R P Weller
Biographic Data
| ID | 41475 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R P Weller |
| GIVEN NAMES | R P |
| FAMILY NAME | Weller |
| SIGNATURE | WELLER R P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2897-3819 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 249 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Divine intimacy, frustration and the madness of the city: Changing transhuman kinship in China
This essay shows the affective resonances of the collision of gods, humans, and rapidly shifting landscapes in a newly urbanized part of Suzhou, China. The first section discusses how ties to spirits are not just metaphors or projections of human kinship, but literal parts of a kinship system that invoke responsibilities of care, based on links of both affect and blood. The second turns to how such intimacy is not always pleasant, and how the clo…
Editing the Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies
Religion in the Folded City: Origami and the Boundaries of the Chronotope
In this article we rethink the chronotope approach by examining what happened to religious space-times in a Chinese urban development project that completely transformed what had once been five relatively rural townships. What happens to chronotopes when a place is so completely transformed? We focus on multiple chronotopic dimensions in the religious experience of those villagers whose families had long occupied this land, but who now live separ…
Respecting silence: Longing, rhythm, and Chinese temples in an age of bulldozers
This essay distinguishes the silence that makes rhythm (and thus ritual) possible, and the silence of loss and longing. It argues that both, as they intertwine, are crucial parts of the adjustment to traumatic change. The interaction between these two kinds of silence offers an alternative to theories that focus primarily on speaking as a way of overcoming trauma, or on silence as antisocial. The ethnographic evidence comes from a surgical case t…
Overnight Urbanization and Changing Spirits: Disturbed Ecosystems in Southern Jiangsu
Three Chinese cases involving ghost attacks, the increase of spirit mediums, and innovations in the forms and objects of temple worship suggest how nonequilibrium ecology, broadly conceived, can clarify processes of urban change. They extend Ingold's call for "ecologies of life" by clarifying how latent potentials become manifest and how new symbiotic assemblages can be created in disturbed ecosystems. These cases arise from the rapid urban expan…
Censorship, foreclosure, and the three deaths of Fengzhen
This article draws on Judith Butler's distinction between censorship and foreclosure, and on Saidiya Hartman's work about how to narrate the silences of the slave trade, to explore two photographs. The first is a dismembered and reassembled family photograph that suggests a distinction between present absences and totally absent ones. The second opens up the case of the three deaths of the goddess Fengzhen caused by China's very rapid urbanizatio…
Symposium: The Achievement of David Martin
David Martin and the Sociology of Hope
Goddess Unbound: Chinese Popular Religion and the Varieties of Boundary
Mazu is an important deity who spread widely within and beyond China. The hardening of internal and external boundaries during the Cold War greatly limited the flow of the cult on the mainland, and completely cut the tie to temples in Taiwan and abroad. The end of the Cold War, however, brought many new possibilities, which are best understood by opening up the concept of "boundary." The Cold War had strengthened the idea that borders are meant t…
Mimesis, or “Society Is Imitation”
The heart of mimesis is a set of shared conventions rather than shared beliefs or shared memory. The repetition of mimesis gives it the character of something eternally present. This gives mimesis a much greater potential for openness than memory does. Unlike the past-continuous of memory, mimesis creates a kind of present-continuous. This chapter focuses on conflict around the reading of mimesis as memory or metaphor in different social contexts…
Sociedad civil y bien común. Hacia una nueva articulación del mercado, el estado y la sociedad civil. Tomo I
La presente obra propone una sana relación entre las lógicas del mercado, del Estado y del don -cuya sede principal es la sociedad civil-, sin que cada una de esas dimensiones pierda su propia autonomía relativa. No solamente plantea dicha nueva articulación en el nivel teórico, sino que la muestra en nuevas praxis sociales, sobre todo en el nivel local y micro, pero con proyecciones posibles tanto nacionales como continentales y globales. Un cam…
How Things Count As the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor
Chronicles of China's Spiritual Revival
A veteran journalist explores the surprisingly varied and vibrant array of religious groups that are now thriving in a country that is officially atheist but searching for something to believe in
Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies
Free markets alone do not work effectively to solve certain kinds of human problems, such as education, old age care, or disaster relief. Nor have markets ever been the sole solution to the psychological challenges of death, suffering, or injustice. Instead, we find a major role for the non-market institutions of society - the family, the state, and social institutions. The first in-depth anthropological study of charities in contemporary Chinese…
On the Boundaries Between Good and Evil: Constructing Multiple Moralities in China
This essay discusses three contrasting versions of the relationship between good and evil in contemporary China: a spirit medium who maneuvers between them, a charismatic Christian group that forges an identity by defending the border between them, and an official state and religious discourse of banal goodness and universal love that seeks to annihilate evil. Each defines good and evil differently, but more importantly, each imagines the nature …
Global Religious Changes and Civil Life in Two Chinese Societies: A Comparison of Jiangsu and Taiwan
People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait accommodated, adjusted, and transformed at least four of the most important 20th-century trends in religious life around the world: the removal of religion
Pluralism and Chinese Religions: Constructing Social Worlds through Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor
What counts as the same? Judgments of sameness and difference are fundamental to how social groups create and define themselves over time and across space. This is never a purely objective decision because no two things, people, or groups are ever identical. Group identity thus depends in part on interpretive decisions about similarity and difference. This paper examines three primary mechanisms for such interpretation: (1) memory, in which we id…
The Politics of Increasing Religious Diversity in China
China has seen a remarkable growth and pluralization of religious activity over the past thirty years, a development that has rapidly overtaken the incremental and sluggish changes in the relevant regulatory structures. In much of the country, the government has managed the mismatch between religious practice and official rules by governing with “one eye open and one eye closed,” that is, by pretending not to notice violations of the regulations …
Ritual and the Rhythms of Ambiguity
This chapter analyzes ritual’s ability simultaneously to create and to cross boundaries. It emphasizes in particular the way ritual defines social time through its rhythmic repetitions. Rituals define and bind things, people, times, and spaces. In doing so, they also forge links to what lies beyond their immediate fields. This chapter argues that rituals offer a way to live in a plural and hence also deeply ambiguous universe.
Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity
The hidden form of capital: Spiritual Influences in Societal Progress
"The Hidden Form of Capital presents evidence from several parts of the changing world about how the realm of the spirit affects the economy. The idea that societies have economic cultures as well as aesthetic, literary, and artistic cultures is well-embedded in a number of major studies attempting to identify the origins of national wealth and progress. This book provides an original contribution to the debate, by discussing the relationship bet…
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 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…
Bandits, Beggars, and Ghosts: The failure of state control over religious interpretation in Taiwan
Throughout the last century, local temples in Taiwan propitiated socially marginal ghosts in the Pudu (Universal Salvation Festival). The traditional state manipulated the ghost cult in an attempt to enhance its control; the current state is making similar, but less systematic efforts. These efforts largely failed, however, because of the nature of popular interpretation. Popular interpretations of the ceremony experienced several transformations…
The Politics of Ritual Disguise: Repression and Response in Taiwanese Popular Religion
Living at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan
This is a preprint (author's original) version of an article published in the journal Public Culture in 2000. The final version of this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-2-477 (login may be required)
Hegemony and Chinese Folk Ideologies: An Introduction
Ten-Section Systems, Omaha Kinship, and Dispersed Alliance Among the Ancient Chinese [and Comments and Reply]
This paper attempts to establish a structural relationship between the kinship regimes of the Shang (1766-1122 B.C.) and Eastern Chou (770-221 B.C.) dynasties of ancient China as they have been described in the works of P. H. Liu and Y. F. Ruey respectively. At present, the findings of Liu and Ruey stand as isolated analyses of the kinship regimes of two dynasties separated in time by some 500-600 years. Recognition of the structural relation bet…
Sectarian Religion and Political Action in China
Why were religious sects in China so often associated with political violence? From the Five Pecks of Rice sect at the end of the Han to the Boxers and Red Spears in the twentieth century, the Chinese authorities have blamed heterodox religious ideologies for inciting people to act against the government. The authorities often repressed even sects that never engaged in violent opposition to the government. The Luo Sect, for example, which was pop…
Merit And Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism
Thirty years ago the buddhist compassion Relief Foundation (Ciji Gongdehui, hereafter Ciji) was virtually unknown. Lost in the backwater of Taiwan's eastern coast, the group began in 1966 with a nun, five disciples, and thirty housewives who contributed pin money of NT $0.50 each day (just over a penny at that time) to help supplement medical fees for the poor. The nuns sewed children's shoes to generate a little more income, and their monthly to…
Overnight Urbanization and Changing Spirits: Disturbed Ecosystems in Southern Jiangsu
Three Chinese cases involving ghost attacks, the increase of spirit mediums, and innovations in the forms and objects of temple worship suggest how nonequilibrium ecology, broadly conceived, can clarify processes of urban change. They extend Ingold's call for "ecologies of life" by clarifying how latent potentials become manifest and how new symbiotic assemblages can be created in disturbed ecosystems. These cases arise from the rapid urban expan…
On the Boundaries Between Good and Evil: Constructing Multiple Moralities in China
This essay discusses three contrasting versions of the relationship between good and evil in contemporary China: a spirit medium who maneuvers between them, a charismatic Christian group that forges an identity by defending the border between them, and an official state and religious discourse of banal goodness and universal love that seeks to annihilate evil. Each defines good and evil differently, but more importantly, each imagines the nature …
The Politics of Increasing Religious Diversity in China
China has seen a remarkable growth and pluralization of religious activity over the past thirty years, a development that has rapidly overtaken the incremental and sluggish changes in the relevant regulatory structures. In much of the country, the government has managed the mismatch between religious practice and official rules by governing with “one eye open and one eye closed,” that is, by pretending not to notice violations of the regulations …
The Human Dimensions of Pollution Policy Implementation: Air quality in rural China
The People's Republic of China is experiencing severe air pollution with very serious public health and economic consequences. Over the past decade, the Chinese government has sought to utilize bureaucratic, political, legal and educational vehicles to address these problems. This paper examines the ways in which those policy measures have been communicated to, understood by, and acted upon by the citizenry, drawing in important part on household…
Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion
This is an out of print book, the rights for which have reverted to the author. The version presented here was digitized from a paper copy provided by the author
Religion in the Folded City: Origami and the Boundaries of the Chronotope
In this article we rethink the chronotope approach by examining what happened to religious space-times in a Chinese urban development project that completely transformed what had once been five relatively rural townships. What happens to chronotopes when a place is so completely transformed? We focus on multiple chronotopic dimensions in the religious experience of those villagers whose families had long occupied this land, but who now live separ…
Religions and philanthropies in Chinese societies
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
Censorship, foreclosure, and the three deaths of Fengzhen
This article draws on Judith Butler's distinction between censorship and foreclosure, and on Saidiya Hartman's work about how to narrate the silences of the slave trade, to explore two photographs. The first is a dismembered and reassembled family photograph that suggests a distinction between present absences and totally absent ones. The second opens up the case of the three deaths of the goddess Fengzhen caused by China's very rapid urbanizatio…
Goddess Unbound: Chinese Popular Religion and the Varieties of Boundary
Mazu is an important deity who spread widely within and beyond China. The hardening of internal and external boundaries during the Cold War greatly limited the flow of the cult on the mainland, and completely cut the tie to temples in Taiwan and abroad. The end of the Cold War, however, brought many new possibilities, which are best understood by opening up the concept of "boundary." The Cold War had strengthened the idea that borders are meant t…
From State-Owned Enterprise to Joint Venture: A Case Study of the Crisis in Urban Social Services
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangtzi Delta, 1350-1988
Power and Protest in the Countryside. Studies of Rural Unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America
Affines, Ambiguity, and Meaning in Hokkien Kin Terms
This is a publisher's version of an article published in the journal Ethnology in 1981. The offprint is posted here in accordance with existing publisher policy, or by special permission via correspondence
Affines, Ambiguity, and Meaning in Hokkien Kin Terms
This is a publisher's version of an article published in the journal Ethnology in 1981. The offprint is posted here in accordance with existing publisher policy, or by special permission via correspondence
Sectarian Religion and Political Action in China
Why were religious sects in China so often associated with political violence? From the Five Pecks of Rice sect at the end of the Han to the Boxers and Red Spears in the twentieth century, the Chinese authorities have blamed heterodox religious ideologies for inciting people to act against the government. The authorities often repressed even sects that never engaged in violent opposition to the government. The Luo Sect, for example, which was pop…
Ten-Section Systems, Omaha Kinship, and Dispersed Alliance Among the Ancient Chinese [and Comments and Reply]
This paper attempts to establish a structural relationship between the kinship regimes of the Shang (1766-1122 B.C.) and Eastern Chou (770-221 B.C.) dynasties of ancient China as they have been described in the works of P. H. Liu and Y. F. Ruey respectively. At present, the findings of Liu and Ruey stand as isolated analyses of the kinship regimes of two dynasties separated in time by some 500-600 years. Recognition of the structural relation bet…
Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Rural Unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America
List of Figures vii 1. Introduction: Moral Economy, Capitalism, and State Power in Rural Protest / Scott E. Guggenheim and Robert P. Weller 3 2. Routine Conflicts and Peasant Rebellions in Seventeenth-Century France / Charles Tilly 13 3. Indian Uprisings under Spanish Colonialism: Southern Mexico in 1712 / Robert Wasserstrom 42 4. Capitalist Penetration in the Nineteenth Century: Creating Conditions for New Patterns of Social Control / Joel S. Mi…
Power and Protest in the Countryside. Studies of Rural Unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America
Allegations in Withdrawn Motion Questioned
Social Contradiction and Symbolic Resolution: Practical and Idealized Affines in Taiwan
This is a publisher's version of an article published in the journal Ethnology in 1984. The offprint is posted here in accordance with existing publisher policy, or by special permission via correspondence
Social/Cultural Anthropology: China's Urban Villagers: Life in a Beijing Commune. Norman A. Chance
Bandits, Beggars, and Ghosts: The failure of state control over religious interpretation in Taiwan
Throughout the last century, local temples in Taiwan propitiated socially marginal ghosts in the Pudu (Universal Salvation Festival). The traditional state manipulated the ghost cult in an attempt to enhance its control; the current state is making similar, but less systematic efforts. These efforts largely failed, however, because of the nature of popular interpretation. Popular interpretations of the ceremony experienced several transformations…
Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion
This is an out of print book, the rights for which have reverted to the author. The version presented here was digitized from a paper copy provided by the author
Inequality Among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China . Rubie S. Watson
Hegemony and Chinese Folk Ideologies: An Introduction
The Politics of Ritual Disguise: Repression and Response in Taiwanese Popular Religion
A Chinese Pioneer Family: The Lins of Wu-Feng, Taiwan, 1729-1895
In an absorbing account of a frontier family's rise to local eminence, from its pioneer days in eighteenth-century Taiwan through its attainment of gentry status there a century later, Johanna Meskill presents not just a family history but a social history of late imperial China as well. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from …
Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion
Power and Protest in the Countryside
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangtzi Delta, 1350-1988
Capitalism, Community, and the Rise of Amoral Cults in Taiwan
Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak States and Strong Spirits in China
Merit And Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism
Thirty years ago the buddhist compassion Relief Foundation (Ciji Gongdehui, hereafter Ciji) was virtually unknown. Lost in the backwater of Taiwan's eastern coast, the group began in 1966 with a nun, five disciples, and thirty housewives who contributed pin money of NT $0.50 each day (just over a penny at that time) to help supplement medical fees for the poor. The nuns sewed children's shoes to generate a little more income, and their monthly to…
Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China
From State-Owned Enterprise to Joint Venture: A Case Study of the Crisis in Urban Social Services
Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State 1660-1990 . Charles Brewer Jones
Sociology (43 works) · Political science (32 works) · History (27 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (26 works) · Law (26 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · China (22 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Politics (15 works)