Inter-Asian connections and the background to contemporary Asian cosmopolitanism

02/06/2009 - 15:00

2 June 2009
15.00 - 18.00 hrs
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

18th WERTHEIM LECTURE by Prof. Engseng Ho (Duke University)

Venue: Agnietenkapel, Oudezijds Voorburgwal 231, 1012 EZ Amsterdam

Engseng Ho’s work covers a range of issues such as long-distance and long-term cross-Asian mobility, maritime connections, Islam in Asia and ethnic diasporas. It furthermore crosscuts traditional regional studies and deals with large topics in current social science (e.g. empire) in refreshingly new ways. In his most influential work - The Graves of Tarim, he narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Ho explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized. A work of both anthropology and history, his book brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide groundbreaking ways of studying religion, diaspora, and empire. Ho interprets biographies, family histories, chronicles, pilgrimage manuals and religious law as the unified literary output of a diaspora that hybridizes both texts and persons within a genealogy of Prophetic descent. By using anthropological concepts to read Islamic texts in Arabic and Malay, this book demonstrates the existence of a hitherto unidentified canon of diasporic literature.

Programme:

15:00-15:30Arrival; coffee and tea

15:30-16:00Prof. Dr. John Grin, Scientific Director ASSR: “Asia research at the ASSR” ;
Prof. Dr. Thomas Blom Hansen: “ASiA/IIAS, Mission and goals” and Introduction to the Wertheim-lecture

16.00Wertheim-lecture by Prof. Engseng Ho

17:00-18.00Borrel/reception with information about ASiA/IIAS and ASSR

The Wertheim Lecture
The annual Wertheim-lecture is a joint endeavour by the ASSR and ASiA/IIAS. The Amsterdam School for Social science Research (ASSR) is a national research school and a research institute of the University of Amsterdam in which social scientists cooperate in multi-disciplinary research programmes. At present 85 PhD candidates are working at the ASSR, of which 15 conduct field research in Asia. Over the coming years, the ASSR plans to further extend her programmes in the fields of teaching and research with partners in Asia in close cooperation with ASiA and IIAS. The ASSR is also home to two large integrated research programmes on Asia: "Genomics" and "Illegal but Licit". Asian Studies in Amsterdam (ASiA) is an initiative of the Board of the University of Amsterdam and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden. ASiA’s goal is to stimulate, facilitate and broaden research activities pertaining to Asia in Amsterdam, and also aims to make the outcomes and insights generated by this research accessible to a wider audience. The IIAS is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam. Its main objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national and international cooperation in the field.