Michael Puett
Biographic Data
| ID | 354395 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Puett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Puett |
| SIGNATURE | PUETT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 170 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Apocalyptic Thought in Chinese Late Antiquity
This article explores the emergence of apocalyptic thought in China. These ideas, which emerged in the second century and became increasingly common over the subsequent centuries, entailed radical rejections of both the religious practices of the day as well as the dominant understandings of divine and human authority. These earlier forms of authority came to be seen as at best limited if not outright dangerous. Appeals were made instead to more …
Préface à Jouer de Roberte Hamayon
Figura central de la antropología siberiana, Roberte Hamayon aportó un nuevo enfoque al estudio del chamanismo al relacionarlo con las epopeyas heroicas buriatas. Al vincular el parentesco, la caza y la ritualidad, Hamayon propuso una teoría del chamanismo como gestión de las deudas vitales contraídas con lo sobrenatural. Su legado ha marcado a varias generaciones de investigadores, que continúan este programa en contextos siberianos contemporáne…
Religion
The concept of religion has recently become an object of strong critique. As numerous studies have argued, the very concept comes from a particular reading of a particular tradition, and the attempt to build a field of study based upon such a restricted concept has resulted in, at best, a highly ethnocentric body of knowledge and, at worst, an implicitly imperialistic one. This essay attempts to respond to such critiques by arguing that instead o…
Modernity Narratives, Modernity Moments, and Belatedness: Periodization as an Historical Construct
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere
The work of appropriation, domestication, and substitution: Theories of sacrifice in the Liji
The Classical Chinese civilisation has come to be known to a significant degree in the literature of anthropology and religious studies through the practice of sacrifice, and particularly through ancestral sacrifice. Despite its prominence as a topic of discussion, however, surprisingly little work has been done in exploring the indigenous theories concerning sacrifice that have emerged in the Chinese tradition. This paper will attempt a small pi…
All about the Rites: From Canonised Ritual to Ritualised Society
This third volume of the “Myriades d’Asies” series is the result of an international conference which was held at the Collège de France in 2018, and published in book form by Hémisphères Editions in 2021, the present digital edition being a revised and improved version of the printed edition. It intends to look afresh at the way ancient China progressively evolved into a ritualistic society, that is a world in which social interactions in times o…
Humanizing the Divine and Divinizing the Human in Early China: Comparative Reflections on Ritual, Sacrifice, and Sovereignty
Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence
Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. This collaborative and interdisciplinary book recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective
Radical Egalitarianism: Local Realities, Global Relations
In this volume, leading scholars in anthropology, religion, and area studies engage global and local perspectives dialectically to develop a historically grounded, ethnographically driven social science. The book’s chapters, drawing on research in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, are also in conversation with the extensive work of editor and contributor Stanley J. Tambiah: They all investigate some aspect of what Tambiah…
Ritual Disjunctions: Ghosts, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Ritual as theory, theory as ritual
Life, domesticated and undomesticated: Ghosts, sacrifice, and the efficacy of ritual practice in early China
This article explores classical Chinese conceptions of and practices surrounding life and vitality. Focus is given to the practice of sacrifice as well as the rejections of sacrifice among millenarian movements in Chinese late antiquity. My argument is that an engagement with this material challenges many of our understandings in the anthropology of religion concerning ritual, sacrifice, and interpretation
The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power
Economies of Ghosts, Gods, and Goods: The History and Anthropology of Chinese Temple Networks
The Analects: Conclusions and Conversations of Confucius
For the first time in one volume, The Analects illustrated by bestselling cartoonist C. C. TsaiC. C. Tsai is one of Asia's most popular cartoonists, and his editions of the Chinese classics have sold more than 40 million copies in over twenty languages. This volume presents Tsai's delightful graphic adaptation of The Analects, one of the most influential books of all time and a work that continues to inspire countless readers today.Tsai's express…
Following the Commands of Heaven: The Notion of Ming in Early China
Genealogies of Gods, Ghosts and Humans: The Capriciousness of the Divine in Early Greece and Early China
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Periodization and “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation
The period categories “medieval” and “modern” emerged with—and have long served to define and legitimate—the projects of western European imperialism and colonialism. The idea of “the medieval globe” is therefore double edged. On the one hand, it runs the risk of reconfirming the terms of the colonial, Orientalist history through which the “medieval” emerged, thus homogenizing the plural temporalities of global cultures and effacing the material …
Ritual and Ritual Obligations: Perspectives on Normativity from Classical China
The goal of this paper is to explore some of the theories that arose in classical China concerning the ways in which normativity could be construed in ritual terms.I focus particular attention on the theories that were developed in portions of the Book of Rites (Liji), which would become one of the most influential bodies of ritual theory throughout East Asia.I will argue that some of these theories deserve to be incorporated into our contemporar…
Classical Chinese Historical Thought
Ritual Disjunctions: Ghosts, Philosophy, and Anthropology
The Huainanzi and Textual Production in Early China
The Han dynasty Huainanzi is a compendium of knowledge covering every subject from self-cultivation, astronomy, and calendrics, to the arts of government. This edited volume follows a multi-disciplinary approach to explore how and why the Huainanzi was produced and how we should interpret the work. The volume should be of interest to scholars of early China, as well as scholars of textual production in other periods of Chinese history and in othe…
Critical approaches to religion in China
This is a discussion of possible approaches for the critical study of Chinese religions
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies is both informative and provocative, introducing readers to key debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggesting future research possibilities. A group of distinguished scholars takes up some of the most pressing theoretical questions in the field. What is a 'religious tradition'? How are religious texts read? What takes place when a religious practitioner stands before a representation of …
Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity
This book shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. The book, building on anthropological theories, draws examples of ritual attitudes from a variety of cultural settings, including original comparisons of Chinese and Jewish discussions of ritual and its importance. The book utilizes psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives on how ritual, like play, creates “as if” worlds, drawing upon the imaginative capacity of…
Life, domesticated and undomesticated: Ghosts, sacrifice, and the efficacy of ritual practice in early China
This article explores classical Chinese conceptions of and practices surrounding life and vitality. Focus is given to the practice of sacrifice as well as the rejections of sacrifice among millenarian movements in Chinese late antiquity. My argument is that an engagement with this material challenges many of our understandings in the anthropology of religion concerning ritual, sacrifice, and interpretation
Ritual and Ritual Obligations: Perspectives on Normativity from Classical China
The goal of this paper is to explore some of the theories that arose in classical China concerning the ways in which normativity could be construed in ritual terms.I focus particular attention on the theories that were developed in portions of the Book of Rites (Liji), which would become one of the most influential bodies of ritual theory throughout East Asia.I will argue that some of these theories deserve to be incorporated into our contemporar…
Critical approaches to religion in China
This is a discussion of possible approaches for the critical study of Chinese religions
To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China
Evidence from Shang oracle bones to memorials submitted to Western Han emperors attests to a long-lasting debate in early China over the proper relationship between humans and gods. One pole of the debate saw the human and divine realms as separate and agonistic and encouraged divination to determine the will of the gods and sacrifices to appease and influence them. The opposite pole saw the two realms as related and claimed that humans could ach…
Sages, Ministers, and Rebels: Narratives from Early China Concerning the Initial Creation of the State
Nature and Artifice: Debates in Late Warring States China Concerning The Creation of Culture
Cet article traite de la maniere dont, a la fin de la periode des Royaumes Combattants, on conceptualisait la creation initiale de la culture, en analysant le debat qui s'est developpe entre 270 et 221 av. J.-C. sur des questions telles que : qui a cree la culture, qu'est-ce qu'a entraine cette creation et ce que la culture a alors cree est-il, oui ou non, encore lie au monde naturel. Pour introduire certaines des questions cles de cette etude, l…
The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in The Writings of Sima Qian
kuai reports of spirit possession (pp. 10-12), poltergeists (pp. 133-34), etc. It remains debatable whether such assumptions are necessary, or even useful, for the successful use of hsiao-shuo texts as windows into the lives of medieval men and women. There is no question of Dudbridge's estimable erudition: his knowledge of T'ang history and texts is superlative, and his use of primary sources is meticulous. Yet, some of his methods and conclusio…
Sages, Ministers, and Rebels: Narratives from Early China Concerning the Initial Creation of the State
The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China
Introduction 1. Domesticating the landscape: notions of ancestors and innovation in the Bronze Age 2. The craft of humanity: debates over nature and culture in warring states China 3. Sages, ministers, and rebels: narratives of the emergence of the state 4. The creation of empire: the emergence and consolidation of imperial rule in China 5. The tragedy of creation: Sima Qian's reconstruction of the rise of empire in early China Conclusion Appendi…
The Ethics of Responding Properly: The Notion of Qíng 情 in Early Chinese Thought
Forming Spirits for the Way: The Cosmology of the Xiang'er Comentary to the Laozi
(2004). Forming Spirits for the Way: The Cosmology of the Xiang'er Comentary to the Laozi. Journal of Chinese Religions: Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 1-27
To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China
Evidence from Shang oracle bones to memorials submitted to Western Han emperors attests to a long-lasting debate in early China over the proper relationship between humans and gods. One pole of the debate saw the human and divine realms as separate and agonistic and encouraged divination to determine the will of the gods and sacrifices to appease and influence them. The opposite pole saw the two realms as related and claimed that humans could ach…
The Offering of Food and the Creation of Order: The Practice of Sacrifice in Early China
Anthropologists of contemporary Chinese religion have often pointed out that the lines between spirits, ghosts, and ancestors are highly permeable. Indeed, the primary difference between them is to be found in food—both in the types of food offered and the ways in which it is given. Ghosts are dead humans who are not fed by living descendants (and thus become hungry and highly dangerous, but also objects of offerings by individuals outside of mor…
The magnitude of ming: Command, allotment, and fate in Chinese culture
Few ideas in Chinese discourse are as ubiquitous as ming, variously understood as command, allotted lifespan, fate, or life. In the earliest days of Chinese writing, ming was already present, invoked in divinations and etched into ancient bronzes; it has continued to inscribe itself down to the twenty-first century in literature and film. This volume assembles twelve essays by some of the most eminent scholars currently working in Chinese studies…
Ritual and the Subjunctive
This chapter begins with a serious consideration of the understandings of ritual in traditions that take it as central, especially Judaism and Confucianism. It argues that such traditions understand the world as fundamentally fractured and discontinuous, with ritual allowing us to live in it by creating temporary order through the construction of a performative, subjunctive world. This is a world “as if”, with ritual understood in its indexical q…
Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Boundaries
This chapter turns to the capacities of the human mind that allow for the construction of the “as if” world of ritual, and begins to explore the ways such worlds allow us to deal with ambiguities and ambivalences. The material in this chapter, unlike most work on ritual, links individual psychology to ritual's broader social work. It looks at the development of “as if” worlds and ritual-like behaviors in children, from things like repeated bedtim…
Ritual, Play, and Boundaries
This chapter takes up the “as if” worlds of play. The first half discusses how the literature on play helps reveal important variations in the world of ritual by clarifying how ritual relates to notions of self and a social role. Special attention is paid to the work of Roger Caillois and Johan Huizinga on play. The analysis helps focus the idea of “ritual” more clearly by asking how it differs from play. The second half of the chapter continues …
Afterword
Ritual and Sincerity
This chapter turns directly to the tension between sincerity and ritual. Sincerity often appears as a reaction against the perceived hypocrisy of ritual; these reactions in turn tend to ritualize over time. Sincerity offers the world “as is” instead of ritual's “as if”, a world of discursive meanings and unique selves instead of repeated acts and fragmented worlds. Modernity has brought an especially powerful turn toward sincerity. One crucial im…
Movements of Ritual and Sincerity
This chapter looks at different cultural examples of the tensions between ritual and sincerity over time. First, it discusses the interplay of law and love, Judaism and Christianity, and ritual and sincerity in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Second, it looks at the history of architectural ornament, which is ritual-like in its repetitions and rhythms and in its concern with boundaries and framing. Here the ritual/sincerity tension plays out ty…
Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity
This book shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. The book, building on anthropological theories, draws examples of ritual attitudes from a variety of cultural settings, including original comparisons of Chinese and Jewish discussions of ritual and its importance. The book utilizes psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives on how ritual, like play, creates “as if” worlds, drawing upon the imaginative capacity of…
Combining The Ghosts And Spirits, Centering The Realm: Mortuary Ritual And Political Organization In The Ritual Compendia Of Early China
The Liji (Book of rites) , Yili (Rites and ceremonies) and Zhouli (Rites of Zhou) would become, in later Chinese history, the three most significant classics from early China for defining ritual behavior. The ritual compendia are a tremendously rich repository of material for historical, theoretical, and comparative work. This chapter analyzes the notions of rituals that are presented in these texts, discusses why such notions were developed and …
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies is both informative and provocative, introducing readers to key debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggesting future research possibilities. A group of distinguished scholars takes up some of the most pressing theoretical questions in the field. What is a 'religious tradition'? How are religious texts read? What takes place when a religious practitioner stands before a representation of …
Critical approaches to religion in China
This is a discussion of possible approaches for the critical study of Chinese religions
Classical Chinese Historical Thought
Ritual Disjunctions: Ghosts, Philosophy, and Anthropology
The Huainanzi and Textual Production in Early China
The Han dynasty Huainanzi is a compendium of knowledge covering every subject from self-cultivation, astronomy, and calendrics, to the arts of government. This edited volume follows a multi-disciplinary approach to explore how and why the Huainanzi was produced and how we should interpret the work. The volume should be of interest to scholars of early China, as well as scholars of textual production in other periods of Chinese history and in othe…
Ritual and Ritual Obligations: Perspectives on Normativity from Classical China
The goal of this paper is to explore some of the theories that arose in classical China concerning the ways in which normativity could be construed in ritual terms.I focus particular attention on the theories that were developed in portions of the Book of Rites (Liji), which would become one of the most influential bodies of ritual theory throughout East Asia.I will argue that some of these theories deserve to be incorporated into our contemporar…
Periodization and “The Medieval Globe”: A Conversation
The period categories “medieval” and “modern” emerged with—and have long served to define and legitimate—the projects of western European imperialism and colonialism. The idea of “the medieval globe” is therefore double edged. On the one hand, it runs the risk of reconfirming the terms of the colonial, Orientalist history through which the “medieval” emerged, thus homogenizing the plural temporalities of global cultures and effacing the material …
Following the Commands of Heaven: The Notion of Ming in Early China
Chinese history and philosophy (23 works) · History (23 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Art (18 works) · China (17 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Literature (11 works)