Course Outline

Week 1: Introduce Course Concepts

• Critical reading and thinking skills
  
  
  
  
  • ACE-FA – the Elements of Critical Assessment and Analysis
    
    
    
    
    • Tools for critically reading a text (or other document) by identifying the Evidence, the Conversation, the Argument, and the Authority (of the author, artifact, performance, or production)
    
    
    • Participant Observation and the Anthropological Method
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  In-class writing assignment week 1: Why am I here studying about religion and spirits in Southeast Asia?

  
  

The Making of Religion: Theoretical Grounding

Weeks 2-3: Inventing Religion

Week 2: Religion is not Secular

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chapters 1 and 6.

Week 3: Religion is Culture

Geertz, C. 1973. Religion as a Cultural System. In The Interpretation of Cultures: selected essays, 87–125.

Optional Readings:

Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The invention of world religions, or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Week 4: Purification

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [1966]. London and New York: Routledge, 2002 (p, 1-50).

Optional Readings

Mauss, Marcel. 1902 [1972]. A general theory of magic. London: Routledge and K. Paul. Chapter 3: The Elements of Magic

Keane, W. (2008). The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14(S1), S110–S127.

Week 5: On Power

Sahlins, Marshall. “The Original Political Society.” In On Kings, edited by David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, 23–65. Chicago: Hau Books, 2017.

Optional Reading

Anderson, Benedict R O’G. “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.” In Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, 17–77. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Tannenbaum, N. B. (1987). Tattoos: Invulnerability and Power in Shan Cosmology. American Ethnologist, 14(4), 693–711.

Week 6-7: Religion and Kings: Prowess and economic success

Week 6: Kings and Religion

Gibson, Thomas. 2007. Islamic narrative and authority in Southeast Asia: from the 16th to the 21st century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 2: The Ruler as Perfect Man in Southeast Asia, 1500-1667.

Optional Reading

Wolters, O. W. 1982. History, culture, and religion in Southeast Asian perspectives. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Miscellaneous Notes on ‘Soul Stuff’ and ‘Prowess’, a ‘Hindu’ Man of Prowess.

Week 7: Rice, Religion, and Sovereignty

Davis, E. W. (2016). Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapt 3: Rice, Water, Hierarchy: The Wild and the Civil.

Optional Reading

Davis, E. W. (2016). Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapter 4: Building Deathpower and Rituals of Sovereignty

Week 8: Midterm Exam – No Class

Week 9: The Old Religion

Wessing, R. (1995). The Last Tiger in East Java: Symbolic Con­tinuity in Ecological Change. Asian Folklore Studies, 54, 191–218.

Optional Reading

Schweyer, Anne Valérie. “Potent Places in Central Vietnam: ‘Everything That Comes Out of the Earth Is Cham.’” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 5 (2017): 400–420.

Work, Courtney. “Chthonic Sovereigns? ‘Neak Ta’ in a Cambodian Village.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2019): 74–95.

Week 10-12: Spirits and Religion

Week 10: Christianity

Yang, S. Y. (2008). Christianity, identity, and the construction of moral community among the Bunun of Taiwan. Social Analysis, 52(3), 51-74.

Optional Readings

Jocano, Landa F. 1965. “Conversion and the Patterning of Christian Experience in Malitbog, Central Panay, Philippines. Philippine Sociological Review. 13(2). Pp. 96-119.

Iteanu, Andre. 2017. “Continuity and Breaches in Religion and Globalization, a Melanesian Point of View”. In The Appropriation of Religion in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Cham: Palgrave Macmillian.

Week 11: Buddhism

Ladwig, P. (2016). Religious Place Making: Civilized Modernity and the Spread of Buddhism among the Cheng , a Mon-Khmer Minority in Southern Laos. In M.Dickhardt &A.Lauser (Eds.), Religion, Place and Modernity. Spatial Articulations in Southeast Asia and East Asia (pp. 95–124). Leiden: Brill.

Optional Readings

Brac de La Perrière, Bénédicte. “Possession and Rebirth in Burma (Myanmar).” Contemporary

Buddhism 16, no. 1 (2015): 61–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2015.1013000.

Kitiarsa, Pattana. “Magic Monks and Spirit Mediums in the Politics of Thai Popular Religion.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 209–26.

Week 12: Islam

Barraud, Cecile. 2017. “A Wall, Even in Those Days! Encounters with Religions and What Became of the Tradition”, in, The Appropriation of Religion in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Cham: Palgrave Macmillian.

Optional Readings

Pemberton, John. 1994. On the Subject of ‘Java’. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chapter 4 and Chapter 6.

Week 13-14: Spirits: Not so supernatural

Week 13: Only natural

Janowski, M. (2017). The Dynamics of the Cosmic Conversation: Beliefs about spirits among the Kelabit and Penan of the upper Baram River, Sarawak. In K. Århem & G. Sprenger (Eds.), Animism in Southeast Asia (181–204). London and New York: Routledge.

Optional Readings

Boomgaard, P. 2013 [1995]. Sacred Trees and Haunted Forests in Indonesia—Particularly Java, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In, Asian Perspectives of Nature: A Critical Approach, eds. O. Bruun and A. Kalland, 39-53. New York. Routledge.

Week 14: Transformations

Lin, Wei-Ping. 2015. Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities. Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Asia Center. Introduction

Optional Readings

Howell, S. 2016. Seeing and Knowing: Metamorphosis and the fragility of species in Chewong animistic ontology. In K. Århem and G. Sprenger (Eds.), Animism in Southeast Asia, (55-72). London; New York: Routledge.

Week 15: Resources and Economics

Sprenger, Guido. 2014. Where the Dead Go to the Market: Market and Ritual as Social Systems in Upland Southeast Asia. In, Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Modernity, eds. V. Gottowik. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Press.

Optional Readings

Graeber, David. “Fetishism and Social Creativity, or Fetishes Are Gods in Process of Construction” Anthropological Theory. (2005) 5:4, 407-438.

Keane, Webb. “The Value of Words and the Meaning of Things in Eastern Indonesian Exchange.” Man 29, no. 3 (1994): 605–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/2804345.

Week 16:  Final Exam- No Class

Class Participation                  25%

Short Answer Midterm           25%

Field projects                          25%        

Final                                        25%

All materials for the course are provided through Moodle