Paradoxical postsecularity in the making: a methodological experiment in the study of China’s temple-centered urban redevelopment

Abstract

The incorporation of Buddhist temples into urban redevelopment within China’s market transition became notable after the 2000s. Domestic and international real estate developers collaborated with local governments and state-owned enterprises in the construction of commercial complexes by converting under-used spaces around renowned Buddhist temples. Among these scattered projects of temple-centered redevelopment across Mainland China, this article identifies one during which the Hong Kong-based developer, Swire Properties (Taikoo in Cantonese), built an open, low-density shopping center in Chengdu around the Daci temple in 2014. Named as the “Taikoo Li,” the project attests to unique logics of planning and operation, while evoking discursive, cultural, and material practices, religious as well as non-religious, in people’s everyday life. Drawing upon an extensive ethnographic study in Chengdu, Sichuan, this article enters a dialogue with postsecularist debates dominated by Euro-American instances, and proposes micro-sociological reinventions of “postsecularity” by adopting a position of “methodological ludism” as opposed to conventional theist, atheist and agnostic positions. Our analytical and methodological inquiries aim to fully showcase the paradoxical nature of “postsecularity,” especially within a contemporary urban context, in which the paradoxes are sustained in the self-conflicting narratives of the researched as well as the reflexivity of the researchers.