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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 7.2 (2024): 222–253; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.07.02.07
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions)
Entangling Bodies and Places: Material Agency in Urbanizing China
Keping WU
Duke Kunshan University
keping.wu@dukekunshan.edu.cn
Wenxuan YANG 楊文渲
Duke Kunshan University
Abstract: China’s fast urbanization takes place concomitantly with the drastic alteration of space. How do people respond to the changing physical forms of space and recreate rituals through the (lack of) material things? In Suzhou, where the current ethnographic research is conducted, rituals have emerged on the most unexpected spots: by a garbage disposal, package delivering station, and by the deserted riverbank. At all those locations stood former temples/shrines that gods and ghosts used to occupy but were demolished to make way for urban infrastructure. Despite repeated banning and purging of deities and temples, worshippers—the dispossessed former villagers navigating the uncertainty of urban worlds—burn incense and paper money, make offerings, and become possessed in those places. The gods’ agency seems to be exercised even after their temples and bodies are destroyed. Rather than simply interpreting this as resistance against modern urbanism and sabotage against the urban infrastructure, this study focuses on the agency of gods and explores how bodies and places ‘intra-act’ to produce rituals of efficacy. Echoing the literature on materiality and entanglement, this study explores the relationships among physical space, the human body, and the materiality of agency.
Keywords: materiality, spirit mediums, body, place, entanglement
About the Authors: Keping Wu is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. She is the co-editor of It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth (Berghahn 2019) and co-author of Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies (Cambridge 2017). Her main area of research is religion and urbanization, religious and ethnic pluralism, and women spirit mediumship in contemporary China.
Wenxuan Yang is a research assistant at Duke Kunshan University, and worked previously at Trinity College Dublin and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She obtained BSc in Computer Software Engineering at Fudan University, and BA German at Jiangsu University of Technology.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
