THE RESEARCH CENTRE RELIGION AND SOCIETY, AMSTERDAM The official opening of the Centre for the Comparative Study of Religion and Society was held on Thursday March 10, 1994. The Centre is a recent initiative of the University of Amsterdam and is part of the Faculty of Political, Social, and Cultural Sciences. Its aim is to study religion from a comparative perspective that is backed up by social anthropology and social history. The research programme examines the social force of both religion and nationalism over the last one hundred years. It will specifically focus on the role of the state in the discourse of `religious/ethnic community' versus `nation'. By Peter van der Veer The programme of the Centre is devised to compare developments in Asia with those in Europe. It wants to look at religion and nationalism in two pairs of societies: India and Great Britain; Indonesia and the Netherlands. It focuses on the modern period, between 1850 and the present, which is the period of both high colonialism and high nationa- lism, as well as their aftermath. The programme is based on the idea that a combination of metropolitan and colonial perspectives should lead to very different kinds of conversations and insights than have previously been possible among scholars who tend to work along the divide of colonizing and colonized nations. It also suggests that comparative work on these issues on both sides of the divide might show that what seemed entirely separate is, in fact, related. In this way the programme will revitalize the discussion of the place of religion in modern society which theories of secularization have brought to a dead end. The programme includes the post-colonial situation. The relationship between nationalism and religion has, of course, undergone dramatic changes during the post-colonial period. To study these shifts, one must again cross the dichotomy between colonizers and colonized. Given the facts of post-colonial migration, the programme can thus throw new light on the extent to which the new nation-states have continued colonial ways of thinking about religion and the ways in which the formerly imperial nation-states have reacted to the religions of the new immigrant groups now settled in the old metropoles. NEW COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL PERSPECTIVES The programme will thus make a contribution to a new perspective on colonial and post-colonial relations. It is unique in bringing this perspective to bear on two sets of colonizing and colonized societies and their post-colonial transformations. This requires the joint effort of a team of scholars in historical anthropology and historical sociology. It will derive its data and its inspiration as much from doing ethnography as from working in the archives. As such, the programme belongs to the field of historical anthropology, but its strongly comparative focus opens it up to new impulses, derived from the emerging field of post-orientalist cultural and sociological studies which look at issues of globalization, ethnicity and migration. The Research Team consists of a specialist on India, Professor Peter van der Veer, a specialist on Indonesia, Dr Patricia Spyer, a specialist on Britain, Dr Gerd Baumann, and a specialist on Holland, Dr Peter van Rooden. In 1994 the Centre had three visiting fellows: Hugh McLeod, professor of Church History, University of Birmingham, Thomas Gibson, associate professor of Anthropology, University of Rochester; Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, professor of History, New York University. Professor McLeod is a specialist on 19th century Christianity in Western Europe. Professor Hsia is a specialist on early modern religion in Western Europe, but has also worked on the Jesuits in China. Professor Gibson has written on the Buid in the Philippines and is currently working on Islam in Sulawesi (Indonesia). Professor McLeod's visit was supported by the British Council and Professor Gibson was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship. CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS The Centre regularly organizes conferences in which there is a strong Asia component. It hosted a symposium on Precept and Practice in Buddhism, in which Professors Gombrich (Oxford), LaFleur (Pennsylvania), Kamstra (Amsterdam), and Vetter (Leiden) were the speakers. With the Universities of Leiden and Nijmegen it co-organized a symposium on Religious Conversion, in which speakers on Asia were Professors Dirks (Michigan), Vishwanathan (Columbia), McKean (Chicago), Keane (Pennsylvania), Van der Veer (Amsterdam), Spyer (Amsterdam), and Kamstra (Amsterdam). In 1995 it will host a conference on 'Religion and Nationalism: a comparison of Asia and Europe' in conjunction with the Max Planck Institut fr Geschichte and a conference on Fetishism. It also organizes regular seminars. Seminars with an Asia focus have been given by Arjun Appadurai, Sudhir Chandra, Thomas Gibson, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, and Deborah Tooker. A series of seminars have been given by Talal Asad, professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New York, on his recent book: Genealogies of Religion: discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). In this book Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The book deals with medieval Christianity, so-called fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia, the Rusdhie Affair, and more. In conjunction with the Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam (CASA), the Centre (Professor van der Veer in particular) trains Ph.D. students whose research often has an Asia component. Currently these are Swee Sekhon, working on religion and identity in Malaysia, Yolanda Tieman, working on Tibetan nuns in Nepal, Marieke Bloembergen, working on the representation of Indonesia in Dutch contributions to world exhibitions, Suzanne Legene, working on the representation of the East in Holland in the first half of the 19th century, and Margit van Wessel, working on globalization and communal identity in Baroda (India).