R. Michael Feener

Professor of Humanities at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University

R. Michael Feener is a Professor of Humanities at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, and an Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He was formerly Research Leader of the Religion and Globalisation Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore, and the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. 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 currently Head of the Maldives Heritage Survey.

Peppering Piety Across Port Cities: The Materialities of Religious Circulations in Asia, from the Silk Road to the Belt and Road

Pepper was a high-profile commodity in circulation along pathways reflecting religious, as well as commercial networks facilitating the expansion of Islam in the Indian Ocean. It has historically figured – via multiple but by no means straightforward ways into: 1) the expansion of Islam in the Indian Ocean, 2) conceptions of communal identity, and 3) the paraphenalia of Muslim religious practice. This presentation will cast a broad view across some of the diverse ways in which this one particular commodity of maritime Asian trade has been moved, used, and imagined in relation to the history of Islam in Asia. However, not all of the ways in which this complex history of maritime pepper trade was related to developments in religious thought and practice are straightforward. Recognizing the imaginative and palpable ways in which a trade commodity can take on such complex religious valences might, I hope, facilitate more nuanced appreciations of the materiality of religion and the religious experiences of things across an interconnected world of Islam in maritime Asia.