Papers

• Religious Plural Societies and their Others in Southeast Asia: Some preliminary remarks on atheism and non-religiosity Timo Duile Bonn University

  This introduction to our panel argues that the issues of atheism, secularism, and non-religion in Southeast Asia matter as a way to enhance our understanding of these societies. Drawing on the example of Indonesia, I explain why atheism had and has a haunting presence in this overall deeply religious society. Atheism is both an integral part of Indonesia’s post-refomasi society and, simultaneously, its outside. In an increasingly conservative society, some parts of Indonesia’s society had become rather secular and even atheist. While recent public expressions of and debates on atheism challenge traditional notions of what it means to be Indonesian, atheism has a longer history. That history reaches back to at least the Indonesian Revolution when young intellectuals engaged in debates on atheism to imagine a new society. By exploring the roles of atheism in different eras, I outline what atheism means for a religious plural society like Indonesia and how atheism both challenges and constitutes it.

• What makes a monk? Nonreligious integration and uncertain categories at a Thai Buddhist monastery Alastair Parsons University College London

  Wat Thamkrabok is a Buddhist monastery in central Thailand that has garnered an international reputation for its addiction therapy, which it has provided to both Thai and international patients at no cost, and regardless of religious background, since 1959. It is less recognized as the locus of a singular and unconventional Buddhist practice called sajja-tham (lit. ‘truth teaching). The proposed paper explores how at Wat Thamkrabok, this indiscriminate treatment program and self-consciously unorthodox religious practice has created the conditions for the deep integration of atheists and the religiously unaffiliated into a monastic community. Drawing on a year’s ethnographic research at the monastery, I explore the movements of identity among secularly-oriented Thai and foreign participants who find affinity there. This includes, for example, several foreign atheists – initially addiction patients – who took monastic ordination without coming to identify as Buddhists. My data suggest that when these life trajectories co-occur with deeply religious ones, secular and religious identities come to inform each other, and the ostensibly firm categorical boundaries of Buddhist institutions like the monkhood can be expanded and reimagined. Ultimately, I argue that this present-tense acceptance of the absence of religion in the lives of others who still aspire to share dimensions of monasticism, paired with the monastery’s alterity relative to much of Thai Buddhism, has led its leadership to re-evaluations of the constitution and primacy of ‘religion’ (satsanaa). They now present their key technique for Buddhist insight – the ‘sajja vow’ – as a natural principle, open to anyone regardless of their religious disposition. As elements of their monasticism become abstracted from their understanding of religion through this encounter with secularism, I ask if the monastery’s community maintains the possibility for the sacred within the secular.

• Navigating Superstition, Science, and (Non-)Belief: Religious Engineering and Dynamics of Secularism in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975 Thao Nghiem University of Groningen

  Scholars of religious studies have recently challenged the classic secularization thesis by accentuating the resurgence of religious actors in the public sphere. Apart from arguing against the privatization of religion, critics also highlighted the Euro-American centric nature of the secularist project. In fact, as a by-product of imperialism and colonialism, secular ideologies have long reached the non-western world. However, the impact of secularism, and how these ideas were received, translated, and adopted among societies outside of the North Atlantic rim are heavily understudied. ?is study aims to address this gap by investigating the configurations of secularism in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the tumultuous Second Indochina War (1955-1975), and how religion was integrated into its policy-making and nation-building programs. Focusing on the governance of North Vietnam during this period, the presentation delves into the intricate negotiation between the top leaders’ ideological commitment to “scientific atheism” within a Marxist-Leninist framework and the practical need to mobilize public support in a war-ravaged nation. Utilizing primary sources from the Vietnam National Archives Center III and the National Library in Hanoi, the study aims to unravel the communist authorities’ stance on religion and non-belief. What forms of religiosity were deemed legitimate and accepted, and what was considered superstition in need of eradication? How did secular modernizing policies, with their new-found glorification of reason, science, and technology, influence governance? To answer these questions, the presentation inquires into communist formal initiatives and socialist rituals such as the New Life Movement, the Anti-Superstition Campaign, and the establishment of Patriotic Religious Associations, among others. Simultaneously, I also explore how different religious groups transformed and reinvented themselves to “fit” into the state-sanctioned category of religion, that is, a Christian-inspired model of organized institution separate from society; and to what extent the religious life of Vietnamese people was disrupted, violently and permanently changed by the regime’s political vision of modernity and processes of atheisation. In so doing, the project adds novel implications to our understanding of the communist conceptualization of religion and its varied perspectives on atheism, and how ideas of secularism - a specific arrangement of church-state separation originated in the Western Christendom, were received, translated, and refashioned by homegrown intellectual traditions and contemporary political requirements.

Abstract