Magic (Wu), Medicine (Yi), Religion (Jiao), and the Scope of Rationality (Li) in Imperial China

For histories of premodern China, disciplinary divides between science and religion studies produce particular sets of problems. Foremost, the very categories science and religion, and the related secular-sacred dichotomy, are arguably alien to premodern China. How do we keep histories of China in conversation with histories of other regions, yet avoid the distorting effects of Eurocentric frameworks? In turn, for interdisciplinary explorations of science and religion, premodern China presents its own challenges. How do we include or even refer to “premodern China” in a comparative conversation without essentializing it as Europe’s non-modernizing Other? This presentation will open the discussion by considering a twelfth-century case study of boundary policing between medical and ritual healing modalities and the operation of “scholarly” (or “Confucian”) distinction in medical and ritual contexts.