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All Journal Heritage of Nusantara: International Journal of Religious Literature and Heritage
Joel S. Kahn, Joel S.
Asia Institute, University of Melbourne
Religion Social Sciences

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Modern Gnostics: The Pursuit of the Sacred in Indonesian Islam Kahn, Joel S.
Heritage of Nusantara: International Journal of Religious Literature and Heritage Vol 3, No 2 (2014)
Publisher : Center for Research and Development of Religious Literature and Heritage

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This paper reports on an ongoing research project on “New Southeast Asian Spiritualties” and offers a preliminary analysis of new Muslim religiosities in the Jakarta metropolitan area (Jabodetabek). Most of the analyses of the pro­cesses of “Islamization” in places like Indonesia and Malaysia in the last few decades focus on a particular set of social cum political agendas: the impo­si­tion of sharia law, the Islamization of the state apparatus, the in­creased emphasis on the external markers of ‘Islamic identity’ and the like. Yet, there appears to be an equally significant, even sometimes opposing, tendency among Southeast Asian Muslims that involves them in seeking out more intense and personalised ‘inner’ forms of religious experience, a pro­cess with parallels elsewhere in the world. In the paper, I discuss examples of this tendency based on fieldwork in the greater Jakarta area, and ask about its implications for current understandings of the consequences (for democracy, secularism, human rights, gender relations, etc.) of Islamization in Southeast Asia.
Thinking About Religious Texts Anthropologically Kahn, Joel S.
Heritage of Nusantara: International Journal of Religious Literature and Heritage Vol 4, No 2 (2015)
Publisher : Center for Research and Development of Religious Literature and Heritage

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This paper addresses the conference themes by asking what contribution anthropology can make to the study of religious literature and heritage. In particular I will discuss ways in which anthropologists engage with religious texts. The paper begins with an assessment of what is probably the dominant approach to religious texts in mainstream anthropology and sociology, namely avoiding them and focussing instead on the religious ‘practices’ of ‘ordinary believers’. Arguing that this tendency to neglect the study of texts is ill-advised, the paper looks at the reasons why anthropologists need to engage with contemporary religious texts, particularly in their studies of/in the modern Muslim world. Drawing on the insights of anthropologist of religion Joel Robbins into what he called the “awkward relationship” between anthropology and theology, the paper proposes three possible ways in which anthropology might engage with religious literature. Based on a reading of three rather different modern texts on or about Islam, the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three modes of anthropological engagement is assessed and a case is made for Robbins’s third approach on the grounds that it offers a way out of the impasse in which mainstream anthropology of religion finds itself, caught as it is between the ‘emic’ and the ‘etic’, i.e. between ontologically different worlds.
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