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Household Sovereignty and Religious Subjectification: China and the Christian West Compared*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Adam Yuet Chau
Adam Yuet Chau*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

This essay is an attempt to explore the cultural logics behind two very different orientations towards spirits (divinities), one Chinese and the other Christian, and the kinds of religious subjects that are produced by practices informed by these two differing orientations. Specifically, I examine the role the household plays in Chinese religious life as a site and structural unit to host different categories of spirits (gods, ghosts and ancestors), and contrast this with the Christian idiom of being hosted by God. In Christianity, God is the supreme host; humans (Christians) can only be guests at God’s banquet but they cannot host God in return. It is explicitly an unequal relationship. And even though they are unworthy of such generous treatment Christians must accept this divine grace and join the communion. The eucharist, the most important Christian ritual for almost all Christians, is a constant reminder to Christians that they are guests, and that when they go to heaven, they will be God’s guests eternally. In the Chinese case, on the other hand, the household hosts the spirits by providing offerings. Gods, ghosts and ancestors are invited to the bountiful banquet at fixed times of the year and then sent off when the banquets are over. The spirits can only be guests; they do not, and indeed cannot, host human guests. In Chinese religious culture there are no accounts of spirits, be they deities, ancestors or ghosts, hosting humans. In the Chinese hosting of spirits, the guest is accorded honour and respect, but it is the host who is the most active, potent and pre-eminent agent. In other words, agency rests with humans. And the social idiom of hosting enframes the entire cluster of ritual actions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 50: Religion and the Household , 2014 , pp. 492 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014

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Footnotes

*

This essay is part of a larger monograph project on the idiom of hosting in Chinese political and religious culture, which was first conceived when I was an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University, in 2004–5, for the occasion of the conference ‘“Religion” in China: Rethinking Indigenous and Imported Categories of Thought’ (21–22 May 2005). I have subsequently presented papers on the topic at the University of Bristol (2006, East Asian Studies); University College London (2006, Anthropology); the Ecclesiastical History Society Summer Conference on ‘Religion and the Household’ (2012); Purdue University, at the summer workshop on social scientific studies of religion in China (2012); the University of Oxford, as part of the Wilde Lectures in Natural and Comparative Religion (2013); and the Macau Ricci Institute (2013). Many friends and colleagues have helped nurture my thinking on this topic in the past few years, amongst whom Stephan Feuchtwang, Henrietta Harrison, Craig Clunas, Mary Laven and Nicolas Standaert deserve special mention. I thank Mary Laven for having told me about the 2012 EHS Summer Conference, and Alex Walsham for having encouraged me to contribute a paper. Presenting an earlier version of this essay in front of a group of distinguished church historians was humbling. The audience members took my wild speculations and deliberately provocative comparisons in good spirit, for which I am grateful. The revision has benefitted from comments and suggestions from Mary Laven and the editors of Studies in Church History. Emile Perreau-Saussine took interest in my ‘hosting’ project and suggested that we read together works on the Catholic mass but this plan could not be realized due to his tragic death in February 2010. I dedicate this essay to his memory.

References

1 By ‘religious subjectification’ I mean the process through which a certain kind of person (i.e. religious subject) is produced through engaging in an ensemble of religious practices over a long period of time. The resulting ‘religious habitus’ in a person issues forth his or her embodied practices. This conceptualization owes its inspiration to theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. For a more detailed explication of these concepts, see AdamYuet Chau, ‘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, Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Sinology (Taipei, 2013), 75-113.

2 See Chau, Adam Yuet, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Palo Alto, CA, 2006);Google Scholar idem, ‘Actants Amassing (AA)’, in Long, Nicholas J. and Moore, Henrietta L., eds, Sociality: New Directions (Oxford, 2012), 133–55.Google Scholar

3 See Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990); Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, transl. Rachel Bowlby (Palo Alto, CA, 2000); Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2012), supplementary issue on hospitality, ed. Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col.

4 One may be tempted to speculate that Christianity has retained this strangerspirit figure which it has inherited from a religion of a nomadic and tribal people, whereas the Chinese, having become sedentary (i.e. living in fixed settlements) for so long, have elaborated on familiar spirits instead.

5 For an exposition of the concept of event production, see Chau, Miraculous Response, ch. 7.

6 Ibid., chs 7-8.

7 Traditionally wealthy lineages tend to have lineage halls in which the ancestral tablets of all deceased ancestors of the lineage are held and where the lineage stages regular offering rituals.

8 See Chau, Adam Yuet, ‘Superstition Specialist Households?: The Household Idiom in Chinese Religious Practices’, Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore) 153 (2006), 157–202;Google Scholar idem, ‘Chinese Socialism and the Household Idiom of Religious Engagement’, in Tam Ngo and Justine Quijada, eds, Religion and Communism: Comparative Perspectives (Berkeley, CA, forthcoming).

9 See Yongyi, Yue, ‘Jiazhong guohui’ (‘Making Temple Festivals at Home’), in Yue Yongyi, Lingyan, Ketou, Chuanshuo (Efficacy, Kowtow, Legends) (Shanghai, 2010), 169–240.Google Scholar

10 There is some tantalizing evidence suggesting such household-centric Christian practices in China. For example, in some places worshippers belonging to officially sanctioned churches attend the Sunday services but gather even more frequently in small groups in one another’s homes for small-scale worship and fellowship; some elderly converts are still in the habit of inviting ‘the Lord’ to come and consume offerings in their homes (i.e. hosting God). See Wang Ying, Shenfen jiangou yu wenhua ronghe: zhongyuan diqu jidujiaohui ge’an yanjiu (The Construction of Identity and Cultural Incorporation: The Case Study of a Protestant Church in the North China Plain) (Shanghai, 2011).

11 Both historical studies of Christianity and the gradually maturing field of the anthropology of Christianity have revealed very many different forms of practising Christianity. I have no doubt collapsed a wide diversity of possible forms of Christian practices into a generic image, but as I mentioned in the caveat above I have constructed these images in such sharp relief for heuristic purposes.

12 See Eugene Y. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Seattle, WA, 2005). This formal impulse has also informed how the Chinese do politics. For example, I have used the hosting idiom to interpret ‘Mao’s travelling mango cult’ during the Cultural Revolution; see Adam Yuet Chau, ‘Mao’s Travelling Mangoes: Food as Relic in Revolutionary China’, in Alexandra Walsham, ed., Relics and Remains: P&P, Supplement 5 (2010), 256-75. Upon receiving the mangoes as a gift from the supreme leader, the revolutionary masses turned them into a sort of revolutionary relic that had to be welcomed, hosted, protected, venerated and then passed on.

13 Ortner, Sherry B., High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (Princeton, NJ, 1989).Google Scholar

14 Herbert, George, The Complete English Works (New York, 1995), 184.Google Scholar I am grateful to Henrietta Harrison for bringing this poem to my attention.

15 I am aware there are divergent views amongst theologians and Christian denominations regarding what happens to the bread and wine but these should not detract from the central imagery of God hosting human beings.

16 See Meeks, Wayne A., The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, CT, 1983).Google Scholar

17 Mary Laven (private communication) reminds me, however, that the Church and the household long continued to struggle over the proper locus of worship. For example, the Council of Trent brought a renewed emphasis on the importance of the Church for Christian ritual life, as exemplified in its measures concerning domestic masses: see Mattox, Philip, ‘Domestic Sacral Space in the Florentine Renaissance Palace’, Renaissance Studies 20 (2006), 658–73.Google Scholar

18 See JrChristian, William A., Person and God in a Spanish Valley, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ, 1989);Google Scholar Cannell, Fenella, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines (Cambridge, 1999).Google Scholar