State, Ritual & Their Affective Betrayal: Theories and Practices of Governance in China - Michael J. Puett, Shanni Zhao

The state and governance in China have commonly been seen as non-religious. However, this does not imply they are devoid of ritualistic elements. As both the current CCP leadership and ordinary people seek to recuperate social life from market encroachment, affect-charged public
rituals are experiencing a significant resurgence in contemporary urban governance and regime-building. Meanwhile, citizens’ sentiments and dispositions are becoming major subjects of the governing practices. In fact, this state deployment of secular rituals for affective governance can be traced back to early China (c. 1200 B.C. - c. 755 A.D.)—historical periods where indigenous ritual theories and practices flourished. This talk unravels to the audience the interplay of ritual and affect that are essential for understanding the theories and practices of governance in China, from the present to the past.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here. 

About the speakers:

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University. He holds a joint appointment in the EALC and Anthropology departments. His interests focus on the inter-relations between religion, history, anthropology, and philosophy. In his research, Puett aims to bring the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He has published many articles on early Chinese history (c. 1200 B.C. - c. 755 A.D.), as well as on classical Chinese ritual, social, and political theory. Puett is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. 

Shanni Zhao is a sociocultural anthropologist and current Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Stanford Center for East Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Anthropology Department at Harvard University with a secondary field in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests focus on state-making, affect and sentiments, public and mediation, marriage and social reproduction, in both contemporary and 20-Century China. She is currently working on her book project. It takes the state investment in youth matchmaking as a vantage point to study the formation of affective public sphere in China’s metropolises, and, thereby, the relations between marriage-making and state-making, and between power and attraction. She has published two academic articles— “Transgenerational Transmission of Suffering: State Violence, Memory, and Aspiration for Alternative Intimate Lives in Contemporary China,” and “Animals with Parents: the Fictive Kinship of Contemporary China’s Body Politic”—and multiple non-fiction articles on this topic.