The Making of Religious Traditions in the Indonesian Archipelago: History and Heritage in Global Perspective (1600-1940)

Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory and forgetting, and attachment to community and place. In my talk I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.