Arlo Griffiths
The EFEO’s Research in Indonesia and the DHARMA Project
Since 2019, a team of scholars from the EFEO and partner institutions in Europe, South and Southeast Asia is collaborating in the framework of a substantial multi-year grant from the European Research Council. The project The Domestication of “Hindu” Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and Southeast Asia (DHARMA, ERC grant no. 809994) aims to uncover various aspects of the social and institutional history of religion in the period roughly corresponding to the European Middle Ages, when forms of Hinduism and Buddhism that shared the use of Sanskrit as a language of learning had broad political support throughout South and Southeast Asia. The DHARMA project is stimulating interdisciplinary research work at several EFEO centers in Asia, notably Pondicherry (India), Siem Reap (Cambodia) and Jakarta (Indonesia). In this presentation, we will focus on the EFEO’s research activities in Indonesia, which cover in general the fields of archaeology, epigraphy, philology, history, art history and religious studies, and are mostly carried out in collaboration with Indonesian counterparts. After an overview of the most significant work accomplished since the EFEO became active in Indonesia in the 1950s, and of more recent and current work undertaken in diverse contexts, we shall highlight the work that has been done since 2019 as part of the DHARMA project.