Wed, 1 April 2009, 4pm to 6pm | English

National University of Singapore @ Bukit Timah Campus

Assoc. Prof Gabriele Marranci

Associate Professor Gabriele Marranci

Lectures

The seminar, starting from an anthropological approach, provides a different reading of religious fundamentalism and extremism that is founded upon fieldwork-based research. It attempts to explain why today young people may be attracted to ‘fundamentalist' and extremist interpretations of religion.

It will be suggested that what has been labeled as ‘fundamentalism' should be read as a system of processes instead of a single cultural and socio-political phenomenon. In order to understand these processes, there is a need to focus attention upon the individual. The seminar will suggest that some ideas, such as justice and dignity, through emotional processes can achieve, for the person, the status of ethos and thus lead to an ideology of justice based on particular ideas of ‘how to be human' and the desire to ‘civilize' the others.

Gabriele Marranci is an anthropologist by training, working on religion with a specialisation in Muslim societies. His main research interests concern identity, Muslim migration/immigration, urban sociology, globalization, fundamentalism, political Islam, secularisation processes, criminology and anthropology of music.

He has widely published in these subjects. He is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at ARI, and the co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at University of Western Sydney. A/P Marranci is the founding editor of the Springer journal Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life, as well the book series Muslims in Global Societies (Springer). His research has been published both in leading international peer-reviewed journals and edited books and he is also the author of four monographs, among which The Anthropology of Islam (Berg) and Faith, Ideology and Fear: Muslim Identities within and Beyond Prisons (Continuum).

Location:

ARI Seminar Room Tower Block Level 10,
469A Bukit Timah Road
National University of Singapore @ Bukit Timah Campus

Time: 4pm to 6 pm

National University of Singapore @ Bukit Timah Campus