Central New York Humanities Corridor presents conference on Indian Ocean religion and culture Oct. 3-5 at Cornell University

Central New York Humanities Corridor presents conference on Indian Ocean religion and culture Oct. 3-5 at Cornell UniversitySeptember 02, 2008Sara Millersemortim@syr.edu

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.