The Bureaucratization of Islam in Southeast Asia: A research group project in retrospective

Governments across Southeast Asia have empowered various state-funded bodies in their attempts of politically guiding and regulating Islam-related discourses and practices. Simultaneously, non-state actors aim to influence the state’s governance of Islam in their countries, resulting in mutual attempts of engaging, educating and at times changing each other across the often blurry boundaries of state and non-state spheres. Based on a research group project that I directed from 2016-2023, I will elaborate on this bureaucratization and state-ification of Islam in Southeast Asia, using primarily examples from Brunei and Singapore. The talk will also include reflections of my experience of designing and conducting such a group project, while roles it played for my career development as young scholar (i.e. how it came to the project, what came afterwards, what it enabled and hindered, etc.), and what I might do differently in retrospective, hoping that some of these reflections might be of use for early career researchers participating in the seminar.

Dominik Müller is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.
 

Lien zoom disponible sur https://anthropo.hypotheses.org/ et  https://ifrae.cnrs.fr/ifrae/seminaire-anthropo/