Katherine Rooney

Barnard ‘10
East Asian Studies

“Nan dai guanyin nu dai fo” (“Men wear Guanyin, women wear Buddha.”) This saying describes the practice, common in China today, of adorning the body with objects invested with obvious religious resonance. The wearing of jade Guanyin bodhisattva or Sakyamuni Buddha images around one’s neck represents part of a matrix of bodily practice widespread in contemporary China that includes prayer beads, pendants, necklaces, and clothing of all types. The buying, selling, and wearing of Buddhist objects is ubiquitous in contemporary urban China. Are we to think of these transactions as, quite simply, the buying and selling of religion? What forces shape and define the trade of objects with such obvious religious significance?

This summer I travelled to Beijing, China for three months to conduct research on the buying, selling, and wearing of Buddhist objects in contemporary urban China. I conducted interviews with people who wear and trade these objects as well as observed the practices surrounding these objects at their different sites of sale.  My fieldwork was focused on a specific area of Beijing—the Yonghegong Temple and the neighborhood surrounding it —an area abundant with restaurants, hotels, and shops of all sorts, which allowed me to study the sale of these objects in their varying contexts. While I focused on this one particular neighborhood, I also visited other Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian temples in Beijing for comparative purposes.

Among the questions I seek to answer in my senior thesis are: What makes these objects sacred? For what reasons to people wear these objects? What does the trade and wearing of Buddhist objects say about religious change in China today? What does it tell us about China’s contemporary consumer culture?

Scholarship on contemporary China is replete with references to the redefinition of Chinese culture and society that has accompanied economic reform.  The country’s religious and secular landscapes are being drastically reshaped by the mass movement of people from rural to urban centers, a generation of enormous amounts of individual wealth, a burgeoning middle class, as well as the birth of Chinese and foreign tourist markets. Studying a single practice imbued with religious significance, as it is carried out in a city at the center of this transformation, can serve as a window into the ways these forces of change interact with one another and how they play out on the body.

The research, thus, may have implications for our understanding of matters beyond the sale of Buddhism in Beijing. It may call into question some of the categories with which sociologists and students of religion often approach their subject matter. The overlap between the selling and buying of what is often labeled religious material culture in the different contexts of Beijing seems to blur the lines between secular and sacred space, between religious objects and souvenirs. Through the study of Buddhist objects, I seek to make broader conclusions about religion and consumer culture in China today and attain deep understanding and appreciation of that visible yet unchartered crossroads where religion and material culture meet in contemporary urban China.