Glorious retweet

US coverage of China is pretty relentlessly negative, so I've taken to following the twitterfeed of People's Daily. Much in the last days has been about preparations for the unprecedented military parade planned for the 70th anniversary of the Japanese surrender, September 3rd. 

Sometimes there's a link to an article in an official news source.

At other times the 140 characters are left to stand on their own. 

And often it's about a striking photograph, a human interest story. I'll let others make sense of the first prisoner amnesty since the death of Mao, but could someone tell me how the third eye bindi has become part of Confucian practice, at least in one unspecified place in East China?

Time for religion?

Yesterday's Shanghai stock market rout was apparently not reported in China's official media! But images of a grotesque 6-meter sculpture of a bull pinning down a bear in Xiamen were. The wry story accompanying is about the incense sticks placed in front of it by investors. Business as usual for Chinese religion, you might say, faith in business as usual. In context it expresses not so much faith in markets as in market control.

信春哥，得永生

I feel down one of those wormholes the internet is famous for - I could retrace my trajectory but it's hardly significant - and found this: Older Brother Chun Religion: Believe in Older Brother Chun, Receive Eternal Life! Brother Chun is the nickname of Chinese pop star 李宇春 Li Yuchun, whose fame peaked about 2009 (according to Wikipedia). She's known as 春哥 Older Brother Chun because of a certain tomboyish look in her youth. Her cult following was especially strong among students. One of my undergrad friends at Fudan (the wonders of WeChat) told me:

it feels like a kind of joke when I was a high school student 5 years ago. It was really popular among us and students shouted "信春哥，不挂科" [Believe in Brother Chun, Don't Fail!] when teachers were to give out exams papers. That is the only ritual.

I'd love to know this following became self-consciously, if parodically, religious - what images of religion fed into it, etc. I'm intrigued also because of the gender switch at its center. Apparently the step from brother Chun to eternal life (and then on to more pressing things like exam success) was the formula 铁血真汉子，春哥纯爷们 Made of Iron and Blood, Chun Ge is Pure Male, often posted with photoshopped pictures of Li's head on a muscled male body.

This is no more "really religious" than the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion, but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting from a religious studies perspective. And it wasn't just students invoking Li's co(s)mic gender switch. Apparently signs were also seen on condemned buildings with the words: 信春哥 房子不会被拆 Believe in Brother Chun, House Won't Be Demolished. More than parody's going on there.

Data

They say all politics is local. The same goes for religion, too, as is made clear by these itineraries of the City God procession in Shanghai in November 1919 and 1920 and April 1924 and 1936. (Look closely and you'll see dotted blue lines along with the red. The red were the day procession, taking the god out of his temple; the blue the evening procession returning to it.) Every step of the way had to be decided. By whom? How? With reference to what needs, precedents, patterns, payments, contingencies, opportunities, godly directives? Religion lives!

YU Zhejun, "Volksreligion im Spiegel der Zivilgesellschaftstheorie: Gottbegrüßungsprozession in Shanghai während der Republikzeit,"

PhD dissertation Leipzig, 2010, 256-8, 263

The religious question in modern China

Questions which can seem merely academic in American religious studies are clearly political here. Witness this from this morning's China Daily, the Foreign Ministry articulating a government policy supporting and respecting religious traditions. The "freedom of religion" language is newish but government intervention is itself traditional here.

Slavoj Zizek, of all people, wrote about this already seven years ago in the New York Times, with his usual delight puncturing the pretensions of liberal observers to be above the fray. "It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it?" (Read the whole article here.)

Receive benefits as if startled

At least until our own times, the most widely published book in the world was a Chinese moral manual called the Tractate of the Most High One on Actions and Consequences (太上感应篇). It was probably composed sometime between the Song and the Ming dynasties, apparently in spirit dictation from the Most High One, who is none other than the divinized Laozi 老子. It's the first example of the "discursive/scriptural modality" in anthropologist Adam Yuet Chao's influential account of the five "modalities of doing religion" to be found in Chinese life, which is both appropriate, given the text's ubiquity, and a little wicked, since the uses of this rather banal text are rather less intellectual than many text-focused understandings of religion might lead you to hope. Besides following the advice in the text, one could attain religious merit simply by reading or rereading it, or by ritually chanting it, and also by printing it and offering it for free distribution. And merit is the name of the game. I've looked through parts of it, conveniently translated by David K. Jordan here. The ledgers of infractions and their consequences are tedious, including what Jordan tartly describes as the seemingly endless and repetitive list of those human deficiencies that strike amateur moralists around the world as so especially fascinating. But the section Jordan calls "How to be good" contains some useful, if all fortune cookie able, advice, including this

受辱不怨 受寵若驚

 which Jordan renders Suffer humiliation without resentment, receive benefits as though startled. (Paul Carus and D. T. Suzuki - yes, them! - translated it as Show endurance in humiliation and bear no grudge. Receive favors as if surprised.) Do you suppose a year in China will get me to the point where I can determine whether good people really are startled at good fortune or only act as though they are? (Beyond its Chinese context this issue connects, of course, to the question of what Max Weber called the theodicy of good fortune, Theodizee des Glücks, and other old bones I've been gnawing on for a long while.)

Adam Yuet Chao, “Modalities of Doing Religion,” in Chinese Religious Life, 

ed. David A. Palmer, Glenn Shive and Philip L. Wickeri (OUP 2011), 67-84, 69; image

什么是宗教学？

My main "research question" for the China year concerns "religious studies in China" - how is "religion" studied and taught by scholars in Chinese university? Religious studies is a recent and fraught field in the US, which I know best, and all indications are that what I've learned to take for granted as "what religious studies is" is in fact a quite local intellectual and institutional formation. I know that, of course, and teach about the contingency and problems of it in "Theorizing Religion" each year, but my reference point has always been the North Atlantic, and more specifically the American case. It was an eye-opener for me to hear Gregory D. Alles at a panel on the not-quite-healed AAR/SBL split at the 2007 AAR Annual Meeting parochialize the intellectual culture of the AAR! His Religious Studies: A Global View made even clearer that particular claims to neutrality, universality and breadth were distinctives of US religious studies rather than the DNA of the field as a whole.

I don't know much yet about religious studies in China (the chapter in Alles' book makes a distinctive recent history clear, and things have doubtless changed since it was written too), but that will surely change quickly. I am truly fortunate to have landed a connection to an actual Religious Studies Department, and at an internationally respected university too. But what is Religious Studies at Fudan? They have a helpful page answering just that question, What is religious science? and it sounds serious. (Curiously the description is in English, even if you access the Chinese page 什么是宗教学.)

What starts out sounding like a pretty conventional old-school western understanding of world religions yields a more nuanced view of the diversity of the phenomena in question at every level. (The only question not asked is the bad boy one: does "religion" exist at all?) Religions have creeds, rituals and canons in variously centralized or diffused, written or other forms, which support moral codes and individual practices and "spiritual experiences" which, when shared, give rise to subtraditions of their own: there are very often several [spiritual] traditions within the same religion. But the way these are studied is academic and impressively (intimidatingly!) interdisciplinary.

7
Another area needs to be included into a curriculum of religious studies: the study of the study of religion. It encompasses historical, socio-economic, cultural and psychological explanatory paradigms. 

8
Philosophy of religion is a connected field, which tries to give meaning to religious experience and creeds in relationship to the philosophical systems of thought that have shaped the history of ideas. 

9
Becoming an expert in religious sciences requires familiarity with some adjacent disciplines and expertise:
(a) languages and textual analysis;
(b) sociological enquiry and methodology, including statistics;
(c) field study, non-directive interviews and anthropological methodology;
(d) history of arts, of sciences and ideas. 

10
Finally, we cannot overlook the contemporary significance of the religious phenomenon; it means formation to interreligious dialogue, religions and globalization, religion and ecology, religion and peacemaking, religions and feminism, religions and psychological healing.

A lot of this sounds familiar, and congenial. We'll see what it's like in practice! I'm sure to learn a lot, both about "religious studies in China," religious studies more generally, and religion - including Chinese religion. I'll probably be learning about all of these together, just as a visitor to American religious studies would find our categories and questions shaped in ways we aren't fully aware of by the inheritances of Protestantism, the enlightenment understandings of religious freedom in our political culture, and current intellectual and cultural issues.