"Actants Amassing: What’s Wrong with Durkheim and Mauss?"

Tuesday Seminar Spring/Summer 2012

  • Date: May 25, 2012
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Adam Chau (University of Cambridge)
  • Adam Chau was born in Beijing and grew up in Beijing and Hong Kong (hence the Anglicised Cantonese romanisation of my Chinese name). His undergraduate and graduate training in sociocultural anthropology was done in the US. His doctoral fieldwork was conducted in Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi Province) in the Yulin and Yan’an prefectures, on the cultural, social and political aspects of the revival of popular religion in rural China during the reform period. The results of that research have been published in a monograph (Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China; 2006, Stanford University Press) and a series of journal articles. After having lived in the US for more than a dozen years, Adam chau came to the UK in 2005, and has taught at Oxford and SOAS respectively before coming to Cambridge.
  • Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 12, Göttingen
  • Room: Conference Room
"Actants Amassing: What’s Wrong with Durkheim and Mauss?"

For more details please contact vdvoffice(at)mmg.mpg.de.

Based on fieldwork research on the ‚giant pig‘ temple festival in northern Taiwan, this talk will present a multi-actant ethnographic critique of the Durkheimian fetishism of the social and Maussian anthropological exchangism.


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