background

Her present research focuses on the relationship between colonialism, Christianity, historical memory, and nation-building in the Philippines. She is planning a new project on the politics of language in post-liberalization India, focusing upon the ideologies associated with English and Hindi, their relative prestige in various domains, and their combined use in everyday social practice.

teaching

Anthropology of Religion
From its inception as a discipline addressing non-Western cultures, anthropology has examined the religious beliefs and practices of people who are ``not us." Yet the cross-cultural study of phenomena such as ``ritual," ``sacrifice," and the ``sacred" also renders absolute distinctions between ``us" and ``them" untenable. At a time when religion is in resurgence from the Americas to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, this undergraduate course surveys the contribution of anthropology to understanding its complexity and resilience.
The questions introduced in this class are foundational ones: Is there a distinct sphere of culture that can be defined as “religion,” and is it a universal feature of all societies? What best explains the persistence of religion— individual emotional needs, the pragmatic dictates of collective life, or human hardwiring? What is the relationship of religion to politics and economics, both within the nation-state and globally? Specific topics include: the place of religion in anthropological thought; the difficulties and dilemmas involved of other people’s (and our own) beliefs; key legacies of social theory and their utility in explaining contemporary phenomena like revivalism and fundamentalism; classic problems in the anthropology of religion, such as ritual and witchcraft—and why they don’t vanish in spite of modernity; the transformation of religious identities by distance and technology.

From Lost Eden to Perfumed Nightmare: Themes in the Ethnography of the Philippines
As a Southeast Asian nation with a history of double colonization by Spain and the US, the Philippines eludes easy categorization within anthropology’s regionalist traditions. This course uses the Philippines to probe some of anthropology’s blind spots, and as a springboard for analyzing hierarchy, political culture, religion, and performance through comparisons within and beyond Southeast Asia. Recent topical concerns in anthropology, such as nationalism, marginality, and globalization, will also be explored using Philippine materials.

Reorienting Southeast Asia (co-taught with Professor Steedly)
This course is an advanced seminar on Southeast Asian ethnography. Moving from classic readings and themes in the literature (e.g. “culture” and “charisma”), it explores how the study of "Southeast Asia" is being reoriented after the demise of the Cold-war paradigm of area studies, and in the wake of post 9/11 geopolitics, state restructuring, and financial crisis. Topics include: violence and criminality, technology and technocultural mediations, political predation and reform, (trans) local activisms.

Ethnographic Approaches to Christianity
What would an anthropology of Christianity look like? This seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students examines a number of anthropological and historical studies of Christianity as it is practiced, focusing mainly upon Catholicism (both orthodox and “folk” varieties), Protestantism (including U.S. Fundamentalism), and some of their theologically “heterodox” Christian offshoots. We examine the relationship between Christianity and the history of anthropological thought, in a deliberate attempt to defamiliarize a religion, which has a taken-for-granted status in Europe and the United States. While we are keenly interested in the historical transformations associated with Christianity, this is not a history course, and we will not always proceed chronologically. Thus, we will frequently read historical works side-by-side with contemporary ethnography, drawing upon, for instance, the considerable anthropological literature on missionary conversion to Christianity in colonial and postcolonial situations in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and paying special attention to translation, resistance, and the re-appropriation of Christianity by local populations. At the broadest level, the course aims to cultivate an awareness of the influence of Christian categories on anthropological theory as well as upon concepts of modernity and secularism. Specific topics covered in this course may include several of the following: the significance of belief as a linguistic, subjective, and rhetorical phenomenon; the epistemological challenges of generating knowledge about religion in general and Christianity in particular; dynamics of secularism, modernity, and the state; the gendering of Christian religious experience and authority; the problem of heresy; the role of material culture (relics, miracles, etc.) as channels for accessing sacred or divine power; the diversity of Christian cosmologies regarding heaven, hell, death, and the afterlife.

Consuming Passions: Cultures of Materialism in Contemporary Asia
This undergraduate course uses anthropological ideas about “material culture” to work through contemporary formations of class, gender, national, and global identity in a wide range of settings in Asia and New Guinea. These are some of the major questions we will address: How are objects intertwined with people’s lives? How do specific relations of production, consumption, and exchange produce social differentiation, status, personal identity, and forms of intimacy? What are the political ramifications of the explosion of new consumer desires, opportunities and fantasies currently underway?



publications

- “The Priestess and the Politician: Enunciating Filipino Cultural Nationalism at Mt. Banahaw,” in A. Willford and K. George (eds.), Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP Publications, 2005).

- "Writer, Hero, Myth, and Spirit: The Changing Image of José Rizal"

- "Surviving Superstition: Christianity in a Philippine Landscape"
Practices and mentalities designated as “superstitious” often serve as crucial foils for defining what counts as rational and modern. In Surviving Superstition, my book-in-progress, I explore how this dynamic plays out at Mt. Banahaw, a major center of folk-Catholic pilgrimage in the Philippines. Interweaving methods of participant-observation, oral history, and archival research, I look at how a landscape and its mobile inhabitants—outlaws who called themselves “mountain people”— have responded to their social construction by the authoritative voices of the Spanish and U.S. colonial eras and of particular postcolonial junctures.

While my book documents the use of the category of “superstition” as a tool of marginalization in the hands of zealous colonizers, romantic nationalists, and even some contemporary critics, it also tells another story— one that unfolds in the accounts of prophecy, mystical travel and cult formation that circulate at Mt. Banahaw. What my book ultimately reveals is the fascinatingly paradoxical quality of “superstition.” At times a force of conservatism that feeds on stubborn and universal fears and wishes, “superstition” is simultaneously a challenge to those who would contain and control the power of religious idioms. At Mt. Banahaw, “superstition” also embodies the potential of the local past to unsettle the present, with consequences that are as much political as they are religious.