"Poly-ontology: rethinking religious plurialism through a Chinese lens"

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In this talk, David Palmer questions the notions of religious “syncretism”, “hybridity” and “pluralism” as applied to China. China has never known the monopoly of a single religion, and the coexistence of a plurality of traditions has, for centuries, constituted an official principle of religious management, for the state as well as for religious institutions themselves and local communities. At an institutional level, this pluralism does not entail the freedom and mutual tolerance of independent entities, nor is it a syncretistic merging or hybridization, but the interpenetration, imbrication and functional differentiation of cosmological systems and practices that maintain their internal coherence and identity – and which are, at an ontological level, often radically incommensurable. This logic operates in the relationships between the “three teachings” of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism; between these traditions and popular religion; as well as, in the contemporary period, for the relationships between these traditions and the Marxist atheism of the socialist state. Taking inspiration from the “ontological turn” in anthropology, David Palmer uses ethnographic examples on Chinese popular religion, salvationist movements and state-religion relationships, to model different logics of “poly-ontological” imbrication in the Chinese world.