Papers (Part 1)

• Hopeless Romantics: Competing Secular and Islamic Narratives in the Lives of Malay-Muslim Women Romance Novel Readers Alicia Izharuddin University of Malaya

  Emerging literature on religious and ethical imperfection argues that moral failure can in fact be productive. Failure reveals the often unstable, incoherent, and multidimensional Muslim selves who are impacted differentially by Islamic revivalism. It shows that Muslims are also significantly affected by “nonreligious” and “secular” ways of being due to contingencies and different life priorities. My paper investigates the role of failure in the personal and religious lives of Malay-Muslim women and their media practices. I am interested in their cultivation of ethical subjectivities as romance readers in times of personal crisis and argue that romantic novels compete with Islamic narratives in the lives of Malay-Muslim women in Malaysia who search for meaning and fulfillment.

• “Indonesia Will Lead the Muslim Word”: Myth, Mediation, and Affective Identification with the Ummah Among Indonesian Netizens Silvia Ilonka Wolf Freie Universität Berlin

  Studies of how Muslim identities are formed and expressed online often tend to juxtapose global identity versus national identity. While some have argued that the Internet has created a “virtual ummah”, others emphasize that interactions on the Internet remain primarily local in character. This paper offers a different argument by examining the online circulation and reception of three Indonesian narratives about Indonesia’s role within the larger ummah. The first narrative is based on a speech held by a Palestinian sheikh during his visit to a mosque in Yogyakarta, in which he suggested that Indonesians will liberate Palestine and the occupied Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. In the second narrative five ordinary Palestinian citizens have reported that the aforementioned vision came to them in their dreams. The third narrative tells about a Saudi Islamic scholar who encountered the Prophet Muhammad in his dream and was told by him that Indonesia will eventually lead the Muslim world. How are these narratives received by netizens on YouTube? How does the remediation of the narratives impact Indonesian Muslim youth’s identification with the global ummah and with the Indonesian nation, respectively? I argue that the global imagined community of ummah and the national imagined community can reinforce one another through such narratives. Moreover, instead of resorting to a shared mythical past, as theorists of the nation have often pointed to, in this case it is the future that is mythified. It is through this mythification of an aspirational future and in relation to an overarching imagined community that the nation gains its significance.

• The Seal of Sainthood: Circulations, Affective Mediations, and Anxieties of Estrangement Ismail Alatas New York University

  This paper observes the reproduction and circulation of a peculiar Hadrami intercessory seal, the various affective mediations it performs, and the anxieties it generates in contemporary Indonesia. Produced in a variety of colors and designs, the seal is made up of three basic invariant elements: the Arabic alphabet h, the numerals 110 and 1030. Signifying the spiritual and intercessory power of two Hadrami scholars and saints, i.e. 'Abdallah b. 'Alawi al-Haddad (d. 1720) and 'Ali b. Muhammad al-Habashi (d. 1912), the seal can be found across the Indian Ocean, in places with a substantial Hadrami diasporic population. As a reproducible semiotic form, the seal facilitates the circulation of a theology of sainthood -- including the notion of saintly power and spiritual inheritance (wiratha) -- and has served as a trademark of the 'Alawiyya Sufi order. Nevertheless, the seal has been used for various purposes, from protective charm to logo of religious institutions, and social media avatars. In Indonesia, the seal has been commodified into hangable artworks, clocks, pendants, enamel pins, rings, jackets, and stickers.

  Observing the contemporary circulation of the seal, this paper looks at how the seal mediates different kinds of intimacy, from spiritual attachment to deceased “friends of God” to a longing for the Hadramawt as an ancestral homeland (for Indonesian of Hadrami origins) and pilgrimage destination. The rapid circulation of the seal has provoked a strong reaction from those who deem idolatrous the act of invoking and seeking protection from an entity other than God. In mediating intimacy with the saints, these critics argue that the seal performs the work of estranging people from the divine.

Papers (Part 2)

• Haunted Trees: Spatial Intimacy in Urban Hanoi Gertrud Huwelmeier Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  This paper explores the performance of popular religious practices at a “haunted” tree in urban Hanoi. Considered as sacred by the local population, the tree and a shrine in its huge trunk mediate between this world and the otherworld. In the early 1960s, a maternity hospital was constructed in the immediate vicinity of the tree. To this day, women pray at the shrine before and after childbirth. As abortions are also performed in the hospital, the tree has come to be regarded by Hanoians as a home for unredeemed souls. The history of the tree and narratives about its existence, however, predate the hospital and refer to the arrival of migrants from India in the early 1900s. They lived on the territory of the current clinic, bred cows in the area, and established a temple next to the huge tree. Indians, like many other non-Vietnamese members of the urban population, left Hanoi after independence (1954). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the sacred tree in urban Hanoi is a place where infant death and abortion are ritually commemorated. Moreover, it serves as a landmark, reminding locals of the former Indian inhabitants of the city. The tree should therefore be considered as a shrine, a locality where affective relations are created and fostered through prayers and offerings, i.e. are mediated between people, place and material objects. As this paper will demonstrate, the haunted tree is a contested icon of different time periods, French colonialism, high socialism, and the manifold dynamics of market socialism shaping Vietnamese society today.

• Intimate Encounters: The Production of Empty Spaces and the Proliferation of Ghosts in Indonesia Martin Slama Austrian Academy of Sciences

  The paper is concerned with a phenomenon in urban Indonesia that one can describe as the production of empty spaces: warehouses, apartment towers, housing estates etc. have been built on an increasing scale, but at least some and sometimes many of them remain empty. The paper thus engages with the following paradox: In one of the most densely populated areas of the world, one can find a lot of buildings, many of them recently constructed, that are not inhabited by people, while in the lower-class kampung living space is extremely limited and has to be shared by a large part of Indonesia’s population. The paper proceeds by asking how this empty (but for most people unachievable) space is charged with meaning which leads the discussion to consider encounters with ghosts and how religious specialists deal with them. In fact, intimate encounters between ghosts and humans as well as between people of different religious and class backgrounds seem to be crucial in this regard. Moreover, in Indonesia today, popular culture is equally occupied with ghosts, particularly the country’s film industry with ghost movies belonging to its most successful productions. The theme of an empty house that is haunted one can also encounter on social media platforms that feature distinct ghost genres, such as short ghost buster videos. By looking at these offline and online phenomena the paper aims at developing an understanding of how contemporary urban inequalities are spiritually constructed by way of intimate encounters located in private spaces and the realm of the uncanny at the same time.

• Strings of Sorrow, Songs of Yore: Mediating Place and Belonging Through the Classical Guitar Songs of Southern Sumatra Bart Barendregt Leiden University

  Classical guitar music is the soundtrack of a Southern Sumatran landscape that over the last hundred years or so has been thoroughly transformed, both by internal and external migration and mobility, highland people’s urge to constantly settle new lands and a general move to the large city. Guitar music (known variously as gitar tunggal, lagu batang hari Sembilan or rejung) helps to contemplate and comment upon such changes. Almost each and every single area in the Southern Sumatran provinces of Lampung, Bengkulu, and South Sumatra proper has its own distinctive guitar music, building on a set of area specific melodies and tunings, and accompanying verses in the local vernacular that tell a nostalgic story of times long bygone, villages no longer there, and people sorely missed. Such songs of collective nostalgia romanticize rural areas, as symbols of an earlier, more pristine way of life, providing its listeners with a certainty that the present and the future seems to lack. By emphasizing the simplicity of life in the traditional village rather than modern values and progress, a counter-modernist historical consciousness firmly seems posited.

  Recording and mediating these area specific songs music through initially cassette, Video CD and lately social media has ironically mostly taken place in Southern Sumatra’s larger cities providing today’s city dwellers with a kind of immediate intimacy: a portable landscape ready to be activated any time, any place. As places in the highlands are no longer exclusively real-time spaces, home now might be constructed and shared through a sentimental song, downloaded and streamed in a single moment, instantly bringing back the times of yore.

Abstract

Keywords

• Anthropology
• Indonesia
• Intimacy