2,212 research outputs found
The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma
No full textBuddhism in China during the late Qing and Republican period remained a powerful cultural and religious force. Francesca Tarocco is a rising star in this field and offers an innovative high-quality piece of work that presents a new perspective on the influence of Buddhism on Chinese culture. Drawing on scarcely analyzed historical and archive sources, including photographs and musical scores, Tarocco adeptly argues that Chinese Buddhism played a more vital role in shaping Chinese culture than previously assumed.\ud
This enlightening study fills a significant gap in the field of Chinese Buddhist history. Focusing on the cultural side of Buddhism, it adds breadth and balance to studies in Buddhism as a whole, appealing to professionals and academics with an interest in Buddhism and Chinese Buddhist history
Charismatic Communications: The Intimate Publics of Chinese Buddhism
No full textI argue here that, secularization and state control aside, there has been in recent years a definite resurgence of interest in Buddhist practice in China (Fisher, 2014; Tarocco 2011, 2017). While other have examined its vital role in the production of national modernity and the institutions of the state, my analysis primarily tracks the work Buddhism performs within the everyday realms of media and technology. In looking at how Chuanxi’s charisma is at works in the intimate connections between Buddhism and technology at Huiri Temple, I follow David Palmer definition of charisma as a “relationship based on the expectation of the extraordinary, which stimulates and empowers collective behaviour” (Palmer 2008: 70). Although the mediation of religion in China is nothing new, only recently is the relationship between religion and mass media being more thoroughly discussed (Travagnin 2017; Clart 2016; Tarocco 2017). Outside of China, several scholars have analysed contemporary environments characterized by networked forms of electronic and digital communication and of religion and the age of media (de Vries and Weber 2002), radio evangelism (Hoover 1988), religious video games (Campbell and Grieve 2014) to understand how religious practice shapes and is shaped by mass media. By examining the spheres of pious self-making and social imaginary that are opened up by Buddhist technoculture, I suggest that deep-rooted attitudes towards the circulation of knowledge and charisma inform the current recuperation of monastic ideals and the production of digital “dharma treasures” (fabao 法宝). These are key to establishing and maintaining local, trans-regional, and international networks of online and offline followers. As James Taylor has remarked for Thai Buddhism, new articulations of Chinese Buddhism are “significantly implicated in local-global historical and sociocultural contexts” (2015: 219)
Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon
No full textIn Japanese the term Karaoke means, literally, ‘empty orchestra’. One definition disparagingly describes it as the ‘social sensation from Japan where sufficiently inebriated people embarrass themselves in public by singing along to a music track with the lyrics displayed on a TV screen’. In recent years the world has been witnessing a massive worldwide karaoke explosion.\ud
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In Karaoke, Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco address the complexity of this social craze, exploring its emergence in post-war Japan, its development and spread across the world to become a phenomenon that constantly evolved to keep pace with changes in technology and culture. Drawing on extensive research and travels around the world, the authors chart the varied manifestations of karaoke, from karaoke taxis in Bangkok to nude karaoke in Toronto, to the role of karaoke in prostitution. Extensive personal anecdotes reveal the dramatic range of social experiences made possible by karaoke and how the obsession with performance and song has touched politics, history and pop culture throughout global society. Karaoke bars are at the heart of rich escapist fantasies, and the authors - in readable fashion and using vibrant illustrations - document this unpredictable fantasy world and the people who inhabit it.\ud
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A fascinating and highly informative read, Karaoke will delight all those who have had the courage to take the mike and front the ‘empty orchestra’
On the market: Consumption and material culture in modern Chinese Buddhism
No full textFor many Chinese speakers in China and elsewhere, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion often includes mediation through or with material objects. Such mediation is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences and often occurs through the consumption of religious material goods, thanks also to media technologies and the Internet. In this article, the author seeks to complicate the notion that the production and consumption of novel Buddhist religious goods can be analyzed solely in terms of 'market theory.' While on the one hand the author shows that Buddhist technologies of salvation are historically associated with materiality, she also contends that the 'aura' of Buddhist-inspired modern religious goods - in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's essay 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' (1939) - is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations. © 2011 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC
Intimacies and Imagined Futures: Video and Performance Practices
No full textIntimacies and imagined futures features the work of nine international and Berlin-based Asian diaspora artists working in video and performance. The exhibition explores how these artists engage with the intimacies of the diasporic and transnational body, self, and everyday in relation to identity, site, memory, trauma, stereotype and imagined stories
Miroslaw Balka
No full textCurated by Vicente Todolí, ‘Crossover/s’, Miroslaw Balka’s retrospective at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, is his first in Italy. It occurs at the same time as a solo exhibition at Galleria Raffaella Cortese titled in German ‘In Bezug auf die Zeit’ (In Relation to Time). Drawing on the definition of acceleration in physics (velocity in relation to time), the show explores three decades of the artist’s career through several key moments. ‘Crossover/s’ benefits from the immensity of Pirelli HangarBicocca’s former industrial space, that concrete container that draws viewers into its dark cavity – immersing us in twilight, it alters our perception of the world. On display here are some of the largest pieces the artist has ever made and the exhibition inevitably overshadows that at Galleria Raffaella Cortese. But it is worth seeing both, for at Galleria Raffaella Cortese the work is intimate, less grandly resolved, making uncertainty a point of reflection
The Buddhist Economies of Modern Urban China
No full textThis paper looks at the dynamic relationship between Buddhism, business, and merit in urban China, particularly in the cities of the lower Yangzi, Jiangnan in Chinese, – Shanghai, Ningbo, Suzhou, Wuxi, Nanjing during the late imperial period and in modern times
Dongya zongjiao jiemi: Yige xin de puxi 东亚宗教揭密: 一个新的谱系 [East Asian Religion Unmasked: A New Genealogy]
No full textThe geneaology of the word "zongjiao" in modern Chin
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