James Hoesterey - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by James Hoesterey

Journal of Islamic and Muslim studies, 2017

ISLAM NUSANTARA:Journal for the Study of Islamic History and Culture

For centuries, what is now commonly referred to in the Cold War-inflected English parlance as “So... more For centuries, what is now commonly referred to in the Cold War-inflected English parlance as “Southeast Asia” has been connected to various regions of the world -- from the transmission of Islam from diverse places in the Middle East, South Asia, and China, to engagements with European colonialism and, more recently, post-independence foreign relations in various regional, multilateral, and global contexts. From the eighth century Muslim traders were traversing the ports of what is now called Southeast Asia, and by the turn of the fourteenth century there is evidence for indigenous Muslim communities.[1] Such economic, cultural, and religious exchange over the centuries has not, despite the warnings of some globalization theorists, led to a homogenization of Southeast Asia, much less a homogenization of Islamic ideas and practices. Rather than coming as a single homogenous and authoritative source, the spread of Islam – and Muslim leaders -- across mainland and island Southeast Asi...

Religious Pluralism in Indonesia

This chapter explains Indonesia's public diplomacy efforts that link global positioning abroa... more This chapter explains Indonesia's public diplomacy efforts that link global positioning abroad with local religious statecraft. Indonesia has undergone an “Islamic turn” in its foreign policy agenda over the last couple of decades. Additionally, Indonesian leaders have tried to brand the country as the home of “moderate Islam.” However, the Islamic turn of foreign policy has refigured long-standing domestic concerns about political Islam and ideological and theological fault lines between Indonesian traditionalists and their Wahhabi detractors at home and in other countries such as Saudi Arabia. Indonesia's revamped image of “moderate Islam” plays better with Western governments worried about terror than those leaders in the Middle East.

CyberOrient

Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), arrived relatively late on the Isl... more Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), arrived relatively late on the Islamic social media scene. By the time Nahdlatul Ulama leadership recognized and commissioned the need for online advocacy, a generation of young media-savvy preachers had already stoked the embers of sectarian divides and cast suspicion on those deemed secular or liberal. Even within Nahdlatul Ulama, a sprawling network of religious leaders and Islamic schools mostly in Central and East Java, the rise of social media revealed internal schisms about the meaning of Islam and the future politics of NU. By 2015, some Nahdlatul Ulama members began to speak in the name of an NU Straight Brigade (NU Garis Lurus) that proclaimed to return Nahdlatul Ulama to its original roots purportedly betrayed by current NU leadership. In response, a diverse group of NU youth-notorious for a love of humor-formed the NU Funny Brigade (NU Garis Lucu), a social media community that used satire and humor to temper the accusations of NU Garis Lurus and to mobilize social media as a uniting force within Nahdlatul Ulama and Indonesia more broadly. In this article, I examine the interplay between these two Nahdlatul Ulama communities, paying special attention to how social media reveals fragments and fault lines, while also providing online space to bridge doubts and divides.

Indonesia-the world's most populous Muslim majority country and third most populous democracy... more Indonesia-the world's most populous Muslim majority country and third most populous democracy-has experienced both a widespread Islamic revival and democratic transition over the last several decades.

Religious Pluralism in Indonesia, 2021

The inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine hit the streets of Jakarta in January 2006. ... more The inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine hit the streets of Jakarta in January 2006. At that time, Indonesia’s parliament was debating a controversial antipornography bill. For weeks on end, parliament invited leading intellectuals, public figures, activists, and religious leaders to offer relevant testimony. Whereas human rights activists and women’s groups bemoaned restrictions the bill placed on female bodies, many Muslim leaders lauded the legislation for “enjoining the good and forbidding evil.” In particular, celebrity televangelist K.H. Abdullah Gymnastiar, known across the archipelago as Aa Gym, or “elder brother” Gym, urged parliament to consider the moral hazards of viewing pornography. Aa Gym admonished that, according to an Islamic ethics of vision, to view such images would lead to the moral decay of the heart. He testified before parliament: “Allah commands us to avert our gaze. What Indonesians need is to cultivate a sense of shame that will help them avoi...

Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2020

This article examines how Indonesia's governmental and civil society Islamic organizations are tr... more This article examines how Indonesia's governmental and civil society Islamic organizations are trying to rebrand the world's largest Muslim-majority country through combined efforts of bilateral, multilateral , and Track II diplomacy. This research explores the multiple sites, discourses, and actors involved in the constitutionand contestationof the claim that Indonesia is the exemplar of 'moderate Islam'. In doing so, the article contributes to a burgeoning academic literature about religion, diplomacy, and soft power. Understanding such soft power strategiesoriginating both within and beyond the statecan shed light on the cleavages, conflicts, and coalitions of religious authority, community, and identity both in Indonesia and on the global stage. Grand projects of diplomacy inevitably have unintended consequences, and the afterlives of public diplomacy are always played out in local, on-the-ground contexts. The article suggests that an ethnographic approach to the study of religion and diplomacy affords a unique understanding of Track II public diplomacy on the ground, providing understandings from the elite meeting rooms of foreign ministries to the basement gatherings of Indonesian Muslims near Washington DC.

Review of Middle East Studies, 2013

As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and po... more As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and political pundits were searching for the best political analogy for the promise—and problems—of the Arab Uprising. Whereas neoconservative skeptics fretted that Egypt and Tunisia might go the way of post-revolutionary Iran, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright praised Indonesia’s democratization as the ideal model for the Arab Spring. During her 2009 visit to Indonesia, Clinton proclaimed: “If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.” Certainly Indonesia of May 1998 is not Egypt of January 2011, yet some comparisons are instructive. Still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, middle class Indonesians were fed up with corruption, cronyism, and a military that operated with impunity. On 21 May 1998 Soeharto resigned after three decades of authoritarian rule. Despite fits of starts and stops, the democratic transition ...

Visual Anthropology Review, 2016

When the inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine was published in 2006, Muslim celebrity... more When the inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine was published in 2006, Muslim celebrity televangelist Abdullah Gymnastiar admonished Indonesians that the unbridled sexual gaze could tarnish a pure heart, leaving it blind to the perils of passion. Averting the gaze, he told his followers, would cultivate a sense of shame and thus steer the heart from vice to virtue. Whereas scholars have offered important insights into the study of religion and visual culture, decidedly less attention has been devoted to the faculty of looking as an ethical and political project. In this article, I bring together literatures on affect, subjectivity, and the state to describe how Gymnastiar deploys a moral psychology of vision to discipline state actors and to endow the post-authoritarian state with a political affect of shame. [Islam, politics, sensory ethnography, state, visual culture]

Visual Anthropology Review, 2014

Practicing Anthropology, 2012

One direction this soul-searching [about the nature of anthropological knowledge] has taken has b... more One direction this soul-searching [about the nature of anthropological knowledge] has taken has been a concern with the parallels between anthropology and tourism; nobody, of course, dislikes a tourist more than another tourist.

Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology, 2013

City & Society, 2012

In contemporary Indonesia, a new generation of Muslim pop preachers and self-help gurus tap into,... more In contemporary Indonesia, a new generation of Muslim pop preachers and self-help gurus tap into, and trade on, the symbolic and economic capital of Islam, science, and media technologies. Through television sermons and elaborate Power Point presentations, these pop preachers and self-help gurus summon the Prophet Muhammad's life and teachings in ways that resonate with the civic concerns, consumerist desires, and aspirational piety of the Muslim middle classes. These sermons and seminars often portray the Prophet Muhammad as the ultimate measure of what it means to be cosmopolitan. In this article I explore "prophetic cosmopolitanism" as a vernacular Muslim cosmopolitanism, but one which is not isolated from, or necessarily prior to, Western liberal-secular ideas about civic virtue. I argue instead that prophetic cosmopolitanism is both informed by, and offered as an alternative to, global discourses about psychology and self, citizen and believer, nation and umma. [Cosmopolitanism, Islam, popular culture, public sphere, transnationalism]. What is the sign of "humanness" in the category of the transnational "cosmopolitan"? Where does the subject of global inquiry or injury stand or speak from? To what does it bear relation; from where does it claim responsibility? Homi K. Bhabha, "Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism" bs_bs_banner

Journal of Islamic and Muslim studies, 2017

ISLAM NUSANTARA:Journal for the Study of Islamic History and Culture

For centuries, what is now commonly referred to in the Cold War-inflected English parlance as “So... more For centuries, what is now commonly referred to in the Cold War-inflected English parlance as “Southeast Asia” has been connected to various regions of the world -- from the transmission of Islam from diverse places in the Middle East, South Asia, and China, to engagements with European colonialism and, more recently, post-independence foreign relations in various regional, multilateral, and global contexts. From the eighth century Muslim traders were traversing the ports of what is now called Southeast Asia, and by the turn of the fourteenth century there is evidence for indigenous Muslim communities.[1] Such economic, cultural, and religious exchange over the centuries has not, despite the warnings of some globalization theorists, led to a homogenization of Southeast Asia, much less a homogenization of Islamic ideas and practices. Rather than coming as a single homogenous and authoritative source, the spread of Islam – and Muslim leaders -- across mainland and island Southeast Asi...

Religious Pluralism in Indonesia

This chapter explains Indonesia's public diplomacy efforts that link global positioning abroa... more This chapter explains Indonesia's public diplomacy efforts that link global positioning abroad with local religious statecraft. Indonesia has undergone an “Islamic turn” in its foreign policy agenda over the last couple of decades. Additionally, Indonesian leaders have tried to brand the country as the home of “moderate Islam.” However, the Islamic turn of foreign policy has refigured long-standing domestic concerns about political Islam and ideological and theological fault lines between Indonesian traditionalists and their Wahhabi detractors at home and in other countries such as Saudi Arabia. Indonesia's revamped image of “moderate Islam” plays better with Western governments worried about terror than those leaders in the Middle East.

CyberOrient

Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), arrived relatively late on the Isl... more Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), arrived relatively late on the Islamic social media scene. By the time Nahdlatul Ulama leadership recognized and commissioned the need for online advocacy, a generation of young media-savvy preachers had already stoked the embers of sectarian divides and cast suspicion on those deemed secular or liberal. Even within Nahdlatul Ulama, a sprawling network of religious leaders and Islamic schools mostly in Central and East Java, the rise of social media revealed internal schisms about the meaning of Islam and the future politics of NU. By 2015, some Nahdlatul Ulama members began to speak in the name of an NU Straight Brigade (NU Garis Lurus) that proclaimed to return Nahdlatul Ulama to its original roots purportedly betrayed by current NU leadership. In response, a diverse group of NU youth-notorious for a love of humor-formed the NU Funny Brigade (NU Garis Lucu), a social media community that used satire and humor to temper the accusations of NU Garis Lurus and to mobilize social media as a uniting force within Nahdlatul Ulama and Indonesia more broadly. In this article, I examine the interplay between these two Nahdlatul Ulama communities, paying special attention to how social media reveals fragments and fault lines, while also providing online space to bridge doubts and divides.

Indonesia-the world's most populous Muslim majority country and third most populous democracy... more Indonesia-the world's most populous Muslim majority country and third most populous democracy-has experienced both a widespread Islamic revival and democratic transition over the last several decades.

Religious Pluralism in Indonesia, 2021

The inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine hit the streets of Jakarta in January 2006. ... more The inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine hit the streets of Jakarta in January 2006. At that time, Indonesia’s parliament was debating a controversial antipornography bill. For weeks on end, parliament invited leading intellectuals, public figures, activists, and religious leaders to offer relevant testimony. Whereas human rights activists and women’s groups bemoaned restrictions the bill placed on female bodies, many Muslim leaders lauded the legislation for “enjoining the good and forbidding evil.” In particular, celebrity televangelist K.H. Abdullah Gymnastiar, known across the archipelago as Aa Gym, or “elder brother” Gym, urged parliament to consider the moral hazards of viewing pornography. Aa Gym admonished that, according to an Islamic ethics of vision, to view such images would lead to the moral decay of the heart. He testified before parliament: “Allah commands us to avert our gaze. What Indonesians need is to cultivate a sense of shame that will help them avoi...

Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2020

This article examines how Indonesia's governmental and civil society Islamic organizations are tr... more This article examines how Indonesia's governmental and civil society Islamic organizations are trying to rebrand the world's largest Muslim-majority country through combined efforts of bilateral, multilateral , and Track II diplomacy. This research explores the multiple sites, discourses, and actors involved in the constitutionand contestationof the claim that Indonesia is the exemplar of 'moderate Islam'. In doing so, the article contributes to a burgeoning academic literature about religion, diplomacy, and soft power. Understanding such soft power strategiesoriginating both within and beyond the statecan shed light on the cleavages, conflicts, and coalitions of religious authority, community, and identity both in Indonesia and on the global stage. Grand projects of diplomacy inevitably have unintended consequences, and the afterlives of public diplomacy are always played out in local, on-the-ground contexts. The article suggests that an ethnographic approach to the study of religion and diplomacy affords a unique understanding of Track II public diplomacy on the ground, providing understandings from the elite meeting rooms of foreign ministries to the basement gatherings of Indonesian Muslims near Washington DC.

Review of Middle East Studies, 2013

As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and po... more As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and political pundits were searching for the best political analogy for the promise—and problems—of the Arab Uprising. Whereas neoconservative skeptics fretted that Egypt and Tunisia might go the way of post-revolutionary Iran, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright praised Indonesia’s democratization as the ideal model for the Arab Spring. During her 2009 visit to Indonesia, Clinton proclaimed: “If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.” Certainly Indonesia of May 1998 is not Egypt of January 2011, yet some comparisons are instructive. Still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, middle class Indonesians were fed up with corruption, cronyism, and a military that operated with impunity. On 21 May 1998 Soeharto resigned after three decades of authoritarian rule. Despite fits of starts and stops, the democratic transition ...

Visual Anthropology Review, 2016

When the inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine was published in 2006, Muslim celebrity... more When the inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine was published in 2006, Muslim celebrity televangelist Abdullah Gymnastiar admonished Indonesians that the unbridled sexual gaze could tarnish a pure heart, leaving it blind to the perils of passion. Averting the gaze, he told his followers, would cultivate a sense of shame and thus steer the heart from vice to virtue. Whereas scholars have offered important insights into the study of religion and visual culture, decidedly less attention has been devoted to the faculty of looking as an ethical and political project. In this article, I bring together literatures on affect, subjectivity, and the state to describe how Gymnastiar deploys a moral psychology of vision to discipline state actors and to endow the post-authoritarian state with a political affect of shame. [Islam, politics, sensory ethnography, state, visual culture]

Visual Anthropology Review, 2014

Practicing Anthropology, 2012

One direction this soul-searching [about the nature of anthropological knowledge] has taken has b... more One direction this soul-searching [about the nature of anthropological knowledge] has taken has been a concern with the parallels between anthropology and tourism; nobody, of course, dislikes a tourist more than another tourist.

Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology, 2013

City & Society, 2012

In contemporary Indonesia, a new generation of Muslim pop preachers and self-help gurus tap into,... more In contemporary Indonesia, a new generation of Muslim pop preachers and self-help gurus tap into, and trade on, the symbolic and economic capital of Islam, science, and media technologies. Through television sermons and elaborate Power Point presentations, these pop preachers and self-help gurus summon the Prophet Muhammad's life and teachings in ways that resonate with the civic concerns, consumerist desires, and aspirational piety of the Muslim middle classes. These sermons and seminars often portray the Prophet Muhammad as the ultimate measure of what it means to be cosmopolitan. In this article I explore "prophetic cosmopolitanism" as a vernacular Muslim cosmopolitanism, but one which is not isolated from, or necessarily prior to, Western liberal-secular ideas about civic virtue. I argue instead that prophetic cosmopolitanism is both informed by, and offered as an alternative to, global discourses about psychology and self, citizen and believer, nation and umma. [Cosmopolitanism, Islam, popular culture, public sphere, transnationalism]. What is the sign of "humanness" in the category of the transnational "cosmopolitan"? Where does the subject of global inquiry or injury stand or speak from? To what does it bear relation; from where does it claim responsibility? Homi K. Bhabha, "Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism" bs_bs_banner