by Catherine Scheer, EHESS, EFEO, MSH Guest professor

History and Memory in East Asia (SOCA-D-491) - coordinator: Pierre Petit & Lisa Richaud

This course addresses the twin issues of history and memory in South-East and North-East Asia. History and memory trigger frictions in East Asia at large, but they can also be considered as a frame or a matrix for the (re)production of social relations and cultural practices in the subcontinent at large. The course intends to approach these processes from an anthropological perspective, sensitive to the long-term and to local contexts, grounded on ethnographic fieldwork and archival sources -- or other relevant sources. This mixed approach should help to gain a better understanding of the representation and the uses of the past in current contexts, ranging from official history to collective or personal memory.

Catherine Scheer is a lecturer-researcher in anthropology at EFEO with special interest in the intersection of religion and development in the highland ‘margins’ of continental Southeast Asia. She studied history (BA) and anthropology (MA) at the universities of Paris Diderot, Paris Nanterre and EHESS, while learning Khmer at INaLCO. Her PhD dissertation (EHESS) examined how Bunong inhabitants of Cambodian highland commune have made sense of Christian teachings since the turbulent 1970s and on how they have been articulating their Protestant identity while claiming rights as an indigenous minority. From 2015 to 2017, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the ‘NGOs and Religion in Asia’ project at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, studying the influence of Christian experts on the production of knowledge and policy recommendations on non-dominant language education in Southeast Asia. Development, Christianization and indigenous politics were key topics in her teaching at the Institute for Ethnology of Heidelberg University (2017-19).

Tuesday 30th April 2024, 2pm-4pm

Room P4.1.10
Campus Solbosch - Building P4 - Level 1
Avenue F. Roosevelt 42
1000 Bruxelles

Free entrance

Contact: east@ulb.be