Please RSVP by emailing chkl.library@utoronto.ca.
Seminar in English, supplement with Cantonese.
About the Talk
Taoist monasteries in Hong Kong emerged in the early twentieth century and, in many cases, evolved from comparatively closed communities into more publicly oriented religious organizations. This talk examines the development and ritual practices of a Taoist monastery in the New Territories in relation to the needs of newly settled urban residents in postwar Hong Kong. In addition to actively seeking blessings from deities, local residents were keen to pacify the deceased and worship ancestors as a way to practice kinship and filial piety, as well as to avoid harms attributed to ghosts and seek protection and prosperity from ancestors. Alongside calendrical celebrations such as patron deities' birthdays, and other festivals structured by the Chinese almanac throughout the year, the monastery developed ancestral shrines for the deceased and offered on-demand mourning rites to the public that generated organizational resources, especially as cremation became the dominant mode of death management from the 1970's onward. As the monastery became more institutionalized, the scheduling, practices, and scope of its ritual services continued to evolve in response to both internal community dynamics and broader sociocultural conditions.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Matt Kin-hang Ma is a Lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. Dr. Ma obtained his PhD from the Division of Humanities of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include the development of Taoist organizations and their rituals, ritual specialist and ritual musician communities in the context of popular religion, and the intangible cultural heritage of Hong Kong.
Moderator Bio:
Dr. Ting Guo (she/her) specialises in religion, politics, and gender in transnational Asia. She is Assistant Professor of Language Studies, University of Toronto, Honorary Researcher at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto, and Book Review Editor for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. She is co-editor of the special forum "Religion and Social Movements in Hong Kong" in the Journal of Asian Studies and is currently co-writing a book on women's history in Hong Kong.