Workshop on:
Religious syncretism and Everyday Life Religiosity

Date:	23 March 2007.
Location:	Faculty Lounge, Shaw Foundation Building, FASS.

• Principal Investigator: Assoc. Prof. Vineeta Sinha

Speakers and Papers:   

1. Daniel Goh (National University of Singapore, Singapore) ‘Chinese Religion from Malaya to Malaysia to Singapore: Syncretism, Hybridization and Transfiguration’
2. Rowena Robinson (Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India) ‘Negotiating Traditions: Popular Christianity in India’
3. Yeoh Seng Guan (Monash University, Malaysian Campus) ‘For/Against hybridity: Religious Entrepreneurship in a Roman Catholic pilgrimage shrine’
4. Vineeta Sinha (National University of Singapore, Singapore) ‘‘Mixing and Matching’: The shape of Everyday Hindu religiosity in Singapore’

This workshop focuses attention on everyday forms of religiosity and the kind of religious encounters that emanate across religious traditions in religiously plural societies. Expressions such as ‘religious syncretism,’ ‘religious hybridization’ and ‘multi-religiosity’ have been offered to theorize such interactions across religious boundaries. The papers in the workshop begin by problematizing these descriptions as well as the sense making strategies they offer, and thereby seek alternative modes of theorizing everyday religiosity. For specific regions within the broader notion of ‘Asia’, a historical perspective reveals a shift from a situation of overlapping religiosity, religious cosmopolitanism and syncretist practices to a situation of increased standardization and homogenization of the ethno-cultural-religious domains, which bear little resemblance to the rich cosmopolitanism of the past.

This shift has culminated in simplistic modes of conceptualizing religious diversity and difference. In different ways, the papers raise the following questions: How do we characterize the kind of free-flowing, intersecting interactions (not always harmonious though) amongst communities, producing what can be called ‘religious eclecticism’ and ‘syncretist practices’? What accounts for the presence of a spirit of openness, receptivity and empathy towards differences, or lack thereof? Do socio-political and cultural conditions in the present favour or facilitate the persistence of hybrid and syncretic practices and the emergence of new ones?

It is also important to ask why religious and cultural practices which were the norm in the historical experiences of the region should now be greeted with surprise and viewed at best as a novelty and an aberration at worst. There is value to such a perspective in seeking new/unexplored/additional sites which allow one to speak to the long-term syncretic, eclectic, cosmopolitan history of the region, vis-à-vis religion. The workshop participants also focus attention on fluid/popular/localized forms of religiosity, arguing that everyday practices carry enormous political significance in the present The papers also highlight the need to look beyond the traditional, mainstream sites of religious expression, outside the parameters of what has been called ‘Official religion’/ ‘institutional religion,’ making a compelling case for more historically and theoretically informed ethnography rather than less.