MF CASR Lunch with Verena Meyer

"Grave Matters: Dilemmas of Modernism in Islamic Java"

Graves of famous figures are often important sites of commemoration where religious communities construct group identities by referring to a normative past. Yet for some, the very act of commemoration can sit uneasily with what the normative content of the past is understood to be. Drawing on ethnographic research in Java among members of Muhammadiyah, a self-consciously modernist Muslim organization, I show how their engagement with these grave matters balances the conflicting anxieties of forgetting their past or clinging to it, arguing that the tensions that emerge are productive sites for the articulation of the organization’s complex ideological positionings.

Please join us in person at the MF Library, or watch on Zoom: https://mf-no.zoom.us/j/64105595003?pwd=S0JpdTIyT1dBcjRwTjg2YzVxdmVRQT09

Zoom Meeting ID: 641 0559 5003

Passcode: MFCASR