Political theologies and development in Asia: Transcendence, sacrifice, and aspiration

By Manchester University Press

This innovative and timely reassessment of political theology opens new lines of critical investigation into the intersections of religion and politics in contemporary Asia. Moving beyond a focus on the (post-) Christian West, this volume locates ‘development’ – conceptualised as a set of modern, transnational networks of ideas and practices of improvement that connect geographically disparate locations­­ – as a vital focal point for critical investigations into Asian political theologies.

Investigating the sacred dimensions of power through concepts of transcendence, sacrifice, victimhood, aspiration, and salvation, this collection demonstrates how European and Asian modernities are bound together through genealogical, institutional, and theo-political entanglements, as well as a long history of global interactions.

With contributions by leading anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists, this volume brings new theoretical approaches into conversation with detailed empirical case studies grounded in modern Asia. In doing so, it offers a fresh and critical analysis of the ways in which political theology is imagined, materialised, and contested both within and beyond nation-states.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526149398

Book preview

Political theologies and development in Asia

Political theologies and development in Asia

Transcendence, sacrifice, and aspiration

Edited by

Giuseppe Bolotta, Philip Fountain,

and R. Michael Feener

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4940 4 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

COVER IMAGE: Parade of mourners for the ‘Development King’ at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (Wat Phra Kaew), Bangkok 2017. Photo by R. Michael Feener.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Silvia Vignato and Robin Bush

Contents

List of figures

Notes on contributors

Preface

1 Transcendence, sacrifice, and aspiration: the political theology of development in Asia

Giuseppe Bolotta, Philip Fountain, and R. Michael Feener

2 East of Westphalia: shaping the body-politic via institutional charisma

Armando Salvatore

3 The yogic ethic and the spirit of development

Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke

4 Managing Karbala: genealogies of Shi a humanitarianism in Pakistan, England, and Iraq

Till Mostowlansky

5 From blood, cast in cement: materialising the political in Thailand

Eli Elinoff

6 The theopolitics of art: Qur’anic objects and their publics in Indonesia

Kenneth M. George

7 Embodying the late King: Buddhist salvation and the sacrifice of sovereignty at a Bangkok mall

Edoardo Siani

8 Being alone: the political theology of the development citizen

Sam Han

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

6.1A page from the manuscript. Sura 114, An-Naas (‘Humanity’) from the Al-Qur’an Mushaf Istiqlal. Reproduced by permission of the Yayasan Festival Istiqlal.

6.2The Lagerfeld bustier. Detail from an unattributed photograph appearing in the Brisbane Courier-Mail, Saturday 22 January 1994.

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Bolotta is Assistant Professor (research) in Anthropology at Durham University (UK), having previously held postdoctoral positions at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute (ARI) and University College Dublin (Ireland). He has published widely on marginalised childhoods, development, faith-based organisations, and the cultural politics of child-focused humanitarianism in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand’s urban slums and ‘spaces of exceptions’. His forthcoming monograph is entitled Belittled Citizens: The Cultural Politics of Childhood on Bangkok’s Margins.

Eli Elinoff is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. His research focuses on political and environmental change in urban Thailand. He has published work in South East Asia Research, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Contemporary Southeast Asia, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and City. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Architects of Citizenship: Politics and City-making in a Northeastern Thai City and working on a second project, A Kingdom in Concrete: Urban Thailand in the Anthropocene, which was recently awarded a Marsden Fast Start grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

R. Michael Feener is Professor of Humanities at the Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) and Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He was formerly the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Research Leader of the Religion and Globalisation Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He has also taught at Reed College and the University of California-Riverside, and held visiting professor positions and research fellowships at Harvard, Kyoto University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Copenhagen, The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (Honolulu), and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamic studies and Southeast Asian history, as well as on post-disaster reconstruction, religion, and development. He is also currently Project Leader of the Maldives Heritage Survey.

Philip Fountain is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. He received his doctorate in Anthropology from the Australian National University. Among other volumes, he co-edited Religion and the Politics of Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; with Robin Bush and R. Michael Feener) and The Mission of Development: Religion and Techno-Politics in Asia (Brill, 2018; with Catherine Scheer and R. Michael Feener). He is currently completing a book manuscript on The Service of Faith: An Ethnography of Mennonites and Development.

Kenneth M. George is Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, having served previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University. A specialist on the religions and arts of Indonesia, his books include Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth Century Headhunting Ritual (University of California Press, 1996); Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2005, co-edited with Andrew Willford); and Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). His current research (with Kirin Narayan) explores the intermingling of religion, technology, ethics, and infrastructure in South and Southeast Asia.

Sam Han is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia, working primarily in the areas of social/cultural/critical theory, new media, religion, and East Asia (as well as their overlaps and nodal points). He is also the author of Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the Sacred in a Post-Secular Modernity (Routledge, 2016), Digital Culture and Religion in Asia (Routledge, 2015, with Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir), Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2011), Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and editor of The Race of Time: A Charles Lemert Reader (Routledge, 2009, with Daniel Chaffee).

Sunila S. Kale is Associate Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies, where she also serves as Chair and Director of the South Asia Studies Center and Program. Her teaching and research focus on the politics and political economy of India and South Asia, history and politics of energy and electricity, development studies, and the history and present-day manifestations of capitalism. She is the author of Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development (Stanford, 2014) and Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States, coauthored with Navroz K. Dubash and Ranjit Bharvirkar (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Till Mostowlansky is an Ambizione Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The Graduate Institute Geneva (IHEID). Before joining the IHEID he worked at the University of Bern, the National University of Singapore and The University of Hong Kong. He has published widely on humanitarianism, development, infrastructure, and Islam, and is the author of Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

Christian Lee Novetzke is Professor in the South Asia Program, the Comparative Religion Program, and the International Studies Program in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press, 2008), Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (with Andy Rotman and William Elison, Harvard University Press, 2016), and The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (Columbia University Press, 2016).

Armando Salvatore, a sociologist and scholar of comparative religion, is the Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies (Society and Politics) at McGill University. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University Berlin, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, National University of Singapore, Leipzig University, and Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (Wiley Blackwell, 2016) and the chief editor of The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam (Wiley Blackwell, 2018).

Edoardo Siani is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. He completed his PhD in anthropology at SOAS in 2017 with a dissertation on the politics of divination at the end of Thailand’s ninth reign. Based in Bangkok since 2002, Siani’s research interests include sovereignty, state violence, kingship, and Buddhist cosmology in Thailand. He has been interviewed regarding Thai society and politics by media outlets including the BBC and Al Jazeera.

Preface

Over recent years we have observed with great interest developments in the burgeoning field of political theology. The vibrant re-emergence of debates about the ways in which religious ideals, cosmological paradigms, doctrinal discourses, and ritual practices continue to shape public politics, even in its most apparently secular forms, has broad-ranging implications for conversations across religious studies, political science and international relations, anthropology, history, philosophy, law, and of course theology. We view the rise of this literature as a decisive marker of the state of critical scholarship in the early twenty-first century. As, justifiably, the social sciences have largely abandoned previously popular theories of ‘secularisation’, academic analysis has moved beyond assumptions about religion’s impending and inevitable demise. Facing the rapid rise in influence of religious politics across both ‘East’ and ‘West’, and acknowledging the stubbornly ‘religious’ shape of so many of our contemporary political processes, scholars have begun to wrestle with the profound analytical challenges of tracing the ‘theological’ in unexpected places across the contemporary world. This shift in tenor and focus has been, in our estimation, a valuable step forward in political analysis. It proffers remarkable opportunities for new insights into core questions of political association, social normativity, multiple modernities, and religious affordances. But the full potentialities of this scholarship have, we suggest, yet to be realised.

Investigations into political theology began within European contexts in which the key issues at stake were the legacies and impacts of Judeo-Christian theology and Greco-Roman culture on the secularising post-Westphalian and post-Reformation nation-state. The Weimar-era German jurist Carl Schmitt is, of course, central to this story. While political theological analysis has expanded beyond Schmitt’s initial stimulus in important ways, the main thrust remains deeply concerned with Western contexts and (post-)Christian theologies. Other contexts and other religious legacies have, however, largely remained unexamined to date.

Political theological analysis has also tended to embrace methodologies from the fields of philosophy or jurisprudential scholarship. Consequently, the primary modes of investigation have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which political theological dynamics are worked out and embodied differently in quotidian practices. In a sense, and perhaps ironically, this reflects some of the ways in which the discipline of (Christian) theology itself has privileged conversations with philosophy over disciplines like anthropology and sociology, which have emphasised the diversity of human experience and, to a greater or lesser degree, sought to examine how broader political and economic changes have influenced everyday life in particular social contexts. Anthropology in particular has, over the second half of the twentieth century, come to privilege ethnographic participant observation of such dimensions of human experience as an almost sacramental methodological commitment. In this volume, we have assembled a collection of studies to highlight some of the ways in which such a concern with everyday political theologies can serve as a necessary and constructive correlative to the abstract philosophical impetus that has dominated most recent work on political theology. Based upon the material presented here, we argue that the quotidian and the philosophical are rightly imagined as dynamic collaborative partners in political theological analysis – and that as such they demand more scholarly attention.

Political theologies and development in Asia is premised on the assertion that analysis of the politics of development in Asia is a particularly promising locus for re-invigorating political theological analysis today to creatively pioneer new theoretical and research trajectories. The emphasis on Asia refocuses attention beyond the North Atlantic and Christian traditions. The focus on development in this volume is, moreover, selected specifically to complicate any simplistic juxtaposition of ‘Asian’ and ‘European’ political theologies. In this book we seek to establish development as a primary site for political theological analyses into the future, which necessarily entails a study of cultural, political, economic, and religious entanglements between multi-polar and non-conventional historical trajectories.

Our emphasis on development here may nonetheless strike seasoned analysts of political theology as unusual. However, we are not the first to suggest this convergence as valuable and compelling. Over the past few decades some of the most astute and innovative analysts of diverse projects relating to state-led development, humanitarianism, NGOs, and human rights have intimated toward political theology as a potential rubric for deepening our understanding of how developmental ideologies work in practice. In this book we draw upon these suggestive comments to explore more directly and more thoroughly what a political theology framework can contribute to the study of development.

This book emerged from a highly collaborative research project on Religion and Development in Asia that was convened under R. Michael Feener’s leadership of the Religion Cluster at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute (ARI). We are grateful to numerous colleagues who participated in the dynamic and creative discussions around these issues that characterised the cluster over the best part of a decade, including Julius Bautista, Anne Blackburn, Bernardo Brown, Gustav Brown, Martin van Bruinessen, Robin Bush, Kenneth Dean, Prasenjit Duara, Lily Kong, Cho Kyuhoon, Amelia Fauzia, Joshua Gedacht, Julia Huang-Lemmon, Jeremy Kingsley, Liang Yongjia, Till Mostowlansky, May Ngo, David Palmer, Anthony Reid, Jeffrey Samuels, Catherine Scheer, Ronojoy Sen, Tosa Keiko, Wu Keping, Zhong Yijiang, and Zuoshi Aga. We are grateful for the support of the Asia Research Institute and its staff for our many different conferences, symposia, book discussions, seminars, and fieldwork trips that fed into and enabled our collaboration to be as productive as it was. The goal of our work in the Religion Cluster was to produce new empirical studies of the intersections of religion and development in Asia, and also to provide new analytical tools to help in better understanding these relationships.

Political theologies and development in Asia should be read as the third instalment in a trilogy of volumes that emerged out of this broader project at ARI’s Religion Cluster. Each book in this trilogy asserts the necessity of attending to political analysis in the investigation of religion and development in Asia. The earlier two books – Religion and the Politics of Development, edited by Philip Fountain, Robin Bush, and R. Michael Feener, and The Mission of Development: Religion and Techno-politics in Asia, edited by Catherine Scheer, Philip Fountain, and R. Michael Feener – broke new ground in establishing themes of religion and politics as inseparable from the study of development, even in its most apparently secular and technocratic iterations. This current volume builds upon the arguments advanced in these earlier books while also exploring new analytical approaches.

Like the earlier volumes, this book also emerged out of ARI’s remarkably productive capacity to convene and conduct international conferences. The meeting on ‘Political Theologies and Development in Asia’ was held in Singapore at ARI in February 2017. We are deeply grateful to the exceptional ARI staff, especially Valerie Yeo, Sharon Ong, Tay Minghua, and Henry Kwan for their outstanding work in organising the event. This book has greatly benefited from the conversations during the conference with scholars who generously shared their thoughts and questions. We would thus like to extend our thanks to all participants, especially to Bernardo Brown, Gustav Brown, Robin Bush, Amelia Fauzia, Amoz Hor, Peter A. Jackson, Nursyazwani Jamaludin, Lei Kuan Rongdao Lai, Mok Mei Feng, Jonathan Rigg, Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario, Catherine Scheer, and V.J. Varghese.

This volume and the conference out of which it originated would not have been possible without the generous support from the Asia Research Institute and the Henry R. Luce Foundation to whom we would like to express our sincere gratitude. Jonathan Rigg at ARI and Toby Volkman at Luce have been wonderful supporters and colleagues over the whole duration of this project. As editors, we would also like to thank the contributors of this volume who have undertaken such innovative analysis of political theology, and from whom we have learned a great deal in the course of our collaborations. We are also grateful for the professional and friendly editorial staff at Manchester University Press, and particularly to Jon de Peyer, for their interest in this work and for all of their help in bringing this book to publication.

Giuseppe Bolotta

Philip Fountain

R. Michael Feener

1

Transcendence, sacrifice, and aspiration: the political theology of development in Asia

Giuseppe Bolotta, Philip Fountain, and R. Michael Feener

Scholarship on political theology has made important interventions toward deconstructing the official script of secularism and revealing the ‘secular conversion’ of a Christian ethos into the constitutional-juridical scaffolding of modern nation-states (Schmitt, 2005; Lefort, 2006). In the context of Enlightenment Europe, political theology developed a number of critical analytical tools to ‘unmake’ the secular fiction of political modernity. Recognising that political theology discourse emerged as a transgressive, deviant expression of modern thinking, we argue that the employment of these analytical tools outside of Europe is promising, including in contexts where the project of secularism has historically proved less effective, produced unintended consequences, and favoured the multiplication of alternative ‘theological secularities’. It is for this reason that this volume focuses on Asia. But a shift beyond Western modernity is not simply a rejection of previous articulations of political theology. European and Asian modernities are bound together through genealogical, institutional, and theo-political entanglements and our analysis of each must take into account this long history of global interactions. Our focus on development – conceptualised here as a set of transnational networks of ideas and practices that connect geographically disparate locations in complex political and religious entanglements – seeks to resituate the objects and locations of political theological analysis within a more expansive horizon. As the chapters in this volume will demonstrate, just as political theology scholarship stands to benefit from new critical attention to development in Asia, so too the critical analysis of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ in Asia gains new traction through active engagement with political theology. We argue that a political theology of development will especially benefit from careful examination of themes of transcendence, sacrifice and victimhood, and aspiration and salvation.

The theological foundations of the political

Scholarship on political theology has not only revealed the elusive character of the separation between religion and politics as has been thought to be characteristic of Western modernity, but it also addresses ‘the political’¹ as intrinsically and ontologically theological. Without providing any essentialist definition of ‘the political’, prominent scholars in political theology are mostly preoccupied with ‘perturbing’ the rationalistic framing of modern political theory through ‘theological’ considerations. According to scholars like Claude Lefort (2006), Paul Kahn (2011), and Harald Wydra (2015), for example, the political is not solely reflected by politics² – that is, administration, policies, and the various juridical-institutional arrangements which regulate political authority and state sovereignty. More fundamentally, ‘the political’ refers to the hidden symbolic principles and sources of ‘truth’ (the theological) that generate different forms of society; transcend the institutional fabric of everyday politics; and give normative meanings, shape, and stage to historically situated modes of collective life and individual experience. The theological foundations of politics enable the possibility of social coexistence by connecting power to the limits and finitude of human experience. The ‘transcendent’ legitimation of ‘immanent’ sovereignty – this is an important point to be stressed – might or might not refer to God or gods, even if traditionally religions have provided the kind of metaphysical assumptions political power is founded on, both within and beyond Christian Europe.

Weimar-era political theorist Carl Schmitt (2005) identified the theological foundation of the political in the fundamental binary distinction between friends and enemies, whereas the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998), drawing on Schmitt, has provided a reading of sovereign power as an historical production of ‘states of exception’ and homini sacri, the latter being an exceptional figure in Roman law that is set apart as both sacred and accursed. The theological foundations of the political inform questions related to the limits and ultimate ends of human conditions, what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) name ‘empty signifiers’. The ‘emptiness’ of the domain addressed by these questions – the fact that questions of salvation, death, life, or God are so large as to escape definitive and final closure – makes the theological an ontologically open and contested field. Across considerable differences of cultural context and historical change, however, we observe processes through which – as Hent De Vries (2006: 46) points out – the anxieties of cosmic indeterminacy become ‘dogmatically fixated, socially reified, and aesthetically fetishized’ as ‘the only Universal Truth’ and source of authority. Or, as Wydra (2015: 10) puts it: ‘Voids of meaning have to be kept in check by transcendental signifiers, symbols and ritual.’ Indeed, ‘the extraordinary’ for Wydra plays a decisive role, such that people ‘require transcendent images that express the eternity of their collective groups and the world’. These might be ‘religious’ or ‘secular’. They might refer to God(s), ‘the People’ (demos), Dharma, science, civilisation, human rights, the market, or development – each taking on new valences when observed as elements of particular political theologies.

For Lefort (2006) the theological-political is located at the crossroads between the transcendent Other (the end of life and the realm beyond life) and the immanent One (the necessary illusion of the unity of the body-politic). The theological signifier of sovereignty, in other words, symbolically generates power as a mediator between the One and the Other, in ways that facilitate a certain configuration of political