Culture, Religion & Diversity Research Cluster
Email: RDC.researchcluster@arts.monash.edu.au
Suzi Adams
Irfan Ahmad
Greg Barton
Gary Bouma
Penny Graham
Anna Halafoff
Brett Hough
Lenore Manderson
Julian Millie
Jemma Purdey
Thomas Reuter
Andrew Singleton
Matt Tomlinson (cluster leader)
Cluster Introduction
Sociocultural diversity is a hallmark of the contemporary world. In the globalised arena of cultural flows, projects of defining and recognizing social identity have gained scope and force. Movements of peoples and ideologies are channeled and crosscut by new technologies, media, and forms and ideologies of representation. The transmission and expression of culture, always a negotiated and contested process, is inherently transformative, although it is often treated as inherent to and emblematic of the groups it delineates at a particular moment.
Members of this research cluster study sociocultural diversity in the broadest possible sense: the plurality of ideologies, identities, and forms of practice in the modern world, whether configured in terms of publics, ethnic groups, nationalities, or other collectivities. Many members of this cluster pay particular attention to the diversity of religion’s sociocultural forms. Spanning private and public arenas, religion is a prominent and pervasive social force that shapes the contours of personal experience and sociocultural configurations around the globe, and, contrary to earlier scholarly expectations of religion’s imminent demise, it continues to be an important influence in the late modern era. Indeed, many members of this cluster investigate religion’s role in both fuelling and ameliorating global risks, including economic inequalities, environmental degradation and terrorism.
Researchers’ fieldsites include urban and rural locations in more than a dozen countries, with research strengths in Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and interreligious relations, with particular attention to Australia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Members of the cluster seek to engage in productive and sustained dialogues with scholars and practitioners interested in sociocultural diversity and, related to this topic, religion’s force in sociocultural formation, expression, and transformation.
Members
Suzi Adams: Social theory; political sociology; French and German phenomenology; hermeneutics; theories of interculturality; theories of modernity; theories of nature; theories of culture; theories of autonomy; theories of meaning and history; the sacred
Irfan Ahmad: Sociocultural and political anthropology; social theory; culture; cultural criticism; religion and politics of modern South Asia, especially postcolonial India; nationalism and transnationalism; Islam; Muslim sociocultural formations; intellectual history of Islam; Islamic movements; Urdu literature
Greg Barton: Indonesian social movements, politics and religion
Gary Bouma: Religion, cultural diversity and social cohesion; management of religious diversity in plural, secular, postmodern societies; theories of social cohesion in multicultural and multifaith societies; emergence of new forms of the sacred and spirituality in religiously plural cities; interaction between religion and society in Western societies including Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Europe; religious plurality in multicultural Australia; postmodernity as a context for interfaith dialogue and theological reflection
Penny Graham: Anthropology of eastern Indonesia; ancestral religious practice and conversion to Catholicism; labour migration and transnational community formation between eastern Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo
Anna Halafoff: Multifaith movements in ultramodernity; multifaith education and social inclusion in Australia; religion, conflict and peacebuilding; religion and common security; faith and media; Buddhism and social change; women and Buddhism in Australia
Brett Hough: Violence, conflict and conflict resolution; contemporary Indonesia, especially Bali; performing arts of Java and Bali; ethnographic film
Julian Millie: Anthropology of Islam; Islamic cultures of Indonesia, especially West Java; Sundanese and Malay writing; Islamic studies
Jemma Purdey: Life writing; violent conflict, human rights and reconciliation in Indonesia; minority studies
Thomas Reuter: Anthropology and politics of religion; Indonesian Studies, especially Java and Bali; comparative Southeast Asian and Pacific studies; minorities, marginality and representation; social organization; status economy; social justice; anthropological theory and methodology; sustainable development and climate change
Andrew Singleton: Youth spirituality, alternative religions, alternative spiritualities, religious change, and men and masculinity
Matt Tomlinson: Religion and ritual; culture theory; language and culture; language and politics; discourse analysis; performance; Christianity; Pacific Islands
Associate members
Lenore Manderson: Embodied experience across cultural, social and economic settings; corporeal change and ideas of the self and social relationships; crosscultural contexts of disability and social exclusion, focusing on Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar and Laos; immigration and parenting, focusing on Cambodian and Iraqi women in Australia, chronic illness and disability, social relationships and well-being; nutritional anthropology; infectious disease; sex, gender and women's health; Southeast Asian ethnography and social history
International collaborations (members of PSI only)
Irfan Ahmad convened an international workshop on critique and activism in Islamic societies, held in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 2008; see http://www.isim.nl/content/content_page.asp?n1=2&n2=1&n3=84.
Greg Barton is Herb Feith Chair for the Study of Indonesia. He is also Deputy UNESCO Chair in Interreligious and Intercultural Relations – Asia Pacific; see http://arts.monash.edu.au/psi/unesco/ and Acting Director of the Centre for Islam and the Modern World; see www.arts.monash.edu.au/politics/cimow.
Gary Bouma is the UNESCO Chair in Interreligious and Intercultural Relations–Asia Pacific; see http://arts.monash.edu.au/psi/unesco/. In November 2009 he will chair the Parliament of World Religions, to be held in Melbourne, which will host delegates from 80 nations. He is also engaged in collaborative projects with a team from the University of Ottawa on “Reasonable Accomodation” and a team from Oxford University on migration, religious resurgence and new forms of the sacred.
Penny Graham has held research fellowships in Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge; the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore; and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She has been a consultant to UNCRD (Bangkok); AusAID and the World Bank (Jakarta); and Granada Television.
Anna Halafoff is the UNESCO researcher in interreligious and intercultural relations; see http://arts.monash.edu.au/psi/unesco/ She is currently coordinating several projects for the UCIIR involving international collaborations including an International Strategic Initiative in the field of Interreligious Studies with the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies (ICRS)–Yogya at Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Yogya, Indonesia and Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) Training @ Monash, in partnership with IFYC, the premier international interfaith youth organisation based in Chicago.Lenore Manderson was recently the Hillel Friedland Fellow in the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand. More than half of her postgraduate candidates are international students, and to date she has successfully supervised more than 50 doctoral students and 40 honours and masters students to graduation.
Julian Millie is producing an edited volume in conjunction with the Centre of Sundanese Studies (PSS) and the Sunan Gunung Jati State Islamic University (UIN), both located in Bandung. The book brings together writings on the life and work of West Java’s great mystic and Muslim intellectual, Hasan Mustapa. The book is a follow-up event to a workshop held at UIN Sunan Gunung Jati in January of 2009.
Thomas Reuter is a co-founder and the current Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA, see http://www.wcaanet.org/), as well as an executive committee member of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). He is also the Chair of the Monash Future Council.
Matt Tomlinson is an affiliated graduate faculty member at the University of Hawai'i. He coauthored an article in the 2009 edition of Annual Review of Anthropology with Miki Makihara (Queens College, City University of New York) titled “New Paths in the Linguistic Anthropology of Oceania.”
Current and ongoing projects
Irfan Ahmad continues to conduct research on practices of critique in contemporary Islamic movements, with the goal of developing a comparative framework for understanding the religious and political life of Muslim minorities in South Asia and the West in the context of liberalism, nationalism and subaltern collectivities.
Greg Barton is currently working on two books, one with the working title Islam’s Other Nation: A Fresh Look at Indonesia, and one on progressive Islamic thought and social movements in India and Turkey.
Gary Bouma is working on a major research project on freedom of religion and belief in Australia. In addition, he is engaged in collaborative projects with a team from the University of Ottawa on “Reasonable Accomodation” and a team from Oxford University on migration, religious resurgence and new forms of the sacred.
Penny Graham is working on a study of the Virgin in an eastern Indonesian polity and a book on ancestral ritual and religion in east Flores, Indonesia.
Anna Halafoff is currently finishing her PhD thesis, Netpeace and the Cosmopolitan Condition: Multifaith Movements in Ultramodernity. She has also recently had a chapter on ‘Venerable Robina Courtin: An Unconventional Buddhist?’ accepted in an edited collection on Buddhism in Australia: Traditions in Change.
Lenore Manderson began a new ARC-funded project in 2008 on Immigration and Parenting among Cambodian and Iraqi women in Australia. The project is being conducted collaboratively with Pranee Liamputtong, Elizabeth Hoban, and Katie Vasey. She is also engaged (with N. Warren and M. Chou) in a research program on computer-based social support and health information, sponsored by the Victorian Government's Department of Planning and Community Development (DPCD), 2008-2009; research on care-seeking, use of CAM, and self-management among people with Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (with B. Oldenburg, V. Lin, B. Hollingsworth, and M. de Courten; NHMRC 491171, 2008-2010); a new project supported by AusAID titled "Socio-cultural Attitudes to Disability in the Solomon Islands: Identifying Culturally Appropriate Solutions to Disadvantage" (with A. Gartrell, 2009-2011); and research on developing public health higher degree research training in Africa, with CARTA (the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa), sponsored by the Wellcome Trust of the Carnegie Foundation (2008-2013).
Julian Millie’s current ARC-funded research project is “Preaching Islam: Politics, Performers and Publics in Indonesia.” This is a fieldwork-oriented project in which he examines preaching events as a form of participation for Indonesian Muslims, paying special attention also to the interests these events serve on behalf of various social actors.
Jemma Purdey’s current ARC-funded research project is ‘Ways of Knowing Indonesia: Scholarship and Engagement in the Australian Academy’. A major component of the project is a biography of the pioneering Australian scholar of Indonesia, Herb Feith. She is currently editing a special edition of the journal RIMA including articles by leading academics in relation to their personal and professional engagement with Indonesia. She is also embarking on new research following on from her book ‘Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996-99’, into the situation of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia more than a decade after reformasi.
Thomas Reuter is currently working on a comparative ARC project with Greg Acciaioli (UWA) on new religious, environmental and ethnic movements in three locations in Indonesia, and on land tenure and livelihoods in post-independence East Timor. He is working with Greg Barton to secure funding for a study of the cultural milieu of Indonesian national elites. He is also teaching and writing on previous research on religious revitalisation in Bali and Java, Indonesia, and on general trends in religion in the context of globalisation.
Andrew Singleton has an ongoing sponsored research project (2007-2009) on Catholic World Youth Day, using surveys and interviews to investigate the impact and outcomes of Catholic World Youth Day in 2008. The research team includes Ruth Webber and Michael Mason.
Matt Tomlinson’s current project is ‘God and Country: An Ethnographic Study of Christian Institutions and Political Processes in Fiji’, funded (2008-2010) by the ARC. In the project, he is conducting ethnographic research on Christianity, ecumenism, and politics in Suva, Fiji.
Community Engagements
Gary Bouma and Anna Halafoff have facilitated a number of training sessions for religious leaders in Australia including Civic Education for Religious Leaders New to Australia, for the then Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and also Media and Communications Training for Multifaith Leaders, for the Victorian Multicultural Commission. The Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) Training @ Monash, will be held in November 2009. Training for young faith leaders will be conducted by IFYC hosted by the UNESCO Chair in Interreligious and Intercultural Relations–Asia Pacific and funded by the Victoria Multicultural Commission. This event has been registered as an official pre-Parliament of the World’s Religions event.
Penny Graham and Greg Barton lead the Monash University Herb Feith Foundation, which has several ongoing academic and community projects, especially in Indonesia; see http://www.herb-feith-foundation.org/projects.html.
Jemma Purdey is deputy chairperson of the board and Julian Millie is the secretary of the Indonesian Resources and Information Program (IRIP) Board, which publishes and manages the online quarterly journal Inside Indonesia. Established in Melbourne in 1983, Inside Indonesia is the world's only online, English-language current affairs magazine specifically about Indonesia; see http://insideindonesia.org/content/view/127/61/.
Conferences
From 3-9 December 2009, Gary Bouma is chairing the Parliament of World Religions; see http://www.parliamentofreligions2009.org/email/email1.htm.
Following the Parliament of World Religions, Lenore Manderson and Matt Tomlinson are convening with Wendy Smith a conference in Melbourne titled ‘Beliefs Beyond Borders: Conversion, Contemporary Pilgrimage and the Transport of Faith in the Early 21st Century’ (12-13 December). Gary Bouma, Greg Barton and Anna Halafoff are also convening a post-Parliament symposium ‘Interreligious Relations in the 21st Century: a Post-Parliament Reflection’ (10 December).
Keywords
anthropology, Asia, Australia, body, Buddhism, Christianity, circulation, colonialism, culture, discourse, diversity, eco-spirituality, ecumenism, embodiment, ethnicity, ethnography, globalisation, hermeneutics, Hinduism, history, human rights, ideology, indigeneity, interculturality, interfaith, interpretation, Islam, language, life histories, meaning, migration, minorities, modernity, multiculturalism, multifaith, narrative, nationalism, Oceania, Pacific, peacebuilding, performance, phenomenology, pilgrimage, plurality, politics, postcolonialism, postmodernity, power, recognition, reconciliation, religion, research methods, ritual, sacred, secularism, semiotics, social cohesion, social inclusion, social justice, society, sociolinguistics, sociology, spirituality, subjectivity, textuality, tradition, transcendence, translation, transnationalism, violence