Doz. Mag. Dr.
researcher
staff representative
martin.slama(at)oeaw.ac.at
+ 43 1 51581 - 6464
Martin Slama is a senior researcher at ISA. He graduated from the anthropology department of the University of Vienna with a PhD thesis about the online practices of young internet users in Indonesia. While still writing up his dissertation, he expanded his research focus to diaspora communities of Hadhrami-Arab descent in Southeast Asia that play a salient role in the region’s Islamic landscape. Developing this research focus further earned him the Austrian Programme for Advanced Research and Technology (APART) grant of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This grant enabled him to write a post-doctoral thesis (habilitation) about Indonesian Hadhramis’ elite networking, constructions of authority, gender order, and internal frictions. More recently, he combined his expertise on Islam in Southeast Asia and the anthropological study of new communication technologies by examining the varied Islamic uses of social media in Indonesia. He is currently further expanding on this theme of being digitally pious by considering AI-related phenomena, while revisiting the (re)positioning of Hadhramis in Indonesia’s entangled religious and political fields. At the same time, he is developing new projects on forms of religiosity, the politics of space and socio-economic inequality as well as on Indonesian perceptions of the past as they can be evoked by photographs from the colonial era. In Indonesia, Martin Slama was guest researcher at Gadjah Mada University and the State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah and currently cooperates with the State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga. He was also a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg. His work can be found in academic journals and edited volumes of academic publishing houses, such as Social Anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,Indonesia and the Malay World, South East Asia Research, Asiascape: Digital Asia, CyberOrient, Archiv Orientalni, Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies; Australian National University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Brill, Amsterdam University Press.
2026 “Islam, Ambiguity, and (In)Tolerance: Perspectives from Southeast Asia” (co-authored with Ismail Fajrie Alatas), Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 73(2-3): 119-149. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685276-01234015
2026 “Exploring Wit in Oppressive and Conflictual Environments: The Significance of Agentic Forms of Humor” (co-authored with Noura Kamal), Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 104: 1-13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2026.1040101
2025 “Encountering (Im)Probable Wit: Religious Puns in an Indonesian Post-Conflict Setting”, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 36(3): 556-571. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.70037
2025 “Anti-Arab Sentiments as ‘Unwelcome Encounters’ in a Tropical Muslim Majority Country”, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 15(2): 496-498. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/736287
2025 “Social Media and the Question of Change in Indonesia’s Field of Islam”, Indonesia 119: 173-192. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ind.2025.a961932
2022 “Rethinking Diasporic Returns: Hadrami Trajectories in Indonesia’s Religio-Political Field” (co-authored with Ismail Fajrie Alatas), Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 178(4): 410-439. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-bja10046
2021 “The Indian Ocean as a Diasporic Space: A Conceptual Introduction” (co-authored with Iain Walker), Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 4(2): 76-90. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26443/jiows.v4i2.78
2020 “Imagining Indonesian Islam as a Centre: New Mediations and Old Concepts of Power”, Archiv OrientalniSupplementa XII: 273-300. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47979/aror.s.2020.XII.273
