How do so-called "world religions" impact upon local and national identities in Southeast Asia? The papers in this panel each view religion in the context of a cultural encounter between local and extra-local forces. In settings ranging from the metropolitan centers of New York and Kuala Lumpur to remote islands of eastern Indonesia, such encounters turn out to be critical for the process of defining social identities—including those bound up with ethnicity, nationality, gender, and of course religion. These encounters demonstrate the ways in which Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism have become vital elements in Indonesian and Malaysian social, cultural, and political dynamics. One sees this in the reactions of an Acehnese painter upon viewing the Islamic art collection at a New York museum; in the dream of an Aruese woman in which her kinsman stands before a Catholic church altar with a cassowary tucked under each arm; in the dramatic rituals of self-mortification of the Tamil-Hindu minority in Malaysia; and in the significance attributed to the Scriptures by Protestants in Biak, Irian Jaya. Each case highlights the transformative power of world religions, but also shows how the religions become entangled with, and themselves transformed by, local and national social forces.

Kenneth M. George, Institute for Advanced Study

This paper tells how Abdul Djalil Pirous, a pioneer in contemporary Southeast Asian art, found a place of self-definition as a modern Indonesian painter upon visiting the Islamic art collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970. This cultural encounter with the East in the galleries of the West led Pirous to find a new home in the transnational and transcultural terrain of aesthetic modernism, Indonesian nationalism, Acehnese ethnic heritage, and Islamic faith. This revelatory moment also marked the beginning of Pirous’s efforts to introduce a discourse of Islamic culture into the world of contemporary Indonesian art.

Danilyn Rutherford, University of Chicago

Christian missionaries and their texts are often depicted as inaugurating a transformation of indigenous notions of space, power, and identity. But along New Guinea’s northern coasts, on the Dutch East Indies’ furthest frontier, the encounter with Christianity had different results. In this paper, I examine the significance of the Scriptures in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia, a place with high rates of literacy and a long history of exposure to outsiders. I take as my starting point practices that transform the Bible into the replacement of the ancestral "idols" that once served as a source of magical power and prophetic truth. This stress on the material qualities of the Scriptures can be placed in the context of the authority Biaks gain from mediating between local and foreign spaces. But it can also be traced to early encounters with unpaid Dutch and German missionaries, who came to New Guinea well before the establishment of effective colonial rule. In their efforts to touch heathen souls—while protecting their livelihood and security—these nineteenth-century "Christian Workmen" presented themselves to Biak heathens as a source of booty which included books and memorized words. Foreign writing entered Biak under conditions that highlighted the worldliness of God’s divine power and the thingliness of written and spoken texts. In the context of older strategies for dealing with foreign polities, the particularities of this history have enabled Biak Protestants to turn their conversion to unexpected ends.

Patricia Spyer, University of Amsterdam

The paper explores a dream of an Aruese woman in which the central emblem of her community’s annual male-dominated performance—the cassowary—appears doubled, gendered, and agamacized. In the dream, a kinsman of the woman stands before a church altar with a cassowary tucked under each arm—one male and one female—in what seems an improbable fusion of those Catholic rites most familiar to recently converted Aruese. The paper considers this gendered baptism of "adat" and "agama" against the background of their separation instituted during the community’s annual performance. What can the dream tell us about the kind of authority that sustains this demarcation between the two realms? What happens to such authority when it is so reflexively staged in the context of a recounted woman’s dream? And how does this relate to the novel spaces opened up to women as members of the Catholic church versus their positioning in "adat" ceremonies—for instance, in the traditional gendering of the annual performance’s space and time? Without thus far having had any clearly discernible practical consequences, the dream nevertheless provides a good starting point for discussing the complex interplay and mutual figuring of "adat" and "agama" in Aru, as well as the role of the "imaginaire" in social change—specifically here the possibilities and limitations entailed in a double take on "adat" and "agama" that crystallized in one Aruese woman’s dream.

Andrew Willford, Cornell University

This paper looks at the role of Hindu revivalism in the identity politics of the Tamil minority in Malaysia as its members simultaneously confront the Malay Muslim majority and the internal divisions within their own group (based primarily on class distinctions). The paper focuses on Thaipusam, a Tamil-Hindu religious festival that involves extravagant practices of self-mortification, which has grown tremendously in popularity among Malaysian Tamils over the past decade, as an example of a traditional Tamil ritual that has acquired new significance in the Malaysian context. Also examined are the elite Hindu reform movements that critique Islamic modernism through the crafting of an "ecumenical" Hindu modernism, while simultaneously distancing themselves from the practices that are identified with lower-class Tamils, such as those associated with the rituals of Thaipusam.