comparative approaches to inter-asian ... approaches to inter-asian religious and trade networks 3-4...

COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO INTER-ASIAN RELIGIOUS AND TRADE NETWORKS 3-4 March 2016 | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

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Organized by the Asia Research Institute; with funding support from the Office of the Deputy President (Research & Technology) of the National University of Singapore; and in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.

Singapore is the hub of Southeast Asia. All kinds of networks have Singapore as their central node. Many of the founding pioneers of Singapore established transnational business networks based on the island, linking it to Southeast Asia, China, and the global market. Early Chinese settlers placed their collective regional business offices (huiguan) inside temples dedicated to their local deities, and these temples developed rites to bolster business trust. The networks of these branch temples/huiguan connect Singapore to founding temples and regions in Southeast China, as well as to other sites around Southeast Asia. Similar networks were developed by Indian business and community leaders, many of whom were also Indian temple founders, and by Arab and Malay community and business leaders who founded mosques. Some of these Islamic merchants were involved in an extensive trading network linking Singapore to the Middle East. Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, built churches, schools, printing presses, and hospitals to serve a growing community of believers. This conference seeks papers that explore the transformations of these different networks. Papers are welcome that map their historical evolution, discuss their central nodes and secondary transmission points, investigate their internal organizations and processes, examine their flows of investment capital, their practices, ideas of the good life, their forms of ritual knowledge and their ritual specialists, their modes of philanthropy and mutual-aid, and the kinds of symbolic and associative capital developed within these networks. We also welcome papers on the transnational networks of the business firms and shipping companies linked to these networks. This conference seeks to build on efforts to disaggregate national and regional frameworks (nation states, Indian Ocean vs South China Sea), and to explore specific axes of circulation and exchange across regions (religious networks, legal frameworks, philanthropic organizations, credit-pooling), leading to multiple or shared sovereignties as well as semi-autonomous communities, and the creation of new social formations across the entire range of Asian connections.

CONVENORS

Prof Kenneth DEAN

Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

E | [email protected]

Prof Peter van der VEER

Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

E | [email protected]


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3 MARCH 2016 (THURSDAY)

09:15 – 09:30 REGISTRATION

09:30 – 09:40 WELCOME REMARKS

09:30 KENNETH DEAN, National University of Singapore

PETER VAN DER VEER, Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

09:40 – 10:00 OPENING DISCUSSION

09:40 Comparative Comments on India and China


10:00 – 11:00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS 1

Chairperson KENNETH DEAN, National University of Singapore

10:00 Connecting Seas, Oceans and Cosmologies in Southeast Asia

BARBARA WATSON ANDAYA, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA

10:45 Questions & Answers

11:00 – 11:30 TEA BREAK

11:30 – 13:00 PANEL 1

Chairperson BERNARDO BROWN, National University of Singapore

11:30 Goddess on the Move: Transcending Boundaries, Fashioning Novel Connections

VINEETA SINHA, National University of Singapore

12:50 Religion, Rights and Historical Injustice: New Alignments of Hinduism in Malaysia

RUPA VISWANATH, University of Goettingen, Germany

12:10 “You and I are Ayyappa”: The Growth of an Aspirational Hindu Pilgrimage Sect in Malaysia

SUDHEESH BASHI, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany


13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH


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14:00 – 15:30 PANEL 2

Chairperson TILL MOSTOWLANSKY, National University of Singapore

14:00 Rationality and Change: Temple Ritual, Kinship, and Vernacular Banking among the Nattukottai Chettiars

NATHANIEL ROBERTS, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

14:20 Theravadin Affinities in Global Singapore: Preliminary Notes on Lanka-Singapore Buddhist Networks

NEENA MAHADEV, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

14:40 “Writing History in Prosperous Times”: Chinese Protestant Genealogies in Minnan

CHRIS WHITE, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany


15:30 – 16:00 TEA BREAK

16:00 – 17:50 PANEL 3

Chairperson LIANG YONGJIA, National University of Singapore

16:00 Occulting the Dao: Translingual Practice in a Cao Dai Scripture

DAVID A. PALMER, University of Hong Kong JEREMY JAMMES, Universiti Brunei Darussalam

16:20 The Theosophical Society from India to Vietnam: (De)Colonization, Occultism and Translation

JEREMY JAMMES, Universiti Brunei Darussalam

16:40 Queen Street: Singapore, Catholicism and the French Civilizing Mission in the Far East

DANIEL P.S. GOH, National University of Singapore

17:00 Divine Mechanisms: The Recent Spread of Dejiaohui

WU QI, National University of Singapore


17:50 END OF DAY 1

18:00 – 20:00 CONFERENCE DINNER (For Speakers, Chairpersons & Invited Guests)


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4 MARCH 2016 (FRIDAY)

09:15 – 09:30 REGISTRATION

09:30 – 10:30 KEYNOTE ADDRESS 2

Chairperson PETER VAN DER VEER, Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

09:30 Socio-Cultural Aspects of Commodity Networks in Eastern Indonesia

LEONARD Y. ANDAYA, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA


10:30 – 11:00 TEA BREAK

11:00 – 12:20 PANEL 4

Chairperson CHEN LANG, National University of Singapore

11:00 The Third Front: Commerce, Muslim Rebellion, and the Straits Settlements, 1870-1910

JOSHUA GEDACHT, Universiti Brunei Darussalam

11:20 A Question of Relative Need: British Colonial Limitations of the Islamic Concept of Charity in Southeast Asia

NURFADZILAH YAHAYA, National University of Singapore

11:40 Islamic Philanthropy Networks in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Issues, Actors, and Transformation

AMELIA FAUZIA, National University of Singapore


12:20 – 13:20 LUNCH

13:20 – 14:40 PANEL 5

Chairperson GIUSEPPE BOLOTTA, National University of Singapore

13:20 The Nine Emperor Gods in Transit: “Vessels for the Gods” in Singapore and Penang

FABIAN C. GRAHAM, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

13:40 The Ah Peh Party: Religious Merriment and Homophilous Networks

WANG KOON LEE DEAN, National University of Singapore

14:00 Transnational Tianhou-Mazu Cult in the Late 20th and Early 21st Century East Asia

CHOI CHI-CHEUNG, The Chinese University of Hong Kong


14:40 – 15:10 TEA BREAK


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15:10 – 16:30 PANEL 6

Chairperson AGA ZUOSHI, National University of Singapore

15:10 Localizing Strategies and Chinese Popular Religious Institutions: Case Study of a Fujianese Village Clan in Southeast Asia

KWEE HUI KIAN, University of Toronto, Canada

15:30 Possibilities and Trajectories of Contemporary Religious Charities in Xiamen

AVI DARSHANI, McGill University, Canada

15:50 San Zhong Wang Temples in Singapore: A Case Study

KOH KENG WE, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore


16:30 – 17:30 PANEL 7

Chairperson CATHERINE SCHEER, National University of Singapore

16:30 Dharmic Ties in the Chinese Diaspora: Nanputuo Monastery and the Xiamen Buddhist Networks before 1949

JACK MENG-TAT CHIA, Cornell University, USA

16:50 Non-mainstream Singaporean Buddhist Monks and their Networks in Southeast Asia and Beyond: Master Guangxuan and Vajra Supreme Master Yuan Fan

HUE GUAN THYE, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore


17:30 – 17:40 CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

17:30 Mapping Chinese Temple Networks in Singapore and Southeast Asia

KENNETH DEAN, National University of Singapore

17:40 – 18:00 CLOSING REMARKS

17:40 KENNETH DEAN, National University of Singapore


18:00 END OF CONFERENCE


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KEYNOTE ADDRESS 1

Connecting Seas, Oceans and Cosmologies in Southeast Asia

Barbara Watson Andaya University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA

[email protected]

This presentation will discuss the changing spirit world of maritime communities in Southeast Asia by differentiating ‘oceans’ from ‘seas’, by linking historical evidence to modern anthropological studies, and by drawing larger transcultural connections. Since the lives of sea-going peoples are fraught with unpredictability, propitiation of local sea spirits was a traditional means of ensuring good fortune and protection. As long-distance voyages expanded from the sixteenth century onwards, the global reach of the world religions, extending beyond familiar seas into the more extensive ocean environment, held out particular appeal. Not only were the gods, deities and saints attached to larger religious systems themselves ocean travellers; in contrast to the unpredictability of indigenous spirits, they were always amenable to requests for help, even when the suppliant was far from home waters. At the same time, as world religions were incorporated into indigenous cosmologies, maritime peoples gained greater agency in negotiating relationships with the local spirits that still wield power in Southeast Asian seas. Barbara Watson ANDAYA (BA Sydney, MA Hawaii, PhD Cornell) is Professor and Chair of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii. Between 2003 and 2010 she was Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and in 2005-06 she was President of the American Association of Asian Studies. In 2000 she received a John Simon Guggenheim Award, and in 2010 she received the University of Hawaii Regents Medal for Excellence in Research. She has lived and taught in Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Her specific area of expertise is the western Malay-Indonesia archipelago, but she maintains an active teaching and research interest across all Southeast Asia. Her most recent book (with Leonard Y. Andaya) is A History Early Modern Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her present project is a history of religious interaction in Southeast Asia, 1511-1800.


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KEYNOTE ADDRESS 2

Socio-Cultural Aspects of Commodity Networks in Eastern Indonesia

Leonard Y. Andaya University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA

[email protected]

Studies of trade tend generally to focus on international networks originating from major world centers. Attention is paid on capital flows, credit structures, and a hierarchy of relationships with areas of economic exploitation occupying the lowest rung. Depicting the model in this manner reinforces ideas of cores and peripheries developed in world systems theory, and ignores the complexity of relationships at the production and collection phase, or the ‘primary’ stage of this network. Nowhere is this truer than in the early modern period (c. 1400 – c. 1830s) in eastern Indonesia, which was the home of some of the most valued products in global trade at the time: cloves, nutmeg, mace, sandalwood, sappanwood, cassia lignea, trepang or bêche de mer, tortoiseshell, pearls, edible birdsnest, and the plumage of the birds of paradise. Obtaining these products required considerable skills, knowledge of the oftentimes treacherous environment, and the establishment of relationships that were fraught with danger. The word ‘network’ implies a far greater uniformity and regularity than is the case from the perspective of local trade in eastern Indonesia. Local traders and chieftains/rulers at this level had to master the socio-cultural aspects of trade to assure the flow of commodities. To demonstrate the complexity of transactions at the local level—unseen and largely unappreciated by international traders and their consumers—I will discuss what was involved in the ‘harvesting’ of two exotic commodities from eastern Indonesia for the global market: trepang and the birds of paradise. Leonard Y. ANDAYA is Professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and currently Senior Visiting Fellow at ISEAS. He has written extensively on the early modern history of Southeast Asia with specialization on Indonesia and Malaysia. His most recent books are Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008) and, with Barbara Watson Andaya, A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). They are also co-authors of A History of Malaysia, with the third edition to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. His current study is on the interlocking trade, religious, and ritual networks in the eastern Indonesian seas in the early modern period. It hopes to demonstrate the viability of such networks as a non-state model of functioning entities among diverse societies located in the seas, the jungles, and the hills of Southeast Asia.


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Goddess on the Move: Transcending Boundaries, Fashioning Novel Connections

Vineeta Sinha South Asian Studies Programme, and Department of Sociology,

National University of Singapore [email protected]

This paper is part of a larger project about the phenomenon of globally sojourneying Hindu deities. Samayapuram Mariamman, a goddess from Tamil Nadu, has travelled far and wide with her devotees. She can now be found in such places as Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, East Africa, Malaysia and South Africa having been carried to these places from the early decades of the 19th century. She has ‘arrived’ somewhat more recently to the cosmopolitan nation-state of Singapore, although there has been a much deeper historical memory about her amongst Singaporean Hindus. Once having reached Singapore’s shores, over the last 15 years the deity has refused to be grounded and rendered immobile or captured and absorbed within official Hindu frames. Instead her time on the island has seen the deity in a state of continuous movement in and out of Singapore’s Hindu domains. Drawing on my ethnographic familiarity with the goddess’ 15 year stay on the island, I argue that her move first into a private household and then the shift from the domestic realm to varying scales of the public realm, resting for now within the frames of an Agamic temple, all carry enormous significance for theorizing Singaporean Hinduism as well as the identity of the goddess and her devotees. In traversing the distance from rural Tamil Nadu to urban, cosmopolitan island nation-state of Singapore, the goddess and her devotees transcend (and disturb, subvert, challenge) given cultural-religious boundaries and hierarchies, find alignment with apparently disparate religious orientations and in the process fashion new connections and solidarities. Vineeta SINHA is currently Head, South Asian Studies Programme and the Department of Sociology, at the National University of Singapore. She obtained her M.Soc Sci from the National University of Singapore and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University. She has written comprehensively on Hindu religiosity in the diaspora, with particular emphasis on the practice of the religion in Singapore and Malaysia. Her work has focused on theorising forms of Hindu religiosity in the diaspora, the intersections of religion and commodification processes, the interface of religion and materiality and making sense of religion-state relations in colonial and post-colonial moments. Her publications include A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore (Singapore University Press & Nordic Institute of Asian Studies 2005), Religion and Commodification: Merchandising Diasporic Hinduism (Routledge, 2010) and Religion State Encounters in Hindu Domains: From the Straits Settlements to Singapore (Springer 2011).


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Religion, Rights and Historical Injustice: New Alignments of Hinduism in Malaysia

Rupa Viswanath Center for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany

[email protected]

Malaysian Indians united under the banner of Hinduism in 2007 to form the organization HINDRAF, the Hindu Rights Action Force—a move which upset the hitherto unchallenged political hegemony of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) in the 2008 general elections, helping to bring the opposition to power. This paper, drawing on preliminary fieldwork among activists, politicians, NGO workers and ordinary poor Indians, tries to account for the success of this mobilization, as well the short life of HINDRAF—the organization now has little political credibility—by attempting to demonstrate connections among what I conceive as three apices of a triangle of political action. At one corner are movement leaders and their novel—in the Malaysian public sphere—depictions of Hinduism. Second is the perception of worsening social, political and economic grievances among ordinary supporters of HINDRAF, who include the urban and rural poor and NGOs working with them. Many of these persons initially embraced, then subsequently drifted away from, the notion of “Hindu rights”; the question is why. The third element to consider is what many Indians perceive as the growing Islamization of the state, and particularly the judiciary. Rupa VISWANATH is Professor of Indian Religions at the Center for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany. She previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a fellow of Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge. Her research and writing address the regulatory practices of secular regimes; histories of slavery in colonial South Asia; caste, race and violence in comparative and historical perspective, and political representation and ideas of “the people”. Her book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern South India, published in 2014 by Columbia University Press, was chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2015 by Choice.


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“You and I are Ayyappa”: The Growth of an Aspirational Hindu Pilgrimage Sect in Malaysia

Sudheesh Bashi Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

[email protected]

Ayyappan worship is a fast growing religious movement in Malaysia with several thousands of devotees travelling each year from the country to the holy pilgrimage centre of Sabarimala in the Western Ghats of South India. This paper explores the transnational nature of this sect which has emerged alongside the proliferation of budget air travel in the region and a religio-political re-imagining of India in the Malaysian Indian diasporic consciousness. Based on fieldwork in Malaysia and India, this paper argues that the religious sect in Malaysia and its distinctively severe form of religiosity and penance fulfils an aspirational role among Malaysian Hindus today, growing from a largely middle-class phenomenon to incorporating working-class individuals and groups over the past decade. The development of the sect in the country has been dual-pronged – involving a transplanting of sacred pilgrim landscape on to Malaysia, as well as a transfer of ritual knowledge through revered ritual specialists (gurusamys) who become conduits between the Malaysian pilgrims and the spiritual, spatial and temporal topography of Sabarimala. At the same time, several Malaysian pilgrims display their own distinctive approach to the worship through an emphasis on states of trance and transcendence, normally devoid within traditionally austere form of Ayyappan worship. The study of this religious sect suggests that the ‘Old Indian diaspora’ in Malaysia is being renewed in terms of the breadth of its religious practices by the emergence of an aspirational form of religiosity, dependent on new Sri Lankan Christian networks in Malaysia and Singapore. Sudheesh BHASI is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Sudheesh’s current research is focused on exploring the transnational religious network of the ‘old Indian diaspora’ in Malaysia and documenting the extent of the economic, material, affective and symbolic ties that exist within the transnational and translocal social space of Hindu networks. At the heart of this research lies a significant anthropological and sociological concern about the nature of transnationalism in longer-established diasporas – how are transnational religious networks formed, maintained or revitalized in an older diaspora that has been away from the homeland for several generations? In his earlier doctoral research, Sudheesh explored everyday religious practices and the production of social capital within the Hindu diaspora in Sydney. Sudheesh’s research interests encompass religion and migration, transnational communities, community development, urban sociality, social inclusion, and neoliberalism.


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Rationality and Change: Temple Ritual, Kinship, and Vernacular Banking among the Nattukottai Chettiars

Nathaniel Roberts Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

[email protected]

The Nattukottai Chettiars are a fundamentally transnational caste. Though based in South India, they rose to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th century due to their role as intermediaries between British banks and native businesses (including Chinese moneylenders) in South East Asia. Though widely dispersed, they remained exceptionally well integrated due to their unique temple-based caste structure, which underpinned both the Chettiars’ banking and kinship organization. Extrapolating from the pioneering work of David Rudner, this paper considers temples as one leg of a three-legged stool, the others being the Chettiar’s unique financial organization and caste endogamy. What happens when one of those legs is removed? Today fewer and fewer Chettiars are pursuing the money-lending vocation their caste is famous for. What effect does this have on the caste’s transnational endogamous marital structure and on the importance of the caste’s temple-based ritual order? This paper presents preliminary results of research into these questions. Nathaniel ROBERTS is a Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. His first book, entitled To be Cared for: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum, is forthcoming with University of California Press (May 2016). It is the result of 18 months of research on conversion to Pentecostal Christianity among Dalit slum dwellers in Chennai. He has also worked on Tamil Pentecostals in Dharavi, Mumbai. His current research is on temples and caste cohesion in the Nagarattar (Chettiar) community in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.


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Theravadin Affinities in Global Singapore: Preliminary Notes on Lanka-Singapore Buddhist Networks

Neena Mahadev Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

[email protected]

This paper delineates some of the contradictory and coherent ways in which two sets of devotees engage in Theravadin Buddhist practices in Singapore. The communities that constitute the network at Theravadin temples and devotional spaces in Singapore are animated by radically different conditions for being and becoming Buddhist. First are “Sinhala Buddhists”—comprised of Singaporean-born Sinhalese as well as Sinhala migrant workers—who consider Buddhism as their native religion. The second group of devotees and religious patrons are Anglophone Singaporean Chinese. The latter generally belong to “non-sectarian” Dhamma groups, yet their study, meditational practice, and techniques of self, are derived from teachings of the Pali Buddhist cannon. This scholastic and modernist approach to the Dharma is transmitted primarily by English-speaking Buddhist monks and learned laity, some of whom are Sri Lankan, and others of various nationalities trained in Pali Buddhism. The trans-sectarian movement was developed first in the early 1900s (Blackburn 2012), and intensified in the 1980s (Ong 2005). In examining the religious, cultural, and socio-economic differences that define these types of Theravadin devotionalism in Singapore, I first trace the imperatives among Sinhala Buddhists to retain their native ethno-religious attachments to the tradition, and offer preliminary thoughts on cases in which Sinhala Buddhists have been led away from Buddhism while in Singapore, through conversion to Christianity. I also discuss what it means for Singaporean Chinese devotees to “take refugee” in Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha; I offer some detail on the pathways that have led English-educated Chinese Singaporeans to Buddhism, inclining them to share the Dhamma, and to take distance from “ritualistic” ancestral practices and Mahayana Buddhist devotionalism. Neena MAHADEV is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in 2013. Her dissertation research examined nationalistic and evangelistic antipathies over conversion, competing political theologies, and rivalrous efforts to carve out sovereign religious domains in Sri Lanka. Her published work appears in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (“The Maverick Dialogics of Religious Rivalry: Inspiration and Contestation in a New Messianic Buddhist Movement”, March 2016). She has also published an essay on conversion and “anti-conversion” in Sri Lanka in Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Asia (Finucane & Feener, eds, ARI-NUS Springer, 2014). Her monograph, tentatively entitled, Rivalry and Political Cosmology: The Buddhist-Christian Conversion Debates in Millennial Sri Lanka, is under preparation.


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“Writing History in Prosperous Times”:

Chinese Protestant Genealogies in Minnan

Chris White Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

[email protected]

Genealogies have long been used by scholars of Chinese history and society for the surface-level biographical information they provide as well as the political considerations and social structures that underlie the compilation of such documents. The tradition of writing or updating genealogies in Mainland China has been restored in the last three decades after a time of dormancy during the early years of the PRC; however the revitalization of this has been accompanied by new variations of the tradition. This paper looks at how current Protestant lineage branches in Minnan are engaging in the practice of composing family histories, following many of the standard formatting and stylistic renderings of traditional genealogies, but also emphasizing the family’s unique religious tradition. By including both male and female lines of descent, Christian genealogies adopt an inclusive understanding of family resulting in multi-surname genealogies that nevertheless hope to present the family as a unified and strong group with a glorious history. The genealogies analyzed in this paper feature ancestral church leaders as paragons meant to inspire the current and future generations while further garnering respect for the family. The narratives presented in such documents see conversion to the church as a turning point in the family’s history, both spiritually and in terms of lineage development. By beginning the family narrative with the initial conversion and emphasizing family members who served as preachers or pastors, such genealogies intimately connect family and faith. Chris WHITE is a post-doctoral researcher with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He completed his MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and his PhD in Modern Chinese History from Xiamen University. His research interests include Protestantism in Southern Fujian and Southeast Asia, and his articles have been published in Twentieth Century China, Ching Feng, and other journals and books.


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Occulting the Dao: Translingual Practice in a Cao Dai Scripture

David A. Palmer Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong

[email protected]

Jeremy Jammes Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam

[email protected]

Caodaism, or Cao Ðài Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ (the “third great way of salvation”, 高台大道三期普度), is the third largest religion of Vietnam with growing congregations in diasporic Vietnamese communities around the world. This indigenous religion appeared in the 1920s under the French colonial regime. In this paper, we begin by exploring the genealogy and the circulatory formation of Caodaism as a product of the conjugation of a distinctly Chinese religious culture – as one of a wave of new religious movements which appeared in early 20th century China and have been called “redemptive societies” in recent scholarship – and a specifically Occultist colonial culture, inspired by Western Spiritualism, Freemasonry and the Theosophical Society. In the second part of the paper, we will investigate the “transligual practices” (Liu 1995) at work in in the key Caodaist esoteric scripture -- the bilingual Vietnamese/French

Đại Thừa Chơn Giáo (大乘真教), a collection of spirit-writing messages by the Jade Emperor, Li Bai, Guan Gong, Laozi and so on, revealed in Vietnamese. The book contains both the original Vietnamese and an extraordinary French translation using the idioms of Roman Catholicism and Occultism. At the same time, the verses of the Vietnamese original, are, in form and content, quite typical of Chinese spirit-writing texts, focusing on Daoist inner alchemy and the Salvationist eschatology of the third kalpa. In this paper, we examine a few representative passages of the scripture, which we have converted into Chinese characters. Comparing the Chinese and the French versions, they would appear to be quite different emanations from two different spiritual traditions. The romanized Vietnamese language acts as a screen which allows the Chinese roots of the texts to be hidden from the Vietnamese followers, and for them to be re-cast in a “modern” idiom derived from French Occultism and Catholicism. By unpacking translingual practices and the circulation of practices and discourses between the Vietnamese, Chinese and French French religious worlds, this study reveals the dynamic logics of the famed Caodaist “syncretism”. David A. PALMER is Associate Professor and Head of Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 2008. A native of Toronto, he graduated from McGill University in Anthropology and East Asian Studies. After completing his PhD at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, he was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and, from 2004 to 2008, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the French School of Asian Studies (Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient), located at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of the award-winning Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007), and co-author with Vincent Goossaert of The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011; awarded the Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies). His next book, Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (co-authored with Elijah Siegler) will be released in 2017 at the University of Chicago Press.


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The Theosophical Society from India to Vietnam: (De)Colonization, Occultism and Translation

Jeremy Jammes Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam

[email protected]

My interest in the Western connections of new religious movement in Vietnam ties into a broader interest in the Theosophical Society development in general, its role as incubators of new secular meditative knowledge and techniques and its interaction with Vietnamese efforts to translate theological canons (Buddhist, Caodaist, Theosophist, Christian) into accessible and secular literature. This paper exposes how, through the historical collision between different kinds of millenarianism (Krishnamurti/Bửu Sơn Kz Hương) and concepts (Vietnamese, French, Indian/Sanskrit and Chinese), the problematic of theosophical and cross-cultural interpretation under colonial period may be reconceptualized. This study on the local impulses of Theosophical Society in French colonial Cochin China sheds new light on theosophical reinterpretation and “modes of circulatory history” of ideas, practices and texts by Vietnamese themselves. Jeremy JAMMES is a social anthropologist and has completed his PhD research on Caodaism in 2006 (Paris X Nanterre). He has published book chapters and articles on religious and ethnic issues in Vietnam and Cambodia. He has recently published a book on Vietnamese religion Cao Dai and its global networks (Les Indes savantes, 2014) and co-edited a special issue on “Evangelical Protestantism and South-East Asian Societies” (Social Compass, 2013). His forthcoming edited book on Christian Evangelicalism in Southeast Asia will be published by Presses Universitaires de Rennes (France). Between 2010 and 2014, he served in Bangkok as Deputy Director of the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC, Bangkok), for which he has (co-) edited three regional geopolitics outlooks. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Social Anthropology in the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Institute of Asian Studies.


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Queen Street: Singapore, Catholicism and the French Civilizing Mission in the Far East

Daniel P.S. Goh Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Queen Street in the civic district of downtown Singapore today boasts an interesting mix of four functioning Catholic churches and four former Catholic schools now housing art and design centers nestled among boutique and backpacker hotels, public housing flats, creative spaces and hipster cafes. In this paper I discuss the formation of this precinct as an informal French quarter of the colonial port-city of Singapore in the Nineteenth Century. This formation advanced surreptitiously on the basis of French Catholic missions attaching themselves to the edge of the Eurasian community centered on the Goa-based Portuguese mission in the area. The French missionaries sought to build the quarter into a network base from which the missions could penetrate the Far East and, later, to maintain its control of the Catholic Church in China. The French churches and schools attracted and cultivated mainly the Chinese residing in the city, leveraging thus the Chinese social and cultural capital for the projection of French missionary network power in Asia. I discuss three important consequences. First, the missionary base and network became the conduits for French colonial expansion and imperialist influence in the Far East. Second, the educational work done in Singapore contributed to the French civilizing mission in the Far East, especially oriented towards the Sino-Confucian societies of Northeast Asia. Third, the French missions established the foundation of the Catholic Church in Singapore, and with its associated Catholic Schools, helped produced the disciplinary revolution and the middle-class strata crucial for constructing postcolonial society. Daniel P.S. GOH is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. He specializes in comparative-historical sociology and has research interests in topics in urban sociology, sociology of religion and sociology of culture. He has been researching and writing on the sociology of religion among the Chinese in Singapore, particularly Christianity and popular forms of Taoism and Buddhism. His latest published work in this field is the article, “In Place of Ritual: Global City, Sacred Space and the Guanyin Temple in Singapore”, in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City edited by Peter van der Veer. For this paper, he moves south from the Guanyin Temple on Waterloo Street to the parallel Queen Street, and back in time to the previous era of globalization under imperialism.


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Divine Mechanisms: The Recent Spread of Dejiaohui

Wu Qi Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

This research intends to examine Dejiaohui’s construction of a transnational network through planchette divination and other rituals, in particular the recent spread of it. It also concerns the Chinese overseas communities and their religions in a global context. Through migration, Dejiaohui is becoming a globalized religion. Their distribution and branching reveals the spreading history of this Chinese popular religion. Dejiaohui has been spectacularly expanded during the last century. Currently, there are nearly 200 congregations in Malaysia, more than 90 in Thailand, 9 in Singapore. Other than that, there are Dejiaohui congregations in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Indonesia, Laos, Brunei, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, United States, and France. On the other hand, Dejiaohui has managed to revive the first congregation “Zi Xiang Ge” in China, and also inaugurated more than 10 other congregations in different parts of China. Dejiaohui institutions among different regions have constructed a strong transnational network. This study would lead me to explore the transnational nature of religious affiliations and networking. WU Qi is a a PhD student in the Chinese Studies Department at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests focus on Daoism and Chinese popular religions, with specific emphasis on the Chinese overseas communities and their religions. Currently, she is working on the project of Dejiaohui and its transnational network.


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The Third Front: Commerce, Muslim Rebellion, and the Straits Settlements, 1870-1910

Joshua Gedacht Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam

[email protected]

Scholars portray the Dutch-Aceh and Spanish-American Moro Wars as decisive events in the histories of Indonesia and the Philippines. During these violent engagements, colonizers defeated Muslim rebels, subdued the periphery, and realized control over the full territories that today comprise Indonesia and the Philippines. However, historians have paid less attention to how the Aceh and Moro Wars were embedded within regional patterns of circulation, mobility, and interaction that transcended individual borders. Traders and religious scholars, soldiers and spies, colonial officials and rebels, moved in and out of warzones with relative impunity. These mobilities played a crucial role in sustaining Muslim insurgency and colonial pacification alike. This paper will examine how conflict did not isolate the sultanates of Aceh and Sulu, but rather, thrust them into intimate contact with the emerging commercial hubs of the region, the British Straits Settlements of Singapore and Penang. War drove multidirectional flows of traders, weapons, and religious scholars, turning urban port precincts into a de-facto third front in trans-regional pacification efforts extending from Aceh to Sulu. This paper will focus on two dimensions of this battle: the confluence of trade, smuggling, and rebel Muslim networks, on the one hand, and the intersection of economic growth, intelligence gathering, and colonial control on the other. Such a focus will highlight the symbiotic transformations that produced both modern trade centers and Muslim insurgencies. This historical analysis will illuminate the uneven geography of gleaming ports, contested sovereignties, and endemic rebellion that persists in Southeast Asia to the present day. Joshua GEDACHT received his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in December 2013. In 2014, he joined the Asia Research Institute (NUS) as a postdoctoral fellow, and he assumed his current position as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, in June 2015. Dr Gedacht’s research examines colonial war-making, Muslim networks, and the reconfiguration of religious connections in Indonesia and the Philippines. His book project, Islam, Colonial Warfare, and Coercive Cosmopolitanism in Island Southeast Asia, considers how conquest engendered paradoxical dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, disconnection and reconnection. Dr. Gedacht has published book chapters and journal articles on colonial violence, transnational massacres, and contested discourses of Holy War. He has also has organized international conferences, workshops, and edited publications on the Muslim Modernities and Islamic cosmopolitanism. In Brunei, Dr. Gedacht teaches courses on the history of Southeast Asia, Empire, and Islam.


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A Question of Relative Need: British Colonial Limitations of the Islamic Concept of Charity in Southeast Asia

Nurfadzilah Yahaya Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Through the establishment of religious legal trusts known as waqfs, Muslim colonial subjects expanded their reach and influence. Although the colonial legal regime theoretically privileged founders’ intentions, authorities fixed the definitions of waqfs by interpreting their terms according to English Common Law. In the process, they attempted to shift Muslim charity towards public welfare away from individual families and clans. Islamic notions of charity became narrower due to legal restrictions in the British Straits Settlements from 1860s till 1942. While this shift definitely limited the scope of founders’ original intentions, British judges leant more towards ruling waqfs as charitable over time. Although colonial authorities directly interfered in religious laws in the case of waqfs, certain interpretations of Islamic law was reified along with legal procedure that became fixed. In this way, Islamic law became protected like a bubble to a certain extent, and became a source of reassurance for some Muslim subjects. This could explain why Muslim Indian and Arab diasporic merchants continued to avidly establish waqfs in the Crown Colony fraught with legal limitations. This article goes beyond the colonizer/colonized dichotomy where the former unilaterally imposed change while the latter constantly attempted to maintain the status quo. Nurfadzilah YAHAYA is a legal historian, and a Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. She is the editor of the World Legal History Blog which is part of H-Law, a mailing list for legal scholars. She is also the Regional Editor for SHARIAsource for Southeast Asia, a go-to site on Islamic law. Before coming to ARI, she held the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in November 2012. She is currently preparing her book manuscript on mobile Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean which is based on her doctoral dissertation which won a Book Prize from the Arab Association of Singapore. The book, tentatively titled Fluid Jurisdictions, explores how members of the Arab diaspora utilized Islamic law in British and Dutch colonial courts of Southeast Asia. She has published journal articles in Law and History Review, Indonesia and the Malay World and The Muslim World.


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Islamic Philanthropy Networks in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Issues, Actors, and Transformation

Amelia Fauzia Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Before the Modern period, Muslims' interconnection and networks in Southeast Asia were mainly built through religious scholars (ulama), Islamic schooling, Sufi orders (tarekat), Muslim traders, waqf (Islamic endowment), and hajj (pilgrimage). Islamic modernist movements in the twentieth century had contributed to the creation of new networks such as printing and modern philanthropic organizations. With recent growing of modern Islamic philanthropic organizations, the practices and ideas of zakat, waqf, sedekah, and humanitarian assistance came to produce networks at national, regional and global level in enhancing the welfare of the ummah (Muslim community). Associations, forums, collaborative work of humanitarian assistances and academic seminars/conferences have been used to create and enhance this Islamic philanthropy network. This network has been up and down depending on the actors, institutions, national and regional political situations, as well as trigger (such as poverty, natural disasters and religious conflicts). Some initiatives of this philanthropic organization networking came from Indonesia, a country with more than 200 million Muslim populations. This article discusses Southeast Asia Islamic philanthropic network that have been initiated by Indonesian Islamic philanthropy organizations in enhancing zakat, waqf, and other philanthropic activities. It takes two case studies namely Dewan Zakat Asia Tenggara (Southeast Asia Zakat Council) and Southeast Asia Humanitarian Forum (SEAHUM). It seems that religious philanthropy network may soften the binary opposition of Islam and secularism, of state and non-state division, of Muslim and non-Muslim (secular) countries and communities. Using civil society discourse, this article analyzes the dynamics of the networks by looking at their actors, issues, and organizations. Amelia FAUZIA is a Senior Research Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster in the Asia Research Institute (ARI) National University of Singapore, and a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, The Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta. She received her MA from Leiden University (1998) working on indigenization of Islam in messianic movement in Indonesia, and received her PhD from the University of Melbourne (2009), working on contestation between state and Muslim civil society in the practice of Islamic philanthropy. Her dissertation was published by EJ Brill entitles Faith and the State, A History of Islamic Philanthropy in Indonesia (2013). She has taught and conducted research related to Islamic history of Indonesia, contemporary issues of Islam in Indonesia, and Islamic philanthropy, looking at dynamics of socio-religious movements. Dr. Fauzia works on organizational and governance transformation of Islamic philanthropy NGOs in responding to developmental and or “secular” assistance.


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The Nine Emperor Gods in Transit: “Vessels for the Gods” in Singapore and Penang

Fabian C. Graham Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

[email protected]

Inherent within emic understandings of the festival, the Nine Emperor Gods are firmly posited as central points of reference around which annually, for nine days, the human actors revolve. The term ‘bodies for the gods’ was coined by Margaret Chan (2009) to describe the primary role tang-ki spirit mediums play in relation to the deities that possess them. Using the same analogy, I employ the term ‘vessels for the gods’ to include all natural and man-made objects in which the gods or their spiritual efficacy is perceived to pass through, or reside. Researched in Singapore in 2010 and 2014 and in Malaysia in 2015, methodologically, while maintaining a key focus on the role of tang-ki, the paper explores the role of material objects in the production of ritual and offers a recursive analysis. From literally following or carrying ritual objects from point A to B – from the small: deity statues and oil lamps – to the heavy: wooden palanquins and the Nine Emperor God’s ship, I have observed how the vessels themselves have shaped the way in which rituals are performed, even if only doing so due to the conditions imposed on their carriers by their physicality. In essence, the actual choice or recognition of ritual vessels has contributed to the production of local ritual forms. The paper has a dual focus: the ways in which variance in ritual vessels produces variations in ritual form, and on how ritual forms may mirror social relations within and between participating temples. Fabian C. GRAHAM is currently researching recent developments in Chinese temple culture and temple networks in Malaysia, with secondary research in Taiwan and Singapore. This involves identifying developments in and diffusion of ritual and material culture, and then accounting for the evolution of difference between the three religious landscapes. His specialisation within this field is tang-ki spirit mediumship with a primary focus on ritual practices and trance possession. Working closely with spirit mediums and their devotees, and adopting a participatory approach where possible to fieldwork, his analysis incorporates the societal factors that have influenced the development of distinct religious elements in each location. His broader research interests include the anthropology of Chinese religion, lingji ecstatic self-cultivation in Taiwan, folk and orthodox Taoism, the invention and reinterpretation of tradition, new ethnographic approaches to the study of religious phenomena, and evolving forms of new syncretic practices in the Asia Pacific region.


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The Ah Peh Party: Religious Merriment and Homophilous Networks

Wang Koon Lee Dean Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

This paper examines the socioeconomic implications of a ritual-like activity that took shape during the 21st century. The Ah Peh Party is a colloquial term used in Singapore to describe the religious gathering or homophily among various temples that worship a generic group of underworld gods. Otherwise known as the Ah Peh, a dialectic term referring literally to an elder uncle or old man, this group of generic gods also assumes the role of a God of Wealth in addition to being an underworld bailiff and/or moral guardian. Gaining popularity towards the end of the 20th century, the reception of the Ah Peh cult is closely related to occult economies that proliferated in the era of millennial capitalism. How then, in the traffic between the religious and secular spheres, are traditional religious rituals and networks transformed? While the early widening reception of the Ah Peh cult can be largely attributed to its efficacy, the recent ritualistic trends suggest that increasing popularity of the cult is interrelated with the social (night)life of the devotees. This paper argues that besides efficacy, merriment is an attractive element in Chinese religiosity in contemporary Singapore, spurring the spread of homophilous networks within occult economies. WANG Koon Lee Dean is a PhD student at the National University of Singapore. His main research is on Chinese religion, focusing on its developments and networks in Southeast Asia. Dean is also interested in the study of overseas Chinese, popular culture, social memory, and Late Imperial China history. Currently, Dean is actively researching on religions in Singapore, in particular Daoism and Chinese popular religion.


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Transnational Tianhou-Mazu Cult in the Late 20th and Early 21st Century East Asia

Choi Chi-cheung History Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

[email protected]

Studies of the cult surrounding Tianhou-Mazu and local society have long centered on two major themes: Studies in Hong Kong reveal a relationship of “sisterhood” alliances that revolve around goddesses of various localities, while studies in Taiwan emphasize the hegemonic or hierarchic order of the goddess through split replicas. Both are religious strategies local communities have implemented to explicate “high culture” (Han Imperial culture or orthodox Taoism) while also acting as a representation of the local people’s own interpretation and understanding of religious correctness and ritual authority. Unlike Hong Kong and Taiwan, a third theme of Tianhou-Mazu cult which is closely associated with ethnic groups could be observed in Singapore where four of the five major Chinese dialect associations deified Tianhou-Mazu. The rebuilt of Meizhou temple in the early 1980s opening a new chapter for Chinese overseas to redefine their religious affiliation. In 2009, the Chinese government applied and successfully listed “Mazu Cult” as one of the UNESCO’s world intangible heritages. The status of “World intangible heritage” further enhances the standardization of the cult of Mazu. This paper through comparing the Tianhou-Mazu cult in Hong Kong and Southeast Asian Chinese settlements attempts to argue that from sisters to descended replica, or from local alliance to global hegemony, the cult of Tianhou-Mazu since the 1980s is not only a replacement of local culture with an emphasis on “high culture,” it also represents a religious strategy local people’s interpretation of correctness and authority. This paper will therefore discuss the foundation of this global development of a Chinese folk cult from the open-door policy period (the Deng era) and its ritual implications in the overseas Chinese communities. It argues that religious hegemony came with the support of the Chinese state. It is a soft power for cultural identification and ethnic unification. Yet, in spite of the imposition of hegemonic power from various authorities (UNESCO, Chinese central Government, Meizhou ancestral temple and intellectuals), popular belief is a matter of choice. It reflect how local religious practice is construed according to (1) the interpretation of global cultural languages, such as anti -superstition and intangible cultural heritage, by the elite Chinese; (2) their decision of when and how to re-connect with the goddess’s ancestry temple, the “Imperial state” or to form alliances with other local communities and (3) the implementation of the local governme nt’s cultural policy.

CHOI Chi-cheung 蔡志祥is a professor in the History Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Tokyo. His has published on Chinese festivals and popular religion, family and lineage, and business history. His major publications include Jiao: Festival and Local Communities

in Hong Kong打醮：香港的节日与地域社会 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. 2000); (co-eds.) Continuity and

Change: Ethnographies of the Communal Jiao Festivals in Hong Kong 延續與變遷：香港社區建醮傳統的民族志 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2014); “Stepping Out? Women in the Chaoshan Emigrant Communities, 1850-1950” in Siu, Helen F. (ed.) Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp.105-127, 300-305, and “Rice, Treaty Ports and the Chaozhou Chinese Lianhao Associate Companies: Construction of a South China-Hong Kong-Southeast Asia Commodity Network 1850s-1930s” in Yuju Lin and Madeleine Zelin eds Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600-1980, (London: Pickering & Chatto Publishers Ltd. 2014), pp.53-77, 204-9.


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Localizing Strategies and Chinese Popular Religious Institutions: Case Study of a Fujianese Village Clan in Southeast Asia

Kwee Hui Kian Department of History, and Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies,

University of Toronto, Canada [email protected]

My research in the past years traces the centrality of Chinese popular religious beliefs and rituals in the trade, mining, market agriculture and other overseas ventures of Fujian and Guangdong people in Southeast Asia (Kwee 2008, 2013, 2014, 2015). By mobilizing these symbolic resources, the sojourners and migrants were able to migrate and expand their economic activities overseas in autonomous ways with practically no assistance from their home regime as well as host authorities from the seventeenth century. They engaged in various ways of capital and labour pooling, mutual cooperation and communal self-governance that were undergirded by the beliefs and rites centred around the deity and ancestral cults in Chinese popular religion and patrilineal kinship imaginings. Stressing the importance of these Chinese popular religious institutions in facilitating their socio-economic organizations and ventures overseas is not to say that they remained unchanged however. Through the case study of the Bai village clan from Anxi in Fujian province and their migration to Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia, this paper shows the sustaining relevance of these institutions as these Fujianese adapted to local situations. Particularly for the first generation migrants, ancestral and deity-cult beliefs and rituals remained central institutions offering mutual help and assistance among fellow clansmen from Anxi. As Bai migrants and their local-born descendants formed broader networks with the non-Bai Chinese and other ethnicities, these symbolic institutions remained relevant even as they undergo hybridization and transformation. KWEE Hui Kian is Associate Professor of History and Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Political Economy of Java’s Northeast Coast, c. 1740-1800: Elite Synergy (Brill 2006). Her current research focuses on Southeast Asia and South China, where she has examined themes relating to Chinese diaspora, capitalism, colonialism and transnational entrepreneurship from the seventeenth century to the present. Part of the research outcome has been published in Comparative Study of Society and History (2013) and several journal articles and book chapters in recent years.


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Possibilities and Trajectories of Contemporary Religious Charities in Xiamen

Avi Darshani Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University, Canada

[email protected]

The past few years saw the rapid mushrooming of temple charities in the city of Xiamen (Fujian). Though they differ in their mode of organization, capabilities and practices, all these groups are committed to basic charitable activities, such as providing material assistance to society's weakest members, and supporting poor pupils and university students. In many cases, distributions of monies and daily necessities to the needy within temples' confines have become structured festive events in which religious and secular rites are blended. However, since such events and provisions of social services by religious charities are limited in scope and scale and the vast majority of the foundation members do not take part in acts of charity, I will explore other ways in which membership in a charity foundation transforms into a religious boon. Also, some organizations have embraced broader definitions of charity, and engage in different endeavors that are seen as a form of help, such as organizing "traditional culture" family summer camps, on the one hand, and offering ritual services for the moribund, on the other hand. I will analyze these activities and examine the benefits they yield for the temples and for the charities. Avi DARSHANI is a PhD candidate at the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. He currently conducts fieldwork in Xiamen, where he studies contemporary religious charities, as well as the history of Buddhism in the Minnan region.


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San Zhong Wang Temples in Singapore: A Case Study

Koh Keng We History Programme, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

[email protected]

Wang Koon Lee Dean Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

This paper is a preliminary exploration into the history of San Zhong Wang temples in Singapore. It shall examine the connections between these temples and the twakor industry, as well as Tong An and Jin Men networks in Singapore in the 20th and 21st centuries. It shall also examine how the establishment and distribution of temples in Singapore reflected important and changing relations between different parts of Singapore (especially different segments of the Singapore River and urban-rural relations). We shall go on to explore the issues of inter-generational change and the creation of new networks in Malaysia since the 1970s, and charts its attempts to reconnect with other San Zhong Wang temples in Taiwan and China during the last ten years. KOH Keng We is an assistant professor in NTU History Programme. He is mainly interested in the comparative histories of business, migration, religion, and colonialism in Maritime Asia. He is currently doing research on the Nine Emperor Gods networks in Singapore and Southeast Asia, China-Southeast Asia business and socio-cultural connections and the historiography of Maritime Asia.


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Dharmic Ties in the Chinese Diaspora: Nanputuo Monastery and the Xiamen Buddhist Networks before 1949

Jack Meng-Tat Chia Cornell University, USA [email protected]

The restoration of Nanputuo Monastery (Nanputuo si 南普陀寺) and the revival of the Xiamen (廈門) Buddhist

networks in the recent decades is a significant factor for the religion’s revival in Southeast China since the reform and open-door period. The historical roots of the Xiamen Buddhist networks, however, need to be understood within the broader context of Xiamen trading networks and the Chinese migration that emerged during the late Qing period. Previous studies on Xiamen have pointed out the economic vibrancy of this city and its trading networks, as

well as the vital connections between the overseas Chinese migrants and their qiaoxiang (僑鄉) in Xiamen. While

existing literature has shed much light on the commercial and remittance networks, they have neglected Xiamen’s religious networks in general and Buddhist networks in particular. Given the prominent existence of Buddhism in Fujian and the presence of many monasteries and eminent monks in Xiamen, there is a need to reconsider the Buddhist networks that connected the port city and the Chinese diaspora communities. This paper examines the Nanputuo Monastery and its Xiamen Buddhist networks linking Southeast China and the Chinese diaspora from the late nineteenth century to 1949. It argues that diasporic religious networks have a significant role in the transregional circulation of religious knowledge, people, and monetary resources between Southeast China and the overseas Chinese communities. While Buddhist clergy and religious knowledge were channeled along these networks from China to Southeast Asia, monetary resources also moved along the networks from wealthy overseas Chinese to China for temple building. Later, these religious networks became significantly important for supporting China’s war effort and facilitating migration to Southeast Asia during the Sino-Japanese War. Jack Meng-Tat CHIA is a PhD candidate in Southeast Asian history at Cornell University. Born and raised in Singapore, he received his BA (Hons) and MA in History from the National University of Singapore, and his second MA in Regional Studies – East Asia from Harvard University, where he was a Harvard-Yenching Scholar. His research interests include Southeast Asia-China interactions, Buddhism, Chinese popular religion, and overseas Chinese history. His articles have appeared in journals such as Asian Ethnology, China Quarterly, Dongnanya yanjiu, Journal of Chinese Religions, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, and SOJOURN. He is currently writing his dissertation titled: “Diasporic Dharma: Buddhism and Modernity across the South China Sea”.


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Non-mainstream Singaporean Buddhist Monks and their Networks in Southeast Asia and Beyond: Master Guangxuan and Vajra Supreme Master Yuan Fan

Hue Guan Thye Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

[email protected]

Although Master Guangxuan 广玄（1912－2011）and Master Yuan Fan 远凡（1957－）are not part of the

Singaporean mainstream tradition of Buddhist monks, nevertheless they were even more active than many monks in transmitting the dharma, and both built Buddhist temples and monasteries all around the world.The former monk built five Buddhist monasteries with Southeast Asian characteristics in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. In 1905 he returned to his home village in Zhangzhou Longhai municipality, Gangwei township, Zhuoqi village to built the Puzhao Buddhist temple, with both Chinese and SE Asian architectural features. This site covers 160 mu (almost 30 acres), and cost over one billion dollars - this is an exceptional site. The latter monk was born in Singapore and then traveled to Taiwan, Korea, India, Nepal and Burma to study Buddhism. During his youth, his meditative experiences led to visualizations that other Chan monks could not explain. He then decided to study esoteric Buddhism and became ordained as a Vajra Supreme Master. He was recognized as the reincarnated Yogi Practitioner Rinpoche by the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa. He then built theSagaramudra Meditation Centre on Pulau Ubin. He then led his disciples in building Sagaramudra Buddhist Institute in Singapore, Sagaramudra Buddhist Association Inc. (Perth, Western Australia), Buddha Mandala Monastery (Perth, Western Australia), Sagaramudra Meditation Centre (Senggarang, Malaysia), Pertubuhan Penganut Agama Buddha Sagaramudra Negeri Johor (Batu Pahat, Malaysia), Persatuan Penganut Agama Buddha Chenresig (Johor Bahru, Malaysia) and Hai Yin Culture and Arts Research Gallery (Mainland, Singapore). Later he trained over 20 Singaporean young monks in esoteric Buddhism, and then sent them out to earn advanced degrees (MA and PhD) in many different academic areas, and later had them run the various temples of his transnational network. These two monks represent new developments in Singaporean Buddhism: on the one hand, charismatic leadership based on a magnetic personality with a common touch, and on the other hand, the intellectualization of the tradition (both In terms of esoteric training and in terms of standard academic degrees) and institutionalization of an esoteric form of Buddhism. This latter example is one instance of the expansive network of esoteric Tantric monks who recognize and consecrate one another that has spread across the world. While Master Yuan Fan showed both intellectualist and organizational tendencies, Master Guangxuan was more remarkable for his simplicity and his charismatic ability to gather devotees and to build Institutions around his personality. This presentation will present a spectrum of non-mainstream Buddhist leaders, their hybrid technologies and their transnational networks. This includes over 30 Buddhist temples that are mostly not recognized by the Singapore Buddhist Federation, ranging from esoteric Buddhists to sectarian groups, some of which use the planchette to compose scriptures, to Buddhist leaders who write talismans and accept the revelations of spirit mediums, to spirit mediums who were themselves are possessed by Buddhas or by Guanyin Boddhisatva, to seemingly simple monks like Guang Xuan who created a devoted following by bringing his Chan practice to the everyday concerns of his followers – cooking for them, tending to their ills with Chinese medicine, and helping them by means of fortune-telling. But this kind of charismatic leader has trouble institutionalizing his network, and several of his temples have now closed. Hue Guan Thye is a Research Fellow of Max Planck Institute (MPI), for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany, and lecturer of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He obtained his BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Peking University, China, and his MA and PhD in Chinese Studies from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A revised version of his PhD dissertation has been

published《沿革與模式：新加坡道教和佛教傳播研究》[Evolution and Model: The Propagation of Taoism and

Buddhism in Singapore](2013). He is also the co-author of《新加坡漢傳佛教發展概述》[A study of the development of Chinese Buddhism in Singapore] (2010). In the past few years, he works on a field project “Mapping Religious Sites of Singapore” under the direction of Professor Kenneth Dean. As part of this project, they performed a survey of more than 800 Chinese Temples and Clan Associations in Singapore. Part of their collection of stone


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inscriptions from these temples and associations has been compiled as a historical reference book, entitled Epigraphic Materials in Singapore: 1819-1911 and will be published with Singapore NUS Press in the near future. Dr Hue’s research interests include the Philosophy of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, Singapore Chinese temples, Chinese Culture, and the Chinese in Singapore and Malaysian.


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ABOUT THE CHAIRPERSONS & ORGANISERS Aga ZUOSHI is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation in Asian Contexts Cluster in Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore. She received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from Minzu University of China. She was an Assistant Professor at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is interested in indigenous religion, vernacular development experiences, and the social construction of money. Her geographical area is southwest China, particularly the Yi. She completed a number of fellowships and grants, including British Academy/ESRC visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is also pursuing a second Doctoral degree in development studies at the University of Oxford. Bernardo BROWN is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, affiliated with the Religion and Globalization and the Asian Migrations clusters. His work on Sri Lankan Catholic return migration has recently appeared in Contemporary South Asia (2014), Ethnography (2015) and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2015). His current research projects focus on Catholic seminaries and priestly vocations in South and Southeast Asia. He received an MA from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Cornell University. Before joining ARI, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. Catherine SCHEER is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her previous work focused on Cambodia’s “indigenous minorities”, specifically the Bunong, and their interactions with Protestant development actors. In her doctoral thesis on the dynamics of Christianisation in a highland commune, she examined the links between local worldviews and ritual practices and missionary teachings that have changed over time, affecting the Bunong’s claimed identity and moral logic. She thereby attempts to contribute to the anthropology of Christianity in continental Southeast Asia. Her current research–in the context of the Religion and NGOs in Asia project–concerns the production of knowledge about languages in education by Southeast Asia-based international organisations, including Christian NGOs. Giuseppe BOLOTTA is an Italian Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from University Bicocca of Milan, and his Master’s in Psychology from University San Raffaele of Milan. He has also worked with Thai scholars whilst being an exchange PhD student at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. His doctoral research is a multi-situated ethnography of religious, humanitarian and state institutional politics for poor children living in the slums of Bangkok (Thailand). His current research project at ARI aims at comparatively exploring the relationship between development and religion in the case of the Catholic, Christian, Buddhist, and “secular” NGOs dealing with childcare in the Thai capital’s shantytowns. He co-founded the research group “Sciences de l’Enfance. Enfants des Sciences” (SEES, http://sciences-enfances.org) and has worked with Psychologists Without Borders (PSF). Kenneth DEAN is Professor and Head of the Chinese Studies Department, National University of Singapore, and Professor Emeritus, McGill University. He directed Bored in Heaven: a film about ritual sensation (2010), an 80 minute documentary film on ritual celebrations around Chinese New Years in Putian, Fujian, China. Dean is the author of several books on Daoism and Chinese popular religion, including Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plains: Vol. 1: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods, Vol. 2: A survey of village temples and ritual activities, Leiden: Brill, 2010 (with Zheng Zhenman); Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: The Quanzhou region, 3 vols., Fuzhou: 2004 (with Zheng Zhenman); Lord of the Three in One: The spread of a cult in Southeast China, Princeton: 1998; Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: The Xinghua region; Fuzhou 1995 (with Zheng Zhenman); Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China, Princeton 1993; and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Brian Massumi), Autonomedia, New York. 1992. His current project is the construction of an interactive, multi-media database linked to a historical GIS map of the religious sites and networks of Singapore.


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LIANG Yongjia (email: [email protected], [email protected], PhD Peking University, 2003) is Professor of Anthropology at China Agricultural University, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at ARI, NUS. He is interested in religious organisation and radicalisation, ethnic and religious revival and regulation, nationalism, and kingship in China. He published over 40 papers on journals such as The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, China: an International Journal, Asian Journal of Social Science, Sociological Studies(Chinese), and Open Times (Chinese). He is the author of two Chinese monographs: Territorial Hierarchy (2005) and Symbol from the Other (2008). His English monograph Reconnect to Alterity: Religious and Ethnic Revival in Southwest China will be published by Routledge. Peter van der VEER is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. He is the author most recently of The Modern Spirit of Asia (Princeton) and The Value of Comparison (Duke) as well as the editor of Handbook of Religion and the Asian City (California). Till MOSTOWLANSKY is an anthropologist with a particular interest in the anthropology of development, globalization and Islam. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and India since 2005. Till is currently researching Shia networks which transcend the modern frontiers of Tajikistan, Pakistan, Iran and India through development and charity. He has also developed an interest in connectivity between China and Central Asia. Till is the author of Islam und Kirgisen on Tour: Die Rezeption “nomadischer Religion” und ihre Wirkung (Islam and Kyrgyz on Tour: The Perception of “Nomadic Religion” and Its Effects) (Harrassowitz 2007) and has a forthcoming monograph with the University of Pittsburgh Press entitled Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Moreover, he is co-editor (with Brook Bolander) of the forthcoming special issue “Language and Globalization in South and Central Asian Spaces” for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language.

comparative approaches to inter-asian ... approaches to inter-asian religious and trade networks 3-4...

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