Events

CHAIRPERSON

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

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

The Pew Research Center recently published a report on religion in six countries in South and Southeast Asia. Three countries, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, are majority Buddhist. Two, Malaysia and Indonesia, are majority Muslim. The sixth, Singapore, has multiple religious communities. This study, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, is part of a larger effort by Pew Research Center to understand religious change and its impact on societies around the world.

The report explores:

1. Religious and ethnic identity, and attitudes towards other religions
2. Different patterns of religious belief and practice across religious communities and countries
3. The deities to whom people pray or offer their respects
4. Funerary practices
5. Differing levels of religiosity by age
6. A deeper look at how religion and national identity intersect

The report also includes an exploration of religion in Singapore – particularly its changing religious composition and the beliefs of its religiously unaffiliated population.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jonathan Evans is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center, where he contributes to international polling projects focused on religion and national identity. Jonathan received his master’s degree from Georgetown University and holds a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University. He is an author of studies on How Indians View Gender Roles in Families and Society, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, Being Christian in Western Europe and Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe.

Kenneth Dean is Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Professor in Yale-NUS College, Research Cluster Leader for Religion and Globalisation in Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (NUS), and Director of Wan Boo-Sow Centre for Chinese Culture in Department of Chinese Studies at NUS. He is the author of several books on Taoism and popular religion in Southeast China. He has published several volumes of epigraphic sources on the history of religion in Fujian and Singapore. He directed Bored in Heaven: A Film about Ritual Sensation (2010) and has developed websites and digital platforms including the Singapore Historical GIS and the Singapore Biographical Databases.

Erica M. Larson is Research Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Boston University, USA. Her research interests include education, religion, ethics, and politics in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly. She has examined how education becomes an arena of deliberation about the ethics and politics of plural coexistence through ethnographic research in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Her current research engages Indonesian youth active in religious organizations and their attitudes and beliefs about corruption as a lens on normative state-society relations and notions of ethics, piety, and responsibility.

Michel Chambon is a French theologian and a cultural anthropologist working on Christianity in Chinese worlds. As a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute in National University of Singapore, he coordinates the Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics (ISAC), an international scholarly network developing and promoting social scientific research on Asian Catholics in contemporary societies.

Neena Mahadev is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College, and Research Associate within the Religion and Globalization Cluster in the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at National University of Singapore. She carried out dissertation fieldwork in Sri Lanka for more than 24 months in 2009-2011 with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Her work appears in Current Anthropology, and in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She is the author of Of Karma and Grace: Conversion and the Politics of Belonging in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2023).

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.