Preliminary Programme

Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

All days
Go back

Wednesday 23 April 2014 11.00 - 13.00
J-2 ASI01 The Confluence of the Social Sciences and History in the Study of Chinese Religion
Hörsaal 29 first floor
Network: Asia Chair: Patrick Pasture
Organizer: Gene Cooper Discussants: -
Shin-yi Chao : Our Lady on the Mountain: a Case Study of the Revival of Communal Religion in Rural Northern China
In this paper, I focus on a historical and still extant devotional movement surrounding a female saint, Lady Wei, who lived in the third-century AD. The paper combines research in historical documents with ethnographic field work to analyze the change and continuity of village communal religion in pre-modern and present-day ... (Show more)
In this paper, I focus on a historical and still extant devotional movement surrounding a female saint, Lady Wei, who lived in the third-century AD. The paper combines research in historical documents with ethnographic field work to analyze the change and continuity of village communal religion in pre-modern and present-day China.
The main temple dedicated to Lady Wei, located on Mt. Yangluo in north China, first appears in an eighth-century stone inscription. By the fourteenth century, more than a dozen of its branch temples were established in villages across Qinyang and neighboring counties according to a temple stele. Many of the villages still hosted temples to Lady Wei during modern times. The temples nevertheless ceased to function from the 1950s after the establishment of the Communist regime until the 1980s when China’s era of economic reform began. Since the early 1990s, Lady Wei’s temples have been restored or rebuilt one after another and have begun to hold services and convene temple festivals.
It has been argued that the speedy revival of popular religion in the reform era in China is an expression of the hidden but enduring local communal autonomy that the collectivist Maoist state failed to crush. With its ambiguous status in socialist China, popular religion as a public sphere does not serve the supposed bridging function that the bourgeois public sphere provides between the state and society in Jurgen Habermas’ theory. Temple-based local organizations present a challenge to the cultural and ideological structures of the atheist Communist Chinese state. The state, nevertheless, is not a monolithic social actor. The agents of the state at the local level often have interests divergent from the policy-making central state, and intervene to defend their local constituencies. The paper thus concludes that the revival of popular religion is the result of a “united front” of social agents and local-state agents successfully negotiating with the central state.
(Show less)

Adam Chau : A Religious Public Sphere?: The Formation of the ‘Religion Sector’ in Modern China
Combining the approaches of the historian and anthropologist, this paper will examine the sociopolitically significant yet heretofore understudied notion of the ‘religion sector’ (zongjiaojie) in modern China, especially in the People’s Republic of China.

As a result of its modernist and secularist ideologies, the modern socialist Chinese state on mainland ... (Show more)
Combining the approaches of the historian and anthropologist, this paper will examine the sociopolitically significant yet heretofore understudied notion of the ‘religion sector’ (zongjiaojie) in modern China, especially in the People’s Republic of China.

As a result of its modernist and secularist ideologies, the modern socialist Chinese state on mainland China has a well-structured institutional framework to manage and control religious life. Each one of the five officially-recognised religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism) has its own structure of officially-endorsed organisations that extend from the top, national level, down to the local level. These organisations, under the supervision of the United Front Department of the Communist Party, run their own affairs such as training clergy and assigning jobs to religious offices, electing representatives to political offices (e.g. the Political Consultative Conference at various levels), implementing religious policies, maintaining places of worship, representing and pursuing the interests of their constituencies, propagating (but not too aggressively) their religions (e.g. with publications, etc.), etc.

But parallel to this rather rigid official institutional structure one finds a shadowy and much more protean and interesting space that’s labelled as the ‘religion sector’, which expands, contracts or shifts in shape as a result of the dynamic interactions between various actors (the state, religious personnel, lay religious devotees, the media, etc.). Combining an examination of contemporary documents with the findings of ethnographic field work, I will explore the factors contributing to the shifting nature of the religion sector and how an investigation of social spaces such as these ‘sectors’ enhance our understanding of the socio-political make-up of modern Chinese society.
(Show less)

Gene Cooper : At the Confluence of History and Ethnography: The Saga of Hugong Dadi
In the world of Chinese popular religion, the pantheon is populated with many figures who actually lived human lives. Thus the effort to understand contemporary religious practice through ethnographic fieldwork in the present inevitably involves a delving into historical sources to reveal how it was the human-become-deity in question came ... (Show more)
In the world of Chinese popular religion, the pantheon is populated with many figures who actually lived human lives. Thus the effort to understand contemporary religious practice through ethnographic fieldwork in the present inevitably involves a delving into historical sources to reveal how it was the human-become-deity in question came to be perceived as efficacious and worthy of worship and supplication.

This paper puts that injunction to work exploring the career of the local deity Hugong Dadi whose cult is centered at the Hugong temple in Fangyan township, Yongkang county, Zhejiang province. Hugong Dadi was in life a righteous official of the Northern Song dynasty (AD 960-1126), one Hu Ze (AD 963-1039), who is credited (among other things) with successfully petitioning Song emperor Renzong on behalf of the people of Jinhua to suspend the head tax during a serious drought. Posthumously revered by the people, he was later said through his appearance in a dream to have had a role in the suppression of the Fang La peasant uprising. For this service he was bestowed the imperial title Youshun Hou (Marquis who Protects Successfully) by Song emperor Huizong, beginning a process in which his efficacy was increasingly recognized, culminating in his full-fledged deification as Dadi, and object of worship throughout Zhejiang and neighboring provinces.

During the war with Japan, when the Guomindang provincial government sought exile in remote Fangyan, Hugong interacted with a number of prominent Guomindang personalities, and the subsequent revival of his cult following the Cultural Revolution was aided by his evocation by none other than Chairman Mao Zedong in 1959 as a human official deserving of emulation.
The career of Hugong Dadi demonstrates the necessity of combining historical and ethnographic data in attempting to understand the role of popular deities in Chinese religious practice.
(Show less)

Ping Yao : Religious Faith and Everyday Experience of Tang Dynasty Buddhist Women
This paper critically examines historical sources on the religious practices of Tang dynasty women from a perspective informed by the anthropological study of gender and religion.

As advocated by earlier feminist scholars and anthropologists, religion is not just a set of ideas, but also a collection of practices that are manifest ... (Show more)
This paper critically examines historical sources on the religious practices of Tang dynasty women from a perspective informed by the anthropological study of gender and religion.

As advocated by earlier feminist scholars and anthropologists, religion is not just a set of ideas, but also a collection of practices that are manifest in the activity of ordinary lives. Previous scholarship on Chinese Buddhist women has concentrated on interpreting Buddhist sutras and vinaya practices, but this can be quite misleading. Instead of finding out what Buddhist women were obligated to do or prohibited from doing, it might be more constructive to find out how these women manifested their faith in their everyday lives. Furthermore, looking into Buddhist women’s life experience might lead us to answers to two important questions in the study of Chinese Buddhism: 1) To what extent did Buddhism penetrate Chinese society, especially the domestic sphere? 2) How did the religion survive the Great Persecution of Buddhism in AD 845 and continue its influence on Chinese culture and way of life until today.

Fortunately, sources for reconstructing the religious faith and everyday experience of Tang women are abundant. In my database of more than six thousand Tang epitaphs, 78 were written for Buddhist nuns, more than 200 were written for Buddhist laywomen, and 35 contain references to Buddhist nuns. These epitaphs not only allow me to conduct an extensive study of Buddhist women’s lives, compare their experiences with Buddhist monks, or with secular women, but also provide valuable information on how Buddhism and Buddhist women were perceived during the Tang dynasty.

Ultimately, then, this paper attempts to answer the call for a “gender-critical turn” that goes beyond the rediscovery of women’s experiences, and attempts to explore how gender has been used to construct religious symbols, myths and power, and has therefor played a significant role in structuring religious life.
(Show less)



Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer