The Dead and Their Ghosts in Chinese Popular Religion

Featured Speaker: Professor David Jordan

At death one leaves behind not only possessions
and a body, but also a heritage of ideas and a set of
social relationships that can persist for generations.
This presentation, growing out of research on ghost
marriage in Taiwan and a course on popular Chinese
stories taught at UC San Diego, will explore some
of the ways in which Chinese tradition deals with
death and the dead and the role of the “war against
specters” that the famous sinologist J.J.M. DeGroot
considered the basis of all Chinese religion.

Presenter Biography

David K. Jordan is Professor Emeritus
of Anthropology at UC San Diego and was a
founding member of the department. He received
a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of
Chicago. His dissertation was based on fieldwork
in a small village in southern Taiwan, where he
studied local religion. This formed the basis of his
book Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors. In a subsequent
sabbatical year, he lived in a Buddhist monastery
while studying heterodox pseudo-Buddhist
groups outside it. This informed his co-authorship
of The Flying Phoenix, about automatic-writing
seances and their practitioners.

Coordinator: Mavis Porter