Producing the Political: Religious Authority and Local Governance

What are the interactions between ritual practices, religious authorities and political contestations in the production of political authority and the practices of local governance? Papers will consider how religious authority is conceived, legitimized, negotiated and integrated into modes of local authority, based on the idea that enactments of local governance are part of the constitution of day-to-day politics itself, not just the nation-state. The hope is to begin to craft an anthropology of governance based on the comparative analysis of religiously framed processes of state-making Asia.

9:00-10:00 Indira Arumugam (National University of Singapore), Visceral Politics: Sacrificial Rituals and Political Theorizing in a Tamil Nadu Village

10:00-11:00 Jeremy Kingsley (National University of Singapore), Everyday Practices and the Fabric of Local Governance in Eastern Indonesia

11:20-12:20 Keping Wu(Harvard-Yenching Institute), Rituals of Pluralistic Local Governance: State and Religion at the Sino-Burmese-Tibetan Borderlands

1:45-2:45 Huwy-min Lucia Liu (Boston University, HK University of Science and Technology), Pluralist Ritual and Ritual Pluralism: Modes of Religious Authority and Political Contestation in Urban Shanghai Funerals

2:45-3:45 Rebecca Nedostup (Brown University), Graves through Time and Space: Place, Peace, and Sovereignty in the Aftermath, Late 1940s Jiangsu

4:00-5:00 Michael Szonyi (Harvard University), A Temple with Two Gods: Finding the Political Past and Present in a South China Community