Junbin Tan

Junbin Tan is a guest in the research group on “Ageing in a Time of Mobility” from January until March 2024. Junbin's research interests lie at the intersection of studies of religious affects, political subjectivities, temporality, and aging and generational life. His dissertation Familiar Futures at Taiwan’s Border with China: Lived Religion, Ritualized Archiving, and Projects for Later Life is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Kinmen, once Taiwan’s battlefront against China and now Taiwan’s most frequently used border with China. He examines the religious activities of current generations of older adults and middle-aged individuals who are approaching retirement, a ritual economy that is purportedly in decline, and cultural workers (wenshi gongzuozhe) who document ritual customs that many people perceive as disappearing. He examines how struggles to conduct temple activities and maintain communication with gods amidst economic volatility, circular migration, and declining ritual labor dovetail with the efforts of cultural workers to document a dying “Chinese culture” at this China-Taiwan borderland. The political sentiments that older generations have for “China,” he argues, must be examined against temple activities, rituals of documentation, and the affects and temporalities they produce. Junbin was a Taiwan Fellowship grantee in 2021, visiting scholar at the Institute of Ethnology, ROC (Taiwan) in 2021-22, and a Graduate Fellow at the Center of Culture, Society and Religion, Princeton University, 2022-2024.