China Religions Seminar
This series is focused on cutting edge research in the study of Chinese religions.  By inviting scholars from different disciplinary perspectives and with different areas of specialty, the seminar hopes to explore the complexity of Chinese religions, both in the past and in the ethnographic present.


Friday, November 13, 2009    12:15 pm

Three Corpse Worms: Fragmentation, Alienation, and Integration of Person/Community
T. J. Hinrichs, assistant professor of history, Cornell University

Like the body spirits residing in and responsible for the proper functioning of the organs, the Three Corpse Worms are born with the person in their Cinnabar Fields. Daoist texts of the fourth through eleventh centuries attest to this. The Corpse Worms stand out in the body’s divine community, however, in that their interests run directly contrary to those of the person of which they are a part. Not only are they not responsible for some aspect of the body’s function, but they actively seek the demise of the whole. They inspire lusts that undermine health and provoke the very transgressions that, when reported to the Celestial Emperor, result in deductions from allotted life spans. Once freed from the host, they roam the countryside, feeding off ancestral offerings. This talk will explore the ways in which these views of the body construct personhood in relation to community, malignancy, and healing.

T. J. Hinrichs is assistant professor of history at Cornell University.  She has published articles on the history of healing and medicine in China. She is currently writing a history of Song period (960-1279 c.e.) policies intended to reform “pernicious” customs imputed to southerners such as the clientage of shamans, the quarantining of the sick, and “gu-poisoning” witchcraft.  Among the more innovative official responses was the deployment of medical knowledge, especially through the distribution of medical texts, for the education of southern commoners and the reform of shamanic healers.

Location: CGIS South, Room S153
1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA
Contact: lkluz@fas.harvard.edu


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