Dr. Adam Yuet CHAU

Dr. Adam Yuet CHAU is University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Modern China teaching in the Department of East Asian Studies, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. He grew up in Beijing and Hong Kong and received his anthropological training in the United States (BA, Williams College, 1993; PhD, Stanford University, 2001). He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in rural north-central China on the revival of popular religion in the reform era and, more recently, in Taiwan on temple festivals (e.g. technological innovations connected to rituals). He is the author of Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2006) and editor of Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (Routledge, 2011). He is interested in developing better ways of conceptualising the Chinese religious landscape. One of his career ambitions is to stop people from asking the question ‘How many religions are there in China?’. He is currently working on book projects investigating the idiom of hosting (zuozhu 做主) and forms of powerful writing (‘text acts’) in Chinese political and religious culture all the while translating a traditional illustrated morality book from the Republican period on ‘cherishing written characters’ (xizizhi 惜字紙).