Draft:Adam Yuet Chau
anthropologist specializing in China
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Adam Yuet Chau is an anthropologist specializing in China.[1] He is Professor of the Anthropology of China in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. He is also Fellow and Director of Studies (AMES subjects) at St John’s College, Cambridge.[1] His research focuses mainly on Chinese religions, especially their social dimensions. His topical interests include religion, state-society relations, cultural history, language politics, etc.[2] His work is distinguished by its attention to how people “do religion” in China and by its effort to develop better ways of conceptualising religious life from Chinese contexts.[3][4]
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Early life and education
Chau was born in Beijing and grew up in Beijing from 1968 to 1980 and in Hong Kong from 1980 to 1989. He studied anthropology at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he received his BA in 1993. He then undertook graduate training in anthropology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, receiving his PhD in 2001.[1] His doctoral supervisor at Stanford was Arthur P. Wolf. During his doctoral training, he conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Shaanbei, in northern Shaanxi Province, particularly in the Yulin and Yan’an prefectures, on the cultural, social, and political aspects of the revival of popular religion in rural China during the reform period.[1][5][6]
Academic career
After living in the United States for more than a dozen years, Chau moved to the United Kingdom in 2005. He taught first at Oxford in Chinese Studies and then at SOAS in anthropology before joining the University of Cambridge in 2008. He is Professor of the Anthropology of China in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. He is also Fellow and Director of Studies (AMES subjects) at St John’s College, Cambridge.[1][2]
In addition to his teaching and research, Chau’s academic activities include serving as an external examiner of PhD theses for SOAS, the University of Lancaster, the Australian National University, Griffith University, the University of Oxford, the University of Paris (Nanterre), the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the Université libre de Bruxelles, the University of Leiden, the University of Oslo, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong; reviewing grant applications for bodies including the French National Agency for Research, the National Research Fund of Luxembourg, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the Israel Science Foundation, and the European Research Council; and reviewing manuscripts for major academic presses including Cambridge University Press, University of California Press, Harvard University Press, University of Hawaii Press, University of Washington Press, Oxford University Press, Peter Lang, Routledge, and Duke University Press, as well as for journals including Ethnos, Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore), Modern China, Journal of Asian Studies, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, The China Journal, Daoism: Religion, History and Society, and The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.[1]
Research
Chau’s research lies at the intersection of socio-cultural anthropology, Chinese Studies, and religious studies. His research interests include Chinese religions, especially their social aspects; ritual theory; hosting as an idiom of social practice in Chinese religion and politics; forms of powerful writing; subjectification; social and cultural transformations in contemporary China; and the Indonesian Chinese returnees (yin’ni guiqiao 印尼归侨).[1]
Doing religion
One of Chau’s scholarly and outreach ambitions is to shift attention away from the question “How many religions are there in China?” and toward the question of how people “do religion” in China. Chau conceives religion as a social technology. It produces particular kinds of subjectivity, though not always in the same way, and mobilises communal energy. One’s relationship to God, deities, spirits, ancestors, or ghosts is only one idiom among many through which people “do religion.”[1][4][7]
In the mid and late 1990s, Chau conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Shaanbei, in northern Shaanxi Province, especially in the Yulin and Yan’an prefectures, on the cultural, social, and political aspects of the revival of popular religion in rural China during the reform period. The results of that research were published in his monograph Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China and in a series of journal articles and book chapters.[1]
Miraculous Response presents Chau’s approach to “doing religion.” Rather than treating religion primarily as a set of bounded traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, or Christianity, or as a matter of belief alone, Chau focuses on how people actually “do religion” on the ground. In this work, he proposes five modalities of “doing religion”: the discursive/scriptural modality, the personal-cultivational modality, the liturgical/ritual modality, the immediate-practical modality, and the relational modality.[3][5][6]
Besides his long-term fieldwork in Shaanbei, Chau has also conducted sporadic short-term fieldwork in Taiwan on temple festivals.[1]
Generating concepts from Chinese and comparative materials
A feature of Chau’s scholarship is its effort to generate new concepts and theoretical approaches from Chinese and comparative ethnographic and historical materials, rather than merely applying pre-existing theories to Chinese cases. Across his work, he has sought to use Chinese religious and social life as a source of conceptual innovation in its own right. This orientation can be seen in a series of formulations associated with his scholarship, including “text acts,” “hosting,” “red-hot sociality,” “ritual terroir,” “spheres,” and “actants amassing (AA),” among others.[4][1][8]
Selected works
Monographs[1]
2006 Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China, Stanford University Press.
2019 Religion in China: Ties That Bind, Polity.
Edited Books[1]
2011 Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation, Routledge.
2026 (projected) Chinese Religious Culture in 100 Objects, Oxford University Press.
Edited Journal Special Issue[1]
2019 ‘Cumulus: Hoarding, Hosting, and Hospitality’ L’Homme Special Issue (co-editor)
Journal Articles[1]
2003 ‘Popular Religion in Shaanbei, North-Central China’. The Journal of Chinese Religions 31: 39-79.
2004 ‘Hosting Funerals and Temple Festivals: Folk Event Productions in Rural China’. Asian Anthropology 3: 39-70.
2005 ‘The Politics of Legitimation and the Revival of Popular Religion in Shaanbei, North-Central China’. Modern China 31 (2): 236-78. Article anthologised in Contemporary Chinese Society and Politics, edited by Andrew Kipnis, Luigi Tomba and Jonathan Unger, Routledge, 2009 (Volume 4, chapter 66; pp. 236-278).
2006 ‘Superstition Specialist Households?: The Household Idiom in Chinese Religious Practices’, Minsu quyi, the Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore 153 (special issue on religious specialists): 157-202
2007 ‘Drinking Games, Karaoke Songs, and Yangge Dances: Youth Cultural Production in Rural China’, Ethnology 45(2): 161-72.
2008 ‘The Sensorial Production of the Social’, Ethnos 73(4) (special issue The Senses and the Social): 485-504.
2008 ‘An Awful Mark: Symbolic Violence and Urban Renewal in Reform-Era China’, Visual Studies 23(3): 195-210.
2009 ‘“做宗教”的模式’ (Modalities of Doing Religion), 温州大学学报社会科学版第22 卷第5 期 2009 年9 月 (Journal of Wenzhou University Social Sciences Vol 22, No 5 Sep, 2009: 18-27).
2010 ‘Mao’s Travelling Mangoes: Food as Relic in Revolutionary China’, Past and Present (supplement 5 Relics and Remains, edited by Alexandra Walsham): 256-75.
2010 ‘迷信专业户? 中国宗教实践中的家户型宗教服务供给者’ (Chinese translation of ‘Superstition Specialist Households?: The Household Idiom in Chinese Religious Practices’; in Chinese academic journal <学海>2010年03期 (Xuehai 2010, 3: 43-56)).
2011 ‘Modalities of Doing Religion and Ritual Polytropy: Evaluating the Religious Market Model from the Perspective of Chinese Religious History’, Religion 41(4) (special issue Beyond the Religious Market Model): 547-568.
2011 ‘做“善事”还是构建“善世”? ― 宗教入世与宗教主体化在中国’ (‘Providing Public Goods or Constructing a Good Public?: Social Engagement and Religious Subjectification in China’) (in Chinese academic journal <宗教人类学> [The Journal of the Anthropology of Religion], Vol. 3: 153-171.
2012 « La channeling zone : religion populaire, État local et rites de légitimation en Chine rurale à l’ère de la réforme » (The Channeling Zone : Popular Religion, the Local State, and Rites of Legitimation in Rural China during the Reform Era). In Gradhiva: Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts, special issue on “Chines, l’État au musée,” edited by Brigitte Baptandier and Anne-Christine Trémon; published by Musée du Quai Branly, No. 16: 156-177.
2013 ‘Activistas Budistas Transnacionales en la Era de los Imperios’. Spanish translation of ‘Transnational Buddhist Activists in the Age of Empires’ (translated by Montserrat Crespín Perales) Entremons: The Universitat Pompeu Fabra Journal of World History (open access journal), Fourth issue.
2014 ‘Culinary Subjectification: The Translated World of Menus and Orders’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2) (special issue on “Translating Worlds,” edited by William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi): 141-160.
2017 ‘Human Organs in Oil Tank Trucks: An Extractology’. Anthropological Forum 27 (4) (special issue on ‘Cosmopolitics of the Invisible: Spirit Worlds and the State of Environment on China’s Ethnic Frontiers’. edited by Giovanni da Col): 402-421.
2018 ‘Of Temples and Trees: The Black Dragon King and the Arbortourists’. International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage 6 (1) (special issue ‘Religion, Pilgrimage and Tourism in India and China’ edited by Michael Stausberg and Knut Aukland) Article 8 (pp. 72-84).
2019 ‘Hosting as a Cultural Form’ L’Homme 231-232 (Special issue ‘Cumulus: Hoarding, Hosting, and Hospitality’, edited by Adam Yuet Chau and Giovanni da Col): 41-66.
2021 ‘Ritual Terroir: The Generation of Site-Specific Vitality’. Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 193 (1) (Special Issue on “Réguler les pluralités religieuses: mondes indiens et chinois comparés” [Regulating Religious Pluralities: Comparing the Indian and Chinese Worlds], edited by Vincent Goossaert and Peter van der Veer): 25-54.
Book Chapters in Edited Volumes[1]
2009 ‘Expanding the Space of Popular Religion: Local Temple Activism and the Politics of Legitimation in Contemporary Rural China’, in Yoshiko Ashiwa and David Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Contemporary China, Stanford University Press, pp. 211-240.
2011 ‘Modalities of Doing Religion’, in David A. Palmer, Glenn Shive and Philip Wickeri, eds., Chinese Religious Life, Oxford University Press, pp. 67-84.
2011 ‘Introduction: Revitalizing and Innovating Religious Traditions in Contemporary China’, in Adam Yuet Chau, ed., Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation, Routledge, pp. 1-31.
2012 ‘Transnational Buddhist Activists in the Age of Empires’, in Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene, eds., Religious Internationals in the Modern World, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 206-229.
2012 ‘Efficacy, Not Confessionality: Ritual Polytropy at Chinese Funerals’, in Glenn Bowman, ed., Sharing the Sacra: the Politics and Pragmatics of Inter-communal Relations around Holy Places, Berghahn Books, pp. 79-96.
2012 ‘Actants Amassing (AA).’ In Sociality: New Directions, edited by Nick Long and Henrietta Moore. Berghahn Books, pp. 133-155.
2013 ‘(The Film) The Song of the Mango (芒果之歌): Political Awakening and the Magical Fruit’. In Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution, edited by Alfreda Murck, pp. 78-95. (catalogue for exhibition of artefacts of the mango cult held at Museum Rietberg, Zürich, Feb-Jun, 2013; Scheidegger & Spiess). German version of article in exhibition catalogue published concurrently: Maos Mango. Massenkult der Kulturrevolution.
2013 ‘Script Fundamentalism: The Practice of Cherishing Written Characters (Lettered Paper) (惜字紙) in the Age of Literati Decline and Commercial Revolution’. In New Approaches to Studying Chinese Popular Religion and Sectarianism 中國民間宗教民間信仰研究之中歐視角, edited by Philip Clart; Boyang Publishers 博揚文化, pp. 129-167.
2013 ‘Actants Amassing (AA): Beyond Collective Effervescence and the Social’. In Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, edited by Sondra L. Hausner. Berghahn Books, pp. 206-230.
2013 ‘Religious Subjectification: The Practice of Cherishing Written Characters and Being a Ciji (Tzu Chi) Person’. In Chang Hsun, ed. Chinese Popular Religion: Linking Fieldwork and Theory, Academia Sinica, pp. 75-113.
2013 ‘A Different Kind of Religious Diversity: Ritual Service Providers and Consumers in China.’ In Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought, edited by Joachim Gentz and Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 141-154.
2014 ‘“做宗教’的模式” (Modalities of Doing Religion). In David A. Palmer, Glenn Shive & Philip Wickeri, eds., 中國人的宗教生活 (Chinese Religious Life), Hong Kong University Press, pp. 63-84. (Chinese version of 2011 article ‘Modalities of Doing Religion’)
2014 ‘關係/來往的’做宗教’模式: 以臺灣’媽祖遶境進香’為例’ (Relational Modality of Doing Religion: The Case of the Mazu Pilgrimage in Taiwan). In 〈研究新視界: 媽祖與華人民間信仰國際研討會論文集〉王見川, 李世偉, 洪瑩發主編 (Mazu and Popular Religion, edited by Wang Chien-Chuan, Li Shi-Wei and Hung Ying-fa), Boyang Publishers 博揚文化, pp. 57-77.
2014 ‘Household Sovereignty and Religious Subjectification: Comparing the Idiom of Hosting in Chinese and Christian Religious Cultures’. In Studies in Church History (special issue on “The Church and the Household”), pp. 492-504.
2015 ‘Chinese Socialism and the Household Idiom of Religious Engagement’. In Tam T. T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 225-243.
2015 ‘Culinary Subjectification: The Translated World of Menus and Orders’. In Translating Worlds: The Epistemological Space of Translation, edited by Carlo Severi and William F. Hanks. HAU Books, University of Chicago Press. (same as 2014 article ‘Culinary Subjectification: The Translated World of Menus and Orders’ in HAU)
2016 ‘The Commodification of Religion in Chinese Societies’. In Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850-2015, edited by Vincent Goossaert, Jan Kiely and John Lagerwey. Brill, pp. 949-976.
2017 ‘The Nation in Religion and Religion in the Nation: How the Modern Chinese Nation Made Religion and Was at the Same Time Made by Religion’. In Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies, edited by Cheng-tian Kuo. Amsterdam University Press, pp. 117-142.
2019 ‘Efficacy: The Immediate-Practical Modality of Doing Religion’. In Sakralität und Macht (Sacrality and Power), edited by Klaus Herbers, Karin Steiner & Andreas Nehring. Franz Steiner Verlag, pp. 203-215.
2019 ‘Spaces of Youth Cultural Production in Rural China’. In Youth and Collective Spaces in China, edited by Vanessa Frangville and Gwennaël Gaffric. London: Routledge, pp. 75-97.
2020 ‘Temples and Festivals in Rural and Urban China’, In Handbook on Religion in China, edited by Stephan Feuchtwang. Cheltenham and Camberley, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 132-155.
2020 ‘The “Religion Sphere” (zongjiaojie宗教界) in the Construction of Modern China’. In Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions II: Intellectual History of Key Concepts, edited by Gregory A. Scott and Stefania Travagnin. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 155-180.
2020 ‘Religion and Social Change in Reform-Era China’. In Routledge Handbook of Chinese Culture and Society, edited by Kevin Latham, London: Routledge, pp. 411-29.
2020 (with LIU Jianshu) ‘Spirit Mediumism in Shaanbei, Northcentral China’. In Spirit Possession and Communication in Religious and Cultural Contexts, edited by Caroline Blyth. London: Routledge, pp. 92-118.
2020 ‘Daoist on Top or Host on Top?: The Relationship Between the Daoist Liturgical Framework and Local Cults in the Jiao 醮’. In Daoism and Local Cults: Rethinking the Paradigms, edited by Philip Clart, Vincent Goossaert and Hsie Shu-wei. Taipei: Center for Chinese Studies, Taiwan National Library, pp. 269-308.
2021 ‘Homo Arborealus: The Intermeshing of Regimes of Tree-Mindedness’. In Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices, edited by Mayfair Yang. Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 225–256.
2022 ‘皈依 guiyi (Prendre refuge). L’essor des identités confessionnelles en Chine et à Taiwan’. In Mots clés en Chine, edited by Vanessa Frangville and Françoise Lauwaert. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 205–233.
2023 ‘Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Thanksgiving as Performance of Belief in Chinese Popular Religion’. In From Trustworthiness to Secular Beliefs: Changing Concepts of xin 信 from Traditional to Modern Chinese, edited by Christian Meyer and Philip Clart, pp. 565–585.
2023 ‘Temple Inscriptions as Text Acts’. In Text, Context, and Acts: Chinese Popular Religion in Practice, edited by Shin-yi Chao. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, pp. 63–86.
2026 “Superstition and the ‘Religion Sphere’. In Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History, edited by Emily Baum and Albert Wu. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.