Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong

This paper is based on my ongoing work on Chinese gods and processes of subjectification whereby such gods affirm unique personas and engage humans in person-to-person interactions. It is based on a critical approach to much of the scholarship on gods who merely treat them as projection of human collective values and needs. I propose that the vast array of ritual techniques developed over the very longue durée in China to allow the gods to “talk back” to humans have allowed these gods to affirm themselves as persons and subjects – even though there was also resistance against such developments. I developed the case of spirit-writing as a particularly effective mean of divine subjectivization. I then wish to open a comparison with other religious cultures and explore the reasons why the presence of gods as subjects varies considerably between different cultural contexts: in some places, gods can engage humans as persons in ways comparable to the Chinese case, and in others they do not. My working hypothesis is that the availability and social acceptance of ritual techniques to allow the gods to talk is a crucial factor in such differences.