Special Issue: Beyond the Market: Exploring the Religious Field in Modern China
Author affiliations: NYU Shanghai Research Institute, Science Building A303, East China Normal University , 3663 Zhong Shan Bei Road, Shanghai, China , 200062
Author biographies Francesca Tarocco teaches Chinese Religious History at New York University in Shanghai and is one of the founding fellows of the Institute for Shanghai Studies at NYU in Shanghai. She is the author of The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma (2007), and is currently working on a monograph entitled The Re-enchantment of Modernity: Buddhism and Photography in Modern China.
關鍵詞
Chinese Buddhism; religious goods; media and religion; consumption
摘要
For 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.
