Lin, Weihsuan
(2016)
Between State and Body:
Religious Geopolitics, Cultivation and the Falun Gong.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This research analyses an ongoing struggle between continually evolving forms of the
Chinese Party-State’s religious geopolitics, its repression of the Falun Gong, and FLG
followers’ self-cultivation and strategies of resistance to the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP). The PhD begins with a discussion of the Party-State’s strategies of sovereignty
and governmentality, drawing upon the works of Foucault and Agamben, and using a
documentary analysis. It then examines the FLG’s discursive strategies by comparing
scriptures before and after the ban in 1999 to examine how collective subject formation
is continually evolving in ever changing political and social contexts. The second part
of the study develops Foucault’s discussion about self-care in an Eastern religious
context, and is based upon original ethnographic data about FLG cultivators in Dublin,
Taiwan and Hong Kong (2012-14). I adopt Foucault’s work on the ‘care of self’, which
includes self-examination, self-mastery, to analyse how individuals choose teachings to
guide themselves, exercise the power to modify and improve themselves, and also care
for others. Through the voices of more than 62 participants and including participatory
observation, the study illustrates how individual FLG followers cultivate and transform
themselves into spiritual or divine beings. Both Foucault and Master Li Hongzhi, the
founder of the FLG, are sceptical about hierarchical power-relationships and pastoral
care. FLG cultivation is characterised by individualised actions of self-care, selfmastery
and ungovernability, which challenges the Party-State’s religious
governmentality. In addition, the CCP’s oppressive sovereignty and legitimacy are
confronted by FLG’s reactive ‘telling-truth/saving-life’ activities, which include the use
of urban landscapes, the internet, media, artistic peformances and the UN Human Rights
system. These projects are mostly organised by individuals and are based upon global
cooperation among FLG followers. The PhD demonstrates how FLG’s alternative
geopolitical practices of truth-telling at multiple scales, while based upon the principle
of caring for others, is integrated into a perpetual and dynamic process of individualised
self-cultivation.
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(PhD)
|
| Keywords: |
State and Body; Religious Geopolitics; Cultivation; the Falun Gong; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography |
| Item ID: |
7592 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
02 Nov 2016 15:07 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
Repository Staff Only(login required)
 |
Item control page |
Downloads per month over past year
Origin of downloads
Altmetric
Altmetric