CFP Deadline: May 1, Workshop, “Religion and Locality in the Chinese World,” Australia

Date: 27-28 August 2013
Location: The Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW), College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University
Convenors: Dr Benjamin Penny, Mr Paul Farrelly

This workshop on “Religion and Locality in the Chinese World,” will explore histories of how religion is created, transmitted, embodied and changed in specific locations in late imperial, modern and contemporary China and Taiwan. Taking not only temples, mosques, churches, schools, tea houses, festival sites, burial grounds and shrines as the locus of research, but also cities, neighbourhoods, counties and districts, it will explore the rich, and often overlooked, details that populate the lived experience of religious activity. Seeking to focus on interactions between place, text and individual agency, the workshop aims to reflect on the layered and specific histories that develop as a consequence of this interplay. Through reducing the scale to a specific locale, phenomena such as religious change, conversion practice, and individual transformation can be reappraised.

Questions to consider may include: How do the particular circumstances of time and place shape religious experience? What is specific to a location that influences the nature of religious practice there? What religious power is embodied in a place? How is the power created or maintained? How are narratives created around a location? How are locations represented in oral and printed media? What is characteristic of the religious world in a particular place? How do the defining religious features of a locality originate?

Interested participants should submit a paper title, abstract with keywords (300 words maximum) along with brief biographical information (name, affiliation) to paul.farrellyATanu.edu.au by 1 May 2013. CIW may be able to provide some financial assistance for the travel and accommodation expenses for successful applicants. The conference will be conducted in English and there is a plan to publish the proceedings in a special edition of East Asian History.

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