Title
In Good Hands: Religion as a Hierarchical System
Speaker
Ward Keeler (Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin)
Abstract
Contravening Talal Asad’s injunction against making universal statements about the nature of religion, I suggest that ideas and practices deemed religious display a consistent logic, that of hierarchy. Religious behavior implies asymmetrical exchange between agents, both persons and metapersons, whereby the subordinate party offers up labor and deference and the superordinate party bestows downward material and affective support. Submission in religious contexts then compromises no one’s dignity, no matter how fulsomely people might otherwise reject calls to subordinate themselves to others. I draw upon my own experience and upon reports of other researchers in Indonesia to illustrate this general take on religion.
Bio
Ward Keeler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Java and Bali (Indonesia), and in Burma (Myanmar) since the 1970s. His work has focused on performance, gender, language, and hierarchy in all three societies. His publications include: monographs on Javanese shadow plays; on Burmese Buddhism and gender; textbooks for the Javanese and Burmese languages; the annotated translation of an Indonesian novel; and CDs of classical Burmese music, as well as several academic journal articles. A collection of essays on the fate of the performing arts in Indonesia and Burma over the last fifty years will be published by Cornell University Press in 2026.