You must register by 5pm on October 16, 2024 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a Director’s Seminar with James Meador. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
Scholars of empire have long argued that imperial states frequently borrowed technologies and techniques of governance from each other, often without acknowledging their sources. Others have noted that pre-modern empires did not observe a secular separation of church and state; instead, one invariably finds a complex entanglement of religious and state institutions. This talk seeks to explore the intersection of these two claims in the borderlands of the Russian empire and the Qing empire, as well as those of their respective successors. Through a series of cases from the early modern to contemporary, it seeks to show how representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church selectively adopted political strategies and semiotic forms from other Christian and non-Christian religious traditions through processes of inter-imperial contact and competition. In the course of discussing these cases, the talk will also seek to highlight the role of ostensibly secular state officials in catalyzing these moments of cultural transfer.
James C. Meador is a linguistic anthropologist and anthropological historian of Sino-Russian borderlands studying the social semiotics of empire. Their work examines Russian, Chinese, and Manchu language materials to understand imperial diversity through processes of contact and social transformation. Their dissertation project Making Chinese Orthodox reconstructed the origins and union of two independent traditions of Orthodox Christianity in China through the bilateral Russian and Chinese state-sponsored revival of the Chinese Autonomous Orthodox Church. Their other research engages social semiotic theory through case studies of religion and multilingualism in empire: Russian Orthodox missionary work in Asia, Soviet Chinese literacy campaigns, extraterritorial Manchu settlements in the Russian Far East, Sino-Russian pidgins, and the Qing Empire’s Board of Colonial Dependencies. They hold a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and a BA in Religious Studies and Russian from Reed College.
