This is a past event. Registration is closed. View other Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai events.
On Monday, Sept 10, The RAS book club will host Benoît Vermander and Liang Zhang, who will discuss their book Shanghai Sacred: The Religious Landscape of a Global City.
Shanghai, a dynamic world metropolis, is home to a multitude of religions, from Buddhism and Islam, to Christianity and Baha'ism, to Hinduism and Daoism, and many more. In this city of 24 million inhabitants, new religious groups and older faiths together claim and reclaim spiritual space.
Shanghai Sacred explores the spaces, rituals, and daily practices that make up the religious landscape of the city, offering a new paradigm for the study of Chinese spirituality that reflects the global trends shaping Chinese culture and civil society.
Based on years of fieldwork, incorporating both comparative and methodological perspectives, Shanghai Sacred demonstrates how religions are lived, constructed, and thus inscribed into the social imaginary of the metropolis. Evocative photographs by Liz Hingley enrich and interact with the narrative, making the book an innovative contribution to religious visual ethnography.
BENOIT VERMANDER is professor of religious studies and director of the Xu-Ricci Dialogue Institute at Fudan University, Shanghai. He is the author of Corporate Social Responsibility in China: A Vision, an Assessment and a Blueprint. LIANG ZHANG is research assistant in the Institute of Religious Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
RSVP: bookevents@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
Entrance: Free for RAS members / non-members 50 RMB
*Dress code for the RAS Library is business smart. Please no shorts, flip-flops, jeans with holes, etc.*
