Death, Politics, Violence, and Ritual: New Perspectives on Chinese Religions

Session Submission Type: Individual Paper Panel

Abstract

This panel presents selected papers that offer new perspectives on the study of religions in China, past and present. The presenters work in the disciplines of Anthropology, Literature, Religious Studies and Art History. The papers use a range of methodologies in order address a diversity of topics: the materiality of colors adopted by Tibetan Buddhist nuns to decorate their built environments; aesthetic representations of blindness, sexuality and body politics in eighteenth-century Chinese fiction; relations between a Tibetan regent and a Qing emperor; the selection of gravesite in ninth-century China; and the socio-religious status of the cockroach in contemporary Taiwan

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• James Benn, McMaster University

Chair

• James Benn, McMaster University

Individual Presentations

• A Visceral Politics of Colors: Adornment Practices of Tibetan Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary China - Yasmin Cho, University of Michigan

• Blindness, Daoism and Dynasty Crisis in 18th-Century Chinese Literature - Qing Ye, University of Oregon

• Ngawang Tshültrim, A Tibetan Regent in the Qing Court - William Kent Dewey, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Selecting Gravesites in 9th-Century China: Fengshui, Land Contracts, and Empire-Wide Death Ritual Standardization - Claire Yi Yang, University of California, Berkeley

• The Cockroach Paradox: Problems of Violence and Ethics in Taiwanese Buddhism - Mireille Mazard, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity