Date:16:00-18:00, January 23 (wed.)，2008
Venue:E207 Seminar Room, East Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University
Title:"Financing Devotion: Economic Histories of the Southeast Asian Pilgrimage to Mecca ".
Speaker: Dr. Eric Tagliacozzo, CSEAS visiting research fellow and Associate Professor, History Department, Cornell University.
Commentators: Kaoru Sugihara (CSEAS, Kyoto University),
Yasushi Kosugi (ASAFAS, Kyoto University)
Abstract:
Performing the pilgrimage to Mecca is incumbent upon every Muslim who is able to do so as the fifth and final religious pillar of Islam. Yet religious devotion cannot be divorced from the ways and means of performing it, namely the financial wherewithal of undertaking a journey which may be thousands of miles from one’s home. Traveling on Hajj for Southeast Asians has always required the accumulation of significant economic resources, therefore, before such a trip could even be contemplated. These funds were earmarked for the trip of a lifetime, one that was usually performed only once. Sometimes the journey was even one that had no return, if the devotee should die on the long and hazardous journey (which happened often, historically), or in the Holy Places themselves. The economics of Hajj, thus, was serious business: the pilgrimage both contributed to regional and trans-regional economies, and also was vital to the financial planning of millions of individuals and their families over the centuries. This paper explores the longue-duree economic history of the pilgrimage to Mecca, outlining its early forms as part of the Early Modern Indian Ocean “system”, its colonial morphogenesis, and finally its modern manifestations in the era of Southeast Asian nation-states