Joel Kuipers of George Washington University proposes to explore the relationship between the usage of Arabic as a sacred speech register and emerging forms of religious identity. The project will test key hypotheses about how gender, education, urbanization, and rapid mediatization affect participation in Islam. The research will take place in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country. The role of classical Arabic (fussha) in everyday life has dramatically expanded in the last 30 years, evidenced in personal names, greetings, Qur'anic verses and other pious expressions in everyday life. At the same time, old patterns of piety are changing, reflected not only in new political alignments, but new ways of expressing faith, ways that are seldom examined by scholars. By focusing on the largest ethnic group in Indonesia - the Javanese - the research examines specifically the role of the Arabic language in the emerging realignment of pious identities in everyday life. Drawing on advanced methods in linguistic anthropology, the proposed study will collect and examine detailed transcriptions of recordings of everyday interactions, classrooms, prayer houses, popular films, radio talk shows, and a variety of other contexts in which pious subjectivities are displayed and evaluated. The results will not only demonstrate rigorous new linguistic methodologies for investigating religious subjectivity, but also provide substantive and comparative insights into patterns of piety in the world's fourth largest country. The project makes strong contributions to international collaboration among scientists through its affiliation with an Indonesian research team at Gadja Mada University. The project also supports the training of undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology.
