studies; Central and Eastern European Migration Review) and East German urban planning and reconstruction of Vinh City (Cultural Anthropology; International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity; American Ethnologist). She is currently writing a book entitled, Planning the Postwar City: East German Urban Designs and their Afterlife in Vietnam. Schwenkel will be a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin during the fall semester, 2015.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Penetrant Transnational Strategies of North Korean Migrants and the Liminalities of Korean National Identity"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: Jun 18, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Byung-ho Chung (Hanyang University)
  • Byung-Ho Chung, a native of South Korea, is the founding director of the Institute for Globalization and Multicultural Studies at Hanyang University. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Illinois in 1983 and 1992, respectively. Dr. Chung is being honored for his work on social activism and education reform extending throughout East Asia. The founder or co-founder of six civil society social justice organizations, he has focused particularly on the relationship between North and South Korea, promoting multiculturalism and peace and establishing organizations to care for refugees, many of them children. In 2014, he was awarded the Madhuri and Jagdish N. Sheth International Alumni Award for Exceptional Achievement from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Mobilization of the Social and the Dearth of Social Imaginaries: Local Appropriations of “Building Society” (shehui jianshe) in Shenzhen’s Urban Periphery"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: Jun 16, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Mun-young Cho (Yonsei University, South Korea)
  • Mun Young Cho is an associate professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research focuses on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. Based on fieldwork in Harbin, her first book The Specter of “The People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines how a state dedicated to serving “the people” manages the impoverishment of urban workers, the one-time representatives of the socialist project. Currently, Cho is conducting research on the evolving landscapes of grassroots activism in South Korea as well as on migrant youth in a Shenzhen’s Foxconn town in southern China, along with various modes and actions of mobilizing “the social.”
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Comparing Chinese Temple and Ritual Networks in Southeast Asia"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: Jun 11, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Kenneth Dean (McGill University)
  • Kenneth Dean is Professor and Head of the Chinese Department and a Research Cluster Leader in the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is Lee Chair and James McGill Professor Emeritus of McGill University. He is the author of several books and articles on Chinese religion and ritual, Taoism and local history, religious epigraphy, and transnational ritual networks. His documentary film Bored in Heaven: a film about ritual sensation (2010) covers processions, rituals and trance possession in contemporary Putian, Fujian, China.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Classes of labour in an Indian Steel Town"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: Jun 9, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jonathan Parry (London School of Economics)
  • Jonathan Parry is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has done field research in various parts of north and central India on various different topics. His publications include Caste and Kinship in Kangra (Routledge 1979), Death in Banaras (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Death and the Regeneration of Life (ed, with M. Bloch, Cambridge University Press, 1982), Money and the Morality of Exchange (ed, with M. Bloch, Cambridge University Press, 1989), The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (ed, with J. Breman and K. Kapadia, Sage Publications, 1999), Institutions and Inequalities (ed, with R. Guha, Oxford University Press, 1999), Questions of Anthropology (ed, with R. Astuti and C. Stafford, Berg, 2007), Industrial work and life: An anthropological Reader (ed, with G. De Neve and M. Mollona. London: Berg, 2009) and Persistence of Poverty in India (ed, with N. Gooptu, Social Science Press, 2014).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Transformation of Asian Megacity and Risk Society: An Analysis of Risk Perceptions among Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: May 28, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Chang-hyun LEE (Kookmin University)
  • Chang Hyun Lee is Professor in the School of Communication at Kookmin University in Seoul South Korea. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from Seoul National University. From 2012-2014, he served as the Director of The Seoul Institute, the research think-tank for the city of Seoul. For more on Dr. Lee, please visit the website: http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/oas/korea-studien/institut/mitarbeiter/gastwissenschaftler/LeeChangHyun.html
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Mediating Piety: A Qur’anic Quarrel in Indonesia"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015

"Rights Gone Wrong on the City’s Edge: Evidence from Ho Chi Minh City"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: May 19, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Erik Harms (Yale University)
  • Erik Harms is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International & Area Studies at Yale University, specializing in urban anthropology, Southeast Asia, and Vietnam. His ethnographic research in Vietnam has focused on the social and cultural effects of rapid urbanization on the fringes of Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City. His book, Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), explores how the production of symbolic and material space intersects with Vietnamese concepts of social space, rural-urban relations, and notions of “inside” and “outside.” He has published articles in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, City & Society, Pacific Affairs, Positions, and is the co-editor of Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity (Hawaii, 2013). Harms is currently writing a book about the demolition and reconstruction of the urban landscape in two of Ho Chi Minh City’s New Urban Zones, Phu My Hung and Thu Thiem. Please visit his project website for more information on this research: http://newurbanvietnam.commons.yale.edu/.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Orthoprax Morals of North India’s Goonda Raj"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: May 12, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Anastasia Piliavsky (University of Cambridge)
  • Anastasia Piliavsky is a social anthropologist who works on Indian politics and crime, and the relation between the two. Trained at Boston University and at Oxford, she is Fellow and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge; she is also currently a co-Inversitagor on an international study of democracy and political criminalisation in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (funded by the European and the British Research Councils). She has written historically and ethnographically on India‘s criminal tribes, borders, secrecy, publicity, corruption and the police, and has recently edited a book on Patronage as Politics in South Asia (CUP 2014).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Vigilant Ethnicity: Korean Chinese Communist Party Members Encounter the Forbidden Homeland"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2015
  • Date: May 5, 2015
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: June Hee Kwon (Duke University / U Pitt)
  • June Hee Kwon is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology/University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She will join the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University as Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow from September 1, 2015. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in 2013. Her research and teaching focus on transnational migration and human rights, kinship and ethnicity, and affect and economy. Her area of expertise spans contemporary Korea (North and South) and China, and includes postcolonial and post-Cold War East Asian inter-connections. She was a recipient of the Eric Wolf Prize by the Society of Anthropology of Work, and the Sylvia Forman Prize by the Association of Feminist Anthropology. Her article, “The Work of Waiting: Love and Money in Korean Chinese Transnational Migration,” appears in Cultural Anthropology 30:2 (May 2015).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Poor@Play: Digital life beyond the West"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2014/15
  • Date: Nov 25, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Payal Arora (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)
  • Payal Arora is the author of several books including Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas (Ashgate, 2010) and The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2014; Winner of the EUR Fellowship Award) as well as co-author of The Shape of Diversity to Come: Crossroads in New media, Identity & Law (in press; Palgrave) and Poor@Play: Digital Life beyond the West (expected 2016; Harvard University Press). Her paper on digitization of information won the 2010 Best Paper Award in Social Informatics by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Her focus and expertise lies in the anthropology and sociology of new technologies, specifically their digital cultures and social activism. She has consulted for both the private and public sector worldwide including with Shell, World Bank, hp, National Health Foundation, The Ministry of Education in Jordan, Sotheby’s, Art Review, Kellogg and the Beirut Chambers of Commerce. She is currently a GE Fellow on the Industrial Internet Project. She sits on several boards including the Global Media Journal, The South Asian Media, Arts & Culture Research Center in University of North Texas, Young Erasmus, Makerocity, and The World Women Global Council in New York. She holds degrees from Harvard University (M.Ed., International Policy) and Columbia University (PhD, Language, Literacy & Technology). She is currently based in the Department of Media and Communication, Faculty of History, Culture and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. For more detail, please check her website: www.payalarora.com
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Racial Barriers and Religious Boundaries: Religion and Assimilation among Second-Generation Asian Americans"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2014/15
  • Date: Oct 23, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Carolyn Chen (Northwestern University)
  • Carolyn Chen is associate professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of the book Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Religion, and Ethnicity among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). She has written in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times about Asian Americans and college admissions. She is currently writing a book called Zen and the Art of Corporate Productivity about the culture of Asian spirituality in Silicon Valley companies.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Making Good Indians out of Goan Catholics: The Catholic Church and the formation of Indian citizens in Goa"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2014/15
  • Date: Oct 14, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jason Keith Fernandes (Centro de Estudos Internacionais, Lisboa)
  • Jason Keith Fernandes is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for International Studies (CIE) at ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon. Subsequent to a degree in law and a Master’s degree in the sociology of law, Jason was recently awarded a doctorate in anthropology for a dissertation on The Citizenship Experiences of Goan Catholics. With a Fellowship from the New India Foundation, he is in the process of writing a book manuscript around language and politics in post-colonial Goa.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Diversity without Difference: Rendering the Modern Rural in China’s Ethnic Tourism"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2014/15
  • Date: Oct 2, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jenny Chio (Emory University)
  • Dr. Jenny Chio is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, USA, where she teaches courses on contemporary China, visual anthropology, critical tourism studies, and the anthropology of media. She completed her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has recently published a monograph, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China (University of Washington Press, 2014), and directed an ethnographic film on tourism in two ethnic villages in China, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness (distributed by Berkeley Media, 2013).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Behind the high-tech fetish: Children, work and media use across socio-economic classes in India"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2014/15
  • Date: Sep 23, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Shankuntala Banaji (London School of Economics)
  • Dr Shakuntala Banaji is a Lecturer in Media and Communications and Programme Director for the Masters in Media, Communication and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has 21 years’ experience as a teacher and educational researcher, currently lecturing in Film Theory, World Cinema, International Media, Communication and Development. Shakuntala has been part of several large-scale research projects for the European Union and other funders; among these ‘Young people and democratic participation in the European Union’ for EACEA through LSE Enterprise (2010-2012); ‘Stakeholder Perspectives on Creativity and Innovation in Schooling in the EU27’ (IPTS 2009-2010) and CivicWeb: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation (EU, Framework 6, 2006-2009). Her unfunded research with young people in South Asia in relation to media, representation, citizenship and technology use is on-going. Shakuntala has published widely on Cinema Audiences, Bollywood, Youth, Gender, Ethnicity, Politics, Creativity and Online Civic Participation. Recent books include South Asian Media Cultures: Audiences, Representations, Contexts (2010) from Anthem Press and The Civic Web: Young People, Civic Participation and the Internet in Europe, (2013) co-authored with David Buckingham.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"From village to city: Hinduism and the ‘Hindu caste system’ "

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014

"Laboring Bodies and Wandering Spirits: East India Migrants and Mobility in Contemporary Mumbai"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014

"The Tri-Color Market Perspective: Understanding Religious Revitalizations in China"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014

"Names, caste, and the secular: reflections from North India"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014
  • Date: May 27, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jacob Copeman (University of Edinburgh)
  • Jacob Copeman is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. His publications include: Social Theory After Strathern. Sage 2014; The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (co-edited with Aya Ikegame). 2012. Routledge; The Art of Bleeding: memory, martyrdom, and portraits in blood. 2013. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, S 149-S 171.; The Didactic Death: Publicity, Instruction and Body Donation. 2012. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 2(2) (co-authored with Deepa Reddy).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"What are ‘religions’ in South Asia?"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014

"In the absence of chance: Play and economy at the Delhi racecourse"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014
  • Date: May 20, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Stine Simonsen Puri (University of Copenhagen)
  • Stine Simonsen Puri is an anthropologist working as a postdoc at Institute for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at Copenhagen University, from where she also received her PhD. Her dissertation was on gambling and speculative economy in India based on fieldwork at indian racecourses. In addition to this, she has worked and published on dance, performance and mythology in India.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The guru as a wise legislator: the guru and informal legal space in rural South India"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014
  • Date: May 13, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Aya Ikegame (Edinburgh)
  • After completing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in 2007 (a historical anthropological study of the South Indian kingdom of Mysore) Dr Aya Ikegame won an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (2007-8). She was then employed as a postdoctoral research fellow on an AHRC/ESRC project on monastery-run schools in South India (2009-10) at Edinburgh University’s Centre for South Asian Studies. She also worked (2010-11) as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary India Area Studies in the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. She joined the OECUMENE Project in 2011.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Anthropology and Government in British India, 1881-1911: Ibbetson and Risley Reconsidered"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014
  • Date: May 6, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Chris Fuller (London School of Economics)
  • Professor Chris Fuller specialises in India. His first fieldwork (1971-2) was in Kerala in southwest India among the Nayars and the Syrian Christians, and his work particularly focused on kinship among the Nayars, famous for their matriliny. From 2003-5, with other colleagues in LSE, Fuller worked on a major research project, sponsored by ESRC, on regionalism, nationalism and globalisation in India, and his research has focused on middle-class company managers and software professionals in the city of Chennai (Madras). From 2005-8, with Haripriya Narasimhan, he carried out an ESRC-sponsored research project on a group of Tamil Brahmans, focusing on this traditional elite‘s modern transformation into a migratory, urbanised, trans-national community. Their book based on this research, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste, will be published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press and Social Science Press (New Delhi). Fuller has also researched and written extensively on popular Hinduism and Hindu nationalism, the caste system, the anthropology of the state and other topics. His current research is on the history of the anthropology of India.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Detachment, disinterest, and indifference: some jain ways of setting oneself apart"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014

"Sovereignty and the act of conversion: the case of Narasapur"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014
  • Date: Apr 22, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Goldie Osuri (University of Warwick)
  • Dr. Goldie Osuri is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. Prior to her appointment at Warwick, she worked at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She has recently published a monograph, Religious Freedom in India: Sovereignty and (Anti) Conversion (Routledge, 2013).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Pirates in Paradise: the formation of the Chinese transnational temple network and the cult of Lin Guniang in Pattani"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014

"A minimal definition of cynicism. Everyday Social Criticism and some meanings of ‘Life’ in contemporary China"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014
  • Date: Mar 25, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Hans Steinmüller (London School of Economics)
  • Hans Steinmüller is a specialist in the anthropology of China working at the London School of Economics. 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). At LSE, he is the convenor of the MSc programme ‚China in Comparative Perspective‘.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Reflections on economic psychology in Heilongjiang and Oklahoma"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2014
  • Date: Mar 13, 2014
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Charles Stafford (London School of Economics)
  • Charles Stafford is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is a specialist in the anthropology of learning and cognition, and has carried out fieldwork for many years in rural Taiwan, China and (more recently) America. He is the author of „Separation and reunion in modern China“ and the editor of „Ordinary ethics in China“. He is also the publisher and editor of the online review journal Anthropology of this Century (AOTC).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Spaces, Objects and Sacred Geographies: Rethinking the History of Kerala’s Faith Practice"

  • Date: Feb 3, 2014
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: G. Arunima (Arunima Gopinath) (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
  • G. Arunima (Arunima Gopinath) is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at JNU, Delhi and currently a Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, University of Kölln. She is the author of ‘There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar c. 1850-1940 (2003) and numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Novel Images: Aesthetics, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial South India, Kerala 1870-1940. Professor Gopinath’s research projects include: “Sacred Geographies, Hybrid Iconographies: Faith Practices and Idioms of Malayali Religious Iconography” and “Gender, Photography and Visual Practices in Contemporary India.”
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room
A talk sponsored by Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and CeMIS, Göttingen. [more]

"The capacity to be content: Aspirations and young adult Catholics in Singapore"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14

"Is there a Sectarian Habitus in Lebanon? On Secularism and Aspirations"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14

"Immigrant religious communities in Switzerland – Bridges or Impediment for Social Incorporation?"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14
  • Date: Nov 19, 2013
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Martin Baumann (University of Lucerne, Switzerland)
  • Martin Baumann is Professor of the Study of Religions at the Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences and current vice-chancellor for the advancement of research at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. with a thesis on Buddhists and Buddhist communities in Germany in 1993 at the University of Hannover (Germany) and received his habilitation graduation with a post-doctoral thesis on Hindu tradition in diasporic contexts in 1999 at the University of Leipzig (Germany). Since 2001, he is professor for the Study of Religions at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland). His teaching and research interests focus on immigration and religion, diaspora communities and religious pluralism, new religions, and Hindu and Buddhist traditions in the West.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Territorial cults and the urbanization of the Chinese world: A case study of Suzhou"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14
  • Date: Nov 12, 2013
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Vincent Goossaert (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris)
  • Vincent Goossaert obtained his PhD at EPHE, Paris (1997), was a research fellow at CNRS from 1998 to 2012 and is now Professor of Daoism and Chinese religions at EPHE. He has served as the Deputy Director of the Societies-Religions-Secularisms Institute (GSRL, Paris) since 2004. In 2007, he was ICS Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research deals with the social history of premodern and modern Chinese religion. He has published books on Chinese temples, Anticlericalism in China, Chinese dietary taboos, the production of moral norms, and most recently, with David Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011) which won the Levenson Prize for Books in Chinese Studies in 2013.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Competition, Entrepreneurship, and Network Formation among Taiwanese Spirit-Writing Cults"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14
  • Date: Nov 5, 2013
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Philip Clart (Leipzig)
  • Philip Clart is Professor of Chinese Culture and History at the University of Leipzig, Germany. His main research areas are popular religion and new religious movements in Taiwan, religious change in Taiwan and China, as well as literature and religions of the late imperial period (10th-19th c.). His monographs include Han Xiangzi: The Alchemical Adventures of a Daoist Immortal (University of Washington Press, 2007) and Die Religionen Chinas (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009). He has edited or co-edited Religion in Modern Taiwan: Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Society (University of Hawai‘i Press 2003), The People and the Dao: New Studies of Chinese Religions in Honour of Daniel L. Overmyer (Institute Monumenta Serica, 2009), and Chinese and European Perspectives on the Study of Chinese Popular Religions (Boyang Publishing, 2012).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Chinese Education and Processes of Individualization"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14
  • Date: Oct 15, 2013
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Mette Halskov Hansen (University of Oslo)
  • Mette Halsko Hansen is Professor at the University of Oslo, Department of East European and Oriental Studies. She is responsible for the master programme in Chinese society and politics, and a newly started joint master in China studies with the University of Zhejiang, in cooperation with University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University. Her research is in the field of modern Chinese society and politics, more specifically: education and youth, processes of individualization, ethnic minorities, Chinese migrations to minority areas, and most recently discourses on the environment and public participation in environmental debates. The research is based on fieldwork mainly in the provinces of Yunnan, Gansu, Zhejiang, and Fujian.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

" ‘Internet Hindus’: Social media and the politics of religious difference in Mumbai"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14

"Collection and speculation of banknotes: Grey market and invisible traders"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2013/14

"India Workshop"

Workshops, conferences 2013
This workshop presents recent research on India and has two components. Each presenter introduces a pre-circulated paper or shows a film (15 minutes introduction + 30 minutes discussion). Interspersed with this, there are three discussion sessions (30 minutes) structured around larger research questions. [more]

"The Comparative Advantage of Anthropology"

Chair/Respondent: Prof. Steven Vertovec [more]

"Spirits of the Citadel: Voice and Power in a Bangkok Community"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013
  • Date: Jun 10, 2013
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University)
  • Michael Herzfeld is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Depart­ment of Anthropology at Harvard University. Author of ten books, including most recently Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome (2009), and producer of two ethnographic films, he has conducted extensive research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand. His current research focuses on the impact of historic conservation on present-day communities, and especially the politics of eviction, and on the local impact of cryptocolonial and neoliberal dynamics. Recipient of numerous awards, including the J.I. Staley Prize (School of American Research) and the Rivers Memorial Medal (Royal Anthropological Institute, Lon­don), he has received honorary doctorates from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki), and the University of Crete, and is an Honorary Professor of Shandong University, Jinan, China. He has served (1995-98) as editor of American Ethnologist.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"The Communist Party and Religionsa"

  • Date: May 15, 2013
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: André Laliberté (School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa)
  • André Laliberté has received his doctoral degree from the University of British Columbia in 1999 and is full professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, where he teaches on the politics of China and comparative politics. He is co-director of the Chair on Taiwan Studies in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa. He has done research in Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, and Hong Kong on the intersection of religion and democratic transitions, issues of identity, and social policies.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Aspirations for Religion? Caste, Secularization and the Cacophony of Religious Performance in Mumbai"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Witchcraft in Africa and Elsewhere"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Parallel Universe: Chinese religion in Singapore"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013
  • Date: May 6, 2013
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Kenneth Dean (McGill University)
  • Professor Kenneth Dean is 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. His main research fields are Chinese Taoism, Popular Culture and Chinese Litterature.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"In Spite of Christianity: Humanism and its others in Britain"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"From the Lord’s Prayer to Invoking Slavery through Prayers: Religious Practices and Dalits in Kerala, India"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Namingand Omission in Three Episodes"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"An Ethnography of Conversion in the National Frame: Introduction"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Frauds & Charlatans: Sincerity’s Elusiveness in Delhi"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Making Tibetan Buddhism Modern in China"

"The political economy of Shi’ite religiosity in Mumbai"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Politics, family feuds, and everyday life in Mount Lebanon under Syrian occupation: 1976-2005"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Where is Europe? Space, Power and Ethnicization among overseas Chinese Protestant Christians"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Life in Death: Relics and the Church Body Politic in Egypt"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Bones of Contention: Violence, Memory, and Reconciliations in Post-Revolutionary Vietnam"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Gender and Sect in Bibi Pak Daman’s Lahore"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"The Afterlife of Images"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"The Cordial State (Samimi Devlet), Religion, and Diversity: the Case of Turkey’s ‘Alevi Workshops’ "

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2013

"Urbanization in Between: Theorizing Urbanization in Rapidly Industrializing China"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2012/2013

"Social life of Banknotes"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2012/2013

"Mapping Tibetan Landscape with Buddhism: Pema Tseden’s Transnational Cinema in China"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2012/2013

"Golden Rule Catholicism: Lived Religion and Young People in the Philippines"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2012/2013
  • Date: Sep 25, 2012
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jayeel Serrano Cornelio (MPI-MMG)
  • Jayeel Serrano Cornelio received his MSocSci (2007) and PhD (2011) degrees in sociology from the National University of Singa­pore. He was a recipient of the Asia Research Institute PhD grant, the Graduate Scholarship for ASEAN Nationals, and the Lee Foundation Prize for academic excellence. He was visi­ting research student at the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University and visiting research associate at the Institute of Philippine Culture. In the Philippines, he has also been research fellow at the East Asian Pastoral Institute and instructor in sociology and development studies at the Ateneo de Manila University.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"A Two Nation Theory with a Difference: India after the Reforms"

Tuesday Seminar Winter 2012/2013

"Ethnic Diversity, Social Polarization, and Political Representation in Multicultural Taiwan"

Tuesday Seminar Spring/Summer 2012

"Actants Amassing: What’s Wrong with Durkheim and Mauss?"

Tuesday Seminar Spring/Summer 2012
  • Date: May 25, 2012
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Adam Chau (University of Cambridge)
  • Adam Chau was born in Beijing and grew up in Beijing and Hong Kong (hence the Anglicised Cantonese romanisation of my Chinese name). His undergraduate and graduate training in sociocultural anthropology was done in the US. His doctoral fieldwork was conducted in Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi Province) in the Yulin and Yan’an prefectures, on the cultural, social and political aspects of the revival of popular religion in rural China during the reform period. The results of that research have been published in a monograph (Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China; 2006, Stanford University Press) and a series of journal articles. After having lived in the US for more than a dozen years, Adam chau came to the UK in 2005, and has taught at Oxford and SOAS respectively before coming to Cambridge.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"Indian Religiosities"

Workshops, conferences 2012
20 minutes for each presentation [more]

"Sacred missions and national identities: Modernist teleology in Siberian religious revivalism "

Tuesday Seminar Spring/Summer 2012

"Multiculturalism in South Korea"

Workshops, conferences 2012
Two Korean scholars will visit our institute and present their papers on Korean multiculturalism. Taking on one hand a developmental perspective and on the other an exploration into civilizational ethics, these papers open a dialogue into the state project of multiculturalism. Please join us for what promises to be invigorating discussion!! [more]

"Urban Aspirations in Seoul (The Seoul Lab)"

Workshops, conferences 2012
The 1st Lab Meeting Program. [more]

"Is there an 'Indian' Urbanism?"

Tuesday Seminar Spring/Summer 2011

"Superscription without Encompassment: Predicament of Turning Gwer Sa La Festival into Intangible Cultural Heritage"

Tuesday Seminar Spring/Summer 2011

"Four Emblematic Figures in the Making of a 'New India' "

Tuesday Seminar Spring/Summer 2011
  • Date: May 17, 2011
  • Time: 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Aninhalli Vasavi
  • Aninhalli Rame Vasavi is a Social Anthropologist with an interest in the areas of sociology of India, agrarian studies, sociology of education, and integrated studies. She has engaged in field-based research over the past decade and a half.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room

"State-Sangha relation in East Asia: is symbiosis possible in a transnationalised world?"

Workshops, conferences 2010

"Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China: An Analysis of External Dynamics"

  • Date: Dec 8, 2009
  • Time: 09:30 AM - 11:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Ji Zhe (Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies, France)
  • JI Zhe is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, and Resident Research Fellow in the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies (2009-2010) in France. He received his PhD in sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 2007. He has published articles on Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, youth religiosity and sociological theory of religion in various journals including Perspectives Chinoises, Social Compass, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie and Nova Religio. Based on his doctoral thesis, his book on modern changes in Chan Buddhism will be published by the Editions de l’EHESS (in the “En temps & lieux” series, 2010, Paris). He guest-edits a special issue of the French academic annual Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, which focuses on religion as educative space in modern and contemporary China (forthcoming in 2011). His current research is on Buddhism and Confucianism in the post-Mao era, and Chinese secularism.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room
In co-operation with the Iranian Studies Seminar, Göttingen University. [more]

"Martyrdom and Nationalism in Kurdish Poetry"

  • Date: Dec 3, 2009
  • Time: 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Mariwan Kanie (Amsterdam)
  • Mariwan Kanie comes originally from Iraqi Kurdistan. Since 1993 he lives and works in Holland. Recently he is writing a Doctoral thesis on martyrdom at the University of Amsterdam and teaches the intellectual history of Arab and Islamic world at the same university.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room
In co-operation with the Iranian Studies Seminar, Göttingen University. [more]

" Little India – Secularism, Transnationalism and Religious Pluralism in Mauritius"

Joint Seminar Series 2009 "Dimensions of Diversity"
Co-organized by: Peter van der Veer & Steve Vertovec (Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity) ▪ Matthias Koenig & Andrea Lauser (Göttingen University) [more]
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