Jovan Maud

I completed my PhD with the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie in 2008.  My thesis, entitled The Sacred Borderland, deals with the production of Buddhist practices and institutions in the southern Thai borderland and how they are implicated in the production of place and processes of state formation in that region.  My main area of interest is on religion in contemporary societies, particularly the connections between religion, power and transnational processes.

Between 2006 and 2010 I worked in the Master of Applied Anthropology program at Macquarie and was acting Director of the program in 2009.  This involvement has meant I’ve become interested in the ways anthropology is being applied in various domains within and outside the academy.  My posts to this blog represent this interest and my desire to understand the manner in which anthropology is developing in response to new social and economic forces and to put into action the notion that anthropology can be a publically engaged discipline.

As of January 2010 I have been at the  Max Planck Institute for the Study of Multireligious and Multiethnic Societies in Goettingen, Germany, as a postdoctoral fellow.  I hope though that the blog will help me to maintain a link with the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie.