Desecularization in Muslim Southeast Asia

02/07/2009 - 15:30

2 July 2009
15.30 - 17.00 hrs
Leiden, the Netherlands

The Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar by Michael G. Peletz, Department of Anthropology, Emory University.

Venue: KITLV, Reuvensplaats 2, Room 138, 2311 BE Leiden

In recent decades scholars have cited evidence of a florescence of Muslim piety and religiosity as well as diverse manifestations of a "resurgent" or "revitalized" Islam in variegated public arenas. Some scholars have conceptualized these dynamics as manifestations of the "desecularization" of public life. Others speak of the "deprivatization" of religion. Still others refer to the "syariahtization" or "Islamization" of national culture. The heuristic value of such glosses notwithstanding, a basic contention of this paper is that many of these terms are deeply problematic insofar as they elide distinctions among phenomenon that are both empirically and analytically distinct. Another, related argument of this paper is that our theories of socio-cultural change are insufficiently robust and inadequately nuanced, as are many of the theories we deploy to make sense of the dynamics and overall vicissitudes of specifically legal change, particularly the contradictions, ambiguities, and indeterminacies of the law, religious or otherwise.

Michael G. Peletz is currently Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. His teaching and research interests focus on social and cultural theory; gender and sexual diversity; law, discipline, and disorder; and the cultural politics of religion -- especially Islam -- and modernity, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. One of his recent books has focused on the ways that Islamic courts in Malaysia are involved in struggles to define the role of Islam with respect to the maintenance of national sovereignty and variously construed projects of modernity and civil society in an age of globalization.