Yang Shen is a cultural anthropologist focusing on religion, secularism, and ritual theories. She received her Ph.D. from Boston University in 2019 and is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Yang’s doctoral thesis was titled, “Sidestepping Secularism: Performance and Imagination in Buddhist temple-scapes in Contemporary China,” in which she examined how religiously unaffiliated temple-goers relate to Chinese Buddhist temples and the implications of generic ritual technologies. In her new project, “Materializing Religious Mediation,” Yang studies the technological variations of a classic Chinese divination technique (drawing the lot) and investigates questions of religious materiality, ritual technology, and imagination as a cultural practice.
Yang Shen