Anthropology lecture, Wish-vows in Chinese Buddhist Temples and the Social Production of “Optative” Selves, by Yang Shen (Fri. Sept 20, 2019)

Anthropology Graduate Lunch Seminar

Wish-vows in Chinese Buddhist Temples and the Social Production of “Optative” Selves

Yang Shen
(Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Boston University)

Friday, September 20^th, 2019 12:00 – 1:30 pm

African Studies Seminar Room, 5th Floor, 232 Bay state Rd, Boston University

Please Contact Kathy Kwasnica at kaek@bu.edu by September 16 at 5 pm to reserve a lunch

In Chinese Buddhist temples, “yuan” activities are widespread, entailing both wish-making and vow-giving. In the eyes of diverse temple-goers in mainland China, wish-vowing is an immediately accessible practice, involving formalistic performative conventions. The talk introduces some of these performative conventions, how they oblige temple-goers to articulate their wish, hope, or desire (namely what relates to the optative mood in the English grammar) in a specific way, and how the yuan narratives commit temple actors to their optative realities. Chinese temple spaces provide a peculiar setting because the setting not only sacralizes the transient moments of wish-vowing but also memorializes them in various ways.

Yang Shen is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, Boston University. Her thesis is titled, Sidestepping Secularism: Performance and Imagination in Buddhist Temple-scapes in Contemporary China.