Entangled Pieties

"At a time when interreligious conflict receives unrelenting attention, this book serves as a model for studying how Muslims and Christians manage to work through the politics of religious difference to get along with each other on a day-to- day basis. Through sensitive, engaging ethnography and insightful analysis, Entangled Pieties shows the careful, sometimes tenuous ways in which neighbors acknowledge and negotiate their mutual religious sensibilities in order to maintain the delicate balance of social life. It demonstrates the value of painstaking, on-the-ground ethnographic research to the study of contemporary religious and social phenomena like the global rise of both Pentecostalism and Islamic piety." (Suzanne Brenner, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, USA) "Entangled Pieties is an important study of religion, ethnicity and gendered social relations in contemporary Indonesia. It is a detailed study of Muslim-Christian relations in a Central Javanese city, tacking between the analysis of national level Muslim-Christian discourse centered on and the details of inter-group relations in daily life. It is a model for the study of inter-religious relationships not just in Indonesia but in other societies where religious diversity is a social fact." (Mark Woodward, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizonan State University, USA) "In Indonesian studies and in the anthropology of religion in general, Islam and Christianity are typically studied in isolation. In this elegantly written and theoretically subtle ethnography of Christian-Muslim relations in Central Java, En-Chieh Chao demonstrates just why it is important to study the two faith communities, not in isolation, but in entangled interaction. Entangled Pieties also offers insights into the challenge and possibility of pluralist co-existence across faith communities. For this and other reasons, this fine book deserves to be read, not only by Indonesianists, but everyone interested in religious pluralism and 'tolerance' today." (Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology at Boston University, USA) "This important intersectional study explores how differing and changing religions, including Pentecostalism and self-designated Salafi Islam, ethnicity, and gender shape newly-emerging social forms in Central Java, and, most importantly, how people weave cross-cutting sociabilities." (John Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Lewis, USA)

This book explores the social life of Muslim women and Christian minorities amid Islamic and Christian movements in urban Java, Indonesia.This book explores the social life of Muslim women and Christian minorities amid Islamic and Christian movements in urban Java, Indonesia. Drawing on anthropological perspectives and 14 months of participant observation between 2009 and 2013 in the multi-religious Javanese city of Salatiga, this ethnography examines the interrelations between Islamic piety, Christian identity, and gendered sociability in a time of multiple religious revivals. The novel encounters between multiple forms of piety and customary sociality among “moderate” Muslims, puritan Salafists, born-again Pentecostals, Protestants, and Catholics require citizens to renegotiate various social interactions. En-Chieh Chao argues that piety has become a complex phenomenon entangled with gendered sociality and religious others, rather than a preordained outcome stemming from a self-contained religious tradition.