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Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity
(Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College)
Call for Papers
The Humanities Institute invites proposals for papers to be presented at a conference scheduled for December 1- 3, 2003. This upcoming Institute will examine the concept of "conversion" in a broad sense as it operated during the 19th and 20th centuries in the Ottoman domain, Indian Islamdom, and the Sino-Japanese worlds.
While the concept of "conversion" has strong religious connotations, many works on religious conversion recognize that often not just the converted, but the converter as well is changed---a transformation that demonstrates the complex, sometimes contradictory outcomes of cultural and ideological adaptation. Conversion can take place in a number of modes: forcible and voluntary, collective and individual, or any combination of these.
Historical instances such as conversion to tenn sei ideology in Japan, or to "modern laicism" in Turkey suggest that conversion may be viewed constructively in larger terms as political and ideological processes: conversion as cultural appropriation---the adoption by subordinate groups of dominant discourses, customs, and institutional forms; conversion as the redefinition of spatial categories- East-West, rural-urban, empire-colony; or conversion as an reordering of social class and the blurring of ethnic and gender categories. The extensive literature on religious conversion will prove useful in analyzing these types of socio-cultural transformations. For a more complete description of the conference, go to the Institute's website: www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/converting.html
Presenters will be provided room and a travel stipend. The goal of this conference is to produce an edited volume and presenters will be expected to make a draft of their paper available before the conference. Final drafts will be expected by June 1, 2003. Other participants will be provided room in the Hanover Inn.
Please send a one-page paper proposal/abstract either to:
Leslie Center for the Humanities
Dartmouth College
Carpenter Hall
Hanover, NH 03755
or e-mail Humanities.Center@dartmouth.edu
