Transcript Studying local religious culture

STUDYING LOCAL
RELIGIOUS CULTURE
GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER
• the speaker
• what can he teach you (if anything)
• the audience
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name & place
academic interests
text vs fieldwork
personal exposure to “religious life”
• do we have a shared vocabulary (probably not!)
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our Englishes & our Chineses (invent a Chinese version for this!)
full or abbreviated characters?
technical vocabulary
different view of normativity in research on religious culture
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THESE LECTURES
• “local” religious culture= all religious culture!
• tensions between perception, expectations and what
we (can) see
• not a complete theoretical survey, was asked to put my
own research central
• studying religious culture: begin by accepting the other
• ground rules
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there are “stupid” questions: still ask them
there are “intelligent” questions: also ask them
use English or Chinese, whichever comes easier
questions will help me to understand the audience and its
needs better
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WHAT DO I KNOW?
• very little
• what I do know:
• incidental fieldwork (Hong Kong, Quanzhou region, Taiwan,
mostly communal rituals, funerary rituals & Feeding the
Hungry Ghosts rituals, exorcist ritual theatre, variety of
sacrificial rituals)
• historical research (communal religious culture, “ethnic
minorities” [mostly Yao], lay Buddhism Song-Republican
period, Triads, oral culture, temple cults)
• secondary literature
• studying religious culture: begin by accepting the
other
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PROBLEMS OF DOCUMENTATION
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either too normal and everyday (=> no record)
impact persecution and repression
normative sources
little research and even less fieldwork
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“DEFINING” RELIGION
(AWAY)
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RELIGION
• religion 宗教 : Christian assumptions
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central text (~canon)
doctrine
ritual & doctrinal specialists
centre of control
institutions
• does this cover actual life? And when?
• religions of the books descending from early Judaism
• even then only to a limit extent
• places religious life outside of people
• this definition includes and excludes: it “constructs”
entities, rather than “finding” them
• excludes even B, D, C, since neither have a single central text
or centre of control
• excludes all local religious life
• top down (what do we study, who decides what is in or out of
the phenomenon)
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DANGERS OF -ISMS
• your definitions: Buddhism, Daoism, & Confucianism
• Buddhism 佛教
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arrival China as –ism?
central text? who is in charge?
our assumptions
does it have a shared set of beliefs
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Western term (horrible) vs Chinese term (better)
ideas of “Confucius” or “texts” linked to Confucius?
Neoconfucianism (reinvented tradition)
still no central text, only points (plural) of departure
• Daoism 道教
• Confucianism 儒教
• Christianity 基督教, 天主教 (! Christianities)
• recent arrival, but rapidly spreading
• to be seen as a local religious culture as well
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RELIGIOUS CULTURE
• quick definition:
• the way (ways) groups of people organize themselves and
create a world inside and around them, define life/living and
death/being dead, whilst putting their own creative role
outside the system and allow no falsification
• God, creator, central texts etc. are not part definition, but part
of what is created
• “religious” as dimension, rather than entity in itself
• adjective not noun
• includes the Daoist, Buddhist, etc.
• Includes practices, festivals, rituals, multiple perspectives, but
also psychoanalysis (!), near-death experiences etc.
• stress is on our role in distinguishing this dimension (etic), rather
than ”uncovering” inside distinctions (emic)
• need to look at emic distinctions
• culture: not study of isolated objects (texts etc.), but texts
etc. in context
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VS. PHILOSOPHICAL OR SCIENTIFIC
APPROACHES
• not so different in epistemological scope & emotional
intent, but:
• religious culture “is”
• philosophy “discusses” (can ideally be falsified, or becomes
ideology)
• science “asks” (where it cannot be falsified it touches on
religious culture) (≠科學)
• philosophy and science recognize role of people in creating
this system
• ways of seeing these three spheres of action and/or
reflection
• as continuous spectrum
• set of discourses that interact, but can be maintained
separately (without becoming split personality)
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SOCIAL HISTORY
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studying religious culture = social history
studying social history = religious history
using “religious” sources on social history
using “general” sources on religious history
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CONCEPTUAL ISSUES
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SOME CONCEPTS I USE (OR NOT)
• orthopraxis & standardisation pantheon (James Watson)
• seeming sameness of religious practice across China
• not quite orthodoxy : not normative
• overlooks hidden differences under labels (Michael Szonyi)
• doing religion (Adam Chau)
• stories
• beyond reading
• telling stories as activity
• ritual
• not just performing transmitted texts: but transforming, maybe
with texts and/or according to texts
• our tasks: asking questions about performance and reception(s)
and audience(s)
• sacrifice
• performance rather than just a set of symbols
• setting up an exchange
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CONCEPTS I DISLIKE
• popular (modern concept, compare 俗, 愚)
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vs. elite (modern concept, compare 士)
vs. widespread
“among the people” 民間
too vague: how to count (80% Chinese people until 1970s
are peasants!)
• heretic/heterodox (modern concept, compare 邪,
妖,左道)
• any pejorative terms (superstition, cult, sect etc.)
• Great Tradition & Little Traditions (R. Redfield)
• diffused religion (CK Yang)
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POWER
• then: who does the writing and why?
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rarely just recording
selection => leaving out and editing
literate=> elites with specific sets of norms & values
influenced by self-representation
our task: to uncover the editing and reframing
• now: professionals
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literate & university trained
part of academic discourse
need to find a job
connected to central & local institutions
independent?
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TEXT
• text fixes unavoidably
• act of writing down
• use of concepts (consistency)
• all (almost) historical sources are textual in some way
• texts
• texts by literate people on oral culture
• text privileged by our witnesses and by us
• this summer course good example!
• research shamanism always begins with Chuci 楚辭
• our texts become new norms
• text versus practice
• text ≠practice
• text in practice
• texts reflecting (part of) practice
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TEXT AND ORALITY
• need to save the texts from themselves
• compare “classicist” traditions and importance
commentary (written and oral, the latter only fragmentarily
transmitted in writing)
• ritual practice
• changing attitudes towards texts
• history of use of the written
• oral culture
• not necessarily “popular”
• changing attitudes towards orality
• oral more prestigious than text for many centuries
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SOME COMMENTS ON
EXISTING RESEARCH
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WHERE IS CHINA
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WHAT IS CHINA
• Or rather: does China exist before 1911 (or even later?)
• what “we” in the West mean by the term China ≠ Chinese
terms 中國, 中華民囯,中華人民共和國
• China ≠ dynastic titles
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lack of cultural and religious integration
political history bias=> capital region ≠ rest of the empire
social history bias=> Lower Yangzi region ≠ rest of the empire
anthropology & religious studies bias=> Fujian (Taiwan) ≠ rest of
China
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• Yao Daoist ritual can tell us much on earlier role(s) Daoist ritual
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WHICH CHINA
• (many) historians: when and as long as “classical
Chinese” is (was) used in the sources
• (many) Western anthropologists: China begins long after
1949, nowadays even after 1976, as long as you can talk
to people (since usually cannot read [classical] Chinese
[very well, anyhow]!)
• (especially) Chinese anthropologists: only “minorities”
(anthropology is of the quaint)
• (most) Chinese folklorists: local Han-culture throughout
fieldwork
• sociologists, literary studies : modern China is urban,
modern is what we recognize as “ours”/Western
• and so on and so forth
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GEOGRAPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS
• China as entity?
• regions: provinces (nowadays) ≠ regions
• W. G. Skinner remains relevant
• local language regions
• dogma of a single China (esp. relevant when discussing “ethnic
minorities”, which are often majorities locally)
• communication nodes (<=markets, roads, etc.)
• results migration
• history of local religious culture regionally different
• north : “south” (wherever the south may be)
• within the south: e.g. Jiangnan, Fujian, Guangdong/Guangxi all
very different
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LOCAL RELIGIOUS CULTURE
• all religious culture is local, some examples:
• temples
• territorial cults
• charismatic cults
• monasteries of all sizes
• surprisingly Buddhism & Daoism were regionally distributed
phenomena (1. generally speaking; 2. in their local variations)
• tied to local economy&society and only rarely to imperial
courts
• types of religious specialists
• shamans and mediums
• performers funerary rituals
• classicist teachers (Zhu Xi himself)
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AGENDA FOR THIS COURSE
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AN ADVANCE PEEK
• Labelling of religious culture (on the importance of
vocabulary and the dangers of normative writing)
• Religious culture at the centre of social organisation
(“diffused” suggests there is something separate)
• Charitable activities and religious life (tendency towards
secularisation)
• Spirit writing, shamans and mediums: contact with the extrahuman world (significance of divine communciation)
• New religious groups (uniting “elite” and “popular” culture)
• Triads (strongly indebted to elite culture: unite the political
and religious dimensions to build social group)
• Rumours and collective fear (the power of oral
communication)
• The cult of Lord Guan (an example of a multivocal temple
cult)
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