UCRiverside Mellon Workshop in the Humanities:
“Southeast Asian Inter-textualities"

Panel Series – Spring 2006

I: Texts and Ritual Practice
April 14, 3:00-6:00 pm, HMNSS 1500

Justin McDaniel, “Cages, Skulls, and Statues: Intertextuality and Magical Protection in Bangkok”

Justin McDaniel has taught courses on Hinduism, Buddhism, Myth and Symbolism, Southeast Asian History, and the Study of Religion. He lived and conducted research in South and Southeast Asia for many years as a Social Science Research Council and Fulbright Fellow, translator, volunteer teacher, and Buddhist monk. His research foci include Lao, Thai, Kheun, Pali, and Sanskrit literature, Southeast Asian Buddhism, and Indic philology. McDaniel’s recent publications appear in the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies and the Journal of the Siam Society, and he has made contributions to collected articles on Buddhism and Modernity, Fragile Palm-leaf Manuscript research, and Pali literature in Laos and Thailand. At present he is finishing writing the first major book on the history of Buddhist education in Southeast Asia.

Jinah Kim, “Text as mother: Representing the Perfection of Wisdom at Angkor”

Jinah Kim is a PhD candidate in the history of art department
at University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral thesis is on the cult of illustrated Buddhist books from Eastern India and Nepal. Her current research interests ranges from exploring the relationship between the text and image, to understanding pragmatic meaning and function of religious objects in different contexts, to searching for the new critical framework for the interpretation of the multivalent and the issues of re-appropriation.

Pattaratorn Chirapravati, "Reading Mural Painting as Text: Exploiting the Power of the Buddha"

M.L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati is a professor of Asian Art and in the Asian Studies Program at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of Votive Tablets in Thailand: Origin, Styles and uses (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1997). Her most recent research has been on Wat Ratchaburana (1424) and Wat Si Chum (the second half of the14th century). She is co-curator of the international Thai art exhibition The Kingdom of Siam: Art from Central Thailand (1350-1800).

II: European Forms of Writing – Malay Forms of Writing
April 21, April 14, 3:00-6:00 pm, HMNSS 1500

Hendrik Maier, “Stammering as a Form of Malay Writing”

Henk Maier is Luce Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He has published widely on Malay and colonial literature, and has translated a number of Malay novels and short stories into Dutch.

Leonard Andaya, “Writing Southeast Asian History: An Intertextual Exercise”

Leonard Andaya is a Professor of History at the University of Hawaii. His work is focused on the history of pre-modern Southeast Asia with a particular interest on the process of ethnic identity formation in the early modern period (1500-1800). He is the author of numerous books, including The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period, and A History of Malaysia (co-authored with B. Watson Andaya).

Michael Nau, “Photography and Visual Culture in the Indies, 1857-1901”

Michael Nau received his B.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College (CUNY) concentrating on postcolonial and postmodern literatures. In 2004-2005 he was in Indonesia on a Fulbright grant to research the narrative strategies of and cultural production of the Jakarta "liberal epistemic circle."

III: Islamic Inter-Textualities of the Indonesian Archipelago
April 28, 3:00-6:00 pm, HMNSS 1500

Michael Feener, “Script, Language, and Literary Polemic: The Qur’anic texts of H.B. Jassin”

Michael Feener's research covers aspects of Southeast Asian Islam from the early modern to contemporary periods, focusing on issues related to the impact of various epistemological shifts of modernization on the development of Muslim thought and culture. His published articles cover a broad range of materials from Sufi hagiography to jurisprudence, however they all share a central concern with the impact of Western academic scholarship on the internal development of religious traditions. He is currently working on a monograph tracing the development of Muslim legal thought in twentieth century Indonesia, as well as a study of Arabic biographical texts as sources for the history of Islam in Southeast Asia.

Julian Millie, “Manaqib texts and Conversational Narrating: The Intertextuality of Sanctity”

Julian Millie is a post-doctoral fellow at Monash University (Australia). His research focuses on observances performed by believers intent on seeking intercession through the agency of saints (wali). Religious practices in which the concept of saintliness is invoked constitute a rich field for the play of intertextualities, for they imbricate saintly biographies into situated practices; the biographical element locates the observance within traditions familiar to Muslims around the globe, while the ritual performance within which the biography is invoked occurs against the background of highly localized understanding of ritual efficacy. Millie carried out field research for one year in West Java, where he attended ritual readings of the manâqib (pious deeds) of one of Islam’s most popular intercessory figures, Abdul Qadir al-Jaelani.

IV: Making Maps, Reading Maps: Interpretations of Nature in SE Asia
May 26, 3:00-6:00 pm, HMNSS 1500

David Biggs, “Reading Nature, Reading Landscapes in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam”

Growing up in the coastal plains of the Lower Cape Fear in North Carolina, David Biggs traded his childhood pastimes of fishing, surfing and swamp exploration for a professional career in environmental history to understand how changes to rivers, estuaries and wet lands are important to understanding human history and our present-day ecological crisis. His dissertation, "Between the Rivers and Tides: A Hydraulic History of the Mekong Delta, 1820-1975," reflects the transposition of his love affair with water and history at home to a thriving agricultural region in Vietnam. Once finding himself in the cities, backroads and ricefields of Vietnam, he decided that he liked it enough to spend over six years there as a teacher and a student of Vietnamese language and culture. He is currently working on expanding the dissertation into a book on the Mekong Delta and is writing a monograph on land surveys involving spatial analyses of historic land use maps to assess spatial patterns of environmental change in the past. When he's not in the archives, the classroom or a quagmire, David enjoys creating place-based, mixed-media sculptures that often incorporate historical or cultural themes or material in their construction. His teaching interests include Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and environmental history.

Charles Zerner, "Title TBA"

B.A., Clark University. M.Arch., University of Oregon. J.D., Northeastern University. Charles Zerner is the Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professor of Environmental Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. Special interests in environmental ethnography, political ecology, environmental justice, law, language, and culture, environmental security and public policy; ethnographic fieldwork with Mandar fishing communities of Sulawesi, Indonesia, and reef management in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands; former program director, the Rainforest Alliance; contributor and editor, People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation and Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia; and co-editor, Representing Communities: Politics and Histories of Community-Based Natural Resource Management. Co-editor, with Banu Subramaniam and Elizabeth Hartmann, of Making Threats: Bio-fears and Environmental Anxieties (AltaMira Press, 2005). Residencies at the University of California, Irvine; Humanities Research Institute; and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; grants include Fulbright Hayes fellowship for fieldwork in Indonesia, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. SLC, 2000-

Tomas Larsson, “Intertextual relations: geopolitical readings of land rights in Thailand”

Tomas Larsson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University. He is primarily interested in the processes of state formation and economic development, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and Thailand. His dissertation is a study of how the threat of colonialism (in the 19th Century) and of communism (in the 20th Century) has shaped the evolution of formal property rights in land in Thailand. Tomas has conducted archival research and interviews in Bangkok, London, and Washington DC. From 1990 to 2000, Tomas lived in Thailand and worked as a journalist. He was Thailand Correspondent for Business Asia, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, and a columnist on the op-ed pages of Svenska Dagbladet and Finanstidningen. Tomas is the author of several books, including The race to the top (2001).