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Belief, Science and the “Modern” Divide in Asia
Organizer: Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University
Discussant: Suzanne O’Brien, Loyola Marymount University
The Modern moment in historiographic terms, is steeped in its own “traditional” assumptions. Enlightenment rationality along with scientific thinking is usually considered the relevant index of the extent and stability of modernity. Yet the spatial instantiation of modernity historically remains the nation state, whose undisputable novelty is always discursively denied in early nationalist writing. The nation, temporally new, is given the patina of old historicity. At the same time it is heralded as opposing and superseding “outmoded” beliefs and practices. How then do the new disciplinary impulses of science and reason accommodate themselves within a national imaginaire determined to prove its antiquity? All the papers in this panel grapple with this issue of how people and institutions try to envision emotions, histories and practices which are apparently older than modernity and yet need their place within it. Are religious beliefs, superstitions and ideologically recalcitrant ghosts unaltered residues of the past or does modernity shift the very paradigms of continuity and change? How were the technologies of Euro-American science and social science, and the new cultural and political categories ported with them, applied by actors at various levels of nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian, Japanese and Chinese society? Finally, does comparing these three contexts simply compel us to add further entries to the list of multiple modernities, or does the example of how religion and the supernatural were reworked also prompt a more fundamental questioning of the core propositions of nationalism and modernity?
The Flight of the "Brahmadaitya": Ghosts and their Advocates in colonial Bengal
Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University
Ghosts, like so many other beings in nineteenth-century Bengal, underwent a profound transformation with the coming of modernity. On the one hand there was an intense denial in the creatures' existence in response to the growing influence of European science and rationality. On the other hand the very apparatus of science and rationality was constantly evoked to scientifically "prove" the existence of life after death. The nineteenth-century Bengali thinker liked to include amongst his intellectual passions a taste for the occult, whereby regular planchet sessions in the houses of the great and the good were common occurrence. At these sessions the effort was not just to communicate with the dead but to determine by means of modern science, the constitution, composition and even the philosophy of the spirit world. Put in this contradictory location, the ghosts themselves underwent certain fundamental changes. Their existence being unquestioned in premodernity, their representation in the various tales were similarly free of controversy. Most ghost stories of the pre-colonial era began with the trusting lines: "once there was a ghost." Such a statement was inconceivable in modernity, as the very being of the creature was under dispute. The paper tracks this change in the genealogy of both the ghost and the ghost-story with the coming of colonialism. It is an effort to understand the apparent continuity of the supernatural in a world that was zealously securing its scientific moorings.
Japanese Protestant Christianity and Modernity
Garrett Washington, Purdue University
Not only do religion and modernity intersect, but they can often play pivotal roles in defining one another. When American Protestant missionaries brought their Christianity into Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, they as well as their multiple Japanese audiences associated the doctrine with the conditions of modernity. Despite protest from successive generations of American missionaries, many Japanese Christians maintained that Christianity and modernity were compatible. Certain Japanese Protestant ministers’ inclusion of scientific rationality in their faith and the increasing connections between the Japanese state and the Protestant church were aspects of a Japanese modernity that most missionaries saw as incongruous with true Christianity. By World War I, Japanese Christianity had become a consciously modern, although contested, space that brought the concepts and ideologies of global modernity still under rigorous examination today into the greater Japanese religious discourse. As is particularly evident with late Meiji and early Taisho Tokyo Congregationalist churches, a significant portion of Japan’s political and literary elite were drawn to (or repelled by) these churches. One strand that appears to unite the varied members and passers-through of these churches is their interest in a modern Japan, replete with modern institutions and ideas. In order to better understanding the appeal of these churches to these listeners and their pastors, an analysis of Christian discourse on modernity should constitute a necessary step. This paper will examine Japanese church journal publications as well as American missionary correspondence and publications in an effort to establish the characteristics of a Japanese Christian modernity, and describe the resistance offered by the initial carriers of both modernity and Protestant Christianity.
Surveying and Seeing Religious Practice in Republican China
Rebecca Nedostup, Boston College
The newly-introduced fields of ethnography and sociology appealed to the intellectual world of 1920s and 1930s China by offering up the regenerative possibility of "knowing" society in its completeness. It is not surprising that the social survey also had a firm grip on the imagination of Nationalist government officials, who wished not only to know society but to re-constitute and thereby control it. As a result, new social categories took on great import. The religious and customs surveys of the Kuomintang government offer one way of examining how the newly-arisen and often murky intellectual distinction between illegitimate "superstition" (mixin) and legitimate "religion" (zongjiao) was enacted in local communities. Though their design was influenced by the work of sociologists and folklore specialists, KMT religious surveys were carried out by county officials with little expertise in those subjects and who, moreover, were often the very people charged with simultaneously enacting the party's anti-superstition campaigns. The results they returned reveal a wide variety in the understanding of the meanings of mixin and zongjiao, and yet the finer points of such an understanding were critical to the survival of temples and practitioners. The legacy of the Republican categorization of religious practice continues to be felt today in government statistics that produce notoriously anomalous numbers for Chinese religious affiliations. More broadly, however, these documents shed light on the extent to which the modern categorization of religion has concretely impacted material power, social life and legal rights.