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elements that were intrinsic to the western Orientalist and colonialist impulse, he believes that Said’s original description remains dualistic, and does not fully acknowledge certain complexities involved in a dynamic interaction of ‘East’ and ‘West’ – terms that Clarke does not want to see as simplistically opposed monolithic entities.16 Clarke’s own particular focus, in contrast to that of the Islamic world of Said’s study, is more on South and East Asia. I will briefly examine his work, particularly with regard to Hinduism, as a foil for further discussion of
remarkable strength in situations where subaltern groups can convert religious difference into collective social or political effort. The ‘rise’ of religious fundamentalism in some of the more underprivileged sectors of US society or of political Islam in the Middle East, Asia and in diasporic ghettoes in Europe evidences as much. Those who dispute attritionist secularist theories as excessively linear, totalising and teleological contend that modern history does not trace one long receding tide of faith but has undergone more jagged and dialectical processes of religious
Asia and Africa reflected contemporary reality. French nineteenth-century colonialism, from Algeria to south-east Asia, under successive regimes from the Bourbon and Orleanist kings to the Second Empire and Third Republic, was consistently decorated with crusading rhetoric and the parallels of crusade history.39 The German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, lecturing on the philosophy of history in 1822–23, suggested that ‘it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to the Europeans’.40 So ubiquitous was the assumption of crusader colonialism that it
choke Malaysia, Singapore” 12 and the BBC similarly reported that “Forest fires saw a thick haze blanket parts of South East Asia for months”. 13 The second focuses on imitating religious specialists to defraud people of their possessions, thus addressing both tang-ki incapable of entering trance possession and those impersonating priests, monks and nuns to offer religious services for profit. Those who have blasphemed deities are also punished in ‘Hell of Severing in Two’. Whereas in the ‘Jade Record’ all who have taken “Holy names in vain” (Giles, 1926 : 401
Jewish connection and he also looked as if he might be from a South East Asian background. To my left were two students I hadn’t met before: Malik, an Asian student, said hello in a northern accent local to this city, later confirming that he had gone to school nearby, and next to him sat a white woman, who shyly introduced herself as Eleanor. Despite being surrounded by chattering voices, our circle of chairs felt intimate, an enclosed space of mutual attentiveness. As we took turns over introductions, I was struck by the limitations of Leo’s suggested method for
of power and stimulate business enterprise; and working at a local level to fortify grass-roots organizations, including women’s groups and zakat committees. As this book goes to press, the scale of trans-Mediterranean irregular migration and its consequences were finally becoming evident to all – with a parallel in South East Asia where the new ‘boat people’ in desperate
Koentjaraningrat (1923–99) who undertook the hajj with his wife in his mid-seventies, after suffering a series of strokes (Fox 2001 : 244). He had no difficulty in accepting the precepts of late twentieth century Western anthropology and applying them to the cultural mosaic of insular South East Asia, which includes many examples of so-called paganism or polytheism. I have the
; Morley, 2003 ), in particular the work of Toby Miller ( 2007 ) on cultural citizenship and media, and, in a similar vein, tries to analyse how South Koreans, especially young South Koreans, conceive of and put into practice solitude (or just ‘being alone’) in the context of what social theorists in East Asia have called ‘compressed modernity’. There is, as Miller writes, an ‘uneasy interdependence of citizenship, consumption and politics’ ( 2007 : 29). He rightly notes, ‘the citizen and the consumer have shadowed each other’. Today, they commingle, with the citizen
by economic success – which is here discussed as epiphenomenal to East Asia’s ‘compressed modernity’. Just as religion has been multiply configured as a locus of transcendence, development has also been anything but static and fixed. Instead, both terms should be understood as ‘moving targets’ (Feener et al., 2015 ). They are shape-shifters, being reconfigured as they journey across time and space. Development, like religion, is multiple. While the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), Amnesty International’s advocacy for LGBT rights, Tzu Chi’s Buddhist
was able to get access a few days after the tsunami, working with Global Peace Malaysia, a Muslim agency. At one time they had a thousand volunteers, some Malaysian but mostly locals. After deciding that housing was the priority, they embarked on a successful construction programme and will shortly have completed 1,450 houses. Banda Aceh is now to become the South East Asian