David A Palmer
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3617950 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | David A Palmer |
| NOMBRES | David A |
| APELLIDO | Palmer |
| FIRMA | PALMER D A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0884-995X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 48 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 314 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The Three Purities and Three-Stage Ontologies
In this article, we draw on the Daoist trinity of the Three Purities to outline a three-stage ontological framework for understanding the relationships between primal unity, emerging patterns, and the phenomenal world. We then apply this framework to identify parallels in Platonic, Sufi, and Baháʼí ontologies. We find that despite differences in time, space, symbolism, language, and conceptualisation, each tradition posits three ontological stage…
Community dynamics and echo chambers
The “echo chamber” effect has been widely decried as a destructive consequence of social media on public discourse, leading people to repetitively encounter their pre-existing perspectives without rebuttal in online political discussions. In this research, we have tested this proposition by using text analytics and the hybrid Louvain method and K-mean clustering to categorize the diffusion patterns of more than 158,000 reposted threads about the …
Towards making EIA more human-centric
Intimate Utopias
Can civil society offer alternative modes of sociality in an authoritarian political regime? Drawing on a study on small “voluntary fellowships” in China, we explore the anti-political values of a specific type of group whose members share a moral code of “civic intimacy” that values an idealized social condition of free, pure and caring social relations, and dream of achieving this utopian condition not through political activism but through the…
Knotting the Banner
Ritual, war, and opium
The 'commons' has acquired a renewed theoretical currency in recent years as a way of conceptualizing how different beings live together in shared places that are shaped and modified by human and non-human actions and structures. Through socioecological changes, warfare, movements of populations, sacralizations of land, political territorializations, and man-made infrastructures, the topography of any region, as a commons, is a process of perpetu…
Warriors of the City-State
This essay outlines how religious ideas and practices shaped the activism of Chin Wan, known as the "godfather of localism" in Hong Kong. While Chin's role in the rise of the localist wave of the 2010s is well known, his role as a religious figure has been completely ignored. As the earliest exponent of "valiant warrior" (yung mou 勇武) and "be water" militant tactics based on Confucian and Daoist narratives, he had a deep influence on Hong Kong pr…
The sacred dimensions of the BRI's infrastructural commons
Whilst the idea of infrastructure has animated scholarship for the past 20 years at least, there remains a need for more expansive understandings of what infrastructure is, and what it can be. The speed, scale, and material disruptiveness with which many of the infrastructural megaprojects that constitute China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been developed both underpin and validate this need. The effects of the BRI are both manifold and d…
Re-Enchanting Modernity
Nurturing Inherent Nobility
The Bahá'í Faith is an important case for a discussion on dignity, religion and human rights. Beyond the notions of dignity enshrined in its basic teachings, a core concern of the Bahá'í community is how to build dignity into the pattern of social relations of an emerging global civilization. The oneness of humanity is the core principle around which all Bahá'í teachings revolve, and within this principle is enshrined not only the inherent, God-g…
The Bahá’í Faith and Covenantal Pluralism
The core teachings of the Bahá’í Faith are often summarized as the “Oneness of God, the Oneness of Religion, and the Oneness of Humanity.” Can such principles resonate with a pluralism based on the recognition of difference? Covenantal pluralism outlines a set of principles of co-existence based on deep respect for difference that acknowledges the exclusive truth claims of different actors. In this article, we examine how the teachings and practi…
Chinese NGOs at the interface between governmentality and local society
The relations between society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been relatively neglected in the field of China NGO studies, which remains largely wedded to a state-NGO problematic within a state-society framework. In this anthropological study of an NGO's post-Wenchuan earthquake recovery programme, we adopt an actor-oriented approach to identify the main lines of tension between the strategies, rationalities, and techniques deploye…
"Japan's World Heritage Miike Coal Mine - Where prisoners-of-war worked "like slaves
Mitsui's Miike Coal Mine is World Heritage listed by UNESCO as one of Japan's "Sites of the Industrial Revolution." The Japanese government, however, has failed to tell the full story of this mine, instead promoting bland tourism. In World War II, Miike was Japan's largest coal mine, but also the location of the largest Allied POW camp in Japan. Korean and Chinese forced laborers also were used by Mitsui in the mine. The use of prisoners was noth…
Handbook on Religion in China
"Informative and eye-opening, the Handbook on Religion in China provides a uniquely broad insight into the contemporary Chinese variations of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. In turn, China's own religions of Daoism, of filial piety and transmissions of rites have spread beyond China, a progression that is explored in detail across 19 chapters, written by leading experts in the field. Utilising a historical focus to emphasize developments and hi…
The Cosmopolitan Moment in Colonial Modernity
This article outlines the spread of the Bahá'í religion-known in Chinese asDatong jiao大同教)- as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912-1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Bahá'í movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlappin…
Ethics of the Heart
This article explores the angst of deeply committed volunteers in China, engaging with anthropological debates on ethics under conditions of "moral breakdown." Under market socialism, sacrificial volunteering is both ideologically glorified and socially deviant, placing volunteers at the point of dissonance between conflicting moral discourses. Interrogating the monolithic governmentality perspective that informs most anthropological studies of v…
Black bloc against red China
During the mass protest movement, Hong Kong has witnessed intense and disturbing levels of violence, intolerance, and anti-Chinese xenophobia. In this article, I reflect on the aggravation of a conflict system in which both sides are vitalized by the energies of fear and anger supplied by the real and imagined intrusions of the other. I trace the roots of this conflict system in the historical formation of Hong Kong's identity as a sacred space o…
The Civil Sphere in East Asia
Leading sociologists who live and work in East Asia examine their region's most dangerous and explosive social problems, and some of their most stunning success stories, from the viewpoint of Civil Sphere Theory. This new and increasingly influential sociological understanding of democracy aims to describe and explain the moral codes and institutional foundations of democratic solidarity, as it manifests itself within a distinct social sphere. Pa…
Three Moral Codes and Microcivil Spheres in China
Civil Sphere in East Asia
Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults
Most of the essays in this volume were first presented at the International Conference on Religion, Modernity, and the State in China and Taiwan, held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, October 28-20, 2005
Cosmology, Gender, Structure, and Rhythm
This article interrogates the near-complete absence of China as a source of materials and inspiration for constructing theoretical concepts and models in mainstream sociology and anthropology. I outline the story of the largely forgotten mutual engagements, influences, and missed connections between the work of the French sociologist and sinologist Marcel Granet (1884–1940), whose work revolved around Chinese religion, and key figures in the hist…
Folk, Popular, or Minjian Religion
Folk, Popular, or Minjian
Guanyin's Limbo
How do objects and humans relationally constitute one another? In this article, we examine statues of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Hong Kong to illuminate the forms of personhood and agency that arise through human-icon relations in a modern metropolis. We follow the life course of Guanyin statues, investigating their production, circulation, animation, and disposal-teasing out worshippers' contradictory discourses on whether the de…
Neo-socialist governmentality
This paper conceptualizes ‘neo-socialist governmentality’ as a set of rationalities of governance that aim to shape, nurture, constrain and guide the autonomy of Chinese subjects in the post-revolutionary era. Contrasting neo-liberal and neo-socialist governmentalities, we outline the mechanisms of translation and coordination that open, appropriate and restrain spaces for the pluralistic problematization of concerns for the self, culture and soc…
The Religious Question in Modern China
Recent events - from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe - vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religi…
Neo-socialist governmentality
This paper conceptualizes ‘neo-socialist governmentality’ as a set of rationalities of governance that aim to shape, nurture, constrain and guide the autonomy of Chinese subjects in the post-revolutionary era. Contrasting neo-liberal and neo-socialist governmentalities, we outline the mechanisms of translation and coordination that open, appropriate and restrain spaces for the pluralistic problematization of concerns for the self, culture and soc…
Gift and market in the Chinese religious economy
Religious market theory has figured prominently in recent scholarly debates in the social scientific study of religion in China. This article argues that the existence of 'religious markets' should not be assumed as axiomatic but should be investigated as concrete social processes, distinguishing between market and non-market relations. Based on field research among popular religious and spiritual groups in China and drawing on the literature of …
Ethics of the Heart
This article explores the angst of deeply committed volunteers in China, engaging with anthropological debates on ethics under conditions of "moral breakdown." Under market socialism, sacrificial volunteering is both ideologically glorified and socially deviant, placing volunteers at the point of dissonance between conflicting moral discourses. Interrogating the monolithic governmentality perspective that informs most anthropological studies of v…
Black bloc against red China
During the mass protest movement, Hong Kong has witnessed intense and disturbing levels of violence, intolerance, and anti-Chinese xenophobia. In this article, I reflect on the aggravation of a conflict system in which both sides are vitalized by the energies of fear and anger supplied by the real and imagined intrusions of the other. I trace the roots of this conflict system in the historical formation of Hong Kong's identity as a sacred space o…
Embodying Utopia
This article discusses the dynamics of charismatic religious movements through the case of the qigong craze, which was the largest mass spiritual/religious movement in urban China in the 1980s and 1990s, until the banning of Falun Gong in 1999. Charisma can be apprehended at three levels: as the embodied experience of individuals; as the emotional affect between masters and followers; and as a collective movement within a macro-social context. Th…
From "Congregations" to "Small Group Community Building
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Bahá'í faith experienced rapid growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Consolidating large numbers of new believers into viable communities has presented great challenges to Bahá'í institutions, including in Chinese communities. Since the late 1990s, a new pattern of discourse and practices has emerged with the aim of nurturing a sustainable pattern of Bahá'í community building. One "aspect" of …
Modernity and Millenialism in China
Qigong was the most widespread form of popular religiosity in post-Maoist urban China. The paper traces the shifting combinations of practices and concepts which came to be associated with qigong from 1949 to 1999 in an evolving ideological and political context, and ending with an analysis of Falun Gong's rupture with qigong groups. Qigong as a social movement was the product of an ambiguous marriage between the Chinese state and popular groups,…
The Cosmopolitan Moment in Colonial Modernity
This article outlines the spread of the Bahá'í religion-known in Chinese asDatong jiao大同教)- as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912-1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Bahá'í movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlappin…
Guanyin's Limbo
How do objects and humans relationally constitute one another? In this article, we examine statues of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Hong Kong to illuminate the forms of personhood and agency that arise through human-icon relations in a modern metropolis. We follow the life course of Guanyin statues, investigating their production, circulation, animation, and disposal-teasing out worshippers' contradictory discourses on whether the de…
Occulting the Dao
This article takes the case of the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion to examine how Asian religious leaders and translators, in a context of colonial modernity, invested a European language with their own cosmologies and discourses, building both a national identity and an alternative spiritual universalism. Studies of translation in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the processes and impact of translating European texts and ideas into the lang…
The Bahá’í Faith and Covenantal Pluralism
The core teachings of the Bahá’í Faith are often summarized as the “Oneness of God, the Oneness of Religion, and the Oneness of Humanity.” Can such principles resonate with a pluralism based on the recognition of difference? Covenantal pluralism outlines a set of principles of co-existence based on deep respect for difference that acknowledges the exclusive truth claims of different actors. In this article, we examine how the teachings and practi…
Chinese NGOs at the interface between governmentality and local society
The relations between society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been relatively neglected in the field of China NGO studies, which remains largely wedded to a state-NGO problematic within a state-society framework. In this anthropological study of an NGO's post-Wenchuan earthquake recovery programme, we adopt an actor-oriented approach to identify the main lines of tension between the strategies, rationalities, and techniques deploye…
Handbook of the Sociology of Religion
Dillon, Michele (ed.) Handbook of the Sociology of Religion Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2003 481 pp. £65.00 (hardback) Students and scholars looking for an overview of the state of the field of the sociology of religion in America today will be well served by Dillon's Handbook, which covers the sub-discipline's main theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues through a collection of balanced, well-written and well-researched chap…
Towards making EIA more human-centric
Intimate Utopias
Can civil society offer alternative modes of sociality in an authoritarian political regime? Drawing on a study on small “voluntary fellowships” in China, we explore the anti-political values of a specific type of group whose members share a moral code of “civic intimacy” that values an idealized social condition of free, pure and caring social relations, and dream of achieving this utopian condition not through political activism but through the…
Ritual, war, and opium
The 'commons' has acquired a renewed theoretical currency in recent years as a way of conceptualizing how different beings live together in shared places that are shaped and modified by human and non-human actions and structures. Through socioecological changes, warfare, movements of populations, sacralizations of land, political territorializations, and man-made infrastructures, the topography of any region, as a commons, is a process of perpetu…
Nurturing Inherent Nobility
The Bahá'í Faith is an important case for a discussion on dignity, religion and human rights. Beyond the notions of dignity enshrined in its basic teachings, a core concern of the Bahá'í community is how to build dignity into the pattern of social relations of an emerging global civilization. The oneness of humanity is the core principle around which all Bahá'í teachings revolve, and within this principle is enshrined not only the inherent, God-g…
Transnational Sacralizations
This article examines the production of sacrality in the context of globalization, through the \ncase of encounters between international spiritual tourists and Chinese monks. The sacred \nmountain of Huashan has historically been localized in the context of Daoist cosmology, \nChinese imperial civilizing, socialist nation-building and, now, global capitalism. While the \nmonks experience Huashan as a gateway for embeddedness into Daoist lineage,…
Le qigong au carrefour des « discours anti ». De l'anticléricalisme communiste au fondamentalisme du Falungong
Dispensateurs de guérisons, d'expériences mystiques et de biens symboliques, les maîtres de qigong ont constitué une forme de clergé séculier de la Chine post-maoïste. Avec l'émergence de ces personnalités charismatiques et de leurs dizaines de millions d'adeptes, apparaissent des discours anticléricaux qui sont utilisés aussi bien par les maîtres que contre eux. Le qigong et son dérivé, le Falungong, nous offrent en effet un prisme pour l'analys…
Vincent Goossaert, Dans les temples de la Chine. Histoire des cultes, Vie des communautés
Le Qigong et la Tradition Sectaire Chinoise
During the 1980s and 1990s, Qigong or “breathing arts” became the most wide-spread form of popular religiosity in Chinese cities. Thousands of charismatic Qigong masters appeared, promoting Qigong methods through transmission networks covering the whole country. Falungong became the biggest Qigong group by the mid-1990s. The article examines the hypothesis of links between Qigong and a galaxy of groups which were widespread in pre-Communist China…
Modernity and Millenialism in China
Qigong was the most widespread form of popular religiosity in post-Maoist urban China. The paper traces the shifting combinations of practices and concepts which came to be associated with qigong from 1949 to 1999 in an evolving ideological and political context, and ending with an analysis of Falun Gong's rupture with qigong groups. Qigong as a social movement was the product of an ambiguous marriage between the Chinese state and popular groups,…
Olav Hammer, Claiming knowledge. Strategies of epistemology from theosophy to the New Age
Handbook of the Sociology of Religion
Dillon, Michele (ed.) Handbook of the Sociology of Religion Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2003 481 pp. £65.00 (hardback) Students and scholars looking for an overview of the state of the field of the sociology of religion in America today will be well served by Dillon's Handbook, which covers the sub-discipline's main theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues through a collection of balanced, well-written and well-researched chap…
André Laliberté, The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Taiwan
Ce livre est une analyse comparative du comportement politique de trois grandes associations bouddhiques dans le Taïwan contemporain. Le premier cas étudié, la Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (BAROC), fut l'association bouddhique officielle dans le système corporatiste du régime Guomindang jusqu'à la levée de la loi martiale en 1987. Depuis l'ouverture politique de l'île, cette association peine à asseoir son autorité sur le monde b…
Alessandro Dell'Orto, Place and Spirit in Taiwan. Tudi Gong in the Stories, Strategies and Memories of Everyday Life
L'ouvrage se veut une étude ethnographique du culte de Tudi Gong, le « dieu du sol » de la religion populaire chinoise qui, depuis Chavannes en 1910 (Le dieu du sol dans la Chine antique, in le T'ai Chan, Essai de monographie d'un culte chinois (Appendice), Paris, Ernest Leroux), n'a jamais fait l'objet d'une recherche systématique par un chercheur occidental malgré son ubiquité dans le paysage culturel chinois et taïwanais. En effet, en plus des…
Affirmations religieuses en Chine
Le retour du confucianisme ne fait plus à lui seul l'actualité en Chine. Là aussi, on observe, à côté du phénomène sectaire, la montée en puissance d'Églises de type évangélique
Embodying Utopia
This article discusses the dynamics of charismatic religious movements through the case of the qigong craze, which was the largest mass spiritual/religious movement in urban China in the 1980s and 1990s, until the banning of Falun Gong in 1999. Charisma can be apprehended at three levels: as the embodied experience of individuals; as the emotional affect between masters and followers; and as a collective movement within a macro-social context. Th…
Les mutations du discours sur les sectes en Chine moderne
Quelle est l'évolution du discours officiel sur les groupes religieux stigmatisés en Chine, depuis la fin du xixe siècle jusqu'à aujourd'hui ? En Chine impériale, l'État s'est toujours défini comme garant de l'orthodoxie contre les rébellions inspirées par les « doctrines hérétiques », xiejiao. En République Populaire de Chine, des années cinquante à quatre-vingt, c'est le terme de huidaomen, « sociétés secrètes réactionnaires », qui est utilisé …
Catégories et politiques du religieux en Chine
Depuis les années quatre-vingt-dix, on observe un essor considérable, dans toutes les disciplines académiques – histoire, anthropologie, sciences politiques notamment – des études sur la religion dans le monde chinois moderne et contemporain qui rendent compte des manifestations de plus en plus variées et globalisées de la vitalité religieuse chinoise. Seule la sociologie des religions est restée relativement en retrait. Les comparaisons avec d’a…
China’s Religious Danwei
This article is a study of the continuities and changes in the state-led institutionalisation of religion in the PRC from 1979 to 2009 and their effects on the structuring of China’s religious field. A normative discourse on religion is constituted by a network of Party leaders, officials, academics, and religious leaders. Official religious institutions have become hybrids of religious culture with the institutional habitus of work units ( danwe…
Religious Philanthropy and Chinese Civil Society
This chapter introduces readers to the different ways in which Chinese people, through their religious traditions, have understood philanthropy and have tried to achieve an idea of “the good” by giving and serving others. It discusses Chinese indigenous concepts of philanthropy and presents traditional practices and contemporary movements drawing inspiration from popular religion, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity. Finally, it considers th…
Chinese Religious Life
Introduction Philip Wickeri Part I: Ways of Being Religious in the Chinese World 1. Spirituality in a Modern Chinese Metropolis, Lizhu Fan and James Whitehead 2. Communal Worship and Festivals in Chinese Villages, Wai-lun Tam 3. The Religious Life of Ethnic Minority Communities, Philip Wickeri and Yik-Fai Tam 4. Modalities of Doing Religion, Adam Chau Part II. Religion, Culture, and Society 5. The Body: Health, Nation, and Transcendence, David A.…
La religion de la Chine
The Religious Question in Modern China
Recent events - from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe - vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religi…
Gift and market in the Chinese religious economy
Religious market theory has figured prominently in recent scholarly debates in the social scientific study of religion in China. This article argues that the existence of 'religious markets' should not be assumed as axiomatic but should be investigated as concrete social processes, distinguishing between market and non-market relations. Based on field research among popular religious and spiritual groups in China and drawing on the literature of …
From "Congregations" to "Small Group Community Building
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Bahá'í faith experienced rapid growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Consolidating large numbers of new believers into viable communities has presented great challenges to Bahá'í institutions, including in Chinese communities. Since the late 1990s, a new pattern of discourse and practices has emerged with the aim of nurturing a sustainable pattern of Bahá'í community building. One "aspect" of …
The Charisma of Shangri-la The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China
Transnational Sacralizations
This article examines the production of sacrality in the context of globalization, through the \ncase of encounters between international spiritual tourists and Chinese monks. The sacred \nmountain of Huashan has historically been localized in the context of Daoist cosmology, \nChinese imperial civilizing, socialist nation-building and, now, global capitalism. While the \nmonks experience Huashan as a gateway for embeddedness into Daoist lineage,…
“Healing Tao USA” and the History of Western Spiritual Individualism
Les pratiques de culture corporelle taoïste sont de plus en plus répandues en Occident depuis quelques décennies. À quel point ces pratiques et les organisations qui les diffusent peuvent être dénommées « taoïstes », est une question controversée parmi les spécialistes et les pratiquants. Dans cet article, nous soutenons que les pratiques culturelles sont inévitablement transformées lorsqu’elles sont introduites dans un nouveau contexte social. N…
Occulting the Dao
This article takes the case of the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion to examine how Asian religious leaders and translators, in a context of colonial modernity, invested a European language with their own cosmologies and discourses, building both a national identity and an alternative spiritual universalism. Studies of translation in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the processes and impact of translating European texts and ideas into the lang…
The Civil Sphere in East Asia
Leading sociologists who live and work in East Asia examine their region's most dangerous and explosive social problems, and some of their most stunning success stories, from the viewpoint of Civil Sphere Theory. This new and increasingly influential sociological understanding of democracy aims to describe and explain the moral codes and institutional foundations of democratic solidarity, as it manifests itself within a distinct social sphere. Pa…
Three Moral Codes and Microcivil Spheres in China
Political science (30 obras) · Chinese history and philosophy (28 obras) · Sociology (28 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · History (19 obras) · China (17 obras) · Politics (13 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras)