A Comparative History of Religion and Secularism in China

Date
Fri November 13th 2009, 4:15pm
Event Sponsor
Center for East Asian Studies
Location
Philippines Conference Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
A Comparative History of Religion and Secularism in China
Speaker: CEAS COLLOQUIUM SERIES Prasenjit Duara, Raffles Professor of Humanities; Director, Humanities and Social Sciences Research;, National University of Singapore Discussant: Mark Lewis, Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Chinese Culture, Stanford University This talk will explore the long durée history of religion and the state in late imperial China in comparative perspective. Religions in China have not historically been associated with tensions over fundamental scriptural or cosmological ideals or with ethnic or communal militancy. Rather, there has been competition between the state, elites and popular groups over the issue of cosmological hegemony and access to cosmological power. Duara will track the ways in which the profile of Chinese society was historically shaped by this fault-line. The question of secularism in modern China has to be understood in the context of this particular difference from the Abrahamic religions.
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