How Daoism Became American: A Tale of Translation, Conservation, Immigration, Appropriation and Impersonation
Daoism is the indigenous organized religion of China, with a two-thousand-year history, an enormous canon of sacred texts, and a complicated liturgy. However, until fairly recently, Daoism was best known in the West, if at all, as a quaint and exotic philosophy of quietism and mysticism. This was how Daoism was depicted in most readily available sources of information, including anthologies of Chinese philosophy and world religion textbooks.
According to Confucian-influenced scholars, Daoism may have inspired a lot of Chinese art and poetry, but it was not a contemporary spiritual option for Chinese, and certainly not for North Americans. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, Daoism became a plausible spiritual path for Euro-Americans, not by becoming more like Chinese Daoism in either of its two current denominations in China (Quanzhen or Zhengyi), but rather by being completely taken out of its religious setting, and reconstituted as a series of modular, individual practices.
This interactive lecture will introduce Daoist leaders and communities in the United States and Canada, from their beginnings to the close of the 20th century, based on original research. It will argue that American Daoism is a definable and distinct religious tradition of North America. American Daoism was neither exported whole cloth from China nor simply invented by Euro-Americans. Rather it arose from collaboration between progressive elements in American society, and elite, lettered Chinese immigrants, nostalgic for their own displaced childhoods. These Chinese men (for they were all men) became the first American Daoist teachers, and they are both self-inventors and inheritors of tradition.
This lecture will ask the question “how much can a religious tradition change before it is no longer a tradition at all?” It will be of interest to anyone interested in how Asian culture is translated into Western context, and issues of appropriation and authenticity. No previous knowledge (of Daoism or anything else) assumed!
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Your Instructor
Dr. Elijah Siegler
Dr. Elijah Siegler is a professor of Religious Studies at College of Charleston, a public university in South Carolina, where he teaches classes on Religions of China and Japan, The Ancient Chinese Secret to Happiness, The Daoist Tradition, Asian Religions in America, New Religious Movements, and many others.
He is the editor of Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order (Baylor University Press, 2016) and the author of New Religious Movements (Prentice-Hall, 2006). He is the leading expert in the field of American Daoism, and has lectured and published widely on that field, including the award-winning book Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press, 2017, co-authored with David A. Palmer). His research on American Daoism has been cited in venues such as Andrew Henry’s YouTube series Religion for Breakfast and Stephen Prothero’s best-selling textbook Religion Matters.
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