Lecture | China Seminar
Daoist Lived Religion from Epigraphic and Archeological Materials
- Date
- Tuesday 17 December 2024
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.29
Abstract
This presentation introduces a multi-year collaborative project that examines archeological and epigraphic materials as materials for understanding the lives of Daoists in pre-modern China. Moving beyond Daoist canonic textual sources, this project seeks to advance the study of Daoism through the use of archaeological and epigraphic materials, including statues, stele inscriptions, cave shrines, temple inscriptions, and inscribed tomb epitaphs. By using these understudied sources to augment, challenge, and correct the canonical sources we seek to further understand the social history of Daoism and explore developments and changes in the lived experience and practices of Daoists that are often invisible in the canonic records. These materials are located in various sites in China and the temporal spread of the project is from the 5th to the 17h century. In this presentation I share several examples from our project to show the importance and significance of this research.
Biography
Gil Raz is Associate Professor of religion at Dartmouth College, specializing in Daoism. While focusing on medieval Daoism, he has also conducted extensive fieldwork in China and Taiwan. His first book, Emergence of Daoism, Creation of Tradition (Routledge, 2012) examined the appearance and development of Daoism as a religion between the second and fifth centuries. His co-edited volume Poetry and Religion in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), is a collection of essays examining the complex interactions of Daoism, Buddhism, poetry, and other literary forms. In recent years his research focuses on archeological and epigraphic materials as sources for Daoist lived religion. His research interests include religious interactions and exchanges in medieval China, notions of the body and sexual practices in Daoism, visual and material religious culture, ritual studies, ideas of sacred time and space.
