Joseba ESTÉVEZ

Senior Research Assistant, HKIHSS, HKU / PhD in social anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Münster | profile link

Jos Estévez is a Senior Research Assistant in the “Asian Religious Connections” cluster at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS). He is in the last stage of completing his PhD in social anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Münster, Germany. His regional specialisation is South-East Asia, where he has conducted long-term social anthropological fieldwork on the role of the Lanten (Yao Mun) rituals experts in Luang Nam Tha Province, Laos, from 2010 onward. His research interests include ritual, cosmology, exchange, social morphology and social transformation, the comparison of ideologies, animism, Chinese religion and Daoism. He is the initiator and director of the projects “A Digital Library of the Lanten Textual Heritage” in Laos, funded by the British Library's Endangered Archive Programme (2016 – 2019), and “The Lanten Oral Stories”, funded by BEQUAL-Laos, the European Union and Australian Aid (2017 – 2020). Currently, he is working in the projects YAODAO and BRINFAITH of the Asian Religious Connections cluster of the HKIHSS.

Spacializing the BRI in the History of Asian Imperial Imaginations

This subproject situates the contemporary mapping of the BRI within the history of the spacial imagination of Asia, using the notion of “empire” as a conceptual tool to interrogate how the connecting and separation of places through networks and infrastructures of trade and religion have been associated with different imaginations, juxtapositions...

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