Speaker: Hanisah Abdullah Sani, Visiting Postdoctoral Associate, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, University of Michigan
Date : Thursday, 9 January 2020
Time : 3.00pm
Venue : AS8 #06-46, Singapore 119260
ABSTRACT
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the expanding colonial administration in British Malaya provided attentive reports on cases of conversions into and out of Islam. This was despite a longstanding policy against intruding into matters of religion and customs left entirely to native rulers. Why did the colonial administration enter into the management and surveillance of religion and why did it center around religious conversions? Current explanations attribute it to exogenous developments including growing anxiety over pan-Islamic and anti-colonial movements across the colonies. Using administrative reports, newspaper archives, and personal correspondences, I argue that surveillance on religion intensified due to endogenous stresses from within the colonial state. Expanding Mamdani’s concept of “decentralized despotism” with the principle and agent theory in the sociology of state literature, I examine how a crisis of indirect rule radically transformed traditional authority in the native state to eventually unravel colonial rule from within.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Hanisah Abdullah Sani is a political sociologist who received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019. Her research interests lie in the intersection of religion, law and society, social change, and comparative state formation. She is currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Associate at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan where she is turning her dissertation into a book tentatively titled: Sacred States and Subjects: The Religious Roots of Colonial State Formation. Her previous work, which examines makeshift prayer spaces among minority religious communities is published in Space and Culture. An alumnus of the Sociology and Malay Studies Departments, she has also done research on the growth of new religious movements, and conflicts of religious ideologies in Southeast Asia.
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