Events

ABSTRACT

By mid-2020, when the coronavirus had fully entered our everyday vocabulary and our lives, religious communities and places of worship around the world were already undergoing profound changes. In Asia, diverse cultural ideas, beliefs, and artifacts were mobilized to make sense of Covid-19, including in plural societies like Singapore. Studying religious narratives, practices, and changes in the Covidian age helps to understand how the transformations that took place in religious communities continue to impact the ways they engage with media, space, and moral and political economies today.

CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023) is a recent open-access “phygital” publication, which analyses the abrupt societal shifts triggered by the pandemic. Two of the book’s editors will be joined by four Singapore-based contributors, and one commentator will be invited to discuss the findings and consider their implications as we continue to adjust to the “new normal.” The open-access volume can be downloaded for free at the following website: https://manifold.uhpress.hawaii.edu/projects/coronasur.

PROGRAM

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS & DISCUSSANT

Erica M. Larson is a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Boston University. Her research examines the intersection of education, religion, ethics, and politics in Indonesia, and her monograph, Ethics of Belonging: Education, Religion, and Politics in Manado, Indonesia, is forthcoming with the University of Hawai‘i Press.

Natalie Lang is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and an associated junior fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt. She is the author of Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion (2021).

Indira Arumugam is an anthropologist who works in Tamil Nadu, South India and among the Tamil diaspora in Singapore and Southeast Asia. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include vernacular political imaginaries, ritual theories and practices, intimate economics of (re)production), modalities of sacrality and monstrosity, play and pleasure and popular Hinduism. Her writings on animal sacrifice, divine agency, rituals, the gift and kinship have appeared in leading journals of anthropology, religion and Asian Studies. Her book Visceral Politics: Intimate Imaginaries of Power in South India is forthcoming.

Jack Meng-Tat Chia is Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of religion whose research focuses on Buddhism and Chinese popular religion. He specializes in Buddhism in maritime Southeast Asia and has broader research interests in migration, diasporas, transnationalism, pilgrimage, and religious diplomacy. He is the author of Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Friedrich Weller Prize. This book was recently translated into Indonesian under the title Kiprah Para Mahabiksu: Agama Buddha dan Modernitas di Asia Tenggara Maritim (Karaniya, 2022), and a Chinese translation is underway. Chia is currently working on two book projects: Sisters in Dharma: A Buddhist Feminist in Postcolonial Indonesia, and Diplomatic Dharma: Buddhist Diplomacy in Modern Asia, which is supported by the 2020 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship awarded by the Social Science Research Council Singapore. In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Faizah Zakaria is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her work centers on environmental history, with interests in religion and ecology, indigenous environmental movements, heritage medicine and natural disasters. Her first monograph, The Camphor Tree and The Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2023. She is currently working on a new project on regional responses to volcanic eruptions.

Alvin Eng Hui Lim is a performance, religion and theatre researcher. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies jointly awarded by the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. He is also Deputy Director and Technology and Online Editor (Mandarin) of the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A, http://a-s-i-a-web.org/). Lim’s first monograph, titled Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance (2018), studies how lived religious practices in contemporary Singapore perform in combination with digital technology. He has also published on theatre, translation, digital archiving, and religious performance in Singapore.

Mathew Mathews is Head of the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) Social Lab, a centre for social indicator research and a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, National University of Singapore. He also leads the IPS Programme on Race, Religion and Intergroup Cohesion. To date, Mathews has been involved in over seventy research projects, most of them addressing social policy issues. At the onset of the Circuit Breaker in 2020, Mathews and his colleagues began collecting data on the experience of Singaporeans during the pandemic through regular online polls. Mathews sits on a number of non-profit boards and government committees including OnePeople.sg, an national initiative which champions racial and religious harmony in Singapore.

ARI ASIA TRENDS SERIES

ASIA TRENDS is the Asia Research Institute’s (ARI) signature talk series. It features insights from ARI’s research on social, cultural and political issues facing Singapore and Asia. The series aims to bring together scholars, stakeholders and members of the public to share knowledge and exchange ideas on the trends and challenges affecting society today.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on participating in this lecture have been sent to registered attendees. Please write to valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.