https://drive.google.com/open?id=1khH0NJ2Qi9vgHmRnnoSb11mRtswcd03Q

Panth, matam, dharm, rah, and ṣirāṭ, meaning ‘The Way’, are some of the terms used by faith communities in South Asia to define their tradition’s path. This conference will explore how these ways were expressed in ritual, belief, and praxis to create distinction. For example, among the 19th century Khōjā of Sindh and Gujarat, the term satpanth ‘The True Way’, referred to numerous vernacular religious practices that incorporated Vaiṣṇav, Svāminārāyaṇ, Jain, Shia, and Sunni practices within a caste faith. Their liturgical materials originally were written in a caste script in a mélange of dialects from Sindhi, Gujarati, Kacchi, Rajasthani, and Urdu. This liminality was not exclusive to the north, in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka araputamiḻ, the Muslim dialect of Tamil in the Arabic script, records the cosmologies and worldview of Muslim merchant communities that intersperses Vaishnava imagery with Arabic vocabulary.

This conference is intended to bring together scholars of the Adivasi, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism to explore how aesthetics, authority, narratives, rituals, and script have been historically shared and divided by faith communities in South Asia. How do we make sense of such heterogeneity that was distant from ‘orthodox’ literature being produced in urbane Sanskrit and Persian? How did rural religion differ and connect to larger faith communities across linguistic and script divides? Where were ethno-religious boundaries drawn between pragmatic mobile merchant communities and how fluid were they until early colonization? South Asian vernacular religion in local languages is a large untapped historical archive from which scholars can produce incisive microhistories. This is an open call for scholars across disciplines who wish to engage with the themes of endangered/extinct languages and scripts, merchant religion, modern religious identity formation, and the transmission of sacred narratives across the Persianate, Turkic, and Indic worlds.

The conference will be held at the University of Mumbai, Mumbai, January 30-31, 2019. The deadline for the submission of paper proposal is July 31, 2018. Successful applicants will be notified by August 30, 2018. The travel allowances ($500) as well as accommodation and board will be covered through the ‘Khoja Studies Conference’. Send your abstracts to: khojastudies@world-federation.org.

https://www.khojastudies.org

Australasian Association of Buddhist Studies Conference 2018

We are pleased to announce the 2018 AABS conference, which will be hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institute and Buddhist Studies@Deakin. This interdisciplinary conference will provide a forum for scholars and students of Buddhism to explore the rich tapestry of Buddhist cultures, philosophies, and practices in traditional settings and in modern social life.

For full details, please visit the conference website.
8–9 November 2018
Deakin Downtown, Level 12, Tower 2
727 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3008

Keynote speakers

Ann Gleig, University of Central Florida

John Powers, Deakin University

Amber D. Carpenter, Yale-National University of Singapore College
The conference committee is now inviting submissions of proposals for papers in all areas of Buddhist studies, including the following themes:

• Buddhism in Australasia
• Buddhism in the ‘West’
• Buddhism and philosophy
• Buddhism in contemporary Asia
• Buddhist texts and contexts
• Historical studies of Buddhism
• Engaged Buddhism
• Buddhism, art and architecture
• Buddhism and meditation
• Food, animals, and Buddhism

Panel proposals on these or additional themes with three abstracts are also welcome. Postgraduate students are especially encouraged to present their research, for which bursaries may be available. The closing date for proposals is 31 August 2018.

To submit your abstract, please visit the conference website.

Conference conveners: Leesa Davis, Anna Halafoff and John Powers, Deakin University

29th-30th November 2018, University of Cambridge

Organizers :

Zubair Ahmad, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin

Amin El-Yousfi, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Mayanthi Fernando (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Samuli Schielke (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin)

Overview:

For quite some time now, the analytics of a ‘cultural turn’ have been informing the study of Islam and Muslims. Enhanced through Clifford Geertz’s seminal work on Balinese and Moroccan cultures, Talal Asad was among the first to point out the assumptive (Weberian and Durkheimian) dichotomies that Geertz based his analysis of religion on; leading him “into making ill-founded assertions about motives, meanings, and effects relating to ‘religion.’” (Asad 2009 [1986]:18). In consequence, this critique led Asad to conceptualize Islam as a discursive tradition, allowing scholars of Islam and Muslims to “understand the historical conditions that enable the production and maintenance of specific discursive traditions, or their transformation and the efforts of practitioners to achieve coherence.” (Asad 2009 [1986]:23). This framework, then, resulted in an “ethical turn” (Agrama 2010; Fassin 2014, 429–435), particularly within the disciplines of anthropology as well as Islamic studies (Katz 2015, 3–4), displacing the focus from the cultural meaning to the ethical self-identification of Muslims (Mahmood 2005, Abu Lughod1998, Hirschkind 2006). In addition to the focus on the ethical, new avenues of enquiry have turned toward “everyday” Islam and its “ordinary” practices by Muslims. The work of Samuli Schielke (2009, 2012, 2015) has been considered important in this regard, introducing yet another turn. Scholars working on Islam and Muslims, however, have argued that the opposition between the “ethical” and the “everyday” have produced a whole set of dichotomies that pathologize Muslims as pious/exceptional/revivalist vs. ordinary/real/imitator (Fadil and Fernando 2015). At stake, as the ongoing debate suggests, are central questions concerning Muslims and freedom, agency, subjectivity, virtue, embodiment, selfhood, and authority.

Against this backdrop, this workshop seeks to provide a forum for critically engaging with the analytics of the “ethical” and the “everyday” in the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe. Accompanied by Mayanthi Fernando (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Samuli Schielke (ZMO, Berlin) as keynote speakers, the workshop will have three interrelated aims: Firstly, to bring into conversation and rigorously interrogate two key analytical turns in the study of Islam and Muslims: the “ethical turn” and the turn toward “the everyday”. By doing so, secondly, to make transparent their modes of enquiry as well as the analytical purchase they suggest and might hold. And, finally, to apply these turns, in a more systematic way, to the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe. The workshop is particularly interested in scrutinizing, and discussing the analytical value and implications of both these turns. What is, we ask, the analytical purchase of these turns within the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe? What, furthermore, might escape our attention while preferring one turn among the other? What happens in the “process of inquiry” while ascribing analytical weight to one rather than the other? In short, what value do these turns hold, offer, suggest, and toward what analytical consequences? And, finally, how are and can both be thought and utilized in a productive and forward-looking way for future research?

Call for Papers and format:

While we are happy to include paper presentations which rigorously address theoretical discussions as well as analytical and methodological reflections on the “ethical” and “everyday”, we encourage panellists to particularly pay attention to the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe from within the “ethical” and “everyday” turn – without necessarily assuming a clear-cut dichotomy between both. In doing so, papers should be both ethnographically based on European context, and illustrative analytically or methodologically of one or both of the two turns. Papers invested in the “ontological turn” by a reference to the “ethical” or the “everyday” are also welcome. Also, we invite submissions to take into consideration the complexities of positionality and representation, particularly within the larger political economy of knowledge production vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims.

Name, Institution/affiliation, short-biography, contact details must be submitted along with abstracts (300-500 words). All abstracts should be sent by August 31st to Amin El-Yousfi (ae375@cam.ac.uk) and Zubair Ahmad (zubair@zedat.fu-berlin.de). Applicants will be notified by September 9th about the outcome of their submission. Successful applicants will each have 30 minutes of presentation time, plus Q&A. The format will involve sending the workshop paper (2500-3000 words) to the relevant discussant two weeks ahead of the workshop (15th November). Following the workshop, participants will be invited to submit developed papers for a special issue of a leading journal.

Sponsors:

We are most grateful for the sponsorship of the Centre of Islamic Studies (www.cis.cam.ac.uk) and the Woolf Institute (www.woolf.cam.ac.uk).