Muslims and Christians: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in the Asia Pacific Region

Santi Rozario, Geoffrey Samuel and Hilary Carey

Research program: Australia in the Asia-Pacific

Today new religious nationalisms are of increasing global significance, and women are being used as boundary markers of religious identity from the international to the local level, while their behaviour is increasingly determined and policed by male religious hierarchies. This ARC-funded project looks at the impact on those religious rituals and practices, long studied by anthropologists and historians, which ensure the sustainability of communities and are frequently the responsibility of women. Ethnographic studies of minority women in mixed Muslim-Christian communities in Bangladesh and Australia are being undertaken to explore the consequences for these communities and the women in them.