Professor Stephan Feuchtwang

Professor Stephan Feuchtwang is a senior research associate of the Department and Programme Director for the MSc China in Comparative Perspective. He has been engaged in research on popular religion and politics in mainland China and Taiwan since 1966, resulting in a number of publications on charisma, place, temples and festivals, and civil society. He is presently engaged in a comparative project exploring the theme of the recognition of catastrophic loss, including the loss of archive and recall, which in Chinese cosmology and possibly elsewhere is pre-figured in the category of ghosts. He is pursuing this project through field studies in Berlin as well as in Taiwan and mainland China. Most recently he has been pursuing a project on the comparison of civilisations and empires.

Selected publications:

Forthcoming. Centres and margins: the organization of extravagance as self-government. In Frances Pine and Joao Pina-Cabral (eds) On the Margins of Religion. Berghahn Books.

2007. On religious ritual as deference and excessive communication. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 13 (1): 57-72.

2007. Public emotions in a colonial context: a case of spirit writing in Taiwan under Japanese occupation. In Amal Treacher, Perry 6, Corinne Squire and Susannah Radstone (eds) Public Emotions. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan.

2007. Belonging to what? Jewish mixed kinship and historical disruption. In Janet Carsten (ed) Ghosts of Memory; Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness. Oxford: Blackwell.

2006. Images of sub-humanity and their realisation. In: Critique of Anthropology special issue on State Violence, guest edited by Tobias Kelly and Alpa Shah. 26 (3): 259-278.

2006. Memorials to injustice. In Memory, trauma, and world politics, Duncan Bell (ed). Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan. 

2004. (editor) Making place: State projects, globalization, and local responses in China. London: UCL Press.

2003. Peasants, democracy and anthropology: Questions of local loyalty. Critique of Anthropology 23(1): 93-120.

2001. Popular religion in China: The Imperial metaphor. London: Routledge. (New edition)

2001. (with Wang Mingming) Grassroots charisma in China. London: Routledge.

Professor Feuchtwang's fieldwork photos can be viewed through the LSE Library Archives catalogue here.

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