David Martin: my teacher, or, a way of seeing

David Martin’s sociology of religion embodied an expansive vision of religion, one that encompassed the entirety of human and social experience: its political, national, economic, aesthetic, poetical and spiritual-religious orientations, and the complexities of their institutional arrangements, entanglements and compromises with one another. David’s sociology was not formulaic; it was a constant struggle – a struggle for understanding the motives, forms and patterns of human behaviour as these changed and shifted under changing circumstances. David was extraordinarily sensitive to the importance of the historical context, and especially the effects of modernity, in all its different guises, on the great cultural traditions of Western civilisation: Christianity and Western ‘high culture’ - the ‘Western canon’ of European art, music, literature and poetry. For David, the former presented the best account of human life; the latter, the pinnacles of human creative and imaginative achievement. As my doctoral supervisor, he also helped me to see and understand the persistence, revival and evolution of that other great European cultural tradition, the Classical tradition, the civilisation of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, in the modern world. Like its Biblical, Judaeo-Christian, counterpart, the Classical tradition has offered, well into the twentieth century, a powerful repertoire of cultural themes, images and symbols of human existence. This repertoire was often seen to parallel and complement the Biblical repertoire, while in its artistic, musical, and literary manifestations, would form the basis of the ‘Western canon’. Modern cultural movements, and especially the expressive and utilitarian revolutions of the 1960s, would set out to break these great images of the axial age. David’s mission would be to restore them

Politics, Patronage and the Persistence of the Ruling Elite in post-UNTAC Cambodia

Cambodia’s ruling elite has now remained in power for over 30 years. Today, many scholars believe that this could be attributed to a set of complex and context-specific patron-client relations that intertwines to form the patronage structures that underpin the political system. However, despite this, the specific dynamics of Cambodia’s patronage structures are still considered underexplored. Here, I investigate the strength and persistence of the ruling elite by exploring the internal dynamics of Cambodia’s political context. While internal dynamics is an abstract term, I suggest that it can be conceptualised as the dialectical interaction between material capabilities, ideas and institutions (i.e. forces). This “force-based framework” is based on Robert Cox’s ontological and epistemological understanding of forces, but adds a constructivist understanding of socially constructed actors. Based on an investigation of empirical material gathered from secondary sources, I argue that the interaction between material domination, manipulation of ideas, and the systematic institutionalisation of patronage relations has constituted a political context that contribute towards the strength and persistence of the ruling elite by exerting strong pressure to conform and support prevailing power relations, at the same time as it limits the scope for rejection and constrains possibilities of resistanc

Urban Hierarchies in Flux: Ananged intercaste marriages in Calcutta

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Cinema as mnemotechnics

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All the King’s Horses, All the King’s Elephants: The Fates of Royal Animals in Nepal’s Post-Monarchy Period

In May of 2008, Nepal’s 240-year-old monarchy was legally dissolved. In the wake of this dissolution, the new interim government sought to replace royal institutions, procedures, and ceremonies with new, parallel processes. One unexpected royal legacy that politicians needed to resolve was that of the former royal animals that had been connected to the position of the King. The king of Nepal and palace institutions had been responsible for the welfare of a range of animals: private royal horses, a palace dairy herd, elephants in Chitwan, and an aviary of pheasants. Many of Nepal’s ex-royal animals have survived for years after the monarchy’s collapse, and many of them were left vulnerable, with no one clearly responsible for or dedicated to them in the new political context. The peculiar and marginalized fates of Nepal’s ex-royal animals highlight the profound institutional complexity the monarchy once entailed, and the far-reaching consequences of its dissolution. They also reveal the grudging and complex ways that parliamentary politicians and bureaucrats have handled some of the more inconvenient legacies of the institution they eliminated

La Belle Dame in bobby socks :Keatsian Echoes in Lolita

This project will explore the various Romantic influences that Nabokov simultaneously draws and draws away from in Lolita. By analyzing the novel in relation to Keats\u27s narrative poems, I will show the ways Nabokov veered from traditional Romantic structures in the trope of courtly love and in images of consumption and consumerism and how he linked the two different notions of consumption in the novel

Emotion in the German Lutheran Baroque and the development of subjective time consciousness

This study examines some of the ways in which it was possible to understand emotion in Lutheran church music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It suggests that emotion related to music more through association and contextual factors than through a fixed relationship, thus explaining the ways in which musical passages and techniques could be taken from a secular context to serve a sacred purpose. With these factors in mind, it is possible to suggest ways in which a listener's likely emotional association with music can be harnessed through particular compositional procedures. Schütz's setting of part of the Song of Songs may well engage with the listener's consciousness over time, stretching it and reinforcing the ‘useful’ emotional associations that the sacred context might bring. The opening aria of Bach's cantata ‘Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen’ achieves something similar over a longer span and with greater emotional intensity. Here there is the added sense of the believer finding, losing and then rediscovering the object of spiritual adoration. The music thus implies the potential alienation of the listener, something both supported and overcome through the very structuring of the music. Its repetitive ritornello process is sometimes hidden but always latent, thus playing on the potential for subconscious recognition. Together, these two examples suggest that music can be used as a powerful demonstration of the historical development of modern forms of consciousness as related to emotional states over time

The Digital, The Local and The Mundane: Three Areas of Potential Change for Research on Asia

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a game-changer for academic research because it has affected all of its aspects, starting from the “where,” which influences the “what” and the “how.” Given these changes, I would like to suggest a few possibilities for updating the “where,” the “what,” and the “how” of research on the Asia Pacific region. I will illustrate these possibilities with some of my own strategies developed or reinforced during the pandemic, as a historian of the art and culture of early modern Japan. Three dimensions of the changes guide my suggestions: the digital, the local and the mundane