CeMEAS lecture:
What’s Religious about a Dead Body? Cadaver Donations in Taiwan
Monday July 25, 2016  · 4 pm (c.t.)  ·  KWZ 0.610
Prof. C. Julia Huang, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan/VisitingScholar, The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University

Drawing from ethnographies, in this lecture Prof. Huang will explore the phenomenon of a recent “surge” of cadaver donations for medical purposes in Taiwan. The setting is a university founded by Tzu Chi (Ciji), a charismatic movement that runs one of the largest charities of Chinese Buddhism in the world. Since Tzu Chi founded its medical school in 1994, the total number of donors for whole body donation for medical education has increased from one in 1995 to over 34,000 in 2013. To what extent is this increase of willed bodies a religious phenomenon? What is religious about the dead body? In this lecture, Prof. Huang will analyze her ethnographies with different approaches to religion, in hope that her work will shed light on the shifting concept of religion in a modern and multicultural context.

Image: By University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences, Anatomical diagram of the human skeleton (rear view), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/huDYbS
Design: CeMEAS