Dr Leo Howe
Senior Lecturer; Dean, Darwin
email: leh1000 [at] cam.ac.uk)
Research interests: south-east Asia and Indonesia (Bali), Europe (Northern Ireland); hierarchy, religion and politics; religious change; and new religious movements; in Northern Ireland, unemployment; local labour markets; the welfare state; bureaucracy; ethnicity; and urban studies.
I have been exploring the changing religious landscape of Bali from the latter part of the 19th century to the present day, through extensive fieldwork and archival research. My research focuses on the variety of conflicts Balinese experienced within the island, with Muslim scholars in Java, and with the Dutch colonial regime, and questions how religious change takes place, describes what the outcomes are, intended and unintended, and seeks to put this in a broad social, political and historical context. In maintaining the integrity and centrality of religious ideas and practices my project searches for a way to interpret long-term change in a rapidly modernising and complex society.
I am also researching the Christian roots of Anthropology, a relatively new area in social anthropology which offers broad scope for looking at the intellectual and religious origins of some of our concepts and theories. This particular project concentrates on debates in early modern Europe on the varied interpretations of Eucharistic practices. It focuses on the arguments of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli in opposition to the dogmas, especially that of transubstantiation, of the Catholic Church. The manner in which anthropologists routinely interpret symbols owes much to the symbolist and metaphorical claims that the principal reformers used in their arguments in the 16th century. I am currently looking at the writings of the 16th century reformists to discover what they may offer in new directions for our current analytical endeavours in regard to symbolism.
