Speaker: Dr Dominik Muller, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Date : Wednesday, 11 March 2020
Time : 2:00pm
Venue : AS8 #04-04
Please email to asevents@nus.edu.sg to register
ABSTRACT
In post-colonial Southeast Asia, Brunei is the only country that has unambiguously been defined by its government as an “Islamic State“ without any secular or Islamist opposition ever publicly questioning that claim. Surprisingly, empirically grounded scholarship on Brunei’s “Islamization“ policies and their societal consequences remain scarce. This presentation will offer an anthropological perspective on government attempts of defining and imposing Brunei’s “national ideology” called “Melayu Islam Beraja” (Malay Islamic Monarchy, “MIB“) and their socio-cultural consequences. While Brunei’s political and state-religious structures are authoritarian and decidedly anti-pluralistic, the presentation will elucidate some “enabling” aspects of Brunei’s Islamic State, exemplified by forms of active participation in the realization of “MIB State“ where social actors create otherwise impossible semi-autonomous spaces of ’embedded agency’ for themselves. Such ‘creative state-making‘ (Müller 2018) neither presents passive compliance, nor can it be described as intentional subversion or even resistance. yet it operates beyond the original intentions of the architect’s of the government’s bureaucratization of Islam. Drawing on recent anthropological scholarship on social agency in other “Islamic States“ and authoritarian settings, the speaker will point out some comparative implications of his case study. He will also address interactions between Brunei’s and neighboring countries’ Islamic bureaucracies, and how Brunei-specific claims made in the name of “Islam Nusantara“ relate to (and sometimes contradict) parallel discourses in neighboring countries using the same term to signify an inherently “pluralistic Southeast Asian Islam“.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dominik Müller is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), where he is Speaker of the interdisciplinary Elite Graduate Program “Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures (SDAC) – Knowledge, Authenticity, Time”. He is also heading the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group “The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia“. I He is a cooperating partner of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Department “Law & Anthropology“), where he previously worked, and has also held short-term visiting positions at NUS, Harvard Law School, Stanford University, the University of Oxford and Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He studied Anthropology, Law and Philosophy in Frankfurt (and as an exchange student at Leiden University), where he also obtained his PhD with a thesis on the rise of pop-Islamism among the youth wing of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). His research interests cover a wide range of themes related to politics, religion and normative change in and beyond Southeast Asia.
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