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

Room: Conference Room

"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

"Studying Muslim social formations: The importance of the Islamicate"

Workshops, conferences 2019
Recent debates on Islam in anthropology have tended to focus on discursive tradition, piety or revivalism, drawing upon the work of Talal Asad (1986, 1994) and Mahmood (2005), and “everyday Islam” or “lived Islam” (Lambek 2010, Osella and Soares 2010, Schielke 2012) which emphasizes subjective ambiguity and ambivalence towards Islamic discourse entailing enjoyment or pleasure in negation of norms. Both streams of literature appear to be in analytical agreement on a separation of religion and secular realms, although Asad himself does not suggest such a separation. This dichotomy allows little discussion on the role of pleasure and aesthetics—which is neither Islamically ordained, nor in itself considered unIslamic/anti-Islamic in Muslim social formations (e.g., Metcalf 1984). [more]

"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
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