The Creolization of a Diaspora Before Genocide: Cases from the History of Cham Religious Communities in Cambodia

How do religious communities change as a result of their mediations between state powers and local conditions? Based on a decade of research conducted in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, this talk examines cases from the history of Austronesian Cham religious communities in Cambodia. Diaspora, syncretism, localization, and jawization are all previous theoretical frames that scholars studying Cham Muslims in Cambodia put forward to describe features of changing community dynamics. They have their advantages and their limits. I will argue, instead, that thinking about a process of continuous creolizations could help us better understand the nuanced layers of dynamics impacting the formulation of Cham religious communities across the early modern and modern historical epochs.

Dr. Noseworthy is a social historian of Southeast Asia and a Visiting Fellow in the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. He has previously been an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an SSRC-Global Residential Fellow at Gottingen University in Germany and a Senior Fellow with the CAORC-Center for Khmer Studies in Cambodia. He has also held teaching positions at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is where he received his PhD in History in 2017.

Via Zoom; registration required at https://bit.ly/HVDSEANOSEWORTHY