CCS Noon Lecture Series: Confucian Rites and the Reorienting of Modern Ritual Theory

Hamilton College's Thomas Wilson will speak at the University of Michigan.

Thomas Wilson Professor of History, Hamilton College

Professor Wilson's work on Chinese ancestral cult practice and imperial rites in late imperial times resituates Confucian ritual discourse as ritual theory, which needs to be read alongside modern theories of ritual. Drawing from Talal Asad, he argues that modern social science and literary theories of ritual posit their own cosmologies to support claims about the nature of ritual that are typically formulated, or at least construed, as universal standards. In this presentation, he will examine classical and late imperial Confucian explanations of gods and the rites that venerate them as a way to reorient Western theories of ritual. Professor Wilson, who joined the faculty of Hamilton College in 1989, earned a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ, and has written extensively on Confucian. He edited On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius (Harvard, 2003), to which he also contributed two chapters and is currently co-authoring a cultural history of Confucius titled Confucius through the Ages, to be published by Random House.