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ItemIs ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias(University of Indonesia, Faculty of Humanities, 2014-01-01)Research by anthropologists engaged with the Comparative Austronesia Project (Australian National University) has amassed an enormous data set for ethnological comparison between the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies, a language group to which nearly all Indonesian societies also belong. Comparative analysis reveals that ancestor veneration is a key-shared feature among Austronesian religious cosmologies; a feature that also resonates strongly with the ancestor-focused religions characteristic of East Asia. Characteristically, the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies focus on the core idea of a sacred time and place of ancestral origin and the continuous flow of life that is issuing forth from this source. Present-day individuals connect with the place and time of origin though ritual acts of retracing a historical path of migration to its source. What can this seemingly exotic notion of a flow of life reveal about the human condition writ large? Is it merely a curiosity of the ethnographic record of this region, a traditional religious insight forgotten even by many of the people whose traditional religion this is, but who have come under the influence of so-called world religions? Or is there something of great importance to be learnt from the Austronesian approach to life? Such questions have remained unasked until now, I argue, because a systematic cosmological bias within western thought has largely prevented us from taking Ancestor Religion and other forms of “traditional knowledge” seriously as an alternative truth claim. While I have discussed elsewhere the significance of Ancestor Religion in reference to my own research in highland Bali, I will attempt in this paper to remove this bias by its roots. I do so by contrasting two modes of thought: the “incremental dualism” of precedence characteristic of Austronesian cultures and their Ancestor Religions, and the “transcendental dualism” of mind and matter that has been a central theme within the cultural history of Western European thought. I argue for a deeper appreciation of Ancestor Religion as the oldest and most pervasive of all world religions.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGods on Earth: Immanence and Transcendence in Indian Ideology and Praxis(INCAA, 2013)Questions concerning the relative importance to Indian civilisation of the Brahmana-dominated model of religious status hierarchy and the royal model of divine kingship and associated hierarchies of state power have been referred to as ‘the central conundrum of Indian social ideology’. These two models of hierarchy nonetheless derive from a broader Indian worldview and both shape, and are shaped by, the existential realities of Indian social life and of life in general. They represent an attempt to respond to a ‘central conundrum’ of human sociality – how to differentiate between the members of a society in terms of status – and a central dilemma of human existence – how to be at once engaged with the world and elevated beyond the ordinary conditions of embodied existence. This paper endeavours to achieve a more unified perspective on Indian kingship and Brahmanism by exploring their relation to the world of social action, and action more generally. Indian civilisation has struggled for millennia with the fundamental existential conflicts of ‘being in the world.’ Hence what is to be gained from unravelling the products of this struggle is not only a better understanding of Indian culture alone but of human experience in general.
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ItemWorld Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA)(John Wiley & Sons, 2018-10-05)Since the early twentieth century, countless modern anthropological studies have paid tribute to the richness of cultural diversity across societies, as well as highlighting some of the existential conditions we all share as human beings. The discipline has not been able to serve as an undistorted mirror of this unity in diversity, however, because scholars from a few privileged nations have dominated the process of anthropological knowledge construction over most of this period of time. The World Council of Anthropological Associations was founded to overcome this deficit by providing a global platform for free communication and democratic participation in the spirit of a new “world anthropologies” paradigm.
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ItemThe Fragmented Self: Cross-cultural Difference, Conflict and the Lessons of Ethnographic Experience(Frobenius Institute, 2006)
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ItemArriving in the Future: The Utopia of Here and Now in the Work of Modern-Day Mystics From Eric Fromm to Eckhart Tolle(MONASH UNIV, CENTRE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE & CULTURAL STUDIES, 2009-12)
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ItemBali Mula: An Introduction to Indigenous Highland Balinese History, Ritual and Social Organisation(National Museum of Prehistory, 2018)More than fifty villages in the central highlands and along the northern coast of the island of Bali, Indonesia, share a common indigenous culture distinct from that of mainstream Balinese society. Based on ethnographic research conducted in 1993-94, and then regularly for shorter periods every year until now, this article looks at the ethnohistory of this Austronesian-speaking people, known as the Bali Mula or Bali Aga (meaning ‘original’ or ‘mountain Balinese’ respectively). The focus will be the ritual order of their regional domains and characteristic local village councils. Ritual relationships define these two major institutions of Bali Mula society according to a principle of seniority or, more precisely, precedence (‘proximity to origins’). Bali Mula social organisation is rather similar to that of Taiwanese indigenous people, shedding light on the historical process of cultural dispersion of the Austronesian peoples.
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ItemUnity in Diversity: Why we need to do justice to local characteristics and identities while also cultivating a sense of global citizenship(Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2018)We have been witnessing a massive nationalist reaction to globalisation in recent years, the reasons for which can be difficult to untangle. If intellectuals hastily come to the defence of the globalist position and demonise this opposite point of view, we only add to a general climate of hostility that is poisoning the prospects for rational public debate in many countries. Rather, our duty is to reveal what is really at stake in this struggle, to identify the forces that are at play, and to make proposals for how to address the underlying problems associated with ‘real-existing globalisation.’ In short, we need to present the public with alternatives superior to those offered by a legion of democracy-, journalism- and science-bashing right-wing demagogues.
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ItemThe Principle of Unity in Diversity as a Measured Response to Resurgent Nationalism: Valuing local diversity as well as global citizenship is not a contradiction(Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva, 2018)The ideological war between globalism and resurgent nationalism in recent years is seen as an invitation to take sides by many intellectuals. Demonising or dismissing followers of the new right-wing nationalism is easy, but the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the last presidential election in the USA should have taught us that ignoring the genuine arguments of this demographic is foolish and dangerous. It reflects a failure by globalists to appreciate the externalised costs of globalisation and the people who bear these costs disproportionately. Supporters of renewed parochialism and xenophobia in turn fail to acknowledge the facticity of our current state of global interdependence, and indeed the urgent need for even greater global cooperation. I will argue that tensions between the two camps arise from the fact that genuine advantages are associated with national and local diversity as well as with global cooperation and unity. In short, from a rational perspective, the purely nationalist and the purely globalist viewpoint are both incomplete, and a new higher order perspective is needed to resolve the issue. This paper is an attempt to develop such a more integrated perspective beyond nationalism and globalism. I will be drawing on some of my own research, which has shown that local cultures in Asia have been experiencing strong globalisation pressures and also have been pushing back through a range of revitalisation movements. The paper draws also on my complementary experiences of working in a number of organisations that are global, but wherein diversity is valued and retained.
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ItemDeveloping Trust: An Integrated Vision for Social and Environmental Sustainability and Justice(UNESCO, 2018)This paper addresses the question of how the world can move toward a common vision and procedure for achieving socio-ecological sustainability and justice, rather than suffer a catastrophic collapse of civilization. I begin by arguing that this aim can only be achieved through an integrated and holistic process of transformation of our economy and way of life, and that the knowledge sector will be central to facilitating this process. If we reflect on the current role of science in society, especially in the ecological context of the anthropocene and the political context of post-truth polemics, fulfilling this role will require us to heal the fact-value split that has until now kept science separate from or servile to the realm of political action. Social science can be particularly helpful at this historic juncture, by helping to define the psycho-social prerequisites that must be met in order to develop a common and inclusive vision and action plan for a sustainable and just society. Social science shows that endemic collective action issues can be addressed systemically through dialogue, co-designed planning and cooperation. It is argued that the central challenge on the pathway toward universal and sustained human security is thus the building of trust.