Description
Book SynopsisStating the Sacred offers a novel approach to nation-state formation, arguing that its most critical element is how the state sacralizes the nation. Focusing primarily on China, Michael J. Walsh argues that the foundational role of the sacred makes all nation-states religious states.
Trade ReviewAs an anatomy of sacralization, territorialization, and violence,
Stating the Sacred illuminates state formation in China through brilliant exposition, dwelling in vivid details, historical depths, and current controversies, but also through uncovering brutal truths of state formation in the modern world. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of how the sacred works in the modern and how the modern works the sacred. -- David Chidester, author of
Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative ReligionIn
Stating the Sacred, Michael J. Walsh parses what China's postcoloniality and South African apartheid have in common: the sacredness of violence. Drawing upon a wealth of theoretical insight from Schmidt on political theology, Bataille on sacrifice, to Agamban on profanation, and Barthes on myth, Walsh is especially insightful on how the Chinese avowedly atheist party-state adroitly rules through its stringent and energetic containment of religion, channeling those energies into policies on territorial sovereignty and citizenship itself. These tactics range beyond patriotic Christian organizations and registering all the clergy everywhere, to policing reincarnation among the Tibetan Buddhist and reeducation of Uyghur Muslims in camps. For Walsh, this sense of 'religion,' shared by China with many other places, becomes the modern repository of violence and mythos that he finds fundamental to any nation-state formation. -- Angela Zito, coeditor of
DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent FilmRecommended. * Choice *
[A] brilliant analysis of contemporary China. * Reading Religion *
This is an innovative study that gives particular consideration to the role of the sacred in the formation of the PRC state, and to nation-states more generally. * Journal of Church and the State *
Table of ContentsPreface
1. Territory
2. Constitution
3. Religion
4. Reincarnation
5. Contact
6. Nativity
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
