Adam Yuet Chau

The Sensorial Production of the Social

In China temple festivals are replete with noises, sights, smells, tastes, and ambient sensory productions. When worshipers converge on a particular temple festival, they produce and experience honghuo (social heat or red-hot sociality). This native concept of honghuo highlights the importance of the social production of a heightened sensory ambience as well as the sensorial production of sociality. In co-producing honghuo the festivalgoers are exhibiting a ‘resonant body-person’ that is in accord with the spirit of mutual responsiveness. I propose a sensory-production model of sensory analysis that foregrounds the active participatory role of social agents in producing a sensorially rich social world. This model extends from, yet also critiques the prevalent cultural phenomenological approach to investigating sensory orders in different cultures. A ‘mindful body’ or an ‘attentive body’ is only the pre-condition for any persons action-full lifeworld.

The Politics of Legitimation and the Revival of Popular Religion in Shaanbei, North-Central China

From the early 1980s onward, popular religion has enjoyed a momentous revival in Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi province), as in many other parts of rural China. But despite its immense popularity, popular religion still carries with it an aura of illegality and illegitimacy. Not properly Daoism or Buddhism, which are among the officially recognized religions, popular religion in theory constitutes illegal, superstitious activities. This article addresses questions of the legality and legitimacy of popular religion by analyzing the case of the Black Dragon King Temple in Shaanbei and its temple boss. It examines how not just popular religiosity but the actions of local elites and local state agents have enabled the revival of popular religious activities, focusing particularly on the legitimation politics engaged in by temples and their leaders.

Modalities of doing religion and ritual polytropy: evaluating the religious market model from the perspective of Chinese religious history

This article examines the Chinese religious landscape through the lenses of ‘modalities of doing religion’ and ‘ritual polytropy’ and explores the implications such different conceptualisations might bring to the religious-market model. It argues that in Chinese religious culture one can identify five modalities of doing religion (the scriptural/discursive, the self-cultivational, the liturgical, the immediate-practical and the relational), each cutting across broader, conceptually aggregated religious traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. Instead of competition between membership-based churches, there is more typically competition within each modality, especially the liturgical modality. Religious pluralism in China is not manifested as the co-existence of, and competition between, confession- and membership-based denominations and churches, but rather as the co-existence of, and competition between, various ritual-service providers with different (though sometimes convergent) liturgical programmes.

An awful mark: symbolic violence and urban renewal in reform-era China

This article investigates the relationship between forms of public writing and power, physical violence and symbolic violence in the context of urban spatial transformation in China. Specifically, it examines the widespread phenomenon in China of painting a big character (chai, meaning ‘to demolish’) on the walls of old buildings that are designated to be demolished. Even though this sign carries a definite semantic meaning, its power is more significantly derived from the form and context of its presentation, and it acts upon, rather than simply communicates to, its intended audience. Inspired by John Austins concept of speech acts, the author calls this and other similar forms of powerful writing ‘text acts’. He argues that the chai phenomenon exemplifies the ways in which authorities resort to forms of powerful writing to effect desired perceptions, to interpellate certain kinds of subjects and to exact accommodating behaviour from these subjects in reform‐era China. His case study focuses on the destruction of old courtyard‐house neighbourhoods in central Beijing.

Hosting Funerals and Temple Festivals: Folk Event Productions in Rural China

Abstract This article examines how Chinese peasants stage important folk event productions such as funerals and temple festivals, and how it might be fruitful to look beyond the ritual-procedural aspects of religious activities and examine how these activities are socially embedded and socially produced. I suggest that there is nothing particularly “religious” about the ways in which popular religious activities are organized; the same set of social skills and organizational idioms used in peasant secular life is employed in staging ostensibly religious activities: volunteerism based on principles of reciprocal labor assistance, division of tasks among helpers and specialists, and the symbolic weight put on the importance of being a good host. I introduce two key concepts, “event production” and “hosting,” to highlight the social aspects of popular religious activities that have not received adequate scholarly attention.

Chinese Socialism and the Household Idiom of Religious Engagement

The conventional approach to studying the impact of Maoism on the Chinese religious landscape (henceforth “Chinese religionscape,” defined here as the totality of the articulations between religious conceptions and practices and their conditions of possibility) focuses on the policies during the Maoist period directly and explicitly relating to the management, control and suppression of religious institutions, personnel and activities. This includes the analyses of, for example, the establishment of the state bureaucratic organs in charge of the officially recognized religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism); the anti-religion/anti-traditionalist policies that aimed at eradicating not only the so-called “feudal superstitions” but also, at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, the entirety of religion as a domain of social and personal life; the opportunistic deployment of certain religious traditions in the service of international diplomacy (e.g. Buddhism in dealing with Japan and the Buddhist countries of South and Southeast Asia and Islam in dealing with Islamic countries in the Middle East and later in the post-Soviet Central Asia). Part of this approach of course is a description and analysis of how different “religions” responded to the challenges, suppression and manipulation. There are three inter-related problems with such an approach.

Human Organs in Oil Tank Trucks: An Extractology

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s the northern part of Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi Province) and neighbouring areas of Inner Mongolia have been experiencing a huge economic boom, thanks to the discovery and successful extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas. While conducting fieldwork on the revival of popular religion in this region in the mid- and late 1990s, I came across various stories relating to suspicions of human organs being transported in large oil tank trucks going out of Shaanbei. Could there have been a link between what is invisible that lies underneath the surface of the earth (coal and oil) and those that lie within human bodies but then allegedly taken out and transported in oil tank trucks (human organs)? This article proposes an ‘extractological’ approach that brings together yet diverges from the methodological and theoretical concerns in anthropological studies on extractive industries and the commercialisation of human organ transplants. In analysing the image of ‘human organs in oil tank trucks’ in juxtaposition with various other pertinent extractological scenarios, an analytical tack emerges, crucially drawing upon Carlo Severi’s work on images and pictography, that goes beyond (or by-passes?) the anti-extraction politics of indignation and points towards an anthropology of conceptual interfacing and articulation (through investigating various kinds of ‘conceptual clutches’).

Culinary subjectification: The translated world of menus and orders

The idea for this article began with a couple of innocent questions: How would one translate the word “menu” (i.e., restaurant menu) into the native languages of people without any experience of restaurants and menus? And how would you explain to them how ordering from the menu works? It quickly became clear that translating the word “menu” entails not only translating the world of restaurant-going and ordering from the menu but also our (i.e., ideal-typically Western) very conceptual and social world, which is another way to say that what seems to be a humble piece of paper listing a certain number of dishes is itself made by the world in which it is found and in turn contributes in a significant way to making that world. In this article I examine the restaurant menu as a world-making social and translocutional/transinscriptional technology (the menu as menu-logic and cosmo-menu). As a kind of text act that is situated at but one of many “iterative/inscriptional stations” along an indeterminate and continuous chain of translocutions and transinscriptions, the menu highlights the temporal dimension of all kinds of translations (translingual, intralingual, transmodal, transcultural, etc.).