Flows of Faith

Flows of Faith Lenore Manderson • Wendy Smith Matt Tomlinson Editors Flows of Faith Religious Reach and Community in Asia and the Pacifi c Editors Lenore Manderson Wendy Smith School of Psychology and Psychiatry Department of Management Monash University Monash University Dandenong Road, Caulfi eld East Wellington Road, Clayton Victoria 3145 Victoria 3800 Australia Australia Matt Tomlinson College of Asia and the Pacifi c Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia ISBN 978-94-007-2931-5 e-ISBN 978-94-007-2932-2 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2932-2 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2012932627 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfi lming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifi cally for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Preface Flows of Faith grew out of our awareness of the dynamic conjunction of two broad fi elds of enquiry – religion and transnationalism. Religion, long a subject of study in the social sciences, has seen a strong resurgence of interest, in part for political reasons. The study of transnational processes, conversely, reminds us that even the most intensively focused local studies cannot ignore the global ecumene. Religion remains an especially mysterious and elusive aspect of culture, because it often deals with ideas about the supernatural. Anthropologists largely focus on the way lived societies are organized according to culturally defi ned beliefs, practices and materials, including the structured ways in which we behave and relate to each other. Our work in this area is essentially empirical. Religious beliefs are very much the exception, concerned with states when we cease to become social beings and how we relate to – and our obligations to – those who were before us. Yet beliefs in the ultimately unknowable states before birth and after death are fi rmly grounded in the here-and-now of social life. Religions often provide the very values which, commonly held, allow communities of human beings to cooperate together for mutual survival. Despite the secular impulse of modernity, faith and religious affi liation continually reassert and offer people existential and practical support. Newly created and long-established communities gather for regular religious services in conventional settings – in churches, mosques and temples – but in diverse locations. Through conversion, a growing number of people worldwide embrace belief systems that fi t uncomfortably in any local historical tradition. Consider the rise of global new religious movements, whose members convert, away from family or community norms, to religions whose beliefs and ritual practices are grounded in traditions very culturally distant from their society of upbringing. Such people constitute new social groups within mainstream society, often highly visible in terms of their residence patterns, daily routines, dress and diet. This is true not just in highly industrialized settings where individualism is heralded, but also in smaller-scale community-based societies and in newly industrialized and marketizing economies. And at the same time, faith communities are now truly global as a consequence of migration fl ows, missionary outreach and tourism and travel. They are the consequence, too, of contemporary information technologies that enable belief systems v vi Preface and their institutions to operate beyond and through borders. Text messages provide daily prayers and support to the faithful; religious events are streamed by internet; list-serves encourage connection, proselytization, discourse and dissent. The global picture is of growing heterodoxy, with tensions that emerge with diversity tempered by the energies and tolerances of cosmopolitan beliefs and practices. When such belief systems, validated by an ultimately unknowable supernatural order, cross boundaries, what are the implications? How do acts of conversion, revitalization and religious innovation depend on boundary-crossing, whether those boundaries are indicated by differences in language, ethnicity, political orientation, or national identity? And how can we understand the power and mystery of beliefs inspired by spiritual experience or religious institutions, as they impact on the political order, the environment and on individual lifestyles? In 2009, through an Australia Research Council Asia Pacifi c Futures Research Network (ARC APFRN) grant, the three of us, anthropologists at Monash University, began this collaboration: Lenore Manderson, a medical anthropologist and social historian who has worked with immigrant Australians and in various settings in Asia; Wendy Smith, an organizational anthropologist who has worked particularly in Japan and Malaysia; and Matt Tomlinson, a cultural anthropologist with expertise in the Pacifi c. We began by convening a 2-day colloquium in December 2009. The colloquium took as its starting point questions associated with manifestations of religion, culture and identity, including the spread of religions within and from different parts of Asia and the Pacifi c. We chose to contrast old and new religions, the orthodox and heterodox. In the context of population mobility, transnational fl ows and globalization, we aimed to re-examine the fl uidity of religious belief and to explore systems and structures of faith across the boundaries of nation state, ethnicity, kin and community. We therefore considered both the movement and con- stitution of major old religions – the so-called great traditions – in diverse settings as a result of colonialism, missionization and the movement of their adherents, and contrasted this with the growth of new religious movements throughout the region. The expansion of old and new religions in diverse locations, and the local infl ections provided to them, challenge the orthodoxy of the association between religion and culture. Conversion in particular points to the plasticity of culture and the search by individuals to fi nd identity in faith-based organizations, regardless of the cultural origins of such belief systems. Yet at the same time, familiar religion provides grounding and a source of identity and community for individuals who migrate to different unfamiliar settings, enabling people to feel at home wherever they are. The detailed ethnographies from the participating anthropologists, and the richness of the discussions, proved that the juxtaposition of Asia and the Pacifi c was a fruitful catalyst to understand the underlying structures of belief’s transportability through the emerging themes of place and identity, marginality and belonging. Our anthropological perspectives proved to be fertile ones, as detailed realities informed our awareness of the remarkable coincidences and leaps of belief across disparate cultural and national boundaries. The theme of innovation, as beliefs are transposed intercontextually to suit individual, community or national strategies, unifi es the collection. The chapters in this volume illustrate that the study of religion Preface vii is a rich source of investigation for many phenomena in the globalizing world, and of the echoes of common patterns in different religious contexts – for example, Christian beliefs about Mount Zion, drawn from the Old Testament, being invoked and implanting in Taiwan and the Solomon Islands, as described in two of the chapters. But attention to globalization also suggests that global pilgrimage ends up radically transforming, or even destroying, the spiritual paradises which pilgrims seek, why and how young people in ‘the West’ adopt the extreme disciplines of Indian asceticism while remaining within their home societies, and how faith and religious identity provide new social networks and support systems in newly settled communities. The chapters illustrate that age-old religious beliefs and the innovative doctrines of the new religious movements are equally malleable across geographical distance, political borders and cultural systems. We thank the Australian Research Council and the APFRN for the grant to con- vene the colloquium. We thank Monash University, including the Faculties of Arts, Business and Economics, and Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, and in particular, we thank Bharati Kalle and Carla Chan Unger for their administrative and editorial support. We are immensely grateful too to Esther Otten, our editor at Springer, who encouraged our efforts and streamlined the complicated editorial and production process. Lenore Manderson Wendy Smith Matt Tomlinson Contents 1 Beliefs Beyond Borders and Communities of Faith ............................. 1 Lenore Manderson, Wendy Smith, and Matt Tomlinson 2 Religion in the Age of Globalization: Emerging Trends, Indonesian Examples .............................................. 13 Thomas A. Reuter 3 Master Li Encounters Jesus: Christianity and the Confi gurations of Falun Gong .................................................. 35 Benjamin Penny 4 Brahma Kumaris: Purity and the Globalization of Faith ................... 51 Tamasin Ramsay, Wendy Smith, and Lenore Manderson 5 Secularism, Society, and Symbols of Religion: Bosnian

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