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

"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

"What Gura Killed: Wildmen, White Men, and the Beastly Excess to Differences That Matter"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Winter 2016/17
  • Date: Nov 23, 2016
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Nils Bubandt (Aarhus University)
  • Nils Bubandt is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, where he (with Anna Tsing) co-directs AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene). With Mark Graham, he is also editor-in-chief of Ethnos. Recent and forthcoming publications include The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island (Cornell University Press, 2014); Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia (Routledge 2014); and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (co-edited with Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Elaine Gan)(University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
  • Room: Library Hall

"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

"Ethnography as history: marriage and moral horizons in Mayotte"

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

"Frontiers of Social Change: Migration, Mobility and World-Making"

Workshops, conferences 2016
A joint workshop between the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Brigham Young University [more]

" ‘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 Moral Background"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring 2016
  • Date: Apr 26, 2016
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Gabriel Abend (New York University/Lichtenberg-Kolleg)
  • Gabriel Abend is an associate professor of sociology at New York University and a current fellow of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg. He got his undergraduate degree at the Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay) and his PhD at Northwestern University (Evanston, United States). One of his ongoing projects takes issue with prevalent approaches to morality, because of their overreliance on individuals’ judgments, neglect of thick concepts, and blindness to the moral background that makes moral life possible. It shows what sociological, anthropological, and historical contributions can help rectify these errors. Another line of research compares the epistemological assumptions of different social scientific communities—see his articles “The Meaning of ‘Theory’”; “Styles of Causal Thought: An Empirical Investigation” (with C. Petre and M. Sauder); and “Styles of Sociological Thought: Sociologies, Epistemologies, and the Mexican and U.S. Quests for Truth.” A third ongoing project examines how the brain figures in societies’ institutionalized understandings about love, art, religion, spirituality, empathy, and morality.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
  • Room: Library Hall

"The Value of Comparison"

Workshops, conferences 2016
organized by RAN HIRSCHL (University of Toronto) and PETER VAN DER VEER (MPI-MMG) [more]

"Comparative Approaches to Inter-Asian Religious and Trade Networks"

Workshops, conferences 2016
Organized by KENNETH DEAN, Asia Research InstituteWith funding support from the Office of the Deputy President (Research & Technology) of the National University of Singapore; and in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. [more]

"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
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