The New Faith Roads in Southeast Asia: Dynamics of a Circulatory Missionary Process

BRINFAITH RELIGION AND EMPIRE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES

The New Faith Roads in Southeast Asia: Dynamics of a Circulatory Missionary Process

ABSTRACT
This lecture on proselytizing to/from Southeast Asia is a critical reflection on a major shift in the world’s religious balance, with geopolitical, sociological and economic implications. Our mapping of religious mutations and issues in Southeast Asia requires an appropriate and dynamic definition of this space, which has been the site of proselytizing networks from outside but also within Asia, whose actions are very often justified by humanitarian ideals. Interestingly, a series of Southeast Asian missionary networks or strategies have recently been giving rise to complex ‘reversed missions.’ In a comparative approach, case studies of Evangelical-Pentecostal, Islamic and Buddhist missionary programs in Southeast Asia since the 1950s will be examined. As a result, contemporary religious dynamics will be considered as a circulatory and interactive process consisting of actors and networks, ideas and values, and identity claims, situated at the crossroads of local, regional and global influences.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jérémy Jammes is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at the Lyon Institute of Political Studies (Lyon Sciences Po, France) and Research Fellow at the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies (IAO).  He is the author of a monograph on Caodai religion, as well of edited volumes on Southeast Asian regional outlooks. He recently co-edited a volume on Christian Evangelicals in Southeast Asia (with Pascal Bourdeaux, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016) and another on Muslim Piety as Economy: Markets, Meaning and Morality in Southeast Asian (with Johan Fischer, Routledge, 2020). He was Deputy Director of the French Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC, from 2010 to 2014), and Director of the Institute of Asian Studies (Universiti Brunei Darussalam, from 2016 to 2018).

ORGANIZER
The event is organized by the CRF Project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road [BRINFAITH]” (RGC CRF HKU C7052-18G), which is hosted by the ASIAR – Asian Religious Connections Research Cluster in HKIHSS.