Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series #7: Rohan Bastin, “The State will have no religion”: Secular Crises, Conversion and Reconversion in India and Sri Lanka.

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the September instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by our very own Dr Rohan Bastin (Division of Anthropology, Deakin University). The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

(Please note: our previously-scheduled seminar by Victoria Stead has been cancelled due to unforseen circumstances. The date and time remain unchanged, however.)

 

Date: Thursday 7 September
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood C2.05, Deakin Downtown, and VMP 39384)

 

“The State will have no religion”: Secular Crises, Conversion and Reconversion in India and Sri Lanka.

Exploring the current controversies in India surrounding freedom of choice and religious conversion, specifically the so-called reconversion or ‘homecoming’ (gharwapsi) campaign being promoted by Hindutva groups, the paper explores a range of debates about secularism and the contemporary Indian state. Through a comparison with similar and closely articulated debates concerning Buddhism, conversion and state religion in Sri Lanka, the paper argues for a revision of the doctrine of secularism as well as the doctrine of postsecularism in both countries through a critique of the popular postcolonial assertion that secularism is a modern concept foreign to the region. 

 

Biography

Rohan Bastin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University. He leads a project that proposes comparative research on socio-religious reform movements in Sri Lanka, exploring four separate yet related research foci in the post-war context involving each of the major world religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam). It explores questions of human equality and social cohesion in the setting of post-conflict national reconstruction.

Upcoming talk – Regional Systems and Phase Changes: Anomalies and Confusions, Iwa Island In The Case Of The Northern Side Of The Kula Ring And Other Points In The Ethnographic World

Friends, if you’re in the Melbourne area you might be interested in this upcoming talk at the University of Melbourne by anthropologist Frederick H. Damon, of the University of Virginia.
 
Regional Systems and Phase Changes:
Anomalies and Confusions, Iwa Island In The Case Of The Northern Side Of The Kula Ring And Other Points In The Ethnographic World
 
Tuesday 8 August, 2017
1.00pm
Lecture Theatre 1, Basement level, 221 Bouverie St, Carlton
 
Abstract
The idea of Phase Change, the transformation of one form into another, has a long history in the physical sciences but, outside of historical and presumptuous evolutionary interpretations, none whatsoever in the social sciences. This is true in spite of the fact that Arnold Van Gennep’s model of rites de passage is one of the best known and well-worn models of pan-human behaviour we have. As H2O molecules appear to have moments of random behaviour as they pass from ice to liquid or liquid to gas, so do humans as they move from one state to another. For long we have realized that logical relations like negation or inversion facilitate our understanding of human transitions. Yet the changeovers of humans and H2O molecules involve the constant of change in time. What of changes in space? Without question regionality of one kind or another is a condition of human society. Yet if the 20th century bequeathed to us two first order approximations for how humans array themselves in space, central place theory on the one hand and world-systems theory on the other, these approaches remain question-begging in the one case and severely limiting on the other. What role must anomalies and phase changes have in our understanding of human variability across space? This lecture strives to make apparent the kind of data we have to be able to understand in order to understand the role of ‘position’ in human sociality. Data used to make apparent what we need to know will come from many years of study of the Kula Ring in Papua New Guinea, as well as other regional systems in the Anthropological corpus, and well described but not well conceptualized aspects of the contemporary modern world-system.
 
Biography
Frederick H. Damon earned his BA from Duke University in 1970, his PhD from Princeton in 1978. He has been at the University of Virginia since 1976 where he is now a Professor in its Department of Anthropology. Since 1973 he has conducted more than four years of on-site anthropological research in and written and edited many papers and books on the north eastern Kula Ring society called Muyuw in eastern Papua New Guinea. His written work focuses on exchange and production, ritual and cosmology, and most recently ties between culture and environment. He is in the process of organizing research in Fujian Province, conceived as the historical and environmental dividing line between East Asia and the Austronesian expansion across the Indo-Pacific over the last 6000 years.