Download or read book Stating the Sacred Religion China and the Formation of the Nation State written by Michael Walsh and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stating the Sacred offers a novel approach to nation-state formation, arguing that its most critical element is how the state sacralizes the nation. Focusing primarily on China, Michael J. Walsh argues that the foundational role of the sacred makes all nation-states religious states.
Download or read book Stating the Sacred written by Michael J. Walsh and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s constitution explicitly refers to its sovereign domain as “sacred territory.” Why does an avowedly secular state make such a claim, and what does this suggest about the relations between religion and the nation-state? Focusing primarily on China, Stating the Sacred offers a novel approach to nation-state formation, arguing that its most critical element is how the state sacralizes the nation. Michael J. Walsh explores the religious and political dimensions of Chinese state ideology, making the case that the sacred is a constitutive part of modern China. He examines the structural connection among texts (constitutions, legal codes, national histories), ostensibly universal and normative categories (race, religion, citizenship, freedom, human rights), and territoriality (the integrity of sovereignty and control over resources and people), showing how they are bound together by the sacred. Considering a variety of what he refers to as theopolitical techniques, Walsh argues that nation-states undertake sacralization in order to legitimate the violence of establishing and expanding their sovereignty. Ultimately, territorialization is a form of sacralization, and the foundational role of the sacred makes all nation-states religious states. Stating the Sacred offers new ways of understanding China’s approach to legality, control of the populace, religious freedom, human rights, and the structuring of international relations, and it raises existential questions about the fundamental nature of the nation-state.
Download or read book The Nation Form in the Global Age written by Irfan Ahmad and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-29 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book argues that contrary to dominant approaches that view nationalism as unaffected by globalization or globalization undermining the nation-state, the contemporary world is actually marked by globalization of the nation form. Based on fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and drawing, among others, on Peter van der Veer’s comparative work on religion and nation, it discuss practices of nationalism vis-a-vis migration, rituals of sacrifice and prayer, music, media, e-commerce, Islamophobia, bare life, secularism, literature and atheism. The volume offers new understandings of nationalism in a broader perspective. The text will appeal to students and researchers interested in nationalism outside of the West, especially those working in anthropology, sociology and history.
Download or read book An Anthropological Inquiry into Confucianism written by Guo Wu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthropological Inquiry into Confucianism provides a chronological, historicized reappraisal of Confucianism as a belief system and a way of life that revolves around three key concepts: ritual (Li), emotion (qing), and rational principle (li). Instead of examining all pertinent concepts of Confucianism, the book focuses on how Confucian thinkers grappled with these three words and tried to balance them throughout multiple dynasties and by polemics an practice performing rites in daily life. Informed by the theory and perspectives of anthropology, Guo Wu revisits the origin of Confucianism and treats it as part of the legacy of pre-textual worshipping and funerary rites which are incorporated, recorded, and interpreted by Confucians. An anthropological angle continues to flesh out the extant Confucian classics by reinterpreting the parts concerning the human-human, human-animal, and human-sacred objects relations. Modern anthropological studies are referenced to showed how Confucian ritualism permeated to the lifeworld of Chinese villages since the Song dynasty and revived in Ming-Qing dynasties along with a resurgent interest in the expression of human emotions, which had an inherent tension with (Heavenly) rational principle. The book concludes that the Confucian balancing of the triad continues into the 21st century along with its revival in China.
Download or read book A Certain Justice written by Haiyan Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-06-05 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A much-needed account of the hierarchy of justice that defines China’s unique political-legal culture. To many outsiders, China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. In this highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, Haiyan Lee contends that this image arises from a skewed understanding of China’s political-legal culture, particularly the failure to distinguish what she calls high justice and low justice. In the Chinese legal imagination, Lee shows, justice is a vertical concept, with low justice between individuals firmly subordinated to the high justice of the state. China’s political-legal culture is marked by a mistrust of law’s powers, and as a result, it privileges substantive over procedural justice. Calling on a wide array of narratives—stories of crime and punishment, subterfuge and exposé, guilt and redemption—A Certain Justice helps us recognize the fight for justice outside the familiar arenas of liberal democracy and the rule of law.
Download or read book Sparks written by Ian Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital account of how some of China's most important writers, filmmakers, and artists haver overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground, its monopoly on history"
Download or read book Sacred Economies written by Michael J. Walsh and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhist monasteries in medieval China employed a variety of practices to ensure their ascendancy and survival. Most successful was the exchange of material goods for salvation, as in the donation of land, which allowed monks to spread their teachings throughout China. By investigating a variety of socioeconomic spaces produced and perpetuated by Chinese monasteries, Michael J. Walsh reveals the "sacred economies" that shaped early Buddhism and its relationship with consumption and salvation. Centering his study on Tiantong, a Buddhist monastery that has thrived for close to seventeen centuries in southeast China, Walsh follows three main topics: the spaces monks produced, within and around which a community could pursue a meaningful existence; the social and economic avenues through which monasteries provided diverse sacred resources and secured the primacy of Buddhist teachings within an agrarian culture; and the nature of "transactive" participation within monastic spaces, which later became a fundamental component of a broader Chinese religiosity. Unpacking these sacred economies and repositioning them within the history of religion in China, Walsh encourages a different approach to the study of Chinese religion, emphasizing the critical link between religious exchange and the production of material culture.
Download or read book The Battle for China s Spirit written by Sarah Cook and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle for China’s Spirit is the first comprehensive analysis of its kind, focusing on seven major religious groups in China that together account for over 350 million believers: Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism, and Falun Gong. The study examines the evolution of the Communist Party’s policies of religious control, how they are applied differently to diverse faith communities, and how citizens are responding to these policies. The study—which draws on hundreds of official documents and interviews with religious leaders, lay believers, and scholars—finds that Chinese government controls over religion have intensified since November 2012, seeping into new areas of daily life. Yet millions of religious believers defy official restrictions or engage in some form of direct protest, at times scoring significant victories. The report explores how these dynamics affect China’s overall social, political, and economic environment, while offering recommendations to both the Chinese government and international actors for how to increase the space for peaceful religious practice in a country where spirituality has been deeply embedded in its culture for millennia.
Download or read book State and Religion in China written by Anthony C. Yu and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In State and Religion in China, Anthony Yu takes a fresh look at Chinese religion and its relation to politics. He argues, against those who claim that Chinese politics has been traditionally secular, or even that the Chinese traditionally had no religion that religion has deep roots in the Chinese past, and that the Chinese state has from its creation always interfered in relgious matters.
Download or read book Violence Discourse and Politics in China s Uyghur Region written by Pablo A. Rodríguez-Merino and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how Uyghur-related violent conflict and Uyghur ethnic minority identity, religion, and the Xinjiang region, more broadly, became constituted as a ‘terrorism’ problem for the Chinese state. Building on securitization theory, Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), and the scholarly definitional debate on terrorism, it develops the concept of terroristization as a critical analytical framework for the study of historical processes of threat construction. Investigating the violent events reported in Xinjiang since the early 1980s, the evolving discursive patterns used by the Chinese state to make sense of violent incidents, and the crackdown policies that the official terrorism discourse has legitimized, the book demonstrates how the securitization, and later terroristization, of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, is the result of a discursive and political choice of the Chinese state. The author reveals the contingent and unstable nature of such construction, and how it problematizes the inevitability of the rationale behind China’s ‘war on terror’, that has prescribed a brutal crackdown as the most viable approach to governing the tensions that have historically characterized China’s rule over the Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the politics of contemporary China, security and ethnic minority issues, International Relations and Security, as well as those adopting discursive approaches to the study of security, notably those within the critical security and terrorism studies fields.
Download or read book China written by Human Rights Watch/Asia and published by Human Rights Watch. This book was released on 1997 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - Suppression of cults
Download or read book The Modern Spirit of Asia written by Peter van der Veer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative look at religion and spirituality in postcolonial China and India The Modern Spirit of Asia challenges the notion that modernity in China and India are derivative imitations of the West, arguing that these societies have transformed their ancient traditions in unique and distinctive ways. Peter van der Veer begins with nineteenth-century imperial history, exploring how Western concepts of spirituality, secularity, religion, and magic were used to translate the traditions of India and China. He traces how modern Western notions of religion and magic were incorporated into the respective nation-building projects of Chinese and Indian nationalist intellectuals, yet how modernity in China and India is by no means uniform. While religion is a centerpiece of Indian nationalism, it is viewed in China as an obstacle to progress that must be marginalized and controlled. The Modern Spirit of Asia moves deftly from Kandinsky's understanding of spirituality in art to Indian yoga and Chinese qi gong, from modern theories of secularism to histories of Christian conversion, from Orientalist constructions of religion to Chinese campaigns against magic and superstition, and from Muslim Kashmir to Muslim Xinjiang. Van der Veer, an outspoken proponent of the importance of comparative studies of religion and society, eloquently makes his case in this groundbreaking examination of the spiritual and the secular in China and India.
Download or read book Chinese Religiosities written by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-11-04 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Extraordinarily timely and useful. As China emerges as an economic and political world power that seems to have done away with religion, in fact it is witnessing a religious revival. The thoughtful essays in this book show both the historical conflicts between state authorities and religious movements and the contemporary encounters that are shaping China's future. I am aware of no other book that covers so much ground and can be used so well as an introduction to this important field." —Peter van der Veer, University of Utrecht
Download or read book Making Saints in Modern China written by David Ownby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sainthood" has been, and remains, a contested category in China, given the commitment of China's modern leadership to secularization, modernization, and revolution, and the discomfort of China's elite with matters concerning religion. However, sainted religious leaders have succeeded in rebuilding old institutions and creating new ones despite the Chinese government's censure. This book offers a new perspective on the history of religion in modern and contemporary China by focusing on the profiles of these religious leaders from the early 20th century through the present. Edited by noted authorities in the field of Chinese religion, Making Saints in Modern China offers biographies of prominent Daoists and Buddhists, as well as of the charismatic leaders of redemptive societies and state managers of religious associations in the People's Republic. The focus of the volume is largely on figures in China proper, although some attention is accorded to those in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other areas of the Chinese diaspora. Each chapter offers a biography of a religious leader and a detailed discussion of the way in which he or she became a "saint." The biographies illustrate how these leaders deployed and sometimes retooled traditional themes in hagiography and charismatic communication to attract followers and compete in the religious marketplace. Negotiation with often hostile authorities was also an important aspect of religious leadership, and many of the saints' stories reveal unexpected reserves of creativity and determination. The volume's contributors, from the United States, Canada, France, Italy, China, and Taiwan, provide cutting-edge scholarship. Taken together, these essays make the case that vital religious leadership and practice has existed and continues to exist in China despite the state's commitment to wholesale secularization.
Download or read book Heritage and Religion in East Asia written by Shu-Li Wang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heritage and Religion in East Asia examines how religious heritage, in a mobile way, plays across national boundaries in East Asia and, in doing so, the book provides new theoretical insights into the articulation of heritage and religion. Drawing on primary, comparative research carried out in four East Asian countries, much of which was undertaken by East Asian scholars, the book shows how the inscription of religious items as "Heritage" has stimulated cross-border interactions among religious practitioners and boosted tourism along modern pilgrimage routes. Considering how these forces encourage cross-border links in heritage practices and religious movements in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, the volume also questions what role heritage plays in a region where Buddhism, Taoism, and other various folk religious practices are dominant. Arguing that it is diversity and vibrancy that makes religious discourse in East Asia unique, the contributors explore how this particularity both energizes and is empowered by heritage practices in East Asia. Heritage and Religion in East Asia enriches understanding of the impact of heritage and religious culture in modern society and will be of interest to academics and students working in heritage studies, anthropology, religion, and East Asian studies.
Download or read book Asia and the Secular written by Pascal Bourdeaux and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume looks at the secular state in the context of contemporary Asia and investigates whether there existed before modernity antecedents to the condition of secularity, understood as the differentiation of the sphere of the religious from other spheres of social life. The chapters presented in this book examine this issue in national contexts by looking at the historical formation of lexicons that defined the "secular", the "secular state," and "secularism". This approach requires paying attention to modern vernacular languages and their precedents in written traditions with often a very long tradition. This book presents three interpretive frameworks: multiple modernities, variety of secularisms, and typologies of post-colonial secular states.
Download or read book Islam Beyond Borders written by James Piscatori and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing how the one community of the faith in the Qur'an, the umma, affects competing politics of identity in the Muslim world.
