Seminar | Pious moderns: Toward healthy progress | Chiara Formichi

Abstract
In this talk, Chiara Formichi will illustrate how by asking the question of how (literate, engaged, middle/upper-class) Indonesians understood and deployed the concepts of modernity and progress, and how these intersected with religious identities and nation-building in the 1920s-1950s period, she found herself reading women magazines, colonial-times reports and pamphlets on hygiene and disease, and post-independence Indonesian publications on nutrition. Through these varied sources, she will make an attempt at bringing to the surface a discursive thread that from the 1920s to the late 1950s connected ideals of progress, health, and religion through the processes of colonization and nation-building, and ultimately manifestations of the wholesome body-soul compound of the modern Indonesian citizen.

Speaker
Chiara Formichi is Associate Professor in Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University.

Registration
Please register if you wish to attend: [email protected]

Photo
Blue Band Advertisement, Karya, June 1951 (no.6), p. 23.