Lecture | China Seminar
Delicate Repertoires - Buddhist Creative Assimilation, Commodification, and Digitalization in Xi’s China
- Date
- Wednesday 30 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Abstract
Since 1980 Buddhism in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter China), has gone through a comprehensive revival, manifested in the restoration and establishment of temples, re-habilitation of monastic and lay communities, and a robust and increasing presence of Buddhist material culture in the public and private sphere. This talk focuses on two interrelated facets of this revival, to explore tangible aspects of lived Buddhism in China today. The first is the economy that evolves around lay Buddhist practice with the production and circulation of Buddhist materials for profit and spiritual purposes. A second facet is the accelerating use of technologies, digitalities, and online modalities for practice, proselytization, and identity-building in the lay Buddhist sphere. We will engage with questions such as: What are the push and pull factors for these Buddhist modalities? What inherent challenges do practitioners of Buddhism in Xi’s China face? And what do online and offline contemporary repertoires of Buddhism tell us about the place of Buddhism in Chinese society today? To explore these questions, we will take both a micro approach, diving into several case studies, and also consider the macro lens of some trends, to see how these examples fit in the larger landscape of religion in contemporary China.
Biography
Dr. Kai Shmushko is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the sociology department at the University of Amsterdam. Currently, she works within the project RECOGNITION, in which she explores religion and spirituality among the Chinese diaspora in the Netherlands. She earned her PhD in Tel Aviv University's Department of East Asian Studies. Her first book, based on her doctoral thesis is titled: “Multiple Liminalities of Lay Buddhism in 21st Century China- Modalities, Material Culture, and Politics” and was published with LUP in 2024. Shmushko’s academic grounding is China Studies, Religious Studies, and Cultural Sociology and Anthropology, with a strong orientation towards on-site and digital ethnography. Her research stands in the nexus of several primary interests: religion and spirituality in the PRC and Taiwan; Chinese migration and diaspora communities; heritage and material culture; religious and cultural production in new media; religion and politics and religious freedom.