Evi Lina Sutrisno
Lecture in English
Embodying Virtue: Body and Faith Expression in Confucian Values
In Kooperation mit Crossculture Religious Studies Project
Abstract
Drawing on classical concepts such as li (ritual propriety) and xiao (filial piety), the class examines how Confucian values are inscribed onto the body through disciplined practices gestures, postures, and ritual performances that are expressed in rituals and everyday life. These embodied forms are not merely symbolic but function as technologies of self-cultivation, shaping moral subjectivity and social harmony. In Confucian values, body can be understood as a site where ethical norms, social hierarchies, and cosmological beliefs intersect.
The class will briefly discuss the historical dimension of the Confucian values about body in China. In the Indonesian history, these values, which had been embodied and practiced by many Chinese-Indonesians, were used by the Dutch colonizers to strengthen racial segregation politics. The class further situates these values within contemporary contexts, such as during the Covid-19 pandemic, during which Confucian values endorsed Confucian believers to comply with the Indonesian government regulation to prevent the spreading of Covid-19 virus.
By engaging with embodiment theory and lived religion approaches, this study contributes to broader discussions on religion and the body by highlighting a non-Western framework in which faith is not primarily articulated through belief, but through cultivated bodily practice. It ultimately argues that Confucianism offers a compelling model of how moral and religious life is enacted, disciplined, and transmitted through the body.
Biographie
Evi Lina Sutrisno is both affiliated to Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and Center for Cross-Religious and Cultural Studies at the University of Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her research interests are about Confucianism, Chinese-Indonesians, Identity Politics and Multiculturalism. She has done research on the history of Confucianism in Indonesia and the struggles of its believers to be acknowledged as a formal religion by the Indonesian government. Currently, she does regular updates on this topic by making several research on the Chinese-Indonesian struggles to promote multiculturalism through Chinese festivals, the split between Confucian believers and the tension within the Chinese community about the blurry boundaries between religion and traditions, which creates disputes whether Chinese iconic festivals, such as Chinese New Year, Cap Go Meh (the first lunar festival), King Hoo Ping (the ancestral spirit worship) are religious or traditional rituals.
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