Agenda

Lecture Series “Religion and Water”
Marine Mothers: Goddess Worship and More-Than-Human Relationality in Maritime East Asia

Aike P. Rots
University of Oslo

19 December 2023
3:30 PM (CET)

Abstract
Goddesses are central to the ritual lives of billions of people. In Asia, especially, people worship a variety of goddesses. Some of these are local and place-based, while others are venerated across the continent. Probably the most popular deity in East Asia is the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, worshipped widely as a caring mother goddess in China (where she is known as Guanyin), Japan (as Kannon), Vietnam (as Quan Âm), Korea (as Gwaneum), and beyond. Another popular Asian goddess is the sea deity Mazu (also known as Tian Fei or Tian Hou), who has many followers not only in her homeland Fujian and nearby Taiwan, but across the maritime Sinosphere, from Japan to Singapore. Guanyin and Mazu are both associated with the ocean and with safety at sea, as are many other popular deities throughout the region, such as the originally Hainanese maritime goddess Shui Wei Sheng Niang, the South Vietnamese mother goddess Thủy Long Thánh Mẫu, the three goddesses of Munakata in Kyushu, and the wind goddess Yeondeung in South Korea. Other popular goddesses, such as Benzaiten (in Japan) and Bà Thu Bồn (in Vietnam) – East Asian manifestations of the originally Indian river goddesses Saraswati and Ganga, respectively – are associated with rivers. All these goddesses not only protect people when they board ships and cross aquatic boundaries, they also have aquatic qualities themselves: they flow, change shape, cross borders, and give life. They are powerful, but unpredictable, and not easily captured within academic or political categories associated with nation states or “world religions”.
In this lecture, I will introduce some of the popular aquatic goddesses of East and Southeast Asia. As I will argue, there is a striking discrepancy between the popularity of goddesses in the real world and the scarcity of academic attention that they have received. How is it possible that, despite their widespread popularity, they have such a peripheral status within religious studies? What would happen if we move away from established classification models and their underlying androcentric biases, and place goddesses at the centre of our analysis? How can such an approach help us rethink popular religion and more-than-human relationality in the Asia-Pacific region? This lecture provides some suggestions for a new research agenda that centres on aquatic goddesses and the people who worship them.

Bio:
Aike P. Rots is Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests (Bloomsbury 2017) and the co-editor of Festivals in Asia (special issue of Religion, 2023), Sacred Heritage in Japan (Routledge 2020), and Formations of the Secular in Japan (special issue of Japan Review, 2017). He has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in the fields of religious studies, Asian studies, critical heritage studies, and environmental humanities, and he is currently PI of the ERC-funded project Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia (2019-2025).

Organized by NICHE and DSAAM (Silvia Rivadossi) in collaboration with Student Association GESSHIN.