The Eastern Han gaze on popular practices, and the European gaze on Chinese Religions

Event time: 
Wednesday, March 25, 2020 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 202 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

As the universality of “religion” is increasingly questioned, comparative studies of religion need to be rethought. Taking seriously the assertion that religion is a modern concept, I will tell two stories about its development, one set in early China, and the other in early modern Europe. The first is about the sudden interest in prayer, divination, and other popular practices by often state-aligned elites in China in the first few centuries CE. The categories and vocabulary developed during this period would end up shaping the way Europeans missionaries drew their own maps of Chinese society using terms like “religion,” “idolatry,” “God,” and “atheism.” In this second story, the Jesuit recognition of an elite gaze on popular practices was a key part of their personal identification with the state-aligned, “Confucian” point of view. As the rationale for the assertion of the universality of “religion” shifted from Natural Theology to Phenomenology, the same rough map of Chinese religions has been used as the basis for the “comparative study” of religion. These two stories, however, raise the question whether cross-cultural similarities are the product of like natural kinds, or an artifact of a bygone sense of kinship between Mandarins and missionaries.

Mark Csikszentmihalyi is the Marjorie Meyer Eliaser Chair of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and co-founded the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. He publishes on the thought and culture of Early China.

Mark Csikszentmihalyi - Marjorie Meyer Eliaser Chair of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley