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CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Michael Feener, Asia Research Institute and Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper draws attention to parallels in the symbolic organization of a variety of Chinese ritual arenas – domestic worship (to deities and ancestors), territorial cults, regional pilgrimages, and imperial sacrifices. Drawing empirically from several decades of research based mainly in Taiwan as well as from secondary sources, I argue that ritual is illuminated when approached as a manifestation of “imagination”. On the one hand, imagination is crucial in the production of various “subjectivies” or identifications (individual, gendered, familial, communal, cultural, national). It is mainly in this production that ritual, as frequently argued, exercises social efficacy. On the other hand, in the rhetorical structure and material organization of space in ritual the agencies of this production are represented (imaged) in the form of alienated or transcendental entities. Imagination is thus, simultaneously, at the core of human creativity as well as a source of alienation. Mediating these creative and alienating trajectories of imagination is desire manifest as fantasy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

P. Steven Sangren is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell University. Prof Sangren received his B.A. from Princeton University and (after three years’ service in the United States Navy) his PhD from Stanford University. His work focuses on Chinese culture and society – especially, gender, religion, and mythic narrative. Drawing inspiration from Marxian and psychoanalytic traditions, he aspires to understand how culture accommodates desire. He is author of History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (Stanford UP) and Chinese Sociologics (Athlone). His current project, tentatively entitled Filial Obsessions, is an analysis and critique of Chinese patriliny and gender ideology.

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