Transmission and Innovation: Mapping Charisma in Modern Chinese Buddhism (Seminar)

Dr Francesca Tarocco (Ca' Foscari, Venice - NYU Shanghai)

Abstract

In this seminar I will examine the relationship between Buddhism, charisma and technology in light of the recent turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of bodies, materiality, and technology. Similarly to other religious communities, Chinese Buddhist practitioners approach their pious self-making through their quotidian reliance on digital media technologies. One of the important consequences of the nonhuman impact on Buddhism has been the intensification and amplification of time. Charismatic Moderns explores the machinic temporality of the Buddhist everyday and its intimate connections with clerical charisma. In witnessing present-day narratives of salvation and redemption, I look at the ongoing renewal of religion in the Chinese world and take up the idea of charisma as a relationship based on the “expectation of the extraordinary”. 

Bio

Francesca Tarocco is Associate Professor of Chinese Religious History and Buddhist Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Visiting Professor of Buddhist Cultures at New York University, Shanghai. Her main research interests are Chinese Buddhism, visual culture, material religion, the senses and the body, urban Asia (in particular Shanghai), media, and contemporary art. She is the author of The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism and of numerous articles on the genealogies and practices of religion in modern China. Recently, she guest-edited “Buddhists and the Making of Modern Chinese Societies”, a special issue of the Journal of Global Buddhism. She is currently an associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Buddhism and is working on two books on Buddhism, media and visual culture.