Introduction. Unsettling encounters: Sites, knowledge exchange, and the making of religion in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a special issue on practices of religious and scholarly knowledge exchange in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. In both regions, the makings of religion have been informed by unsettling encounters between religious experts on the one hand and academic scholars of, and in, religion on the other. These encounters, we argue, can be revealed and productively analyzed through a focus on sites of learning and exchange, such as schools and universities, temples and monasteries, holy shrines, conferences and workshops, but also texts and archives. At such sites, alternative actors, referred to in this special issue as ‘strategic amateurs and accidental experts’, often emerge as unexpected agents of religious change. After explaining the central theme and approach, we draw together and synthesize two strands of argument found in the separate articles, respectively the centrality of moral geographies and geographic imaginations to the making of religion and the intriguing role played by performances of expertise, either as a form of gatekeeping in religious communities and institutions or as alternative sources of religious knowledge and authority. The article concludes with a reflective note on the role of scholars in both fortifying and destabilizing understandings of region and religion.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• knowledge production
• sites
• moral geography
• expertise
• the Caribbean
• Southeast Asia

Acknowledgements

This special issue results from a workshop convened by the editors together with Tom Hoogervorst at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in 2017. We thank everyone who participated in this event for the thought-provoking and productive discussion. An earlier version of this introductory essay was presented at KITLV, in the framework of the institute’s ‘Under Construction’ sessions chaired by Ward Berenschot. We are grateful to our colleagues for their constructive feedback. The contributors to the special issue are acknowledged for the pleasant collaboration and for their comments on earlier versions. We thank James Hoesterey, who also kindly read a draft, for his helpful and inspiring comments. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor, David Henig, for helping us improve the manuscript and for guiding the project toward publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We thank Iza Hussin for suggesting the concept ‘strategic amateurs’, during the workshop that provided the basis for this special issue: ‘Unsettling Encounters. Scholarly Study, Religious Knowledge, and Difficult Histories in Asia and the Caribbean’, KITLV, Leiden, 11-12 September 2017.