Type of Credit: Partially Required
Credit(s)
Number of Students
Course Description
This course investigates the variety of traditions found in indigenous communities that were labeled ‘animism’ and considered ‘superstition’ or a primitive form of ‘religion’ by colonizers. The course argues for a critical examination of these forms in order to do three things. The first is to read in ‘animism’ something that is not ‘religious’ but political and economic, which is to say foundational to social life. It involves relationships with other species of plants and animals, often referred to as ‘nature’ as well as other entities not visible to humans, often referred to as ‘gods’ and classified as ‘religion’. The second is to examine the concept of ‘religion’ as something with political and economic roots. We will do this through an examination of the ‘religions’ of pre-colonial Asian states, Buddhism and Islam. The third is to understand the ‘animist’ elements of these ‘religions’ (including Christianity) as they are practiced by contemporary people absorbed by state systems. We will illustrate the course concepts using ethnographic examples from Southeast Asia, with some data from Taiwan.
We will leave behind the question of how it is that ‘superstitions’ persist into the modern era and will grapple rather with the political and economic paths through which local practices became ‘superstitions’. By exploring those local practices that continue to be practiced both inside and outside of ‘religious’ institutions, we investigate the contemporary lived experiences of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity in Southeast Asia with the intention to discover the extent to which and the manners through which each accommodates or thwarts local non-doctrinal practices. Our inquiries into spirits and religion in the Southeast Asian context will be supplemented by your own ethnographic field data gathered through small ‘fieldwork’ exercises.
能力項目說明
Class Participation: Attendance and participation are central to your success in this course. Classes are discussion based and will focus on the key concepts from the readings. Course readings and discussion will form the basis for your exams. In-class writing assignments are included in your class participation grade. Lectures are vital to understanding the new theoretical and conceptual focus of this course, you are expected to come prepared, to take notes, to ask questions, and to engage in discussion.
Midterm: Short-answer, take home, open book exam. You will be given six questions relating to the first weeks course material. You will choose four and write 500 words per question. Use a recognized citation system to cite materials from the course. An excellent mid-term will make connections across course topics, incorporating multiple readings into each short essay.
Ethnographic Fieldwork Exercises: You will collect data through four different fieldwork exercises: Two observation exercises and two sets of interviews. The assignments involve collecting primary source ethnographic data, presenting your data (2 page written summary and informal oral discussion), and analyzing your findings.
Final: This is a take-home, open-book exam. You will answer two of four prepared questions, each answer consisting of 500 words. You will then present three things that interested you about the course with detailed descriptions of the thing, including citations from the relevant course materials. You can treat these as individual 500-word essays or combine them into one essay that will not exceed 2000 words. An excellent essay (or collection of essays) will show 1) comprehension of course materials, 2) incorporation of insights from field exercises, 3) connections to broader discussions (be sure you are clear about course materials first!).
Three-credit course
To achieve the three-credit course requirement, this course offers at least 54 hours of instruction.
We will meet physically in class for 3-hour sessions weekly (42 hours). Week 8 is a mid-term take-home exam. Week 16 is the final take-home exam.
Office hour instruction is offered each week (3 hours/wk. adding 48 hours of additional instruction opportunities).
Learning Outcomes:
Students will have a strong understanding about the relationship between spirit traditions, religions, economic activities and state systems that can be used as an analytical framework for ethnographic work in religion, politics, economics, or environmental studies. It can also be used to better understand the society we live in and the dynamics of social interactions. In addition, students will gain practical experience with ethnographic data collection methods and the reflexive work of the ethnographer.
Course Outline
Week 1: Introduce Course Concepts
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In-class writing assignment week 1: Why am I here studying about religion and spirits in Southeast Asia?
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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.
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Ethnographic fieldwork Due Week 5: Participant observation: Record instances of social or institutional boundary marking that you encounter. Does not have to be related to spirits or religion. We’re looking for the enactment of social classification systems.
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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.
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Ethnographic fieldwork – On Power - Due Week 7: What are the characteristics of the powerful people around you. Fellow students, professors, coaches, parents, employers, others…. Watch them. What defines their power? Gather 2 real-time examples (not memories or types), and clearly explain what creates the power you see. class discussion on observation skills and note taking |
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.
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Ethnographic Fieldwork Due Week 11: Interview 3 people to learn their understandings or family history with religion (faith). Tell me about…. ? Discuss the unstructured interview and the work of creating and revising questions
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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.
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Ethnographic fieldwork Due Week 14: Interview three people to learn their understandings about nature. Discuss the unstructured interview and the work of creating and revising questions
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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