Michael G. Peletz

Professor
PhD University of Michigan 1983

Anthropology 220
404-727-0484
mpeletz@emory.edu

Michael PeletzMichael G. Peletz received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley (1973) and his M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1983) from the University of Michigan. His teaching and research interests focus on social and cultural theory; gender and sexual diversity; law, discipline, and disorder; and the cultural politics of religion -- especially Islam -- and modernity, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. Professor Peletz has done extensive fieldwork in Malaysia and has undertaken archival research in Malaysia and England; his research and teaching interests have also involved travel to Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

Professor Peletz’s recent books have focused on gender, sexuality, and body politics across Asia (Peletz 2007), and on the ways that Islamic courts in Malaysia are involved in struggles to define the role of Islam with respect to the maintenance of national sovereignty and variously construed projects of modernity and civil society in an age of globalization (Peletz 2002).

Professor Peletz’s new book, Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times (2009), examines three big ideas -- difference, legitimacy, and pluralism -- and is chiefly concerned with how people construe and deal with variation among fellow human beings. Why under certain circumstances do people embrace even sanctify differences, or at least begrudgingly tolerate them, and why in other contexts are people less receptive to difference, sometimes overtly hostile to it and bent on its eradication? What are the cultural and political conditions conducive to the positive valorization and acceptance of difference? And, conversely, what conditions undermine or erode such positive views and acceptance? Taking as its point of departure the prevalence of transgendered ritual specialists and the prestige accorded them throughout much of Southeast Asia’s history, the book examines pluralism in gendered fields and domains in Southeast Asia since the early modern era, which historians and anthropologists of the region commonly define as the period extending roughly from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

In the coming years Professor Peletz expects to continue teaching and conducting research on Islam in Southeast Asia (and beyond); gender and sexual diversity; law, discipline, and disorder; and the cultural politics of modernity.

Publications


Books

Gender Pluralism by Michael Peletz Michael Peletz, Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia

Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since
Early Modern Times.
Michael G. Peletz, New York and London: Routledge, 2009.

 

Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in
Modern Asia.
Michael G. Peletz, Ann Arbor:
Association for Asian Studies, 2007.

 
Michael Peletz, Islamic Modern Michael Peletz, Reason and Passion

Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and
Cultural Politics in Malaysia.
Michael G. Peletz, Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002.

 

Reason and Passion: Representations
of Gender in a Malay Society.
Michael G. Peletz, Berkeley and London:
University of California Press, 1996.

 
Michael Peletz, Bewitching Women, Pious Men Michael Peletz, A Share of the Harvest
Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender
and Body Politics in Southeast Asia.
Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz (eds.)
Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1995.		 A Share of the Harvest: Kinship, Property,
and Social History Among the Malays of
Rembau.
Michael G. Peletz, Berkeley and London:
University of California Press, 1988.