David J. Mozina (Scholar/Author)

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series, this event features scholar and author, David J. Mozina, who will be speaking on his book, "Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice." Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, this lecture invites you into the flourishing yet fraught religious world of Daoist ritual masters amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. It reveals how these masters' livelihoods, which hinge on their liturgical ability to protect and heal bodies and spaces from demonic affliction, are a function of their personal relationships with fierce and fickle martial deities, and how those ritual claims are rooted in the great Daoist liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368). This lecture will appeal to specialists of East Asian religions and to religionists and anthropologists interested in ritual.