Taiwan is host to a panoply of popular spiritual-religious practices that reach back to the 17th century. Since 1987, these folk institutions have proliferated, blurring among other things the boundary between secularism and religiosity. They permeate different facets of contemporary Taiwanese society, from politics to technology, grassroot movements to elections. Regardless of faction, political and social groups negotiate and exert new configurations of social power in this spiritual space, which is also used transnationally. This talk focuses on the most influential among them and discusses how one may approach such a study in new and interdisciplinary ways.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Jing Tsu is Jonathan D. Spence Chair Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. She holds an affiliation with the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and has also taught in the Grand Strategy program. Her research spans cultural and social history, nationalism, diaspora, and history of science and technology. Her most recent book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Penguin Random House, 2022), examines how the Chinese written script negotiated its way into the technological age of global communications dominated by the western alphabet. The book was named a 2023 Pulitzer Finalist. Her current research focuses on the social and political life of spirituality and technology in Taiwan.