About the Book

In the burgeoning study of globalization the study of religion has been sorely neglected. Yet despite the inroads of modernization, the societies of South, Southeast and East Asia remain deeply permeated by religion. Issues of identity, cultural politics and citizenship are all fundamentally influenced by religious affiliation. This volume explores the relationship between globalization and religion in contemporary post-colonial Asia - a situation in which new found political and cultural autonomy, far from leading to the widespread secularization predicted by many a generation ago, has stimulated the flourishing of both traditional and new forms of religious expression. This study examines the interplay between history, the contemporary consumer capitalism and its attendant forms of popular culture that are making inroads all over Asia, and the deeply held religious beliefs and institutional memberships on which many national, regional and local identities still fundamentally depend and which set up the complex social, cultural and personal negotiations and revisionings that arise when tradition meets globalization. In a world of increasing religious polarization signaled by the putative "clash of civilizations", the exploration of these dynamics is empirically and politically important and also holds many implications for the field of cultural studies as a whole, East and West.

About Author

Dr. John Clammer is Adviser to the Rector and Director of International Courses at the United Nations University, Tokyo. Previously he was Professor of Comparative Sociology and Graduate Professor of Asian Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo and he has been a visiting professor at universities in England, Australia, Germany, Korea, Japan, Singapore and Argentina. He has published extensively in the fields of cultural sociology, development sociology and the sociology of religion, with a focus on Japan and Southeast Asia and has an ongoing interest in the dialogue between social theory and Asian realities.

Contents

Foreward
Acknowledgments

Part One: Religion and Globalisation in Postcolonial Asia: Globalisation, Secularisation and Identity

1. The Culture(s) of Globalisation: Religion, Identity and Citizenship
2. Cultural Studies and the Cultural Politics of Asian Religion
3. Asia in Europe's Imaginary: Disciplinary Knowledges and the (Mis) Representation of Cultures
4. After Orientalism: Postcolonialism, Culture and Globalisation

Part Two: Japan and the Globalisation of Religion in Southeast Asia

5. Changing Worlds: Transnationalism and the Flow of Religious Symbols and Beliefs
6. The Local, The Regional and the Global: Soka Gakkai and the Spread of Japanese Religious Cultures in Southeast Asia
7. Gobalisation, New Religions and the Contemporary Re-Imagining of Japanese Identity
8. Globalization and Citizenship in Japan: New Identity Politics in a Post-Bubble Economy

Part Three: Postcolonial Reconstruction of Religion

9. The Politics of Religious Memory: Confucianism and Reinvention of Patriarchy
10. The Crisis of Asian Modernity: Buddhism, Development and Postcolonial Theory in the Thought of Sulak Sivaraksa

Part Four: Religion and Popular Culture

11. Religion, Popular Culture and Cultural Communication in Contemporary Asia

Bibliography
Index

 

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