Amanah Nurish
Dr. Amanah Nurish is an Indonesian anthropologist. She is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Dept. of Anthropology – Stanford University. Her Fulbright project focuses on “Transnational Links and Political Trajectory in Contemporary Indonesia.” She teaches at the School of Strategic and Global Studies, University of Indonesia. She worked with Arizona State University for the project on Salafi links in Southeast Asia in 2015 – 2017. Before working as academia, she served as a regional consultant in the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) for the program Violent Extremism and Corruption in Pacific Asia region. She also has experiences working with USAID Washington D.C for the project of Climate Change and Conflict in the East Indonesian Archipelago.
Dr. Amanah Nurish is known as “the generation after a half century of Clifford Geertz”. She revisited Geertz’s study on the “Religion in Java”. For seven years, she conducted ethnographic researches on minority religions especially the Baha’i movement in Southeast Asia for her master and Ph.D project. It had a significant impact on a public policy regarding religious minorities' rights in Indonesia.
In 2018, Central Sulawesi was hit by a deadly tsunami and liquefaction disaster, paralyzing coastal infrastructure. She spent several years conducting ethnographic research in post-disaster communities experiencing social, cultural, and religious upheaval.
She currently focuses on researches to develop academic discourse for the issue of religious populism and transnational movement, which lead identity politics as a new landscape in contemporary Southeast Asia.
She wrote books, monographs, journals and popular articles: Religion of Java: a Half Century of Clifford Geertz (2019), Shi’te and The Birth of Baha’i Faith in Iran (2016), Halal Labeling: The Next Gold Mine (2014), Welcoming Baha’i: New Official Religion In Indonesia (2014), Fetishism And Imagined Gods (2019), Corona and the New Terrorist Trap (2020), Religious Populism in Indonesian Democracy in the Internet Era (2021), Resilience of The Baha’is Community In Facing Covid-19 (2021), Santri-Abangan After A Half Century of Clifford Geertz (2021), When Abangan Embraces Sufism: Religious Phenomenology to Counter Radicalism in Indonesia (2021), Muslim-Christian Conflict and the Rise of Laskar Jihad: Tracing Islamophobia in Central Sulawesi – Indonesia (2022), etc.
