Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

This presentation explores the discourses on womanhood in PRC’s state-sanctioned Church (TSPM) through examining the comic series “Sister Martha.” Its protagonist Martha, a Maoist “iron girl” who lives a Christian life while upholding communist ideologies, is explored as a nexus of responses to various social, religious and political questions in the post-Maoist China. This presentation complicates the Western liberal critique that TSPM church is “less Christian” as a site of CCP’s manipulation of religious freedom. By engaging with post-colonial, feminist and Islamic theorists, I explore the comic to show how the TSPM church community can also be generative of feminist theology and Christian women’s practice in contemporary China.

This paper compares the implications of two spiritual exercises in the context of Indonesian-Chinese Christianity 25 years after the May 1998 riot that traumatized many Chinese-Christian people. I compare and analyze Inward Training, a Taoist mysticism text, and several writings by Howard Thurman on meditation and centering down. Inward Training pictures the presence of “The Way” and a vital flow of energy (ching) within the cosmos, including the self, that requires cultivation for harmonious living. Quite parallelly, Thurman argues the human Spirit contains latent “inner vitality” that must be realized and unleashed, and the discipline of moving in necessitates venturing to great lengths outside oneself. Because these two moral texts emerge from different contexts, they carry a distinct extrovertive expression. I will compare how these two spiritual exercises could be appropriated to Indonesian-Chinese Christianity in the aftermath of socio-religious trauma to precipitate healing.

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How did Confucian officers of the imperial court during the Song and Ming dynasties conceptualize the relationship between official ritual spaces and the cosmos? Records of court discussions on the proper construction of official ritual spaces divulge an imperative that altar terraces and temples must exactingly match the ebb and flow of particular spheres of the cosmos. Confucian officers did not imagine the correspondence between built space and cosmic sphere as merely second-order symbolic representations of a purportedly more real cosmos. Rather, the rites conducted at imperial altar terraces and in temples were seen as an integral part of the cosmic order of things. This paper basis its findings on a comparison of Suburban Feastings conducted at Round Terrace, understood as a microcosm of Vaulted Firmament, and Libation Rites at Culture Temple that housed the sages, worthies, and scholars who transmitted the Dao.

This paper addresses justifications for why ritual sacrifices to Confucius in the late imperial period continued to include beef offerings, contrasting with a widely followed taboo on killing bovines and consuming beef observed in daily life and non-Confucian ritual practices. Dating only back to the Tang-Song transition, this taboo was a late addition to practices shared amongst Chinese religious traditions. Nevertheless, it had a significant impact on food and ritual cultures, giving rise to new conflicts about ritual purity and meat consumption. Though some Confucian fundamentalists rejected it as non-canonical, late imperial sources record many examples of others struggling to negotiate the sacrificial tradition with their personal observances of the taboo. Using examples from popular morality texts, I explore how their author, a late Qing Confucian socio-moral reformer, navigated this tense religious environment, as he championed the beef taboo while also defending Confucius' continued ritual beef consumption.

What does the Ji yi chapter in Record of Rites say about techniques for maintaining the proper countenance when approaching spirits of the dead, especially as a part of visualization practice? It shows that visualizing one's deceased ancestors is tied to maintaining the correct countenance and affect during sacrifice. Some influential accounts of early moral self-cultivation, such as the Mencius, incorporate the similar underlying principle that one is more apt to act morally in the real or imagined gaze of one's family members. While the existence of ritual impersonators of the dead is acknowledged to be a part of funerary ritual, re-descriptions of early Chinese self-cultivation practice often leave out summoning the dead in favor of an emphasis on the development of the individual's faculties. In examining the role of visualizing the dead during ritual offerings, this paper asks, What is lost when one forgets them?

Making offerings to Confucius in Confucian temples (kong miao/wen miao) is a widespread practice in Mainland China, South Korea, and much of the Chinese Diaspora. Based on recent ethnographic work, this paper surveys the diverse ritual offerings to Confucius in temple settings today, with a focus on the varied and innovative practices in mainland China, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the United States. In analyzing ritual offerings to Confucius, questions arise regarding the ritual process, ritual meaning, as well as the possible impact of social factors such as national and cultural identities. In the ever-changing contemporary realities of lived Confucian traditions, Confucius is unfailingly a deity to whom ritual offerings must be made.

Classical philosophy in Jainism develops along two main textual traditions, one stemming from the Tattvārthasūtra, a Sanskrit work attributed to Umāsvāti (350-400); and the other from a group of works composed in Jain Śaurasenī and attributed to Kundakunda (from early 4th c. CE to 8th c. CE). In both cases, the seminal works are manuals of soteriology within which correct knowledge and, from this, the characterization of methods to acquire it, has a determining position. This talk aims, first, at clarifying some aspects of this centrality of knowledge in Jainism and, second, at assessing how this affects their theories of knowledge, by focusing on Kundakunda's seminal Samayasāra(SSā), Essence of the Self. I will especially focus on how it is possible to know the nature of a self which operates only in its own realm and is radically distinct from karmic matter, whose effects only we can measure.

The presentation explores Abhinavagupta's account of the move from knowing through emotion in everyday experience to knowing an emotion directly through aesthetic experience. For Abhinava, emotions are some of the subject-side factors that shape what objects of experience appear and how they're further conceptualized. In aesthetic experience, the latent impressions for core human emotions may be triggered in a way that moves beyond an individual's normal restrictions on how they see their world. When this happens, the emotion may be savored directly, as an object of human experience, rather than as a factor shaping how a different object manifests. This savoring is not an abstraction that moves away from embodied human experience, but rather carves more deeply into what it means to be human than our ordinary experiences normally afford.

In my paper, I will first sketch Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) epistemic stance and then relate it to his vision for making a new public in colonial India. Unlike publications that relate Tagore’s critique of nationalism to his cosmopolitan views, my paper will attempt to illustrate how this critique emanates from his rejection of some contemporary epistemic projects.  

Many commentaries have been written on the “butterfly dream” from the Zhuangzi. They consider it from various theoretical and practical angles. This paper continues in this spirit by reflecting on how the “butterfly dream” can help us to live more flourishing lives via its engendering, ironically, both perspectival doubt and perspectival confidence, as well as more fluid shifts between the two. In section one, I clarify what is meant by both “doubt” and “confidence” along with several ways in which they can be directed towards their relevant targets: entire perspectives (rather than merely individual propositions or sets of propositions). In section two, I then explore how the “butterfly dream” can be read as inviting readers to use both thought and feeling to shift between perspectives more fluidly, in part by focusing their attention on what might be termed “fit” rather than “truth” or “accuracy”, and why these explorations are significant. 

Knowledge (zhi ) often appears in early Confucian texts as a positive state for which we should strive. Some early Confucian texts suggest that other states are more valuable than knowledge, which value is primarily instrumental. Other passages suggest that knowledge is valuable in itself, and most curiously, there are certain passages in which knowledge appears as potentially harmful. Looking specifically to three major early Confucian texts, the Lunyu (Analects) of Confucius, the Mengzi, and the Xunzi, I argue early Confucians take knowledge to be a state the goodness that is qualified due to the possibility of different forms of knowledge, corresponding to greater or lesser ability, understanding, and associated skill. This marks knowledge as a fundamentally different kind of state than virtues such as filiality (xiao 孝), which early Confucians understand as unqualifiedly good, even if not alone sufficient for the achievement of full moral development.

This paper presents data from a longitudinal EEG study on dreaming, spirituality, and attachment to supernatural agents. It highlights to role of dreaming in processing social relationships and emotional dynamics, and proposes a new framework for taking a relational approach within the cognitive science of religion. 

This presentation argues for integrating enactive cognition into CSR, using Agency Detection as a case study. This key element in CSR’s explanatory model faces increasing skepticism, due in part to a lack of experimental confirmation. One proposal is to recast agency detection in terms of predictive processing. While this is promising, serious concerns remain, e.g. the ultimate sources of the “priors” that inform prediction, and compatibility with evolution. Enactive cognition offers a better approach: a fully embodied, socially embedded model. AGENT is not a mental representation triggered. Rather, under specifiable configurations of the brain-body-world nexus, a disruption in goal-directed action engages an embodied agency-attunement that guides behavior in re-establishing action. The perception of agency emerges from ‘agency-attuned’ responses—it is enacted rather than detected. This model encompasses key contributions of predictive processing, but eliminates problematic cognitivist assumptions, preserving the role of ‘agency detection’ within CSR. Additional contributions will be suggested. 

In this paper I explore the hypothesis that a range of characteristically religious phenomena -- from spirit possession and ritual action to divinization and religious healing -- are found where two aspects of human behavior that are normally conjoined come apart, namely, voluntary action and the feeling of consciously willing that action.  I argue that this hypothesis preserves the key insights of the explanatory model that has predominated the cognitive science of religion -- namely, the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality, our so-called “theory of mind” faculty -- while subsuming this model within a more comprehensive theoretical framework.  At the same time, it frees the cognitive approach from some problematic presuppositions that have placed it at odds with more established humanistic approaches to the study of religion.

T.M. Luhrmann has demonstrated the role of mental imagery practices, called “kataphatic prayer,” in allowing evangelical Christians to hear God and interact with Him through their physical senses and their minds. The online community of tulpamancers employs similar practices to develop a kind of imaginary friend within their mind, known as a tulpa. Scholarship has not yet engaged in a sustained comparison of the two communities and their use of kataphatic techniques. This paper fills that gap, seeking to understand how the psychological processes in question foster the experience of contact with a non-human other (God in the case of evangelical Christians and tulpas in the case of tulpamancers) and examining the role of faith and an encouraging community as supporting elements in the process. Additionally, I explore how these mental interactions with non-human others can provide psychological benefits like bolstering emotional well-being and mitigating negative effects of mental illness.

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has to date been dominated by evolutionary approaches to religion built on a cognitivist, computational understandings of the mind. Even as cognitive science has, since the late 1990s, begun to move away from such frameworks, CSR has yet to evolve accordingly. The cognitive scientific study of meditation (CSM) was introduced in the early 1990s from a non-cognitivist perspective, namely embodied and enactive cognition, however this subfield has been compromised by key tenets of Buddhist modernism like Buddhist exceptionalism and the idea that Buddhist meditation is itself a science of the mind. This paper will seek to address this lacuna in CSR and evade these shortcomings of the subfield of CSM by sketching out an enactive approach to the study of contemporary Abrahamic contemplative practice in North America.

Cookies, badges, bridges, troops, uniforms, pins, pledges, gestures, handbooks: the Girl Scouts of the USA is a ritually dense, proto-religious organization that provides a remarkable case study for the challenges of ritual change and evolution, particularly as attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion has brought new attention to the idea of ritual inclusivity. This paper explores a tension at the core of Girl Scout identity and its impact on ritual change and evolution: specifically, the self-professed description of the Girl Scouts as a “Movement” dedicated to evolution and change, alongside its commitment to historicity and continuity. The struggle for ritual change will be examined in three core aspects of Girl Scout identity: (1) cookies; (2) the pledge; and (3) gender. 

The Five Planets meditation/actualization ritual recorded in one of the original Shangqing Daoist scriptures, Perfected Scripture of the Eight Immaculate, ascribes supreme power to the female deity instead of the male deities in a tripartite celestial hierarchy. This deviates from traditional power structure of an older but comparable actualization method that involves ingestion of qi of the Five Directions in the Array of Five Talismans of the Lingbao. This paper will examine the points by which the former departs from the latter and demonstrate, through Catherine Bell’s theory on “the ritualized body,” how the “ritualization” of absorption of astral glint, which signifies feminine power, has helped emerging Shangqing Daoism to differentiate and privilege its new scheme the old ones. The reordering of power was so influential that later Daoist scriptures felt obligated to address the issue of central power of divine feminine spirits, despite their varying degrees of agreement.

In this paper, I revisit a provocative suggestion made by anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano in his 1981 article “Rite of Return: Circumcision in Morocco”—his suggestion that, at least in some cases, rites of passage would be better classified as rites of return. I develop this idea on the basis of fieldwork I have conducted on male initiation rites in northern Mozambique. Specifically, I compare two different regional male initiation rites, one called nipantta and the other called jando. In the historical eclipsing of the former by the latter, one sees a decreasing emphasis on the maternal and the feminine, and an increasing emphasis on linear, unidirectional change (i.e., the “passage” from sexually amorphous children to pure, independent, and unambiguous men). In recovering the wisdom of nipantta I present an ethnographic resource for rethinking classic theories of male rites “of passage”—in ways that are less androcentric and less linear.

The India-based Adhiparasakthi Hindu tradition focuses on achieving both spiritual and humanitarian aims including positive social change. This contemporary guru-led Goddess tradition under the leadership of Indian Guru, Bangaru Adigalar represents a contemporary movement within modern Hinduism. Central to this tradition is the Guru’s directive which has implemented an innovative structure of ritual authority instantiating women's leadership in ritual, and an egalitarian nondiscrimination discourse. This innovative structure of ritual authority demonstrates a marked difference from traditional Hindu orthodox practices which maintain a male Brahman priesthood delimited by caste and gender restrictions. Prioritizing female ritual authority has served to expand the purview of women’s religious expression and agency within the tradition. This paper examines the ways in which a consideration for humanitarian equity promoted within the Adhiparasakthi organization and its North American diaspora communities has both modified and challenged traditional views of gender and ritual authority from within a religious framework.

The Tamil yogin Sri Sabhapati Swami (ca. 1828–1936) is known for his elaborate visual depictions of the Royal Yoga for Śiva, but lesser known is the attention paid to musical poetry and sound within his publications, which span Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, and English language worlds. In addition to lyrical songs and poetic compositions, Sabhapati also included instructions on the aural recitation of musical notes and mantric seed-syllables (bījamantra), framing them as fragmented powers of the syllable Om. He was probably the first modern yogin to develop a practice of silent chanting linked to the purification of the five elemental principles (tattvas), cakras, and lotuses. This paper analyzes how singing and aurality played an integral part of Sabhapati’s yogic literature as well as at a contemporary temple devoted to him, with special focus on how it was designed to enhance meditative practice as well as benefit audiences of devotees.

This paper explores the world of religious songs called ginans. Ginans, from the Sanskrit jnana ("gnosis”), are devotional poems and hymns attributed to Ismaili pīrs, or Muslim saints. The performance of these songs is of special importance to the Satpanth Ismailis of South Asia, a religious community that evolved in the Indian subcontinent since the twelfth century. In exploring the Satpanth Ismaili ginan tradition, this paper asks several larger questions: can a tradition of hymns fashion a religious community? Is there enough perceived sacred power in ginans to move listeners to reorient their religious or emotional attachments from their existing religious identity to another? This paper is going to suggest that ginans have played a foundational role, by virtue of their combined musical and poetic impact, in reshaping the perception of listeners, in this case, “Hindus,” and making them receptive to the authority of Ismaili Pirs and Shia Ismaili Imams.

The Gujarati poet Nishkulanand Swami composed lyric texts within a bhakti (devotional) community as it re-established itself in western India under the leadership of Swaminarayan (1781-1830). These texts have been sung in private practices and public spaces throughout the community’s growth locally and internationally. In recent decades, live and video productions have rendered them into melodic sequences interspersed with expositions, contemplative practices, or images of gods and gurus. I argue that these musical productions perform a vital religious role by facilitating embodied meaning-making experiences of the texts, creating meanings that, although based on texts, refer to religious desires, persons, and events external to the texts. Preliminary ethnography suggests that for many, the texts become meaningful only through their musical renderings. Using the lens of metonymic shifts, I illustrate the process by which individuals come to engage Nishkulanand's writing through extralinguistic elements: music and their visceral reactions to the musical productions.

This paper explores the music and movements of the performers during the Uthra Śīvēli festival at the Śrī Vallabha Temple located in central Kerala. This festival is celebrated by Hindu devotees across caste and geographical boundaries in the region. The festival procession of deities inside and outside the temple is accompanied by music, which directs the procession's progression, including the dance performance in which processing devotees participate. In addition, temple priests personify various deities to make them accessible to the devotees. This paper examines the role of music in producing and facilitating the religious experience of ritual performers and devotees observing the ritual. I argue that music functions as a ritual agent in this context; it plays an active role in producing, in the context of this festival rite, “ritualized” bodies (Bell 1992) and the experience of “sacredness” (Jacobsen 2008).