March 1, 2022: “Ritual & Relationship in Living Daoist Practice”

Videorecord of presentation on YouTube

Tuesday March 1, 12 noon – 1:30 pm, via Zoom
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Faculty Roundtable
Understanding China Series Event 9

“Ritual & Relationship in Living Daoist Practice”

Featuring David J. Mozina (Author)
in conversation with Jonathan Pettit (Associate Professor of Chinese Religion, UHM)
and Edward Davis (Associate Professor of Chinese History, UHM)

In the hills of China’s central Hunan province, an anxious young apprentice officiates over a Daoist ritual known as the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin. Before a crowd of masters, relatives, and villagers—and the entire pantheon of gods and deceased masters ritually invited to witness the event—he seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. If the apprentice cannot bring forth the deity, the rite is considered a failure and the ordination suspended. His entire professional career hangs in the balance before it even begins. Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, this presentation invites you into the flourishing yet fraught religious world of ritual masters amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. It reveals how these masters’ livelihoods, which hinge on their liturgical ability to protect and heal bodies and spaces from demonic affliction, are a function of their personal relationships with fierce and fickle martial deities, and how those ritual claims are rooted in the great Daoist liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368).

David J. Mozina studies living Daoist and Buddhist ritual traditions in Hunan province in south China, and the roots of those traditions in the liturgical vibrancy of the Song, Yuan, and early Ming periods and in the religious traditions of the late imperial period.  His monograph Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice was published in 2021 by the University of Hawai‘i Press and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. Dr. Mozina is the author of several articles, including “Oaths and Curses in Divine Empyrean Practice,” Journal of Chinese Religions 48, no. 1 (2020); and “Living Redactions: The Salvationist Roots of Daoist Practice in Central Hunan,” Daoism: Religion, History and Society  11 (2019).

Jonathan Pettit is Associate Professor of Chinese Religions at UHM. His research focuses on the production and dissemination of Daoist texts, both in the medieval era and in contemporary groups such as the Yiguandao.

Edward Davis is Associate Professor of Chinese History at UHM. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Middle Imperial China (750-1600) and the history of Chinese religions from the ancient period until the present.

Co-sponsored by the UHM Departments of History and Religion