Remembering Devotion: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca

Eric Tagliacozzo, History and Southeast Asia Studies, Cornell University

What do pilgrims remember about their Hajj? What aspects of this
incredible journey, which used to take months in a passage by sea, but now takes hours in a voyage by air, are worth remembering, and what is forgotten? How do Southeast Asians organize their experiences in their memories, what is sifted as crucial to a Muslim life well-lived, and what is incidental? Are material circumstances remembered as vividly as spiritual obligations, and what do various pilgrims' memories have in common? Perhaps most importantly, how do Southeast Asian Muslims explain the Hajj to others and to themselves in the act of narrating experience? Is this process different from writing a memoir of the pilgrimage, which many Hajjis indeed have done as an act of devotion? In this talk, I examine these questions first from the standpoint of several decades-old Hajj memories trapped in a vault, the Oral History repositories in the National Archives of Singapore. I then convey some of the memories of pilgrims as to the physical circumstances of their journeys, spanning travel, health, residence, and living in the Hejaz. A third section of the talk explores the spiritual dimensions of the pilgrimage, as religion itself comes to the fore in the lived experience of devotion. In conclusion I then ask how useful Oral History may be in narrating the journey to Mecca, as a source of information but also as a vestige of what is often described as the most charged spiritual moment in any Muslim's lifetime.

Eric Tagliacozzo is Assistant Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University. His work has focused on regional and trans-border approaches to Southeast Asian History, especially in the maritime realm. He is the author of a range of articles on smuggling, frontiers, and long-distance trade in Southeast Asia, published in many journals and edited volumes. His book, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915, was published by Yale University Press in 2005. He is also the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes, The Indonesia Reader: History, Culture, and Politics (Duke University Press) and Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries Between History and Anthropology (University of Michigan Press).

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