Workshop on Religion and Identity - Session one Power Point

1. Identity
and religion

2. Describes a process through which people come to
come to know who they are, and seek proper
recognition from the actors and institutions around
them.

3. How does religion (as a practice, a category of
representation, and an institutionalized form) help or
complicate how people see themselves in the modern
world?

4. Ethnic
Racial
National
Religious
Gender
Regional

5. -Edmund Leach -
Political Systems of Highland Burma, 1959

6. British court document, 1930
Name of Witness: Hpaka Lung Tseng
Race: Lahtawng Kachin (Pawyam, Psuedo-Shan)
Age: 79
Religion: Zawti Buddhist
Lives at: Man Hkawng, Mong Hko
Occupation: Retired Headman
Father: Ma La, sometime Duwa of Pao Mo
When I was a boy some 70 years ago, the (Shan) Regent Sao Hkam Hseng who
then reigned in Mong Mao sent a relative of his
Nga Hkam by name, to negotiate an alliance with the Kachins of Mong Hko.
After a while Nga Hkam settled down in Pao Mo and later he exchanged names
with my ancestor Hko So Tli and my grandfather Ma Naw, then Duwas of Pao Mo;
after that we became Shans and Buddhists, and prospered greatly and as
members of the Hkam clan, whenever we went to Mong Mao we stayed with the
regent .......

7. Signifiers of Identity
Geography
livelihood
Religion
genealogy

8. Identity categories
not always stable
internally diverse
expressions of difference often have a background of
similarity

9. People must differ from each other intelligibly; to create diversity, one has to
ensure the existence of similarities against which difference can be made to
appear. (Harrison, 2006)
Expression of difference requires a shared public

10. Perennialism
Ethnicity is a universal ontological category,
however the
Constructivism
Primordialism content and boundaries of ethnicity are always
being re-negotiated
Ethnicity is a modern phenomena, a product of
Modern ethnic groups have human social interaction, only “real” as far as
continuity from the past. Situational Perennialism society supports it.
Identity (especially ethnic and
national) is rooted in biological
- nations and ethnic groups emerge, change and Modernist Constructivism
vanish throughout the course of history, focus on
categories or universal categories Ethnic and national identities are modern
boundaries and social interaction
phenomenon associated with the era of nation-states
like kinship. Barth
Smith, Instrumentalist Perennialism Hobsbawm
Geertz ethnicity is mostly a tool of social stratification,
used to support systems of social stratification
HARD SOFT

11. Son of Sultan Iskandar Syah of Melaka,
Sri Muhammad Syah (Raja Tengah)

12. Issues
Processes of
classification
fluidity?
scale

13. “Embodiment” and performance of identity
History and identity (use and selectivity)
Myth
Religion and ethnic boundaries

14. Zheng He (Cheng Ho)
Nanjing

16. Merdeka Sunat - Yasmin Ahmad

17. Ascribed Ethnicity
(Primordialist Model) Geertz 1973-
‘primordial
corporate The
based feelings more
traits
ETHNIC GROUPS
of oneness’ one
shares
the
more
CULTURE ethnic
(inherited traits one is
that people share)
purity
* Folk theories

18. CATEGORIES
OF religion language
INCLUSION
EXCLUSION
AND particular
traditions dress
INTERACTION
Ethnic categories provide an organizational vessel that may be given varying
amounts of form and content - [ethnicity is] a structuring of interaction which
allows the persistence of cultural difference.

19. It is important to recognize that although ethnic categories take cultural
differences into account, we can assume no simple one-to-one
relationship between ethnic units and cultural similarities.
The features that are taken into account are not the sum of “objective”
difference, but only those which the actors themselves regard as
significant.
(Barth, 1969:14)

20. Religion, Identity and the nation-state
- 25 March -
* State management and intervention in religion, and the definition of
religious identities through state apparatus
* Politicization and codification of religious identity
* The issue of the Chinese in Indonesia

21. Religion and Tradition
8 April
*Colonial period categorizations
* The “boundary” between culture and religion
*institutional definitions of religion
*Questions of conversion

22. Tourism and Identity
15 April
*Representations of cultural identity through tourism
*identity and commodification
*media and identity
*authenticity and world religions

23. Articles
Clifford, James. Identity in Mashpee.
Brubaker and Cooper. Beyond Identity. 2000.
Smith. History and National Destiny. 2004.
Barth. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.

24. IDENTITY
Analytical
Category
Category of practice -identity politics - folk theories - discourse

25. Uses
1. non-instrumental modes of social and political action; action
governed by particularistic self understanding rather than universal self interest

26. Understood as a specifically collective phenomenon, implying a fundamental
sameness among members. This sameness should manifest in solidarity, shared
dispositions or consciousness, or collective action

27. 3. Product of social or political action, the development of a kind of collective
understanding or “groupness” that makes collective action possible. Identity then
is both a product of collective action, and a basis for further action.

28. 5. Something that represents the unstable, multiple, fluctuating and fragmented
nature of the contemporary self.

29. #
#
2 and 3
4 and 5
Fundamental
reject notions of
sameness (across persons
sameness
and across time)
or continuity

30. who is doing the
identifying?
IDENTITY IDENTIFICATION
A Condition A Process
Relational - position in a social web or relationship
(kinship, patron-client Categorical - membership in a class of
persons sharing some categorical attribute (race,
class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation

31. SELF UNDERSTANDING
Perhaps tacit, may be variable across time and persons. Also makes a distinction about how you
identify yourself in and how others identify you
Self-Identification Self-representation
(explicit) (explicit)