Asia Institute - Research Publications

Now showing 1 - 10 of 184

Language shift and maintenance in the Korean community in Australia

Shin, S-C ; Jung, SJ (International Journal of Korean Language Education, 2016)
The amalgamation of Malagasy

Adelaar, KAA ; Bowden, J ; Himmelmann, NP ; Ross, M (Pacific Linguistics Publishers, 2010)
Is ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias

Reuter, T (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.
The Java Spirit: Religious Diversity in Indonesia

Reuter, TA ( 2013)
Gods on Earth: Immanence and Transcendence in Indian Ideology and Praxis

Reuter, TA (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.
1965setiaphari (living1965)

Setiawan, K ; Wulia, T ( 2015)
‘Old guard’ continues to constrain human rights reform in Indonesia

Setiawan, K ( 2016)
The fear of communism still haunts Indonesia

Setiawan, K ( 2016)
Rights in the firing line

Setiawan, K ( 2016)
The AIIB and China's Normative Power in International Financial Governance Structure

Peng, Z ; Tok, SK (SPRINGER SINGAPORE PTE LTD, 2016-12)

Asia Institute - Research Publications

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