SHS Distinguished Lecture: Indonesia and Greater India-Scholarly and Religious Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies, 1880s-1990s

February 10, 2017

Dr. Marieke Bloembergen, Senior Researcher, KITLV – Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden, Netherlands delivered a Distinguished Lecture titled “ Indonesia and Greater India: Scholarly and Religious Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies, 1880s-1990s”, on February 7, 2017. 

In this lecture, she discussed work-in-progress of her ongoing project on ‘Indonesia and Greater India. Scholarly and religious knowledge networks and moral geographies, 1880s-1990s’. In this project, she explores, for the period 1900s-1980s, how, why and for whom, in Asia, Europe and the US, a predominant Islamic Indonesia became situated in ‘moral geographies of Greater India’ – or: moral and geographical imaginations of Asia as defined by one Hindu-Buddhist civilization, with its origin in India, and perceived to be superior to others.

She talked about how India, or Greater India was never far away for members of a generation of Indologists coming from Europe, and working in what is today South Asia, mainland Southeast Asia, and the Indonesian archipelago.

Dr. Marieke Bloembergen, Senior Researcher, KITLV – Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden, Netherlands delivering the Distinguished Lecture

Bio-Sketch of Dr. Marieke Bloembergen

Marieke Bloembergen is a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden (KITLV). She has published a monograph on the Netherlands Indies at world exhibitions (2006) and on the history of policing in the Dutch East Indies (2009). She has recently finished a large joined research project (with Martijn Eickhoff, NIOD) on the local, inter-Asian and global dynamics of archaeology and heritage politics in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, resulting in several articles and a book manuscript to be submitted. Her research interests include the political dynamics of knowledge production, and biographies, histories, and memories of (post-) colonial policing in (post-) colonial Indonesia, in a widening, inter-Asian and global context.