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| About
me |
I
am an
American scholar of modern Chinese history, and have been based in
Singapore since 2003. Before coming to NUS, I lived
in various places in China and Japan, and since then have visited most
of the countries in Southeast Asia. If felt really ambitious, I
might promise to put up travel photos.
On this
page, you will find a all manner of information about my research
on the history and religion of China, as well as some interesting
pictures and student papers on religion in Malaysia. Most of my
own papers are available for download from this site - just follow the
links.
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| Religion
in
North China |
Sacred Village
When
I was first living in Shandong during the early 1990s, I spent a lot of
time cycling around
the countryside, and was amazed by vitality of the living religious
traditions of rural North China. When I went back to work on my
PhD, I decided to examine these traditions, the role they played in
local society, and how they have changed over the past century. This
took me
back to China, where I conducted fieldwork in Cangzhou, an unassuming
stop on the train between Tianjin and my old home of Ji'nan.
The
result was my first book, The Sacred Village:
Social Change and
Religious Life in Rural North China (University of Hawai'i
Press, 2005)
Table of
Contents
Introduction
(download
as .pdf)
Ch.
1 Background : rural Cang
County
Ch.
2 Religious life and the village
community
Ch.
3 Spirits, sectarians, and Xiangtou : religious
knowledge in local
culture
Ch.
4 Monastic Buddhism : the limits of institutional
religion
Ch.
5 Pseudomonastic sectarians : the Li sect in town
and country
Ch.
6 Apocalyptic sectarians : the way of penetrating
unity and the end of
days
Ch.
7 Village sectarians : the Most Supreme and Heaven
and Earth
Teachings
Conclusion
: Cang County and Chinese religion
The
Chinese translation: 神聖的乡村：華北鄉村的社會變遷與宗教生活 should be coming out soon.
The review essay “从非常态到常态历史：清代秘密社会史近著述评”
by Cao Xinyu of Renmin University captures very accurately the point I
tried to make about the place of religious groups in local society. It
is available at the Chinese
site, or you can download it here.
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From inside Sacred Village...
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Village sectarians of the Heaven and Earth Teaching (Tiandimen). Although scholars often
associate these groups
with violence, they are actually the foundation of everyday religious
life in much of rural China.
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A government perspective on religion: This is newspaper propaganda from
the 1951 campaign to eradicate a religious
group called the Way of Penetrating Unity (Yiguandao).
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Changing Ideas
of Religion in
East and
Southeast Asia
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Over
the past few decades, scholars have spent a lot of time tracing the
origins of what we
now think of as a "global" culture. Many of the ideas that we take for
granted --
especially ones about culture and politics -- are really Western in
origin, and date from a time when Europeans were able to force their
will
and ideas upon much of the world. Some have claimed that the idea of
religion
that we use today -- what religion is, what role it should play in
society -- come from this very specific moment of history. This is
important because if true, it means that we should not be using these
to think about religion further back
in history, or in non-Western societies.
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I
have been interested in these questions for some time. For the 2003
ICAS
conference, I thought through some of these problems in a paper
entitled "Area
Studies, history and
religion: Discipline and the
problems
of social science paradigm." My colleague Chi
Zhen and I are now
preparing to publish this paper in Chinese as ”区域研究，历史与宗教：
科学与社会科学的范式问题.“
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This
was followed in 2005 with "Imperialism, Hegemony and the Construction
of Religion in East and Southeast Asia," which explored
some of the ways that European ideas and practices of religion were
felt in Asia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. It
appeared in the "Theorizing Empire" theme issue of the journal History and Theory,
Vol. 44, 4, December 2005.
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Casting Faiths
In that same year, an especially attractive group of
scholars met in Singapore for a three-day workshop to discuss this
question in greater detail, using a variety of current and historical
examples from Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and
Vietnam. Over the past few years, we have revised a selection of
these
papers into Casting
Faiths:
Imperialism and the Transformation of
Religion in East and Southeast Asia, a unique
edited volume, recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Casting Faiths examines exactly how new
ideas and practices of religion were accepted, not merely into
discourse, but into a variety of practices, including law, governance,
education, and religious mission, and should be available as an e-book
later this year.
Introduction
The transformation of religion in East and Southeast Asia –
paradigmatic change in regional perspective, Thomas DuBois (download
as .pdf)
I. Orientalism and the
western
recasting of Buddhism
- From Thathanadaw to Theravāda Buddhism: Constructions of Religion and
Religious Identity in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Myanmar, Alexey Kirichenko
- Publishing Eastern Buddhism: D.T Suzuki's journey to the West, Judith Snodgrass
II. Mission and meaning in
Christianity
- The Education of Annie Howe: Missionary Transformations in late Meiji
Japan, Roberta Wollons
- Idols and
Art: Missionary Attitudes towards Indigenous Worship and the
Material Culture on Nias, Indonesia, 1904-1920, Mai-lin Tjoa-Bonatz
- The Virgin heads South: Northern Catholic Refugees and their Clergy
in
South Vietnam, 1954-64, Peter Hansen
III. State and
religious
ethnicity
- The Making of Islamic Law: Local Elites and Colonial Authority in
British Malaya, Iza
Hussin
- Christian Conversion and Ethnic Identity in East Kalimantan, Jennifer Connolly
- Recasting
Religion and Ethnicity: Tourism and Socialism in Northern
Sichuan, 1992-2005, Donald
Sutton and Xiaofei Kang
IV. New media and new religion
- Japanese media and
Manchurian Cultural Community: Religion in the Shengjing Times, 1907-1944, Thomas DuBois
- Showing
Faith: Exhibiting Ōmoto to Consumers in Early Twentieth Century
Japan, Nancy Stalker
Afterword
Questioning faiths?
Casting doubts, Oscar
Salemink
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| Religion in Manchuria |
In
1931, Japanese troops captured the three provinces of the Chinese
northeast, a region commonly known as Manchuria. The
following year,
Japan engineered the declaration of the territory as a new country,
which it called
Manchukuo (meaning "nation of Manchuria") . Only a handful of
foreign governments ever recognized the new state. Most observers
considered it to be little more than a simple puppet of Japanese
imperialism, and after thirteen short years, Manchukuo disappeared into
history.
Despite its checkered past,
Manchukuo is interesting to historians
because it was at the cutting edge of many social and political trends.
Since Manchukuo was engineered from the ground up, its creators were
free to imagine a completely new, advanced society that was also
supposed to be uniquely Asian. Manchukuo is a very good image of what
certain people at the time considered to be the Asian "land of
tomorrow."
For the past few years, I
have
been researching religion and society in Manchuria,
with a special emphasisis on the Manchukuo period. The project has
taken
me into new areas, such as law and the history of ideas. Eventually,
all of this research will to come together in a new book on the
formation of religion as a social institution on the Manchurian
frontier, but in the meantime, I have published a few interesting
papers:
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"Local
religion and imperial imaginary: the development of Japanese
ethnography in
occupied Manchuria," appeared
in
the American
Historical Review,
Vol. 111, no. 1 (2006) and examines how Japanese scholars
such as Ōmachi Tokuzō came to understand a particular view of Chinese
religion that was based on their own understanding of national spirit
and civilizational progress.
This propaganda poster depicts "the harmony between the people and the
army" -- one vision of how Manchukuo would progress
under Japanese
guidance.
- www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.1/dubois.html
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"Japanese
print media and Manchurian cultural community:
religion in
the pages of the Shengjing Times, 1907-1944" examines
a
Japanese-owned newspaper
published in Shenyang to ask hether the popular press created opinions
or reflected them. This paper appears as a chapter in Casting Faiths.
At right another form of publication: a Japanese postcard of the Shinto
shrine in Harbin.
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"Rule
of Law in a Brave New Empire: Legal Rhetoric and Practice in
Manchukuo," was
recently
published in the Law
and
History Review, Vol.
26, 2 (2008), and examines why law was so important to the
short-lived state. The answer, I conclude,
lies in the importance of law to how states and societies define
themselves.
This picture at shows one moment of this history, the 1937 Japanese
abrogation of extraterritorial rights in Manchukuo.
- www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/26.2/dubois.html
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“Manchukuo’s filial sons:
States,
sects and the transformation of graveside piety,” will appear in
the December 2008 issue of the journal East Asian History.
This article shows how the custom of keeping vigil at the tomb of
a dead parent became a source of magical power, which a series of
governments both feared and sought to cash in on.
The picture at right shows the tomb of a "filial son" in the middle of
the city of Changchun. This tomb was a pilgrimage site during the
Japanese period, and continued to attract visitors until it was razed
in 1957.
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"The politics of charity: Daoyuan-Red Swastika Society 1920-1940."
Throughout the 1920s, a combination of ineffective government and a
series of natural and manmade disasters brough untold suffering
millions of Chinese. In response, charitable groups such as the Red
Swastika Society rose to organize relief efforts. The formation of
Manchukuo divided the group, but out of such events they developed the
tradition of political independence seen today in groups like the
Tzu-chi Foundation or Médecins Sans Frontières.
The Red Swastika Society remains active in Hong Kong, Taiwan and
Southeast Asia today. On the right the front entrance to a Red Swastika
grade school in Malacca.
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"'God Bless Manchukuo:' the Manchurian
Origins of Vatican Diplomacy"
Catholic missionaries of the French Missions Etrangeres de Paris were
established in Manchuria as early as the 1870s, and by the 1930s were
an important and politically well-connected part of society. While few
in
the Vatican supported Japanese actions, diplomats such as Cardinal
Eugenio Pacelli recognized in Manchukuo a unique need and opportunity
to transform how the Holy See conducted relations with non-Catholic
states.
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| Conferences |
Since
coming to
NUS, I have planned two conferences, both of which were funded
by grants from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Asia Research
Institute.
The first was the "Casting Faiths" workshop that Maitrii Aung-Thwin and
I organized in 2005. |
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The second
was "Chinese
Nation , Chinese State,"
the Biennial
Conference of the Historical
Society for Twentieth Century China (HSTCC), which was
held in
Singapore,
June 26-28,
2006.
For paper
and panel descriptions, follow the link to the conference website. |
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| Chinese
Religion in Malaysia |
Temples
in Malacca
and Penang
Anyone
who visits
heavily Chinese cities in Malaysia cannot help being struck by the
vibrant life surrounding temples, shrines and religious practices.
There are a number of very good books on this topic, and I do not claim
any sort of expertise, but over the past few years, I have collected
few hundred photographs of Chinese temples, ancestral associations and
the like. I am currently preparing brief photographic maps of such
sites in Malacca and Penang. These should be up soon.
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Student
papers:
Religion and Society in Malacca
In
Spring of 2006,
five honors students from the Department of History at NUS embarked on
a special course in which we conducted fieldwork in Malacca on topics
related to religion and society. Each student wrote an
outstanding paper, and since that time, I have come across the same
topics, often in scholarly settings, but never done quite as
well.
I have
recently posted both these papers on the Chinese
Religion in Malaysia website. The map and
photos will be up as soon as I can get to them. |
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| Recipe
BLOG and food videos! |
So you like food, do ya?
Well have a look my nerdly recipe
blog at www.recipeeps.blogspot.com
If you want to see some tasty food in the making, watch
this expert making my all-time winter breakfast -- jianbing guozi - filmed in Ji'nan, in December
2008.
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Contact
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e-mail: histdd
"at"
nus.edu.sg
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Department
of
History
National
University of Singapore 11 Arts
Link
SINGAPORE
117570
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