Author Meets Critics: the Anthropology and Secularization of Asian Religions and Buddhism

This roundtable brings together scholars with diverse disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical backgrounds whose recent publications have nonetheless each centered questions surrounding the accommodations and counter-movements that have emerged within various Asian religious communities in response to processes of secularization. Panelists will include: (1) Mayfair Yang, whose work, Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (2020), scrutinizes how investments in temple-building, rituals, and festivals operate to subvert state secularization in China; (2) Hannah Gould, author of When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan (2023), which surveys changing Buddhist death rituals and funerary equipment in contemporary Japan reflect adaptations and reactions to demographic decline; and (3) Justin McDaniel, who examines the injection of Buddhism into secular domains in Thailand as well as the tradition's diversification and globalization through his recent work Wayward Distractions: Ornament, Emotion, Zombies and the Study of Buddhism in Thailand (2021).