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

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

"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
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