Religion, Violence and Agency in South Asia

April 11-12, 2003
University of Notre Dame

A Conference of the Program in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding

Sponsored by the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies

Venue: Hesburgh Center for International Studies

The latter part of the twentieth century proved fertile ground for studies that contextualize the affects of violence upon women in South Asia and of the multi-levelled and historical consequences of such violence. Equally rich have been studies that examine women's agency in this region, especially from feminist, subaltern, and ethnographic perspectives. In the new millenium we move towards a productive and theoretically innovative synthesis of studies of South Asian women's agency and social conflict with the emerging area of peace studies. We focus our enquiries through the lens of the rich religious traditions of this region and the contested nature of nation building in the postcolonial era.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

FRIDAY, APRIL 11

2:00 p.m. Welcome and Overview: Scott Appleby

2:15 p.m. Keynote Address: "Forms, Life and Killable Bodies,"
Veena Das

3:15 p.m. Break

3:30 p.m. Resisting Terror: Women, Agency, and Micro-politics of the Sri Lankan Everyday

Panelists:

• Patricia Lawrence: "Women and Memory in Sri Lanka's Terrain of Torture and Disappearances"
• Alexandra Argenti-Pillen: "Wives of the Disappeared and Mothers of Soldiers: Survivorhood in the Rural Slums of Southern Sri Lanka."
• Mangalika de Silva: "Nation on Display, Women as Powerplay: Contingency and Dissonance in Narratives of Violence."
• Mohammed Abu-Nimer: Respondent

6:00 p.m. Dinner - Greenfield's Cafe

7:30 p.m. Keynote Address: "Traditions of Violence in South Asia,"
Peter van der Veer

SATURDAY, APRIL 12

8:30 a.m. Encounters with the Mysterious: Women's Engagement with Alternative Powers Structures in Authoritarian Burma

Panelists:

• Monique Skidmore: "Buddha's Mother and the Billboard Queens: Contesting Moral Power in Contemporary Burma"
• Ingrid Jordt: "With Patience We Can Endure: Buddhist Women's Other-Worldly Pursuits Under Burmese Authoritarian Rule"
• Bènèdicte Brac de la Perriére: "To Marry a Man or a Spirit? The Subversive Power of Women Spirit Mediums in Burma"
• Juliane Schober: Respondent

10:30 a.m. Break

10:45 a.m. Between Subjects and Citizens: Women, the "Modern" State, and Violence in Bangladesh and India"

Panelists:

• Cabieri Robinson: "The Territory of the Body and the Politics of Suffering: Terror, Refuge, and the Reproduction of the National Family in a Refugee Camp in Azad Kashmir."
• Betty Joseph: "The Nuclear Sublime: The Gendering of National Violence in Contemporary Cultural Texts."
• Lamia Karim: "Woman as Surrogate Citizens: State Policies, Developmental NGOs, and Militant Islam in Bangladesh."
• Yasmin Saikia: "Overcoming the Silent Archive in Bangladesh: Women Bear Witness to the Violence in the 1971 Liberation War."

12:45 p.m. Lunch - Greenfield's Cafe

2:30 p.m.: Round-table discussion on religion and peacebuilding in South Asia.

• Cynthia Mahmood, Chair
• Dan Philpott
• Fred Dallmayr
• Nell Bolton
• Cecilia Van Hollen
• Open Discussion

4:30 p.m. Closing Reception

Conference Presenters

MOHAMMED ABU-NIMER is a conflict resolution specialist in the School of International Service, American University. As a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Kroc Institute, Abu-Nimer will complete a book on Non-Violence and Peacebuilding in Islam (University Press of Florida, Forthcoming). As a practitioner of peace and conflict resolution, he has
worked in Mindanao Philippines, Sri Lanka, Palestine, and
Israel.

SCOTT APPLEBY is Professor of History and John M. Regan, Jr. Director of the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

ALEX ARGENTI-PILLEN is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. She is the author of Masking Terror: How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka (Pennsylvania University Press).

BÈNÈDICTE BRAC DE LA PERRIÉRE is a senior research scholar at LASEMA-CNRS, Paris. She is the author of Les rituels de possession en Birmanie: du culte d'Etat aux ceremonies privées (Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations 1989), and more than 40 papers concerning spirit possession, religion and social change in Burma.

NELL BOLTON is a Masters Student in International Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute. She earned a Masters in theological studies from Emory University and has worked at the Carter Center as a project assistant in African peacebuilding. Her research and practical interests are in the intesection of religion, gender, conflict, and social change.

FRED DALLMAYR is the Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame. In addition to his many articles, he has authored 14 books, including, most recently, Achieving Our World: Toward A Global and Plural Democracy (2001); Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (2002); Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-cultural Encounter (Rowman and Littlefield, l996); and Alternative Visions: Paths in The Global Village (Rowman and Littlefield, l998).

VEENA DAS is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her recent books include Critical Events: An anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, Oxford University Press, 1995 and three volumes on the themes of social suffering, violence and subjectivity and remaking everyday life after traumatic violence of which she is a co-editor.

MANGALIKA DE SILVA is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology,
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of
Amsterdam. She is a scholar-practitioner and has worked on
research projects in Sri Lanka concerned with women's rights
as human rights, women in parliament, women in the labor movement,
and women in armed conflict.

BETTY JOSEPH is Associate Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (University of Chicago Press, 2003). She is currently at work on a second book project, Timing the New World Order: Postcolonial Fractures and the Cosmopolitics of Everyday Life.

INGRID JORDT is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology Harvard anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has spent many years as a nun and scholar in Burma and has published articles and book chapters about the processes of political legitimation and lay-monastic relations in Buddhist Burma, and Buddhist meditation movements. She is currently working on a book entitled Political Legitimacy in Post-Independence Burma.

LAMIA KARIM is a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow 2002/3 at the Kroc Institute. She is currently working on a book entitled The Political Economy of Shame: Women, Development and NGO's in Bangladesh. She is also working on another project on South Asian Muslim modernity, civil society, and madrassah education in Bangladesh.

PATRICIA LAWRENCE is currently a Rockefeller Visiting Scholar at the Kroc Institute, teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her warzone research in Sri Lanka has produced
several films and publications. The book she is currently completing is entitled Work of Oracles: Violence, Suffering, and Healing in Sri Lanka.

CYNTHIA MAHMOOD is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She directs a book series on The Ethnography of Political Violence and is author of Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

CABIERI ROBINSON is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at Cornell University. She has two articles in two edited volumes (Spring 2003) on the Kashmiri refugee question. Winner of several prestigious research awards, including a Macarthur Peace Studies Dissertation Award and a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship.

YASMIN SAIKIA is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the author of Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos at the Crossroads of Assam (Delhi 1997). Her forthcoming book is on memory, history, and identity in contemporary Assam. She is currently conducting research on trauma, history and gendered silence concerning the 1971 War of Liberation of Bangladesh.

JULIANE SCHOBER is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University, specializing in the Theravada Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia. She has numerous publications on the religion, social structure, and politics of modernity and nationalism in Southeast Asia, especially Burma, and is the editor of Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 1997)

MONIQUE SKIDMORE is a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow 2002/3 at the Kroc Institute. She is also a 2003-2007 Australian Research Council Scholar in the Center for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. She has two books in press: Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and The Burma Reader: Surveying the Changing Social Landscape (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004).

DAN PHILPOTT is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Core Faculty Fellow of the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton University Press 2001) and is currently conducting research on reconciliation and politics.

PETER VAN DER VEER is Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Amsterdam and the director of the Research Centre on Religion and Society. His latest books include Nation and Religion (1999), Modern Orientalisme (1995) and Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (1996).

CECILIA VAN HOLLEN is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame. Her scholarly interests are in medical anthropology; reproduction; gender, and South Asia studies. She is author of Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in India (University of California Press, Forthcoming-August 2003). She is currently conducting research on HIV/AIDS, stigma, and gender in India.

ATTENDING THE CONFERENCE
All conference sessions are free and open to the public. Information regarding accommodations for the conference is available by contacting:

Rashied Omar- PRCP Coordinator
Phone: (574) 631-7740;
Fax: (574) 631-6973
Email: Omar.1@nd.edu)

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