The Religions and Cultures Cluster of the Central New York Humanities Corridor is
presenting a major conference, "Religion and Culture in the Indian Ocean Region,
1800-Present," Oct. 3-5 at Cornell University's Kahin Center for Advanced Research
on Southeast Asia.
The conference is designed as an exchange of knowledge and ideas among the three
member institutions in the Central New York Humanities Corridor-Syracuse
University, the University of Rochester (including the Eastman School of Music) and
Cornell-in addition to academics from other U.S. and international institutions.
The program includes presentations by more than a dozen participants from as far
away as London and Singapore, scholarly discussions, and an Indian dinner and
dance presentation.
Long before the beginning of European expansion in the 16th century, the Indian
Ocean constituted a cosmopolitan arena in which traders, religious scholars and
mystics from different world religions circulated with minimal friction. Recent
scholarship yields that many of these people continued interacting during the height
of British Colonialism in the 1800s and 1900s.
Ann Grodzins Gold , professor of religion and anthropology at SU, along with
professors Anne Blackburn of Cornell and Tom Gibson of the University of Rochester,
organized this conference that will explore the expanding and contracting translocal
connections within the Indian Ocean arena from the 18th century to the present day,
looking at what were, and are, the conditions leading to more and less cosmopolitan
or parochial religious practices in the region, and how the histories of the varied, and
sometimes competitive, visions of collective belonging oriented by religion shaped,
and were shaped by, Indian Ocean flows.
Schedule and registration information is available at
http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/southasia/conference/index.asp.
This past spring at SU, the Cultures and Religions Cluster of the Central New York
Humanities Corridor hosted a popular conference that examined how music has
moved religion in regions linked by seafaring trade networks and coastal mainland
migrations in the Indian Ocean.
The Central New York Humanities Corridor is made possible by a grant from The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The conference is funded by the South Asia National
Resource Center, a consortium at Cornell and Syracuse universities supported by a
grant from the U.S. Department of Education, with additional assistance provided by
the Cornell Southeast Asia Program.
