Events

Jointly organized by Department of Chinese Studies and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Marcus Bingenheimer, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on my ongoing work on Chinese gods and processes of subjectification whereby such gods affirm unique personas and engage humans in person-to-person interactions. It is based on a critical approach to much of the scholarship on gods who merely treat them as projection of human collective values and needs. I propose that the vast array of ritual techniques developed over the very longue durée in China to allow the gods to “talk back” to humans have allowed these gods to affirm themselves as persons and subjects – even though there was also resistance against such developments. I developed the case of spirit-writing as a particularly effective mean of divine subjectivization. I then wish to open a comparison with other religious cultures and explore the reasons why the presence of gods as subjects varies considerably between different cultural contexts: in some places, gods can engage humans as persons in ways comparable to the Chinese case, and in others they do not. My working hypothesis is that the availability and social acceptance of ritual techniques to allow the gods to talk is a crucial factor in such differences.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Vincent Goossaert is Professor of Daoism and Chinese Religions at École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Sciences et Lettres University. He is the co-editor of T’oung Pao, a leading journal in sinology established in 1890. His research deals with the social history of Chinese religion in late imperial and modern times, especially Daoism, religious professions, socio-religious regulations, productions of moral norms, and human-divine sociability. He has published about twenty books, including Making the Gods Speak: The Ritual Production of Revelation in Chinese History (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), Heavenly Masters: Two Thousand Years of the Daoist State (University of Hawai’i Press & Chinese University Press, 2021), Vies des saints exorcistes: Hagiographies taoïstes, 11e-16e siècles (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2021), and Bureaucratie et salut: Devenir un dieu en Chine (Geneva, Labor et fides, 2017).

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