Project Details
Projekt
The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia
Applicant
Professor Dr. Dominik M. Müller
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Asian Studies
Asian Studies
Term
from 2016 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290540325
Across Southeast Asia, governments have empowered institutions to “guide” and regulate Islamic discourse. The motivations at play, the approaches they take, and the national histories and discursive arenas in which this is embedded, differ widely. Yet, in each country with significant Muslim majority or minorities populations, state actors are intensely trying to influence Islamic discourses and Muslim subject formations in their territories, while non-state actors try to influence the way the state is governing Islam and (un-)desirable religious citizenship. This results in a relational dynamic of mutual attempts to engage and influence each other across the blurring boundaries between bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic spheres. These relational dynamics are at the heart of what the Emmy Noether Project (ENP) calls the "bureaucratization of Islam", viewed anthropologically as a social phenomenon.Since its formation, the Emmy Noether Group has been empirically exploring and theoretically examining this phenomenon from an anthropological perspective, with three doctoral students and the Principal Investigator (PI) conducting ethnographic fieldwork in five countries. This work is currently (2019) ongoing, as the doctoral candidates recently returned from a final visit to their field sites.Enabled by a change in the Emmy Noether Program, this application proposes an additional year (10/2021–09/2022) comprising a deepening of the PI’s work and two new post-doctoral projects extending the ENP empirically and analytically. The new sub- projects’ themes have emerged from current work, which pointed to new directions that the existing ENP cannot pursue. The extension project’s empirical basis comprises (1) the PI’s expanded fieldwork on the bureaucratization of Islam in Singapore, and (2) two post-doc projects producing ethnographic case studies on the bureaucratization of Islam on sub-themes pre-determined by the PI and further developed by themselves. All projects will be conducted within the ENP’s meta-conceptual framework, while serving to test, modify and deepen it in light of new empirical directions. The applied-for Post-Doctoral Project I will focus on interlocked workings of nationalizing and de-territorializing forces inherent to the state-driven bureaucratization of Islam in Southeast Asia. It will examine various forms of transnational interaction between different Islamic bureaucracies in Southeast Asia as well as their ongoing at-tempts to institutionalize such cooperation through ASEAN-wide Islamic bureaucratic bodies.The proposed Post-Doctoral Project II takes an experimental shift of perspectives, while broadening the meta-project's scope: A Southeast Asian social scientist will investigate the bureaucratization of Islam in Germany, while testing and re-thinking the meta-project's conceptual framework, hypotheses and terminology. This will strengthen its aim to situate its hypotheses and findings in broader trans-regional context.
DFG Programme
Independent Junior Research Groups
International Connection
Netherlands, Singapore, USA
