A Modern Religion? The State, the People, and the Remaking of Buddhism in Urban China Today

Alison Jones will give a lecture on Chinese religions at Harvard University.

Alison Denton Jones
Harvard College Fellow in Sociology
Biographical Note

Alison Denton Jones is Harvard College Fellow in Sociology for the 2010-11 academic year. Her areas of interest include cultural and organizational sociology, religion, social movements, civil society, development, globalization, China and East Asia, and research methodology, especially qualitative methods.

Jones received a B.A. in Asian Studies and Sociology from Pomona College, Claremont, CA (1998) and a certificate in Chinese Studies from the Johns Hopkins - Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies at Nanjing University in the PRC. This unique program offers graduate-level courses on modern Chinese history, culture, and society taught entirely in Chinese by professors from Nanjing University. She speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently and has lived in China and Taiwan for a total of over four years since 1997. Jones received an M.A. (2006) and Ph.D. (2010) in Sociology from Harvard University.

Jones’ dissertation engages directly with long-standing questions in sociology regarding the role of religion in a modern society, and with the diffusion and adaptation of Western conceptual and organizational models in other “modernizing” societies. “A Modern Religion? The State, The People, and the Remaking of Buddhism in Urban China Today” shows how Buddhists seek to create authentic and useful Buddhist practices, organizations, and narratives about religion’s place in society, while negotiating pressures for legitimacy with the state and from the contending public narratives about value that have resulted from China’s recent “opening up” to the world. This study is based on a year of field work in a single Chinese city, but rooted in almost fifteen years of engagement with Chinese societies. Relying on her fluency in Mandarin Chinese, Jones conducted in-depth interviews with lay Buddhists and extensive participant-observation in Buddhist activities and organizations.

Earlier research on “socially engaged” Buddhism in Taiwan also investigates cultural processes of boundary drawing and narrative strategy in newly globalized religious organizations. In addition to developing further publications from studies of contemporary Buddhism in the PRC and Taiwan, Jones is extending this research through two comparative projects. These projects examine the cultural dynamics of regular lay people’s engagement with the particular Western and Protestant concepts of “religion” and “spirituality,” now disseminated across the globe.

Beyond her work on China, Jones brings a cultural and institutional approach to bear on the study of nonprofits and voluntary associations, especially in the United States. She is a collaborator and coauthor with Chris Winship, Van Tran, and Corina Graif (all Harvard University) and Professor Mario Small (University of Chicago) on a multi-stage, multi-method pilot study of organizational affiliation in two Boston neighborhoods. This work on nonprofit and voluntary organizations similarly questions how people engage with the sector in terms of identification with, participation in, and narratives about organizational forms and the sector. Jones’ future research plans include extending these questions to the nascent field of nonprofit and voluntary organization in China (beyond her dissertation’s investigations about the organizational dimension of lay Buddhism).