Dr. Benoit Vermander, academic director of the Xu-Ricci Dialogue Center Faculty of Philosophy, Fudan University, Shanghai, presents "Sacredness and Desecration in Contemporary China: Representing and Managing Territories."
As the land is often the object of veneration in China, it is also desecrated through social and ecological exploitation. The sacredness of the "Chinese garden" (a leading metaphor for any sacred territory) contrasts with the desecration of the "waste land." How does the Chinese collective psyche cope with the cultural nostalgia for the ancestral land on the one hand and the actual depletion of its resources on the other?
Location:
Hogg Building (WCH), Meyerson Conference Room 4.118